Outlaw

Album review

In the early- to mid-'60s, Gene McDaniels was a successful singing star whose carefully orchestrated records, full of production polish, split the difference between R&B and pop. He hit the charts with the singles "A Hundred Pounds of Clay," "Tower of Strength," and "Chip Chip" and was a popular performer on-stage and on television. However, McDaniels was a more thoughtful and politically conscious man than his hits would suggest, and after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., he left America to live in Sweden and Denmark and focus on songwriting. When he returned to the United States in 1970, he was billing himself as Eugene McDaniels, and his music took a sharp turn into a new direction. Few would recognize the guy who sang "A Hundred Pounds of Clay" and the artist who made 1970's Outlaw as the same person unless they were told, and even then they might not believe it. On the opening title track, a loose country-rock number about liberated women, McDaniels sounds remarkably like Mick Jagger (an interesting creative choice since McDaniels would record "Jagger the Dagger," an unflattering appraisal of the Rolling Stones' frontman, on his next album, 1971's Headless Heroes of the Apocalypse). Even when McDaniels' vocals more closely resemble his early hits, his music is radically different. Outlaw is a set of songs that exist in a place bordered by jazz, rock, and funk, and McDaniels' phrasing is expressive and adventurous in a way it had never been before. Most importantly, as a songwriter McDaniels had eagerly embraced the counterculture and the issues of the day, and Outlaw is full of smart, pointed lyrics that speak of race, class, and cultural division in a style that's articulate and just a bit theatrical, as if this were the original cast album to an off-Broadway revue about the turbulence of the early '70s. The musicians (who include Ron Carter, Hugh McCracken, and Ray Lucas) bring an unflashy virtuosity to their performances, and Joel Dorn's production is suitably clean and unobtrusive, giving the music a welcome sense of focus. At a time when African-American consciousness was exploding in new and provocative directions in popular music, Outlaw shows Eugene McDaniels was at the vanguard of this revolution, even if the album didn't find an audience until it became a cult item decades after the fact.

© Mark Deming /TiVo