Let’s Take It to the Stage
Nashville musicians team up for a full-scale live funk revue
by Jonathan Marx
George Clinton said so himself: funk used to be a bad word. Look it up in the dictionary, and almost every definition has a negative cast: foul; stinky; depressed. But the musicians who birthed funk music in the ’60s recognized something essential about the nature of funk: sometimes the only way to pull yourself up is to get as down and dirty as you can go. So they took the already limber rhythms of soul music and greased them up even more.
They were clearly onto something. Four decades since James Brown announced that he had a brand new bag, the music continues to live on in the samples and the grooves that fire hip-hop, electronica and pop. And lately, raw funk has experienced a renaissance.
It began in places like New York and L.A., where clubs would host DJ nights spotlighting unheralded classics; eventually, funk devotees started putting together bands to replicate the experience of hearing the music live. They rehearsed with the dedication required of any outfit that hopes to walk in the same footsteps at James Brown’s notoriously tight JBs, and they recruited veteran singers like Lee Fields and Sharon Jones, little-known performers who’d been at it for decades. Before long, they had a whole scene going, revolving around labels like Daptone and Stones Throw.
Nashville’s got its own place in the funk resurgence, thanks in large part to Doyle Davis, co-owner and manager of Grimey’s record store, who’s been playing deep funk sides on his weekly radio show on WRVU-91 Rock for the last eight years. Through his store and his Friday-night broadcasts, Davis, a.k.a. “D-Funk,” generated enough local interest in New York’s Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings that the band booked a tour specifically so they could play Nashville, where they were greeted with a packed house.
In the crowd that night was Bill Elder, a producer and studio manager at Dark Horse Recording in Franklin. A big fan of Davis’ radio show, he’d long dreamed of putting together his own funk band. When he heard Jones & The Dap-Kings’ Dap Dippin’, “it was the record that really turned the light bulb on,” he says. He contacted The Dap-Kings’ producer, Bosco Mann, pumped him for information and told him he was going to put together a similar band in Nashville. That was several years ago. This Friday, Elders’ band, The Dynamites, will make their debut at The Basement.
Normally, a local band’s first gig wouldn’t be cause for excitement—but then, how many bands took two years to assemble? “The music is put together in a very calculated way, though it doesn’t necessarily give that impression,” Elder says. “Every piece has to be looked at from a spatial standpoint, a rhythmic standpoint. It’s about every instrument having its own space to do its thing.”
What Elder didn’t have when he first assembled his band, though, was a singer. Then one day Doyle Davis was talking to Michael Gray, one of the curators of the Country Music Hall of Fame’s Night Train to Nashville exhibit. As Gray enthused about Charles Walker, one of the Nashville R&B performers featured in the exhibit, Davis thought: here’s the singer Elder’s been searching for.
“That was the longest part of this process: finding the right frontperson,” explains Elder, who’s beyond thrilled to be working with Walker. “He’s totally still got it…[and] he saw clearly what I was trying to do.”
While Elder insists that the Dynamites experience will be “all about Charles,” the singer is far more modest about his role. “The first show is going to be a work in progress,” Walker says. “I’m just kind of rolling with the punches and seeing what’s going to come out of it. I know a lot if it’s going to have to do with me.”
Walker’s career dates to the late 1950s, when he recorded for local producer Ted Jarrett’s Champion label. By 1960, he’d left for New York and a career that saw him opening for the likes of Jackie Wilson, James Brown and Etta James. He spent 30 years away from Nashville, touring overseas in the 1980s, before returning home in 1992. Now, more than a decade later, he’s entering a new phase of his career that, ironically, finds him exploring sounds that his contemporaries left behind decades ago.
“It’s kind of going full-circle,” he says. “Mainly what has changed is the arrangements, and my voice is a lot stronger. Even though I had a powerful voice back then, it still was immature, and now I know more what to do with it. Back then, I was just whoopin’ and hollerin’.”
One thing that distinguishes 21st century funkateers like The Dynamites, Davis points out, is that they’ve come of age in the hip-hop era. Their music “is more streamlined,” he says. “You’ll hear more drum breaks in a song than maybe you’d hear in an old-school recording.” Or you might hear some improvisation here and there, but with none of the indulgence that jam bands are notorious for. “Part of the appeal is the economy and almost minimalist quality: it’s tight, in the pocket, mad-swinging and with great tunes.”
When Walker and The Dynamites play The Basement this Friday night, they’ll run through a set that mixes freshly written originals with songs from Walker’s career and some well-chosen covers. And, in what’s sure to be a highlight, they’ll be joined on a song or two by Ernie Vincent, of the early-’70s New Orleans funk group Ernie & The Top Notes. The singer recently relocated to Clarksville after leaving his hometown in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and when he takes the stage, few songs could sound a more affirming note in the wake of so much destruction and displacement than his ebullient 1972 single “Dap Walk.”
“Hey, get up brothers! Don’t sit there with your head hanging down!” Vincent exhorts at the opening. Then the music kicks in, the supple bass and wildly elastic guitar reminding us that nothing liberates the soul like a funky groove.
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