Jr Walker & All Stars - Ultimate Collection

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Music reviews of Ultimate Collection

Music Review: They Didn't Just Jump Off The Grooves - They Exploded Them
Rating: 5 Stars

Anyone who planned on going to his grave mistaking Walker for a two-trick pony on the basis of the gutbucket classic "Shotgun" or the urbane soul of "What Does It Take (To Win Your Love)," the two hits with which he remains most identified, is going to have to change his plans hearing this set, the elemental anthology Walker has long deserved. Just begin with "Shake and Fingerpop," the second track. From the thwapping drum kickoff and that insane-in-the-brain ludicrous-high C saxophone squeal to the heartpunching guitar-bass riff, this makes "Shotgun" resemble a dirge. (The heavy mental meatheads and hip-hop slops only wish they had something this dangerous to crank.) Aside from "Cleo's Mood" (and its surprisingly effective answer track, "Cleo's Back"), you have "Tune Up" (probably the single least inhibited single ever to spring from the 1960s Motown stable, if you don't count the Contours' earlier "Shake Sherrie") "Satan's Blues," "Last Call," even "Pucker Up, Buttercup" proving these guys were as much the sons of the blues as anything else. They even got Motown's most stylised writer-production team to loosen up: Holland-Dozier-Holland got in on the fun by writing and producing for them "(I'm A) Road Runner," and it didn't exactly leave them scarred for life.

"What Does It Take (To Win Your Love)," the best-selling single of Walker's career, wasn't as offbeat a turn as might have been thought considering Walker's image until that point. (Motown chronicler Nelson George pretty much nailed it when he described "Shotgun" as having "the kick of a bull and the greasy feel of a pig's feet dinner.") Walker's saxophone style was actually deep enough to knit with the sauteed polish of the fabled Funk Brothers house musicians. And they put depth to spare into composer/producer Johnny Bristol's slightly stylised soul balladry. They got some decent mileage out of the mode, not to mention (just listen carefully to "Do You See My Love For You Growing," "Take Me, Girl, I'm Ready," and the beautifully moody "Walk In The Night") opening the door toward disco (though you can't blame Junior for that genre's worst excesses of metronomic banality). But the pair also had enough anchorage to take a kind of subversive liberty with Motown's underpinnings, and it resulted in the most jarringly affecting record of Walker's career in 1972.

Getting sociopolitically relevant (as began to happen with the label's music in 1967-68) was one thing, but it was something else again to bump against the history Motown's very existence sought (and usually successfully) to transcend. Bump against, take on, and all but wave it in its own face with a shocking affirmation is precisely what Walker did with "Way Back Home" (which Bristol co-wrote with Gladys Knight, whose own "Midnight Train To Georgia" would suggest a similar tortuous homecoming from another vantage). In three minutes of bristling music with gospel overtones and the most passionate vocal Walker ever cut in his life (not to mention perhaps the most controlled heat he ever breathed through his sax), he stared down the cold reality of his Southern root at the outset, then slapped it right to one side to remember what was simple, affecting, enduring ("Have ya ever been swimmin' in a muddy creek/with nothin' on your body from your head to your feet/like way back home?"), and unstolen by even the worst of the old South no matter where his life had since taken him. This may have been too raw to let "Way Back Home" become a huge hit even in 1971-72, but it has dated far, far less than most topical protest music, thanks to the shameless soulfulness applied with no small irony by Motown's own Mr. Life Of The Party.

And you'll want this CD's selection because they were mastered from the original singles; Motown was only too notorious for cutting just-so-slightly-different versions for its albums, and Walker especially should be heard even now as he intended it to be heard on the radio or in the jukeboxes: undiluted and untaxed. (Ideally, he of all the Motowners should be represented by a live album, but the three released on him back in the day were so haphazardly recorded, and so drastically mixed the guts right out of the man's music, that they remain unlistenable.) He recorded sparingly at best in the years since his Motown hitmaking run dried up (though it's long been a cliche that he put the whomp into Foreigner's "Urgent"), and it might seem a waste, but (as Allan Slutsky's booklet notes illustrate) Walker didn't exactly live for the recording studio in the first place. It showed when, like most Motowners of the time, was compelled to take a crack at a labelmate's hit (really: we could live quite nicely without his versions of "Come See About Me," "Money," and "How Sweet It Is"), but even playing his own music he played like he was running fifteen minutes late getting to the next roadhouse and the next sweaty gig. Almost forty years after "Cleo's Mood" started it all, Walker's music still sounds that way - lucky us.

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