Soul’d Out: The Complete Wattstax Collection
CRAFT RECORDINGS/CONCORD
REISSUE OF THE MONTH 8/10
THE self-styled ‘World’s Oldest Teenager’ nearly cost Stax Records several million dollars. During Rufus Thomas’s set at Wattstax – the label’s epochal 1972 all-dayer in the Watts neighbourhood of Los Angeles – the crowd at the Memorial Coliseum rushed the field and started dancing the funky chicken. Clad in a bright pink suit and his signature white go-go boots, Thomas beamed as the throng twisted and shimmied, but he soon backpedalled and began trying to shoo the spectators back to their seats. What followed was a masterclass in crowd control, as he threw out rhyming appeals for calm (“As soon as you get in the stands, then you’re gonna see the ‘Funky Chicken’ man!”) and even mercilessly roasted one particular straggler (“He don’t mean to be mean, he just wants to be seen”).
Neither the 1973 Wattstax documentary nor the pair of live albums that followed offer much in the way of explanation for Thomas’s sudden change of heart. In order to rent Memorial Coliseum, however, Stax hadmammoth 50th-anniversary reissue, where we finally get to hear almost every second of the concert played out in real time, emcee John KaSandra explains it to the audience: “It would be beautiful if we would respect each other and take our seats. We just can’t afford to let it happen like this.” Once the field is finally vacated, Thomas continues his set, crossing his fingers that the crowd don’t want to “Do The Funky Penguin” quite as rowdily as the funky chicken.
