Monday, April 19, 2021

Bobby Paris

A few days ago I was looking at the record store Glass House Records on Instagram and an image of an album came up that spoke to me. The singer is Bobby Paris, and the album is called Let Me Show You The Way. The positive/negative photo of Paris drew my attention, but also the name Bobby Paris. I then look up the album on Discogs website, and I even liked the song titles: “No No No Girl” and “Going Out The Way I Came In.” The album was released in 1968, and I tried to imagine what the music would be like on this album. Some of the songs are on YouTube, but I wanted to feel his music by the album cover.

The brief liner note on the back reads: Bobby Paris is crazy. Music feeds him. It’s like adrenalin. Put the needle down…watch him grow and swell and wing and move…and he’s alive. Really moving…giving everything. He makes you want to sing. Not many people can do that. He’s wanted a long time to put this album together. Watch him move.

He wrote all the songs on side one, either by himself or with Jill Jones, another name that appealed to my sense of poetic names. Side two is called “The Cycle” which strikes me that maybe it’s a conceptual group of tunes with each song has an interlude. The two covers I recognize is “Don’t Let The Sun Catch You Crying” and the classic “Bye Bye Blackbird.” The credit is that the album is produced and directed by Bobby Paris and the arrangements and conducting is by Gene Page. Looking at Gene’s credits he did the soundtrack to Blacula, which strikes me as a cool credit. In 1978, he made an album Close Encounters which all the songs deal with the stars. “Theme from Star Trek,” “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “When You Wish Upon a Star,” and “I Feel Like I’ve Been Livin’ (On The Dark Side of The Moon).” I listened to Page’s album later and it’s very much the classic Disco album of that decade.

The Paris album is on the label Tetragrammaton Records, which was partly owned by Bill Cosby. It’s interesting to note that this label also pressed and distributed John and Yoko’s Unfinished Music No. 1 and Two Virgins. The label also released some Cosby comedy albums as well as early Deep Purple and Pat Boone. Paris’s songwriter partner Jill Jones, wrote “Get Me To The World on Time” recorded by The Electric Prunes. So, of course, I had to buy this album.

Let Me Show You The Way arrived in today’s mail, and again, the mailman left the album on top of the mail box which makes me nervous because someone off the street could have stolen this package. It is one of the reasons why I track all my mail, and I literarly wait by the window to see the mailman arrive. Once I hear his electronic gizmo go beep, that is when I put my face mask on and rush to the mailbox. I opened the packaging and got the album out. The record felt good in my hands, and finally seeing the front and back cover in person. In my mind I thought that this maybe a hybrid of white pop with Black soul, and I wasn’t too far off. Paris’s production (or direction as it’s labeled on the back cover) is Phil Spector in scope, and Page’s arrangements are busy and dramatic. It reminded me of some of the big Tom Jones ballads, but also brought memories of Paul and Barry Ryan, who made a series of British singles in the mid-70s that were dramatic and huge orchestration. Paris does the same with his songs on this album. There are strings, horn section, big drums, and instrumentation that drowns each other out. There is one song “I’m That Kind of Man” that has an incredible arrangement that drives the song like a powerful train going across the country. It’s relentless and powerful.

Tonight trying to pick up information about this mysterious artist, it seems he was discovered in England as part of the Northern Soul movement. Without his knowledge, his records were being played in nightclubs that were devoted to obscure American soul artists. DJs would put tape across the label so other DJs wouldn’t know who the artist is. A very intense social and music scene that took place in the 1980s. Nevertheless, the one classic record that Paris partipated in as a co-producer is Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billy Joe.” Truly the stars are brighter with his presence.