BLACK MERDA!: Press

My Soul's Been Psychedelicised Mojo Magazine. Feb 15 2005 Ben Edmonds

Some quotes in the articles posted are paraphrases of what we said and some not quite what we said, but for the most part they are what we said.


From the article "My Soul Has Been Psychedelicised" in February 2005 Special "Psychedelic!" issue or Mojo magazine, by Ben Edmonds.


The black psychedelia of the '70s was buried deep underground. Its practitioners toiled in anonymity, usually unknown to each other. They seemed destined to remain a lost footnote to pop history until a compilation of this music began to make the rounds of collectors on a cassette that became known as "Chains & Black Exhaust".

Among the most intriguing of the groups featured on this tape was the Detroit quartet Black Merda. Guitarist VC L. Veasey and Anthony "Wolf" Hawkins began playing together when they were barely in their teens in Detroit. By 16, the duo were playing sessions in the Fortune Records stockroom studio for Nolan Strong and Nathaniel Mayer. Edwin Starr introduced them to Ed Wingate of Golden World Records, where they often found themselves playing alongside moonlighting Motown musicians. When one of these sessions produced the hit "Agent Double-O-Soul, Edwin Starr took Veasey (now on bass), Hawkins and their friend, drummer Tyrone Hite, on the road in his backing band the Soul Agents.

They began to veer from the R&B straight and narrow while on tour backing Gene "Duke of Earl" Chandler. "I had been stationed with the army in Tacoma, Washington," says VC. "One day I saw a story in a Seattle paper headlined, Hometown Boy Makes Good, about a local guy who'd gone over to England. They had a picture and I thought the guy looked like a clown. I was laughing at his funny clothes. Later we were in a record store and I saw this album, Are You Experienced, by that funny-looking guy. We bought it thinking it was gonna be a laugh, but once we played it we couldn't stop playing it. It was a completely new sound; this weird guy Jimi Hendrix had reinvented the electric guitar".

Gene Chandler further enlarged the group's consciousness. The singer would never see another hit a big as his first but he was apparently hip for an older dude. "Was he ever!" chuckles Anthony Hawkins. "We had a dressing room at the Uptown Theater in Philadelphia with no windows. Turn the light out and it was pitch black, He had us all smoke this really strong weed and made a challenge; whoever could stay in the room for a whole song would make $10. He shut the light and put on A Day In The Life by The Beatles. When the orchestra built up he really cranked the volume and then switched the speaker knob back and forth real fast to make it extra freaky. Most of "em couldn't take it and ran out; me and VC hung in there. That started the trip and after that there was no turning back."

They decided to devote themselves to the new thing. Drafting Wolf's brother Charles on rhythm guitar and Tyrone Hite on drums, the quartet embarked on a journey to inner space. Edwin Starr needed a group of Soul Agents for a tour with The Temptations and Gladys knight & The Pips, and Black Merda joined providing Edwin dropped his horn section and allowed the musicians to wear their freaky finery. VC: He loved the change, because it made him look like he was with the young people. It also made Gladys and the Tempts look passé, with their matching outfits and big orchestra. At Madison Square Garden they started screaming like we were The Beatles just because of the way we looked."

Eddie Kendricks hipped songwriter Ellington Jordan to Black Merda. The similarly psychedelicised wrier, who performed under the name Fugi, got the group to back him on the black-psych classic "Mary, Don't Take Me On N Bad Trip" for Chess. This brought them to the attention of young Marshall Chess, who saw in Black Merda the organic realization of everything the company had attempted with the faux-psychedelic sessions that Muddy Waters and Howling Wolf had been subjected to, and a way to help bring the blues label into the here and now.

VC Veasey: "We weren't psychedelic, per se, though we were way into the lifestyle. Musically it one more color we could use to express our own feelings. We had different social issues to deal with than the hippies. But isn't that what psychedelic was supposed to be about-freeing you to be your real self? We were more real than a lot of people could handle." The group's song "Ashamed" pointedly took the hippies to task for babbling about peace and love while ignoring the poverty and oppression that constituted reality in Black Merda's neighborhood.

As they were on the verge of a breakthrough things began to fall apart. Marshall Chess decamped for Europe to run Rolling Stone Records, leaving no one at the label that understood the band. A company assigned producer rendered their 1970 debut a weak echo of the band's raw live power. Touring California with Fugi, the band impressed Eric Burton and War, who offered them a production deal. For reasons the members of Black Merda still can't explain 30 years later, the band instead opted to return to the Midwest and record a second album for Chess, Long Burn The Fire, that was even further removed from their strengths than the first.

Black Merda's premature demise illustrated the difficulty this music faced attempting to survive as the "70s swung inexorably toward disco. Though the band worked occasionally in Detroit's black show bars, there was no black industry to help further their musical agenda. And unlike Clinton's Parliament/Funkadelic, they lacked management that could forge alliances with the city's white rock 'n' roll establishment. They were almost literally out there on their own.

"Even though Chess had no idea what to do with Black Merda, at least it was a real company, " says Dante Carfagna, the Chicago collector whose cassette compilation helped spur the resurgent interest in black psychedelia. "Most of the music was happening in smaller towns. More than Detroit or Chicago, there's be pockets of activity in places like Ohio. It wasn't popular; it wasn't the dance-funk the black community was embracing at the time. Bands that got people dancing and drinking got the work. Lots of fuzz and delay won't do that trick. So it was very localized and tended to show up on local 45s. There was no network; so the pockets of activity happened independently of each other." Carfagna is working on an above Ground collection of black psych to be released later this year.

Among the beneficiaries of this interest are the slightly dazed members of Black Merda. By the time this magazine appears, they will have played their first show together in 30 years, and seen the reissue of their two albums on the CD "The Folks From Mother's Mixer". "I was shocked to wake up one day and discover that we had an underground following." says Veasey. "I see we're still pretty much the only people doing this type of music. We've still got the niche all to ourselves."

Detroit Free Press

Detroit Free Press (MI)


January 21, 2005

'70S PSYCH-FUNK OUTFIT BLACK MERDA WILL TAKE DETROIT STAGE FOR THE FIRST TIME IN 30 YEARS

Author: BEN EDMONDS

Hard to believe, but it started with a single cassette. In 2001, a Chicago record collector compiled a cassette for a friend in Memphis consisting of obscure, long-forgotten 45s by black hard-rock and psychedelic-funk groups from the 1970s, among them a little-known Detroit quartet called Black Merda. This cassette was copied for another friend, who copied it for somebody else, with the collection eventually circulating as a bootleg CD titled "Chains & Black Exhaust" that consolidated underground interest in this strange, largely unexplored sub-genre of rock 'n' roll.

The unexpected beneficiaries of this subterranean buzz are Black Merda, which returns to a Detroit stage for the first time in 30 years Saturday night as one of the highlights of the Motown Winter Blast festival. The group's two albums, which disappeared almost as soon as they were released in the early '70s, are being combined and reissued on a CD called "The Folks from Mother's! Mixer."

"I was shocked to wake up one day and discover that we had an underground cult following," says bassist VC L. Veasey, who formed Black Merda in 1968 with his neighborhood guitar partner Anthony (Wolf) Hawkins. The two teenagers had been playing recording dates for Fortune, Golden World and the other Detroit R&B labels that competed in the long shadow of Motown. When one of these sessions yielded the hit "Agent Double-O-Soul" for Edwin Starr, the pair hit the road as members of his backing band, the Soul Agents. A chance encounter with the first Jimi Hendrix album changed everything. After drafting drummer Tyrone Hite and Wolf's younger brother Charles Hawkins as second guitarist, the foursome developed a hard, guitar-heavy sound and flamboyant look that was unlike anything on the traditional R&B circuit. With hard-hitting lyrics reflecting the members' urban environment, Black Merda was equally unlike any of the progressive rock bands with whom they occasionally shared stages.

This uniqueness, the source of the band's strength, would also prove to be its Achilles' heel. Backing similarly psychedelicized singer-songwriter Fugi -- who under his given name Ellington Jordan has composed "I'd Rather Go Blind" for Etta James -- on the underground classic "Mary Don't Take Me on No Bad Trip," Black Merda came to the attention of the venerated Chicago blues label Chess Records. Attempts to capture the group's full-blooded live sound in the recording studio, however, met with disastrous incomprehension. "People were always trying to turn us into something we weren't," says Wolf Hawkins, "like Motown or Isaac Hayes. When we got our first album back and heard how small and weak they'd made us sound, we almost cried. The power was gone. It didn't sound anything like us."

This incomprehension extended to marketing, and Black Merda's 1970 debut sank without a trace. Its 1972 follow-up, "The Fire Still Burns," was even further removed from the band's strengths. Because there was no black industry to support the band's musical agenda and because, unlike Parliament/Funkadelic, it did not have management that could forge alliances with Detroit's white rock establishment, Black Merda sputtered to a premature halt.

The records, however, were immediately prized by collectors, who saw Black Merda as part of a movement that was all but invisible to the pop mainstream. "There were actually other black bands playing hard, psychedelic funk," says Dante Carfagna, the Chicago collector whose homemade cassette helped spark the current resurgence of interest. "Most of it happened in smaller towns, on a highly localized level. There was more of it in Ohio, for example, than in Detroit or Chicago. It wasn't popular, and there was no network. So these little pockets of activity happened unaware of each other." Carfagna, who at 30 is too young to have seen any of these bands perform, is compiling a fully authorized successor to "Black Exhaust" for release later this year.

"Playing the old songs at the show will be a trip," says Veasey, sitting around the kitchen table of his Southfield home with the Hawkins brothers. Sadly, original member Tyrone Hite succumbed to cancer three weeks ago. For this performance, the core trio will be supplemented by drummer Ken (Spiderweb) Rice and Robert Jones on keyboards. Both have recently been playing with the Funk Brothers. The enigmatic Fugi has even flown in from California to participate in the festivities.

"What I want to do ultimately," Veasey says, "is record new material. We've all stayed in music as individuals. We consider ourselves writers first and foremost. What interests me is seeing if we have anything new to say as a group. Just based on the first rehearsals, I think we will." "Our music always strove to have some underlying social message, and I think people would expect any new songs to continue with that," says Wolf Hawkins.

"Yes," adds his brother Charles, "but I think they'll want to see how we've grown musically as well, to see what we're capable of exploring within the Black Merda! sound." "For me," Veasey sums up, "there has to be something philosophical built in. I don't want to waste my time writing anything frivolous. It was always about getting people to take a look at themselves by expressing something I went through. We still need to do that. Like they say, now more than ever." Contact freelance writer BEN EDMONDS at bedmonds@msn.com" Record Number: 0411922205