Soul man

You’ve heard
“Bernadette” by the Four Tops, “Back Stabbers” by the O’Jays, and “Natural
Woman” by Aretha Franklin more times than you can count. You probably think you
know soul music pretty well.

            Think again. What you know are the
relatively few soul tunes that have made it into the Top 40 over the decades.

            What about all those hits on the
r&b chart that never even cracked the pop chart? Think of all the album
cuts that have fallen into obscurity. To hear the full, vast scope of soul,
you’ve got to tune into Scott Wallace’s Rejuvenation.

            Every Friday evening from 7 to 10
p.m. on WRUR 88.5 FM Wallace plays all the songs you missed. And I do mean all the songs. Wallace arrives for each
show with 12 binders. Each binder holds 100 CDs. Each CD contains 25 tunes. Do
the math and you’ll come up with 30,000 songs.

            “I love this music,” says the
45-year-old letter carrier by day. “There are so many soul tunes out there,
I’ll never hit bottom.”

            Growing up in a Navy family, Wallace
spent his childhood as far west as Minnesota and as far east as Rhode Island.
But he spent the largest portion of time in Elmira. And while other kids were
getting their motor skills together, Wallace was refining his knowledge of
soul.

            “I got into music really early,” he
says. “Records were always around the house. When I was a couple of years old I
listened to Ray Charles night and day. I couldn’t touch the record player, so
when the album ended I would ask my mom to put the needle back at the beginning
of the record.”

            It didn’t hurt that his grandmother
worked for a family that owned a record store. In the 1960s, Wallace and his
cousin Donny could go there and listen to whatever they wanted. The rest of the
country may have been conquered by the British invasion, but Wallace and his
cousin focused on the Modern Jazz Quartet, Jimmy Smith, Miles Davis, and Ruth
Brown.

            While listening they would scour the
album covers on the inner sleeves of Blue Note and Atlantic records,
fantasizing over the albums they would buy if they had the money. His cousin,
who was a year and a half older and always a step ahead, turned him on to
albums by Tower of Power, Les McCann, Eddie Harris, and others.

            The boys would sometimes accompany
Wallace’s uncle to a bar around the corner from their home. “He’d give us
orange soda and we would listen to the jukebox and see what music people were
into — Jimmy Smith, Jimmy McGriff.” Donny, who died a few years ago, went on
to sing in bands in Elmira and in Florida.

            Wallace believes his father was most
responsible for his education in soul. “He liked Fats Domino, Bo Diddley, Jr.
Walker & the All-Stars,” he says. “When I’m trying to get ideas about where
I’m going to go with the next tune, I think of these things.”

Wallace caught on early when it came to acquiring records.

            “When I would go shopping with my
mother, I learned that if I was good, I could come out of the store with a 45,”
he says. “And if I had to go through some trauma, say a dentist appointment, I
could come out of it with an album.”

            His affinity for radio came early,
too. By the time Wallace was 6 or 7, he was never without his transistor radio.

            “I listened all the time,” he says.
“Providence had a great jazz station. And this was a time when Top 40 radio was
great. You just have to look back at those times and smile.”

            When his father retired in 1969, the
family moved to Rochester. Wallace scanned the radio dial until he got to the
far end, where he found Lou Paris’s show on the old WHEC 1460 AM. Musically,
Paris was right on his wavelength. To this day, in homage to Paris, Wallace
begins his show the way Paris began his, with “Kool & the Gang,” the funky
instrumental by the group of the same name.

            Wallace began his radio career on a
fluke in 1982. He ran into a high school friend at Record Archive and began
talking about a mutual friend in radio. Stan Merrill, a WRUR staffer who was
working in the back room, overheard the conversation.

            “He asked me if I did radio and if I
was interested in volunteering at the station,” Wallace says. “I said no to
both questions and went home. I forgot about it, but I must have mentioned it
to my wife because she said, ‘You might want to give it a try. If all these
other people can do it, you can do it.’ So, basically, I said yes because
lightning doesn’t always strike twice. I figured this might be my only
opportunity.”

            He began by doing news and sports on
Sunday mornings. To learn the ropes, he sat in with Talik Abdul Basheer, a
professor of his at Monroe Community College who was hosting Black Classical Music at the station.

            A few months later, when Bop Shop
owner Tom Kohn stepped down from his Friday-night oldies show, he asked Wallace
to take over the time slot. That show eventually morphed into Rejuvenation.

Wallace has never taken up an instrument himself.

            “I just play records,” he says. “I
look for people’s reactions. I like that angle.”

            Wallace’s core audience consists of
members of Rochester’s African-American community. (He doesn’t ask, but callers
often tell him what neighborhood they live in.) This is significant because, in
a lot of cases, he finds that the audience in general for soul music is white.
“The show has been able to get in on the pulse from the get-go.”

            The requests he gets are often
fascinating.

            “They might request a hit from a
jukebox in a town in Alabama where they grew up, that was popular in a 200-mile
radius,” Wallace says. “Eighty percent of the time I’ve got it.”

            Wallace bemoans the fact that in an
age of media conglomerates, grass-roots regional hits are no longer possible.
“That’s a thing of the past,” he says. “They’ve made up their mind who’s gonna
make it and who isn’t.”

            With 30,000 songs at his fingertips,
you might think Wallace is an obsessed music fan who must have every last
record by the artists he likes.

            “I’m not compulsive,” he says.
“Having that piece of plastic is not nearly as important to me as having the
song.”

            When he encounters rare records, he
transfers them to CD to preserve them. Most of these obscure tunes won’t be
reissued any time soon.

            After a long search, he recently
scored an old favorite, The Intruders’ “I’ll Bet He Don’t Love You.” But he’s
still searching for the original recording of “The End of the Rainbow” that
McKinley Mitchell did for the Wonderful label. And, if you know anyone in
possession of “Darlin’ Darlin'” by Ty Hunter on Chess Records, call him at the
station Friday night (275-9787).

On some jazz,
blues, and soul shows DJs celebrate birthdays by playing sets of music by a
particular artist. Wallace enjoys that approach as a listener, but he will
never do it on his show. He prefers a straight-forward variety-show approach,
focusing on the best soul music, most of which was recorded in the 1960s and
1970s.

            Although most of the artists he
plays are black, Wallace holds several “blue-eyed soul” groups in high esteem,
including The Magnificent Men, The Rascals, and Tower of Power.

            “They cut great records,” he says.
“I’m certainly going to give them a spin.”

            But, he reserves his highest praise
for more roots-oriented r&b.

            “Stax is unquestionably the greatest
soul label ever,” Wallace says. “It was like the control model for all the
other southern labels. They all wanted to do what Stax did: real raw southern
soul music. The funny thing is that Stax struggled to get popular enough to be
like Motown.”

            The songs Wallace plays — from
Stax, Motown, Philly, Chicago — may not be complex harmonically, but great
soul songs from that era are little slices of the zeitgeist. You’ve got Johnny
Taylor worrying about “Who’s Making Love.” There’s Phillipe Wynne of the
Spinners philosophizing that “Love Don’t Love Nobody.” It’s a rich world that
has all but disappeared.

            Wallace has ideas about what’s happened
to black music over the decades: the rise of disco, rap, and hip-hop, the
advent of drum machines, long-established groups breaking up…

            “People gave up on hoping for the
next big thing,” he says. “They went back and listened to the old stuff. Even
the songs that aren’t so great sound better than anything that’s coming out.”

            Wallace believes hip-hop DJs have
been a somewhat positive force in bringing back the old music. But he can’t say
he listens to a lot of black radio today.

            “The percentage of stuff that might
appeal to me isn’t high, and the price of the CD is so high, you don’t get much
bang for your buck.”

            Among the contemporary crowd, he
likes Lauryn Hill, Jill Scott, and Macy Gray, with reservations.

            “I like a couple of songs; there’s a
lot of filler. The standard has gotten a lot lower,” he says. “The praise is
too high for people like Alicia Keys. After one record, she gets a TV special.
Video has been a tremendous negative because, if nothing else, it’s very
expensive so the money that a company puts into artists, and the range of
artists, is down. Video has made people lazy. They don’t listen to music
anymore, they watch it.”

            Wallace and his wife, Amy, have a
21-year-old daughter, and three younger children. As parents, they are not fans
of gansta rap.

            “Generally, when bad language is
coming across, I tune right out,” he says. “The Isley Brothers have succumbed
to that. I find it disturbing, but they’re selling a lot of recordings. Gladys
Knight came out with a pretty good album a couple of years ago; I know that
didn’t sell like the Isley Brothers record. I’m not into censorship and I
believe that people should be able to express themselves, but it used to be you
could say what you had to say and it would be clean.”

When it comes to programming, Wallace is indebted to Greg Townson (known for his work
with the Hi-Risers) with whom he hosted Rocket
– 88 Saturday nights from 1995 to 1998.

            “Our concept was to change the mood
every three minutes so nobody could figure out what kind of a show it was,”
Wallace says.

            One night, when Townson called and
said he wasn’t coming in, Wallace panicked. He decided that he was not going to
talk. He would simply play four songs, say what they were, and go on to the
next set. He found he was able to concentrate and sneak in an extra set of
songs. Thanks to that panic attack he stuck with four-song sets on Rejuvenation.

            Wallace also learned a lot from
doing the open-ended show with Townson.

            “A good jock has to know what he
likes, but a good jock has to be willing to come out of his comfort zone and
hear other ideas and suggestions,” he says. “Somebody might ask me to play a
song and because they like the show, they just assume that I’m open to it. But
I might say to myself, I’d rather not go there. If I have it, ultimately, what
I’ll do is work it in and either put something in front of it to set it up or
put something behind it to make it a little bit stronger. You can make it
work.”

            Wallace’s show has a subtle
structure in which the first two hours are a set-up for the last hour.

            “The happier people are, the more
comfortable they are, the more I can push the boundaries,” he says. “You’re
always playing that yin and yang. You want to push it, but you want to bring it
back in.” That’s why late in Wallace’s show, you might hear more challenging
tunes by Jimi Hendrix or Eddie Harris.

            Through the years Wallace has seen a
lot of his heroes live, and he’s met several of them. But nothing has thrilled
him more than getting to know Alphanso “Country” Kellum, who played rhythm
guitar for James Brown from 1963 to 1970 (the most significant years), and
lived in Rochester until his death three years ago.

            “I shiver when I think of his
significance. Country’s part, the rhythm, is the final glue holding James
Brown’s tunes together,” Wallace says. “A lot of people think about who they’d
like to meet in this life and they think about some dignitary or some sports
star, maybe a big, big rock star, but for me it could never get any higher than
meeting and knowing Country. He was always available to talk. I never asked him
about James Brown. I wasn’t interested in that. But I did want to know
Country’s guitar part, how he worked up the part.”

            Ultimately, that’s what Wallace’s
show is about. While the headliners and hottest selling records get 99 percent
of the attention in our culture, Wallace has an ear for all the subtle
ingredients that liven up the mix.

Scott Wallace’s soul
top 10

“Drown In My Own Tears,” by Ray Charles

“This live version is
the Rosetta stone of soul recordings.”

“Dedicated To The One I Love”

5 Royals

“A really
forward-leaning tune by the unsung heroes of 1950s soul.”

“I’m So Proud”

Impressions

“A Curtis Mayfield
tune that always seems to floor me.”

“A Change Is Gonna Come”

Sam Cooke

“An epic tune.”

“My Girl”

Temptations

“Even through all the
exposure it still comes across.”

“In the Midnight Hour”

Wilson Pickett

“A southern soul tune
just right for the time.”

“Knock on Wood”

Eddie Floyd

“The back beat on it
is great.”

“Cold Sweat”

James Brown

“The song that pushed
him into the future.”

“Soul Man”

Sam & Dave

“The best Stax tune,
more raw than Motown could ever hope to be.”

“La La Means I Love You”

Delfonics

“This might have the
greatest hook ever on a soul tune.”

Scott Wallace’s
obscure soul top 10

“I’ll Understand”

The Soul Children

“So raw. It’s a
cheating song, but it’s also right out of the church.”

“Cry Me a River”

Bettye LaVette

“A beautiful tune, a
knockout performance.”

“He’ll Be Back”

The Players

“A song about the
Vietnam War, influenced by the Impressions.”

“I’m Goin’ For Myself”

Eddie & Ernie

“A hard-hitting
southern soul tune.”

“She Broke His Heart”

The Just Brothers

“A real
doo-wop-influenced harmony tune on the cusp of turning into full-blown soul.”

“So in Love”

The Festivals

“A Philadelphia
group-vocal tune that modernized itself into a soul tune with a little more
melody and rhythm.”

“Got No One”

The Delacardoes

“One of the most
gorgeous tunes I’ve ever heard in my life.”

“What Can You Do When You Ain’t
Got Nobody”

The Soul Brothers Six

“A local reworking of
‘I Found a Love’ by Wilson Pickett.”

“I’m Counting on You”

Freeman Brothers

“A great southern
gospel soul tune.”

“On a Little Island”

The Enchanters

“Another example of
doo-wop moving into the soul era.”

This article appears in Nov 19-25, 2003.