Curtis Mayfield - Beat Club, Bremen, Germany, 1-19-1972

I'm a big fan of soul music from the 1960s and 1970s (which unfortunately pretty much got killed off by disco in the late 1970s). For a variety of reasons, it's rare for me to come across entire "albums that should exist" in this genre. But every now and then I do, and here's a really nice one.

Curtis Mayfield certainly in a giant of soul music. He had a long run of good music, but I think he peaked around 1970 to 1972. So here's a "live" album that captures him at that peak. I put "live" in quotes because there actually is no audience whatsoever, but he plays an entire concert as if there was, including some between song banter.

The cause of this strange situation is the German TV show "Beat Club." By 1972, it had evolved to where it would let major artists stretch out and play more than just the usual one or two hits. I think in Mayfield's case he had three songs get on air at the time, but he recorded an hour of music in a TV studio for the producers to select from.

Most of this performance was lost in someone's vault for many years. But a bunch of complete Beat Club performances have been recently been making their way to YouTube, and just last month Mayfield's appearance got posted. I converted it to mp3 format and broke it into individual tracks.

The concert is from early 1972, so it predates his huge selling "Superfly" soundtrack later in the year. But it's got lots of great songs from his two earlier acclaimed solo albums, "Curtis" and "Roots." The set list is somewhat different from his 1971 album "Curtis/Live" (recorded 12 months earlier), and of course there's the sound quality advantage of having no crowd noise (though you may feel one loses some of the live concert vibe).

I particularly like his version of Marvin Gaye's "Inner City Blues." This song fits him so perfectly that it almost seems like he wrote it for Gaye instead.

I've cleaned up the recording in the sense that I removed some false starts and dead silence between songs. Also, he performed the last song, "We're a Winner," all the way through, then decided he didn't like it and performed it all the way through again. I only kept the second take.

I was all set to post this, but then it occurred to me that it didn't seem right to post something from Mayfield from 1972 and not include anything from the fabulous "Superfly" soundtrack. So I poked around and found four key songs from that done in 1972 that match the studio sound quality of the rest of this. Two of them actually were done live in the studio with no audience, the same as the Beat Club performance. I've added those at the end.

The result is an hour and nine minutes of prime Mayfield. This really should be released officially, just like so many BBC performances have been.

And by the way, if you want to see it and not merely listen to it, just search for it on YouTube.

01 Inner City Blues - Ain't No Sunshine (Curtis Mayfield)
02 Check Out Your Mind (Curtis Mayfield)
03 Mighty Mighty [Spade and Whitey] (Curtis Mayfield)
04 We've Only Just Begun (Curtis Mayfield)
05 We've Gotta Have Peace (Curtis Mayfield)
06 We People Who Are Darker than Blue (Curtis Mayfield)
07 Keep On Keeping On (Curtis Mayfield)
08 talk (Curtis Mayfield)
09 Stare and Stare (Curtis Mayfield)
10 talk (Curtis Mayfield)
11 Move On Up (Curtis Mayfield)
12 We're a Winner (Curtis Mayfield)
13 Pusherman (Curtis Mayfield)
14 Freddie's Dead (Curtis Mayfield)
15 Eddie, You Should Know Better (Curtis Mayfield)
16 Superfly (Curtis Mayfield)

https://www.imagenetz.de/itcYS

The album cover is a screenshot I took from the YouTube video of Mayfield's Beat Club performance.