Merry Clayton - SOUL!, WNET Studios, New York City, 3-8-1972

By chance, I'm posting this right after posting an album by Dana Gillespie. But I'm glad at the coincidence, because in a better world both of them would have been big stars. They certainly had the talent. If you know Merry Clayton at all, you probably know the fact that she's the female singer who sings some truly amazing vocals on "Gimme Shelter," the classic Rolling Stones song. But she's done a lot more than that.

Vocally, Clayton is very much in the mold of classic Aretha Franklin. She's as soulful as it gets, and she can belt a song out like a diva. She put out two songs in the early 1970s that I highly recommend: "Gimme Shelter" in 1970, and "Merry Clayton" in 1971. But her music career faltered after that. She's continued to sing for decades, but she's only put out three more albums.

So what happened? There are answers to that question in the 2013 documentary film "20 Feet from Stardom," an Academy award winning film about back-up singers. Basically, to make it as a star, you need luck, drive, ambition, charisma, looks, and other key factors. Sheer talent isn't enough. Clayton had all the talent in the world, but lacked some of those other things. So she mostly made a living being a back-up singer. 

You can read more about her at her Wikipedia entry here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merry_Clayton

I'm mostly interested in her career in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Those were peak years for soul music in general, so it's not surprising she was firing on all cylinders then too. I plan on posting a stray tracks album for her from that time. But first, I want to post this live album, because I think it's a good intro for those who aren't familiar with her material.

Because Clayton never became a major artist, we're lucky that there's an live recordings of her from those early years at all. There are basically no bootlegs to speak of, and only a couple of officially released live songs. But thankfully she played a mini-concert on the early 1970s TV show "Soul!" and someone uploaded that to YouTube. I converted that to mp3s. 

Unfortunately, it's not the full show. That's clear, because the last song got cut off. (I didn't include the incomplete song, because there wasn't much of it.) If anyone has the rest, please let me know, so I can present all of it. There are only 24 minutes here from that show. But what there is certainly shows that she had the talent to go toe to toe with Aretha or any other female soul singer of the time. I especially like her cover of Neil Young's "Southern Man." Hearing the song sung by a black person puts it in a different light and adds greatly to its emotional power.

Since what we have of the "Soul!" show is relatively short, I tried to add to it with other live songs by her. But the pickings were extremely slim. I found two songs she did for the Big Sur Folk Festival in 1970. Luckily, those made it to the official album of that concert. I also found a bootleg containing her singing just one song, "Acid Queen," since it was part of bunch of musicians singing the different parts to the Who's concept album "Tommy."

All those songs are from 1970 or 1972. At the end of the album, I've included a song from much, much later, 1989. But I feel it fits in well, because it's a song she did on her 1971 album "Merry Clayton." So it's highly likely she would have played it in 1972. By the way, the song is "Steamroller," which is a cover of a James Taylor song.

One weird thing is that pretty much all the songs had the audience applause cut short. So I did some editing to all the ends of songs to give them more reasonable audience reactions.

The album is 44 minutes long.

01 The Times They Are A-Changin' (Merry Clayton)
02 Bridge Over Troubled Water (Merry Clayton)
03 After All This Time (Merry Clayton)
04 Grandma's Hands - Amazing Grace - Grandma's Hands (Merry Clayton)
05 Southern Man (Merry Clayton)
06 Love Me or Let Me Be Lonely (Merry Clayton)
07 The Acid Queen (Merry Clayton)
08 Steamroller (Merry Clayton)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15284283/MerryClay_1972_SoulWNETStdiosNewYrkC__3-8-1972_atse.zip.html

You may notice this album cover looks very similar to one for an Al Green album I posted. That's because both concerts were played at the same place, for the same TV show, about one year apart. The font for the "Soul!" title was exactly that way for the show, so I figured I would just use that same font and such again.

The photo though, obviously is different than the Al Green one. It was taken in London in 1972.