1976 Carey Harris And Michael Orr “Spread Love” on Sunstar

I mean, I think this is one of those records you really have no choice but to own, in that it is both psychically and morally not optional, regardless of your overall feelings about soul/funk/proto-disco. What, are you AGAINST Spreading Love? I didn’t think so. After all, what else is music but a mathematical communion not only with other people, but every living thing around you, and even the hazy notion of existence itself, based on a combination of vocalization, rhythm, and intervals? While this record is smoother than butter a wide-haunched milkmaid has been churning non-stop since 1872, it’s also utterly, completely honest.

As I’ve gotten older and presumably some fraction wiser, I’ve come to believe that it is not the stomping bassline or raw guitar lick that makes me love (along with everyone else) Mike James Kirkland and Cymande, it’s the pure honest vulnerability. And as someone who grew up with an almost religious fervor for Led Zeppelin, and still enjoy them to whatever degree, I realize now that they may be the most dishonest band ever. Almost to the point of genius, their artifice. Not only through rampant uncredited theft, but the trappings of posture. You know who Michael Orr is stealing from? No one but his heart. Sure, not every tune on here is going to fire every musical piston, but in totality it is nothing but a lo-fi, way downlow statement that, if handled by, say, Stevie Wonder or Quincy Jones, sprinkling in a few more hooks and production magic, may well have ruled the 70’s as completely as it was possible to dominate AM radio. This record, my friends, is the very definition of a phrase that I made up halfway through typing this sentence, from now on called Soul Heritage. Oh hell yeh.