The Instrumentals of Rock Podcast Episode #6 Harry Weinger

The latest episode of the Instrumentals of Rock Podcast is up and ready to listen to.  Link in Bio. In the latest IOR podcast I interviewed Harry Weinger, a veteran of the entertainment industry who is currently Vice President of A&R for Universal Music Enterprises, the catalog division of Universal Music Group. Harry has produced and/or managed hundreds of releases, winning two Grammy® Awards and many other honors for his work.  We discussed his unique job in the music business and in particular two releases he was a part of, Marvin Gaye’s Funky Nation, The Detroit Instrumentals and James Brown Soul Pride, The Instrumentals 1960-1969. Enjoy!#harryweinger#jamesbrown#marvingaye#sixtiesinstrumentals#instrumetalfunk#iorpodcast#iorock#instrumetalrockmusic#instrumentalmusic#boxsets#soulpride#funkynation#universalmusicgroup#thepopcorn#thechicken#mashpotatoes

Transcript

Mitch Barnett (00:00.174)
Welcome to the Instrumentals of Rock podcast. I'm your host Mitch Barnett. In this episode, I'll be talking with Harry Weinger, a veteran of the entertainment industry who is currently vice president of A &R for Universal Music Enterprises.

the catalog division of Universal Music Group. Harry has produced and or managed hundreds of releases, winning two Grammy Awards and many other honors for his work. Among those hundreds of box sets and catalog reissues Harry has been a part of are two releases by Soul Legends' James Brown and Marvin Gaye. Two artists you would not necessarily associate with this podcast, but listen and you'll hear why.

In 1993, Harry put together a two CD set, James Brown's Soul Pride, The Instrumentals, 1960 to 1969, that features 36 instrumental songs from James and his band, including previously unreleased live cuts and several rare non -LP tracks and b -sides. And in honor of the 50th anniversary of What's Going On, UME released Funky Nation, the Detroit Instrumentals.

an album's worth of instrumentals Marvin Gaye recorded with a group of young up and coming musicians in late summer, 1971. The tracks had been on CD bundled into a larger set in 2011, but in 2021, they were given their due in a standalone digital release. So let's get to it, find out how Harry does his job and how those two unique releases came about. Harry, thanks for coming on the Instrumentals of Rock podcast today.

Before we get started talking about these two instrumental projects that you worked on with James Brown and Marvin Gaye, I wanted to talk a little bit about your career in the music business. I noticed on your Instagram profile, it says you're a producer, storyteller, and occasional photographer. Let's start with the occasional photographer. So I love photography, and I have in my work, first of all, I'm happy to be here. Thanks for thinking of me.

Mitch Barnett (02:24.43)
funny you asked about that because my wife and I went to public gardens yesterday and I thought, shoot, I didn't bring my camera. I mean, like having the act of having a camera, holding a camera, pointing the camera, making these choices and framing and understanding what the camera does. I actually in my work have collected a lot of photographs, music oriented photographs. And I have lots of books on all the great photographers from various...

genres, particularly, you know, Herman Leonard, Chuck Stewart, Jim Marshall. I even have one from Don Paulson, who did a lot for teen magazines in the sixties. And he has the photo of when Smokey Robinson is teaching the Temptations, my girl. Oh, wow. And I got the photo directly from him that he signed, that he printed signed. Then I got Otis of the Temps to sign it. I got Smokey to sign it. And I got Paul Reiser who arranged the strings and horns to sign it. So.

It's not so much about acquiring those things. It's more about feeling like you're there and feeling like you have these captured moments. You're in the moment. Right. So I've done some of my own stuff, just sort of poking around. You know, you're taking pictures of flowers and you're shooting through the chain link fence. And sometimes that's in focus and sometimes what's in the back, you know, the high school kind of stuff. The background's in focus. I like doing portraits.

I haven't done it much lately. It's funny. I could sit in the room and mix a Marvin Gaye instrumental for hours. I could sit with an engineer and we're ordering food and we're talking about where the horns are going to go. Is there enough guitar to make it the lead? And where's Marvin? And no, we hear him talking to the musicians. Let's use it. I mean, I could do that for a couple of days. I did it actually in Nashville, but something in the post -production and photos, I get really impatient. So I got to work on that.

I've to work on the patience. I've got to work on finding the right tool that makes me comfortable. I have the Apple Pencil. I've done my own retouching. I scanned old photos. I get old photos of my dad in Paris in 1946, and I can make it look really clean. I like doing that, but I have to see where are my limitations and then what happens. That's why I'm occasional. That's the answer.

Mitch Barnett (04:53.39)
When you first started out, got your start in the radio industry? I guess you could say that because I went to school for that. I went to Ithaca College is almost like a trade school, at least when I was there, because in radio we didn't have kind of our own show, man. I formatted radio station and I ended up becoming music director, like an assistant music director my sophomore year and then I became a music director at the FM station that was widely heard upstate New York.

in my junior year and we made a concerted effort to be branded. And I use one of the first computers on campus, which dates me to create a computerized playlist. How they were played is computerized like a lot of these chain stations. But just that when we presented a playlist to labels, I had our top play tracks. I had our A tracks, our B tracks, maybe the album cut from at that time, sticks or Journey or something. I would throw in a temptation song and I would get called out on.

we were a rock station, but it was like extra school because I talked to the labels every week. You're not in Boston, right? You're not in Chicago, you're in upstate New York, but we had a pretty big reach. So we started getting more and more attention and I started getting more and more attention from labels and I like to go, I lived in the suburbs of New York. So when I went home from college break, I would visit the labels. I mean, when you're young, you're stupid. You don't know, you just go.

I'm going to go to Atlantic Records. I would call ahead and say, I'm coming in. And, you know, sometimes they take me to lunch. Sometimes we'd hang out. I did a promotional disc for Arista that went to college radio stations where I didn't do any interviews. I cut up the interviews and then then I took the tapes, made a reel to reel copy and then sat and edited the thing in my house on a reel to reel that I bought with money I'd made working at, wait for it, Radio Shack.

So I was really, you know, I was into audio, how things would sound, and I really liked cutting tape. That served me well in terms of where I ended up, which was I started a journalism career, if you would call it. I didn't study journalism, but someone hired me to write a column about radio. But when I evolved out of a writing career, because I had done production, like I knew how to cut tape.

Mitch Barnett (07:13.102)
In the digital era, digital editing is easy for me. The fact that I could see the sound waves and not have to guess where the bump or the click or the tempo or the beat or the thing are counting, and you can see it, oh, please, easy. So I'm glad I had that experience. So when I started working on catalog stuff, to marry those two, right? To be able to write notes or hire somebody to speak about the project that I was doing and then I was comfortable in a studio, that's when I started the catalog thing.

How would you explain what it is you do now and what you've done for 40 of your career? It's always a funny thing to describe. But if you see my title, like I'm a VP of A &R, right. But A &R for catalog does not mean you are assigning people. You're not actively seeking new artists to make hits. You're dealing to make future catalog. You're dealing with pre sold hits, right?

And so you're A &Ring, for example, Marvin Gaye. You're looking at the whole of the catalog. What is available? What is not available? What audience is not being served? What part of his catalog would serve that audience? How do you attract a new audience? Is it a remix? Is it a reissue? Is it something like a deluxe edition, which becomes its own story? And therefore, because the story travels through the media, that sheds light on whether it is a deluxe edition of, like,

a Let's Get It On Deluxe Edition, sheds light on Let's Get It On. Right. And if it gets a few more people to stream by whatever you whatever your bucket is to learn about what's going on, let's get on and play it. Great. If you go to the bonus tracks, great for me, because I think it enhances the story. So, yeah. So sometimes it's as simple as I'll go back to Let's Get It On because it's on my mind. OK, it's on vinyl.

but maybe for Valentine's Day, we should do a nice red color vinyl as a kind of limited edition. There's not a heavy lift there because the quote unquote product is complete, but the story around it maybe can be enhanced by the fact that it's red vinyl. He talks about love and lust and the breakup of a marriage in this song and the discovery of a new love. And you know, there's a narrative there that you can enhance by having something as simple as red vinyl. And then of course it's what color red and what kind of red and what pressing plan.

Mitch Barnett (09:37.742)
All these are decisions that have to be made where you're working with a team, production team and a sales team, a commercial team to come to that kind of decision. And then it can be something like the Bob Marley biopic that's out now and doing really well where in that specific situation, you're being asked to deliver a particular version of a song to be a part of a movie. You're not necessarily aware of what the script says or what the actors are saying around it, but they need a...

particular version of a particular song and you have to find either stems, session, a cappella, a live version. You got to know what format do they want an mp3 for reference. Do they want a wave? Do they want a high res wave, a standard deaf wave? They just want it off the CD. Do you want the flat master? Do you want the EQ master?

Mitch Barnett (10:29.998)
These are questions that an AR person can ask and also, and then can answer depending on the conversation you're having with the person during the requesting. Sometimes you're offering those things, right? You find out there's a project like the James Brown documentary that's starting. You raise your hand and go, what do you need? Do you know that there's this in the vault or do you know that this is available as an instrumental? Do you know that he recorded 11 albums on smash? Do you have?

these materials as part of the story. And then sometimes you're doing something digital where you are finding an album that is just not available at any streamer. And you go, how did that happen? And you find out maybe there's a classic record that you like that could be popular, could be niche, where it never made it to CDs, so it's never been digitized. So you've got to do that work to see, okay, where are the tapes? What's this going to cost to digitize if we find the tapes?

Are they the correct versions? These are part of the artist and repertoire process. So you're really an archaeologist, an audio archaeologist. Part of the job, part of the job too is you're creating teams within the company where you're delivering not just physical audio or digital audio, you're conveying a story. So if a product manager say is working on the Bob Marley campaign or Marvin Gaye or...

Sometimes it's just a matter of, okay, let's go over the basics, right? What's our foundation here? There's X number of albums. This was his most popular. These are the highlighted tracks. And by the way, if you want more, here's a spreadsheet with everything, and here's a link to all the albums, right? But you're kind of helping to funnel information in a way that's usable for everyone. And you create real bonds with people because I'll tell you, I can say I'm a producer, but...

one of the projects you're going to ask me about is something that someone from the, you know, in the commerce team came to me and said, you know, we should be, we should be doing something on what's going on for the 40th or 50th or whatever it was. And I go, I've done that already. Right. Yeah. But there must be stuff. And I don't think there's stuff, but it came from a dialogue between us and me knowing that if someone is asking something's in the air, right. I just take that tack like, shit. Now I got to look. Yeah.

Mitch Barnett (12:50.862)
Let's start with the Marvin Gaye project, the Funky Nation, the Detroit Instrumentals. How did that come about? Yeah. So you have to go back to the 30th anniversary. There's kind of a, my friend Cliff White used to call it a potted history of how these tracks emerged. And what I was able to do after a couple of years of sort of

this potted history of saying, well, here's an interesting track from the Marvin Gaye archive of him trying out these instrumentals. And even on the box set from the 90s, there's a thing called Checking Out Double Clutch. And there's another one called Strut in the Blues. And, you know, he talks about these are just a bunch of cats from Detroit. And then I put a couple of songs on the Let's Get It On Deluxe Edition in this idea that the frame for those instrumentals that were

At that time, I put in three of them and two of them with the same track, but different takes, right? Running from Love and Mandota. This idea that let's get it on, the ramp up into Let's Get It On, Marvin went all these different paths to figure out how he was going to then do this record. And that was a very broad, as it turned out, overview of that story. Because as the years went by, and I've been lucky enough to still be at the gig where I can help reframe the stories, is that these instrumentals were their own thing.

And Let's Get It On is its own thing. What happened in between what's going on is not just Trouble Man, but there was an unreleased album or an attempted unreleased album called You Are the Man. These instrumentals have nothing to do with that. Part of the journey, but not specific to any of those things. It really is the aftermath of what's going on. So it's really August, September of 71. So what's going on? The single had come out in January, 71.

He hadn't cut an album. I just want to be sure the myth is understood that there was a single that Motown's Barry Gordy really didn't want out. He just saw Marvin in a different light. Motown had to be careful about where it was stepping politically. He wanted to be sure we kept the love man grooving on the love man stuff. Didn't really like it, but of course Marvin spoke to a generation and the record blew up overnight.

Mitch Barnett (15:09.454)
And Barry Gordy turned around to Marvin and said, you know that song that I didn't want out, I need a whole album like it. And he said, okay, no problem. He hadn't written anything yet. That was mid -March to the end of March, he cut the rest of the album. Album comes out in May. People are screaming at him to tour. He doesn't tour. He doesn't think he does one or two shows in 72. I think he maybe did a couple of things in 71 for charity, but he did not tour. What he did was, as Marvin is now the Oracle,

And Marvin is speaking for everyone. Upset about the Vietnam War and upset about what's happening in urban cities, what's happening all over the world. He's like, I'm not doing it. And he goes into the studio in Detroit with Ray Parker Jr. who is then what? What is he then? 16, 17? Leroy Emanuel from The Fabulous Counts, Michael Henderson on bass from Miles Davis' band who was then 20, who once told me his Afro couldn't fit through the door frame. He had to duck.

Hamilton, Bohannon on drums. Wow. From Stevie Wonder's band. And they just they jammed. They just jammed and they noodled around. And there really isn't much going on in terms of melody. But they kind of f 'ed around and, you know, did some shit. And all the songs got all these tracks got titles. None of them are like Untitled Instrumental or Some Shit I Made Up. It's just all have titles. And so for the 40th anniversary, so in 2011,

I expanded that idea of what is Mandoda and what is running from love and what else is there like Daybreak, Country Stud, Help the People, Infinity, Mandoda and taking those songs in the box and putting them in this context. So checking out Double Clutch were part of the story. It was on a collection where it was the CD of the original album, some box, some bonus tracks, a second disc of these Detroit Sessions that we call them. And then to keep the Detroit theme.

we had one piece of vinyl, which was the Detroit mix of the album that had yet to be on vinyl. Then we come to the 50th. Now that streaming has taken hold, all these elements were kind of bunched up in one deluxe edition, again, without a real proper framing. So that's why there is a compilation called Funky Nation, because there's what's going on, those sessions, those bonus tracks, that vibe, those singles, that moment, and what I call Funky Nation.

Mitch Barnett (17:34.606)
Those instrumentals to me were a separate thought as a result of what's going on, not necessarily attached to what's going on. Although if you have this collection from the 40th anniversary, I'm very happy if you enjoyed it, because a lot of heart and soul is in that. But those mixes, those versions ended up becoming their own thing. And the fact that we got a lot of interest in these instrumentals that weren't there really before, and you seeing them as a separate entity,

tells me that they needed to have that separate thought. They need to have their own focus. The other thing I wanted to mention, I may be preempting your question, but the key thing about these is that it's not just tracks created for Marvin Gaye and he didn't show up. There's a few of those in the vault. Producers get assigned to Marvin Gaye and he's not there. He instigated these sessions. He's the co -writer, he's the producer, he's talking to the band.

We used as many countdowns where he's giving the countdowns as we could so you could hear, be assured that these are Marvin Gaye instrumentals. And he's playing keyboards? If there are keyboards, some of them I'm not sure there are. He may be playing, you know, percussion here and there, you know, he's a drummer. I should not forget, by the way, Wawa Watson. So there's three guitar players. Was it with the idea that it was going to be released as a all instrumental album? Well, I think, you know, I wasn't.

there. A lot of people think I worked for Motown, but I wasn't there. And the vibe is that I think Marvin needed an escape. He needed to be with musicians and just jam. And Marvin also would start things and abandon them, especially if a record wasn't a hit. Imagine if what's going on in the single wasn't a hit. He probably wouldn't have written the album. You're the Man was an R &B hit, but never showed up on any subsequent, was not really a pop hit and then didn't show up on any subsequent Greatest Hits records.

He never finished the album and you're the man wasn't a hit. Let's get it on. Just just to get an exit. Some folks listening can get an idea of Marvin's M .O. So I'm not talking out of my ass is look at let's get it on. I know from the timeline of the sessions that he recorded with Ed Townsend, then abandoned the sessions. Wow. He didn't fit. He recorded three out of six tracks and they managed to convince him to come back and do another session that he also abandoned and didn't really do any vocals for.

Mitch Barnett (20:00.878)
which are other instrumentals we could talk about. The only way he got to finish the album was Motown pulled Let's Get It On from that early session with Ed Townsend, mixed it as a single, comes out, it's a hit, finishes the album, like what's going on. And if you'll notice, supporting my theory, listen, what's the B side of Let's Get It On? It's a four -year -old, how old was it? It's like three -year -old album track. It's a cover of I Wish It Would Rain. By then it's two and a half, three years old.

They didn't have anything else from the session. They didn't have anything. They put it out. So I think in this case, you've got an artist who has a smash. He's proved his point. I need to do this kind of music. The people have responded. I don't need to go out there and shake my ass, which is what he called touring. And he was scared to be at a horrible stage fright. Read my friend David Ritz's book, Divided Soul. Marvin just had a hard time getting it up for getting on stage, like being in the studio. He liked being in the room with musicians.

Um, now whether he'd go back and finish these, you know, did he abandon them because he was started to work on something else or did he just want to go and hang? Not that you asked, but the tracks on these funky nation are pretty heavily edited. You know, these jams are gone for five, six minutes and tracks are two, three minutes. There's just enough to leave you wanting more. And was this, I should know the timeline with, um, Tammy Terrell and her passing.

This was right around that time. Yeah. So Tammy Turrell dies in March of 70. He cut the single what's going on in June of seven, June 1st. So two and a half months later, you know, is not touring and all that kind of stuff. To me, it's kind of an interesting this, this timeline that he went in with these guys, had he played with them before or he just knew them because they were the hot.

buzz guys at the time sort of thing, or how did those guys get chosen? And so interesting to see how their careers went on. Obviously he picked the right ones. It just seems so much like he just wanted to do something totally opposite of what he had done before. I mean, I would agree. And then he also cut them all at Studio B. He didn't go to Hitsville. He went to Golden World Studios to cut these. And...

Mitch Barnett (22:23.342)
That was in Detroit, but not near West Grand Boulevard. Perry Gordy had bought up the competition at Golden World. They kept the studio late 66. They used that room for strings and for other overdubs, and that's where Marvin went. It's fascinating. I don't know if they're well over know the answer. And that's all I would hope to see, that there's some kind of vibe in those tracks that are inspiring or worth a listen. I love it. Kind of like,

the other project we're going to talk about where you've got one of the most legendary singers of all time, as with Marvin too. And there's all these instrumentals. And especially the Marvin Gaye, the Detroit album, it's such a cool groove. I mean, it's just Marvin Gaye music, but without Marvin Gaye singing. And it was just really good when I came across it. Marvin was nothing but cool. Right.

He was super smooth and cool. So you could only get that kind of vibe. And I do, I have, we have sort of gone back for the email a little bit, but I don't want to forget the instrumentals from the let's get it on sessions, which I think are part of the story in that not quite two years later, if I can go on, I mean, he's already recorded, let's get it on if I should die tonight and please stay. And he's abandoned those sessions and taken off, allegedly gone to the desert and abridged it. I don't know what he did, but.

Motown got David Vandepeet, who had done What's Going On, out to LA and convinced Marvin to come back. So in the past, I've looked at those sessions and thought, oh, these are just kind of sidebars, but they're actually a serious part of the timeline. And Marvin is in the room. You can hear him say, let's play that back. Watch me. You know, he does countdowns. It's not Vandepeet doing the countdowns. It's Marvin. One of the, going back to photographs, my most cherished

photographs that I have is from Jim Britt who did the album cover. And he's got Marvin and Vandepeat at the studio and Marvin is getting ready to stride really fast over to Wilton Felder who was then playing bass to give him some ideas about what he wanted. So Marvin is clearly directing, producing the sessions. They're not constructing material so that Marvin might put vocals on it later. He is in the room saying, this is what I want. Oh, and you know,

Mitch Barnett (24:49.646)
Herbie Hancock is playing piano. Just thought I'd tell you that. And then he abandoned those sessions and then ended up finishing the record. And then the other instrumentals that we can talk about are within the Ed Townsend sessions. There are three songs that they don't finish. Ed does lyrics, but Marvin doesn't do anything with them. So there are three more songs that are instrumentals on this Deluxe Edition that I like to bring up because I want people to hear it. It's just to hear.

You know, Marvin is now even more confident as a producer and more specific about what he wants and is trying out a few divergent paths to get to what eventually becomes the album. I think in the way that we look at Picasso sketches and notebooks of Da Vinci that Marvin in the Pantheon is a great artist, it's okay sometimes to, I think to look at what he's working with. What do you got going here? What are you thinking about? Oh, you're gonna go there? You could have gone there. And the other thing that,

almost sent me down a very bad rabbit hole. And I'm gonna leave this for future generations, so I'm challenging anybody out there. You could reconstruct the Let's Get On album as a smooth jazz masterpiece without vocals. The instrumentation is there, the heart is there, the saxophones and the trumpets and the guitars, it's all there. Not me, not now, it's too much. But you could, someone could really do it, not replay it, but take the original tracks and...

figure out a way to make it. Anyway, you can make it that. Yeah, what an incredible talent he was. And then 72 is Trouble Man soundtrack, right? Right. And he hadn't done a soundtrack. He was pretty involved in that, right, as far as not just songs for the movie, but also doing the, what's it called? Well, that's the score. Yeah. So that's a really good piece of connective tissue brought in here, which is...

You've got Funky Nation. There's a stop and start where he's not gonna tour and then he does the You're the Man single, some recordings around it that end up not coming out, trying out different producers, does vocals, drops it all to go to Hollywood and score a movie. And doesn't sing like Curtis Mayfield doing Superfly or Isaac Hayes doing Shaft. He basically does one vocal and the rest of it's all this incredible jazz. I mean, this soul jazz shit is incredible. It is, it's really good. You know,

Mitch Barnett (27:16.526)
My understanding is that he directed kind of an orchestral score group of musicians. And then there was like a core rhythm band. He did different sessions with each one and he directed and he told them what he wanted. And then he kind of sing the parts and James Carmichael who was then, you know about to start producing the Commodores about that. He's got both got the soul guys and he's got the old school guys and he's got kind of traditional jazz guy all working with him to create.

something that hits a meat to it, but he's directing it. I was going through my albums a couple months ago and I came across Grover Washington Jr. album and he does a version of Trouble Man. It's a great, great, great version. From the Soul Box, isn't it? Yes. Yeah, that was good. I worked at a record store in my early 20s and the manager there was a, he loved jazz. And after work he had a...

trailer down in Newport. We go down there, roll a joint, he'd pull out his sacks and start and put on the junior man and start blowing with with the junior man. And then we sit down and have a beer with Trouble Man or Junior Walker, which would just well, he always called Grover Washington called him Junior Man. Oh, Junior Man. I got you. That is that's pretty cool. And that's where I, you know, fell in love with Grover Washington Jr. And so that's how I love it.

I loved him playing inner city blues. You know, he did Marvin's. Um, the arranger on that record is Bob James on soul box. Yeah. I noticed that. Yeah. Let's talk about the, uh, James Brown soul pride, the instrumentals, 1960 to 1969. You got it. I love doing that project. Oh, that whole two CD box set and a great story that was told on the inner sleeve. Yeah. The liner notes. And it's really.

It's about the band as much as it's about James Brown. There was so much I learned in just that little booklet. When he first started in his career, he was really a musician as much as a singer. I mean, starting with the flames and all that early stuff, he was really not just a front man singer, right? Well, I think James could convince you that he was a decent instrumentalist.

Mitch Barnett (29:42.158)
Right, because he played organ or piano, like he does the piano solo on Sex Machine. He's the drummer on Night Train. You know, I don't doubt his confidence. I don't doubt any sort of drive on his part to put the band front and center. I think because his sound and what he intended was unique, was so unique that he couldn't just have a studio band play it. It had to be his band. He had to direct the band.

He did something that I don't know if anybody would do nowadays. I mean, nowadays people have alter egos and people sometimes go by interesting names. You know, like Beyonce has Sasha Fierce. These are kind of alter egos. James Brown wanted his band to be front and center. I don't know whether he saw the future, but he could save money because the opening act could be his own band. You know, he did a record called Do the Mashed Potatoes that was credited to a local disc jockey, King Coleman, in Miami.

But it's James Brown and the band. And it was a hit. They're touring all over the place as King Cole in those early 59, early 60s. And so finally King let him have a single and do instrumentals. He did a cover of Hold It and on the label it says James Brown presents his in all caps band, B -A -N -D in big letters. He was determined that that would be his future. He would have his own band and they would get their own shine. You know?

but under the direction of him, because if you ever went to a James Brown show and the band was the opening act, they would play hits of the day, not always, you know, pass the P's. They'd have to play whatever the hits are. They're playing instrumental versions. You know, the James Brown band that opened up for James Brown are playing instrumental versions of current hits of the time. Yeah. But James, early on, the show until about...

66, 67, he usually opened his own shows playing organ. And that was the big reveal. The band would be playing the King, which is one of their instrumentals, or they'd be playing tighten up, again, a cover, or they might be playing soul food or evil. And the big reveal was that James Brown would be playing the organ. Spotlight would hit where he would be. And that was a big deal. That later shifted to where he'd come out and sit on a stool and sing That's Life, Kansas City, kind of standards.

Mitch Barnett (32:08.43)
So he was the ultimate showman kind of thing. And he didn't have to work that hard. But the instrumental side, particularly in the 60s, what this compilation does is shine a light on those tracks. And also because he did so many albums on Smash that were instrumentals, there's a lot of filler. We're not necessarily the album, you if you wanted to hear Bob is Bagger, Cold Sweat, you didn't really go to those records back in the day. So what I wanted to do with this compilation is not only document the singles that were released that may have not been on the albums, but then,

pluck from certain albums tracks that were worthy on their own. Yeah, on their own. The Popcorn was a hit single. Ash Potatoes, we know, they recut it a few times. Every song that's on this two CD set, were all of them released at some point on James Brown records through the 60s or some of them unreleased? Well, all of them were on various albums. There were a couple of kind of non LP singles.

You know, I threw in like, if there was a mono single and I found the stereo master, I would put out the stereo. Grits and Soul was a great record. There's a couple of tracks from that. But I did find, you know, like Devil's Den, which was a really big opening set track for the band. I found a live version from 66 that was just on fire. And we put that on the compilation. And then he updated Mashed Potatoes in that same show. And we put that out on.

compilation, which you can stream. And the other one that I really love, because I eventually put out the whole show from Dallas in 68, August of 68, where the band does tight note, Maceo does the little asides where he's calling the band. So it's not strictly an instrumental, but man, the trumpet solo on that thing is just amazing. You know, I found a different mix of funky drummer that was supposed to be on an album, but didn't come out. So.

And some of them were, you know, newly mixed, some we found the masters. A lot of quotes are, you know, short little interviews from the band members in that booklet. Was that something that you found from previous interviews? Is that something you all did at that time? Well, I think at the time, it's too bad most of these guys are gone. But, you know, we did this back in a little over 30 years ago. I think these are all.

Mitch Barnett (34:31.15)
Yeah, if I talked to Bird or Lewis Hamlin, Bobby Bird, I would have put it in there. I don't, like I said, I don't try to remember everything because my brain would fill up. Yeah, I mean, you've got the chicken and Peewee Ellis is a big part of this. Peewee Ellis and Maceo, Maceo takes the solos. But Peewee Ellis as a writer and arranger is really key to the band. Once you get past the kind of late jump band, blues band, Bill Doggett type of honky tonk instrumentals, you get into something more sophisticated when you get into the popcorn chicken.

Come On in the House, got the barn -burning sax records evolved into something a little more which you can sink your teeth into. In the Middle was a P .B. Ellis record. Soul Pride was a P .B. Ellis record. He's just really digging into the funk and the little tickly guitar scratches. And he's got a way that the rhythm section of the horn section, well, first of all, the rhythm section really has to lock. How do you interact with the horns? He told me he had separate rehearsals for each of them.

so they could get their confidence, not get out of whack by trying to lock with each other in the room. They would lock separately. He'd get them tight, super tight, until they were undeniable, then he put them together. And that's where something like, you know, say it loud, which is actually on an offbeat, right? And their musicians seem to be more articulate than me about this, so forgive me. But something like, I got the feeling. How do you play that record?

and everything's just cooking and cooking and cooking and cooking and nonstop. And you've got to watch James do his shout and go, so, you know, that's from P .W. Ellis having taken over the band in 67, begins to instill a bit of pride and a bit of confidence. And in addition to the showmanship, they have real, real extra musicianship. Not that Nat Jones was a slouch or the band before that was a slouch, we're slouches at all. You know, James made his bones on the band.

But once you get into 67, 68, 69, man, you know, mother popcorn, the popcorn, low down popcorn, let a man come in and do the popcorn. We have all these instrumentals in addition to those because of his deal with Smash where he wanted to protesting his deal with King. So he signed with Smash and was able to do instrumentals as long as they were in vocals. He was cool. And then 69, then 70 comes, then there's this transition.

Mitch Barnett (36:53.134)
with James Brown and what happens with him. And he changes musicians and his whole career is starting to change at that point. Is that right? Yeah. March of 70, February, March of 70s, that band has had it as successful as they've been. I think you see a man like James who's becoming enormously successful and they're well paid, but they don't feel like the working environment is right and the money is not right.

and they quit, they call his bluff and quit. And he calls their bluff back and hires a new band. So it's Bootsy, Catfish, Don Juan Martin, these real rookie, raw, horn and guitar players. And you know, they kind of have this jagged edge, but it helps James. One, because he has to sort of be, he has to sort of be dad, or you know, Uncle James, I mean, becomes the godfather. But in this instance, he cannot tell Bootsy to get his shit together. He has to be gentle.

because if those guys quit, he has zero back. Right? And you can hear it. It's a little bit of a humble brag. We put it in the dock where you hear him talking to Bootsy and Catfish. He's telling them, hey man, you know, like, don't forget, hit those ones. He's not saying, oh, you better get on the one. I'm going to find you. He is, hey man, it's okay. It's all right. It's all right. You know, it's all right. Let's just try it again. You know, the tone is very different. The funk is just incredible. You know, Bootsy and Catfish lock in with Tiger.

But then Clyde comes back, Clyde Stubblefield comes back and that becomes its own kind of amazing rhythm section. And they do their own instrumentals. You know, the first version of the JBs do the grunt, which becomes a big sample. And then, you know, when Fred Wesley comes back and takes over the band and the younger guys quit to start their own group and then eventually get into Parliament Funkadelic, it starts a whole nother branch of the tree. Right. The JBs, the second version of the JBs, you know, they start doing.

doing it to death, pass the peas, give me some more, giving up food for funk, same beat. These are all classic instrumentals that James Brown directs that Fred Wesley is arranging. Make work. Yeah, and that was just a fascinating story snapshot of the 60s with instrumentals and with his band and his career and how many different chapters he had of his career. It was interesting what you just said about James Brown being careful with his musicians.

Mitch Barnett (39:18.798)
The younger guy, the younger guys, the younger guy. Because when you think of the older one, you think, you know, he's not taking shit from anybody. Well, he didn't in the 60s either. But there there is this but there's that 11 month period. Can you imagine Bootsy and Catfish holding the band for 11 months? There's that 11 month period where, you know, he's just got it. He's kind of just got to be the kind uncle while also training them on how to be a James Brown band because of ain't hitting it.

That means he's not hitting it and he's not having it. Wow, it's fascinating. Back to back to your career, I saw something with the Kennedy Center that you did with Questlove. Yeah, so you two are sitting in front of the big board and he's pulling stuff up and listening to it and everything. Is it just over time that because have you ever been a recording engineer yourself or are you just?

No, I mean, not because you're not really recording, but you seem pretty comfortable in a studio. Obviously that's my happy place. And is that just something you've learned on your own? Yeah. I just, I just like, I just like being there, but I learned early on that my strength was not necessarily knowing how to, uh, plus two at 10 K, but do a roll off that I can't. What I wanted in my brain is to be able to express the emotional side.

and have an engineer whom I trust to interpret what that is. So I want to lean into, listen, I feel like the guitar is lost. Something's not sitting right. That's a producer's direction. And so the engineer might think, oh, if I put it left and right and then I do this and I get a little reverb and just time out, I have to be able to give instruction as to what I feel like.

is in my head can sound like coming through speakers. I have to trust what the speakers are, what the headphones are, who the engineer is, what kind of dialogue can you have with an engineer? Something, you know, I suppose your audience might understand this, but for people who don't is that working with an engineer is an intimate experience because sometimes you're literally side by side for hours. And sometimes you want to reach over and you've got to brush up against somebody and you've got to touch that thing that you don't want. They don't want you to touch. So there's a trust there.

Mitch Barnett (41:43.534)
is an interrelationship and there's hopefully an interconnectivity where you're able to understand each other. I want to invoke Kevin Reeves, who I've worked with now since almost 27 years, where I can be in a room and I'll hear something and I'll start to say it and he will start to fix it. Wow. Because there's an understanding of what we're going for. And so, but thank you for saying that.

I just, again, I really want to stay focused on the emotional content, the sound, the response, and not be really concerned with pressure and levels and echo and DBs and all the new plugins that people I work with are very well versed in. I have a Pro Tools rig on my laptop, but it's literally in case there's something I need to hear.

I don't need to book time in the studio to hear it. I can just throw it into Pro Tools. And I can certainly bring up the vocal, make sure that everybody's in pitch. I can do my little amateur stereo spread. Then I have a language, right? Then I have a musical language to go to an engineer and say, here's what I'm hearing. Can you do this? This passage right here. Can you mute that, but then bring it up in this passage? Okay, Marvin's chewing gum here. How do we get rid of it without getting rid of the room ambience? Right? That kind of thing.

Those are the things I'm concentrating on. It's interesting what you do. You have such a responsibility. You're not a producer that's working on a new piece of music with the band or the artist right next to you and you're suggesting something. I mean, you're working on something that's already been done and you're saying, okay, we want to do this. We want to do that. There must be times where you're thinking, you know, is this the right thing to bring this up or to bring that down or change that or not have that. And what a...

interesting position to be in. You're attempting to enhance history, not necessarily alter anyone's intent. And sometimes you don't know what the intent is. You might be guessing, but I welcome anyone to want to change anything after I vacate the seat. But you know, it's so important to be open to hearing what's going on. What is the legacy? Is this valuable? And how do you not screw up? Just don't screw up. Right.

Mitch Barnett (44:07.15)
That was the challenge with this unreleased James Brown song. We got to change. It's out. It actually took me years to kind of figure out if it was a real record. It wasn't something I found a month ago and we just put it out. It took years of marinating to go, is there something there? What do we need to do here? So that took some time. What do you have coming up? That I can talk about? Well, I'm looking at actually the Marvin Gaye live album, exclamation point. I'm 74 with Distant Lover on it.

You know, we've dabbled in having extra tracks that were mixed at the time, but then ended up because of vinyl time limitations, they cut them out. So some of the bonus tracks are on the version that's streaming, but the original album is not streaming, right? So I want to kind of reframe that, right? Like I've been doing is, you know, I like to do foundational work and then we have little filigree around it. The foundational work is, geez, get the original album out there. Boom. Okay, take care of that.

Now, what do we do with the bonus tracks? Okay, we'll do like an expanded version. And we'll actually call it that instead of the version that's out there now, which just looks like the original album. I'm trying to figure out now like where do those bonus tracks really go? And there's a couple of other tunes that are, I think there's really just one. Again, I'm in the middle of it now. I've got to listen to the whole thing and see what's not there. Well, Harry, thanks, man. It's been really interesting. I think what you do is just fascinating. I really appreciate those instrumentals.

got out and we can listen to them. So it's really great. Yeah. I appreciate you reaching out to me. I hadn't thought of talking about them in this way. So it's nice to be able to kind of walk through it and you see the value in them. James is really, he could be a musician both on keyboards and drums, but really with his voice, I get a percussive voice. Yeah. And to really know how to direct a band so powerfully and viscerally and make it really a great experience.

You know, for Marvin, with his smoothness, had a definite idea of how he wanted his music to live. You know, the instrumentals you mentioned and we talked about really are him saying, this is what I want. Yeah, you definitely feel that. So cool. All right, man. Thanks a lot. All right. See you down the road. You got it. All right. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Instrumentals of Rock podcast.

Mitch Barnett (46:31.758)
Recently, the podcast reached over a thousand downloads since we began last summer, and I want to thank all of you who have taken the time to listen. I really appreciate it. Also, a special thanks to Harry Weinger for being a guest on the podcast. Check out James Brown SoulPride, the instrumentals, and Marvin Gaye Funky Nation, the Detroit instrumentals, wherever you stream or find digital music. Cheers.