Touched by Jackson

The Soul of Designer Records Review by Stephen Thomas Erlewine
Chances are, you've never heard of Designer Records. One of many independent labels run on a little less than a shoestring in the '60s and '70s, Designer Records was one of the many imprints run by Style Wooten, a Memphis recordman who recruited new talent in classified ads in the back of local newspapers (this also happened to be how he found his wife). Wooten's rates ran low but he wasn't cheap. As long as the musicians had the cash, he took his time in the studio, coaxing the best possible performances out of his nonprofessional artists, which wasn't a particularly easy thing to do due to his own amateur status. He could play a little, but he left a lot of the actual recording up to Roland Janes, a former studio guitarist for Sun who had played with Billy Lee Riley and Jerry Lee Lewis before he departed to set up Sonic Studios in Memphis in 1962. Two years later, Style became a regular customer of Sonic, cutting a wide variety of artists – country, rockabilly, soul, rock & roll – and issuing them on a bewildering number of imprints, many of them named after cars.

Refuges: A Charisma Records Anthology tells the audio story of one of the most innovative labels of the '60s and '70s. Though this collection only spans a mere decade in the history of Rock (1969-78), it is a decade filled with musical innovation and excitement. Though most of their releases may have hovered outside the Top 40 in the U.S., the label's roster consisted of artists that are just as influential today as at any other time in the last 30-40 years. Features 44 tracks including cuts from Peter Gabriel, Van Der Graaf Generator, Genesis, Monty Pythons, Hawkwind, Bo Hansson, Rare Bird, The Alan Parson Project, Lindisfarne, Peter Hammill, Keith Emerson, String Driven Thing and many others.

Craig Charles is one of the UK’s best-loved Funk & Soul DJs. Broadcasting for over 10 years Craig Charles is spearheading the Funk & Soul revolution with his shows on BBC 6 Music and BBC Radio 2. Funk & Soul Classics is his roots and heritage. This three-disc Set displays the rich routes and sultry rhythms of a genre that has touched and influenced many. The sixty tracks collectively represent some of the finest pieces of genre-defining music spanning across six decades, Craig Charles added “Having the chance to put together a collection featuring my personal favourites from the golden age of American soul & funk music, alongside some absolute funky nuggets from the contemporary bands keeping that raw soul sound alive in the 21st Century is a dream come true!” This definitive collection includes some of the heavy weight classics alongside some outstanding modern hidden gems. Funk & Soul Classics features some of the most celebrated vocalists and musicians, collectively earning multiple Grammy and Soul Train Awards.

Unlike other labels subjected to exhaustive multi-disc retrospectives like this whopping ten-disc Revolutions in Sound: Warner Bros. Records – The First Fifty Years, Warner Brothers never embodied a scene or sound: they've always embodied what a major label should be – a dominant force that chronicles and dictates the sound of the mainstream. Coming out at the tail-end of 2008, when the influence of major labels is on a slow steady decline, Revolutions in Sound can be seen as a portrait of a time that's beginning to recede into the past: a time when there was such a thing as mass entertainment, when the pop audience all shared a common bond of hit records they either loved or rallied against. Perhaps the greatest things about this monumental box set is that it captures that colossus while also illustrating that for a while, majors did take risks. Of course, Warner was the riskiest of all the majors, never held back by an anti-rock & roll sourpuss like Mitch Miller, who struggled to keep CBS out of the tumult of the '60s (this with no less than Bob Dylan as the label's flagship rock artist). Instead, Warner embraced the underground, recording some of the strangest to shake out of the '60s, and that adventure fits a label that turned to rock & roll to help establish themselves as a real player at the turn of the '60s.

It's telling that Rosie Flores' e-mail handle begins "chickwpick?" In a long and eclectic career of singing, songwriting and performing, no phrase has ever more aptly described the San Antonio native.