Smith – I Just Wanna Make Love To You
Smith – Let’s Get Together
Smith – Tell Him No
Since last week I finally brought out my Soundtrack in Search of a Quentin Tarantino Film mix, I thought this was a fitting post for this week’s Dig Deep. I first heard Smith through Tarantino’s excellent soundtrack to Death Proof, which included their lone hit, “Baby It’s You.” One night at La Cita I was playing that song and Soul Marcosa remarked how I should check for the record since it actually had a couple of really good songs. Within a week I found this copy at Amoeba for $2 or $3.
There are several things to really like about this group. They have a sound that’s a little rougher than the usual bubblegum fare of the late 60s. It’s not quite soul, not quite rock, not quite a lot of things, but it has a really great sound on the best tracks. Predictably, my favorite aspect of the group is the sound of the drums from Robert Evans, he keeps it very minimal, but very very tight. The other thing to really like about Smith was lead singer Gayle McCormick.
In fact, if there is a place this group went wrong it was in thinking that anyone other than Gayle should have been singing their vocals. McCormick reminds me very much of Lydia Pense of Cold Blood, both petite blonde girls with big time vocals, probably often compared to Janis Joplin, even though they don’t sound remotely like her. The best tracks on this record, including the hit and similar tracks like “Tell Him No” and “Let’s Get Together,” are the ones where she sings solo. Elsewhere the male vocalists can’t hold a candle to her and the energy suffers for it. It’s in those moments that the absence of original material really hurt this group. But when Gayle is singing lead and the band is cooking, you can forgive the lack of originality.
For instance, “I Just Wanna Make Love To You” is almost a carbon copy of the version that Muddy Waters put down for his Electric Mud record, but it sounds just a little bit better with Gayle on vocals and the separated sound (fuzzy guitar on left channel, drums and organ on the right) beneath her from the group. It’s in tracks like that (and on “Let’s Get Together,” their almost unrecognizable version of the Youngbloods “Get Together”) that showed that Smith held a lot of promise, they just never seemed to be able to fully realize it. Their second record Minus-Plus doesn’t show much progression (at least to my ears) and eventually McCormick realized she was the best thing in the group and set out on her own, though with mixed results. But in 1969, Smith had a dynamite single and a really solid sound, this record is a testament to what could have been.
Cheers,
Michael
…and just because it’s such a fabulous song, here’s video of the group playing “Baby It’s You.” What is notable about this performance, in addition to that crazy Sheena warrior princess headband, is that Gayle is clearly singing for real, but the band is not playing for real, which means it’s a backing track and there’s an instrumental version of the song and, likely, the whole record. The mind boggles at how many instrumental versions there are in record label vaults from this period of time…