Rod Stewart - Every Picture Tells A Story
Rod the Mod finds his solo footing, headed for stardom, with the Faces in his wake.
6:00 AM GMT 22/06/2011
Features Disc of the day
Ronnie Walker
Someday
(Philly Archives, 2000)
Roots of the Philly sound from a forgotten falsetto teen.
Ronnie Walker has a vocal style that separates the men from the boys, with the men standing all the way over there, by the bar, coughing gruffly lest notions of masculinity be assaulted by their proximity to this high-pitched purveyor of falsetto heartbreak. Walker started young, just 15 when he recorded spookily sad soul valediction I’m Saying Goodbye for Bell Records in 1966. With its roots in desolate doo-wop, Walker’s echo-chambered head-register drifted through mists of grieving girls and funereal organ, establishing a sound that seemed cloaked in old velvet, bidding farewell from the other side of a ghostly veil. This is the Philly sound, before Philly meant too-smooth Gamble & Huffness, a lonely wail forged for cheap, capturing the eerie curse of unrequited love in the days when teenagers were sold romance as an out-of-reach ideal in True Confessions magazine and scared single by urban legends in which smooching led to venereal disease, horrible highway carnage or encounters with The Hook. Walker’s 1967 single for Phillips, Really, Really Love You b/w Ain’t It Funny epitomises this wandering soul sound, Ronnie’s tragic upper register reverberating in a discount echo-chamber like the disembodied voice of some tuxedoed prom-night ghost, looking down on his bride to never-be, his tormented treble filling the night with an ethereal spookiness that says vampires at the window as much as lovers at the door. Amazingly, the ever-youthful Walker is still recording and underneath the disco uplift his is still the sound of deep spectral heartbreak.
Andrew Male
Posted by Ross_Bennett at 6:00 AM GMT 12/11/2008
Further Listening
The Delfonics – La La Means I Love You (Arista, 1997)
Various - Philadelphia Roots (Soul Jazz, 2001)
Harold Melvin & The Bluenotes – Harold Melvin & the Bluenotes (CBS, 1972)
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