VINYL ME, PLEASE Archives - Guerssen Records

Talking To The People

GuerssenAdmin — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 22:00:00 +0000

There’s always a risk you run, when championing a record like Talking to the People, of overstating your case. There’s generally an easy-to-grapple-with reason why something that the vast majority of the listening public hasn’t listened to hasn’t been heard. Poor distribution, something slightly missing in the singles, critical misunderstanding, bad timing; all those things have coalesced to make many deserving records lose out on their just desserts.
But pressing play on Talking to the People really does feel like something revelatory, something transcendent. It’s like if the Bar-Kays of the early ’70s had a woman on the mic, or if Funkadelic leaned more into rock, or if Sly Stone had half the budget. It’s an album that feels contemporary — it almost predicts Black genre experimentalists like SAULT — but also fits so neatly in with everything happening in Detroit and Memphis funk in 1973. It failed to find an audience because the audience it predicts — the musical omnivore who could see the strands between everything — hardly existed in earnest by then.

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Never Loved A Man

GuerssenAdmin — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 22:00:00 +0000

Brand new deuluxe Vinyl Me, Please re-issue 180 gram vinyl re-issue pressed on purple & white vinyl. An album originally issued in 1967. Including ‘Respect’ & ‘Save Me’ & many others. (Plated at Quality Record Pressings).

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Black Moses (2LP)

GuerssenAdmin — Wed, 22 Jan 2025 23:00:00 +0000

For all the name Black Moses conjures, for all that it confers, it was not a name Isaac Hayes gave himself; that title was bestowed by a radio DJ sermonizing an intro to one of his songs. It was not a name Isaac Hayes — raised by his god-fearing grandparents in a former sharecropper’s shed after his parents died before he turned two years old — thought was even appropriate. It seemed sacrilegious to him. But that name, it meant something that even Hayes had to acknowledge. He had ascended to a plane that no Black performer before him had ever reached before. He topped the R&B charts and, eventually, the pop charts without ever having to compromise who Isaac Lee Hayes Jr. was. He had shown his people that James Brown’s “I’m Black and I’m Proud” edict was possible. He dripped in gold chains inside his album gatefolds and drove cars literally trimmed in it. Unapologetically.

Black Moses towers as Hayes’ crowning solo achievement. Its 14 songs stand as a 90-plus-minute testament to Hayes’ nonpareil greatness, songwriting ability, singing, and arranging. A monument to authenticity, Black Moses projects a self-confidence so mammoth it feels like receiving the stone tablets of swagger down from the mountain of cool.

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Rejuvenation

GuerssenAdmin — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 22:00:00 +0000

Anchored by seamless jam sessions and syncopated grooves, which Neville would call ‘tight, sparse and funky as the fuckin’ devil,’ The Meters evolved from unfussy, mostly instrumental tracks to full-throated, expansive funk that reached an apex on their fifth album, Rejuvenation, in 1974. With deep-fried grooves, astounding musicianship and a reverence for their history both in New Orleans and in Africa, this album has only felt more vital with age. While it didn’t sell as many copies as the record deserved at the time, it’s a product of these band members’ years of hard work gigging in sweaty night clubs, backing up other artists as session players and persevering through a thankless industry. Above all, it’s a testament to New Orleans.

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