SMIP #11: Brother Love’s Travelling Salvation Show by Neil Diamond
Whether you believe him or not The Minister persists in maintaining that, between roughly 1968 and 1973, Neil Diamond was perhaps the best, most underrated and most innovative pop songwriter around.
In 1968 Diamond acrimoniously left Bang Records – the company that made hits of Solitary Man, Girl, You’ll Be A Woman Soon, Thank The Lord For The Night Time, Kentucky Woman and Cherry, Cherry – to hook up with UNI after Bang’s owner Bert Burns refused to give The Artiste his creative head.
Diamond’s first releases for UNI bombed spectacularly. Introspective, autobiographical ballad Brooklyn Roads – a million miles from the bubblegum of Cherry, Cherry – peaked at 58 on the Billboard chart; Latino-infused rocker Two-Bit Manchild made it no higher than 66; and the anodyne singalong country number Sunday Sun crested two places lower still. The album from which all three were taken – Velvet Gloves And Spit, its back cover bearing a picture of a leather-jacketed but shirtless Diamond leaning on an armless tailor’s mannequin (as horrifying a visual proposition as it sounds) – failed even to make the Billboard Top 200 album chart.
Diamond, New York, c.1968
(inner sleeve of Bang Records’ 1973 Double Gold compilation)
Today, such a run would almost certainly spell the end of the careers not just of the singer in question but also of the record company executive who signed him. The music industry in the late Sixties was a very, very different beast.
So it was in January 1969 that a sallow, Brooklyn-born Jew decamped from New York to Memphis to record at American Sound Studios, where house band The Memphis Boys awaited to commit to tape a gospel number (complete with mid-song sermon by a fictional preacher) that would be lead single from an album that would be released with this artwork:
Brother Love’s Travelling Salvation Show – the album:
further evidence of Diamond’s shirtless late-60s tendencies
(Click here for larger front and rear covers if you dare)
It’s probably not a business plan that would meet with Simon Cowell’s approval…
The Memphis Boys may not have the name recognition of their Memphis neighbours Booker T. & The MGs, Alabama’s Muscle Shoals house band or Motown’s Funk Brothers, but their pedigree is unimpeachable.
In 1967 The Memphis Boys had propelled Aretha Franklin to superstardom thanks to her and their reinterpretation of Otis Redding’s Respect; a few months before Diamond arrived the band had backed Dusty Springfield on her seminal Dusty In Memphis album; the next session at American Sound after Diamond’s was for Elvis Presley, who would record with The Memphis Boys Suspicious Minds and In The Ghetto. In their heyday, American Sound and The Memphis Boys created 122 Billboard hit singles in the three years from 1967.
American Sound Studios, Memphis, Tennessee, derelict in the
1980s before it was demolished to make way for a parking lot
The Memphis Boys comprised organist Bobby Emmons, pianist Bobby Wood, drummer Gene Chrisman; bassist Mike Leech; and guitarist Reggie Young. They were produced by Stax-alumnus Chips Moman and Tommy Cogbill (who would also sometimes play bass).
The Memphis Boys with the King in 1969
Whether the song was originally designed by Diamond as parody, pastiche or homage (his own explanation of the song’s genesis has varied down the years), these good ole Southern boys understood gospel revivalism and in one of the happy coincidences that litter the history of pop music, the right song found the right musicians at the right time in the right place.
From Wood’s opening chords [0:00-0:084], played above Emmons’ gentle organ and [from 0:04] Leech’s pulsating bass, this record catches the ear. It didn’t – and still doesn’t – sound like anything else on the radio. Whether we’re in a Harlem church hall or a revivalist tent we don’t yet know, but this is not vanilla pop music.
While it doesn’t quite rival “Awopbopaloobopalopbamboom” as pop’s greatest opening line, Diamond immediately paints the picture:
Hot August night
And the leaves hangin’ down
And the grass on the ground smellin’ sweet
[0:08-0:16]
Wood and Leech propel matters along [0:16-0:22] until more of the canvas is unveiled:
Move up the road
To the outside of town
And the sound of that good gospel beat
[0:22-0:30]
Then Wood signals a change in mood [at 0:33], Leech cuts out the fancy stuff, the backing singers start to “Woooooo” and the build to the chorus begins:
Sits a ragged tent, where there ain’t no trees
And that gospel group tellin’ you me…
[0:35-0:46]
Having gently kept time throughout the first verse, now Chrisman cuts loose [0:45-0:47] to demonstrate why he’s possibly the finest rock drummer whose name you’ve never heard and we reach one of the daftest choruses ever laid down on tape, underpinned by Emmons’ pulsing organ riff.
It’s Love, Brother Love’s, say, Brother Love’s Travellin’ Salvation Show!
(Halle! Halle!)
Pack up the babies and grab the old ladies
And everyone goes
‘Cos everyone knows
Brother Love’s shows
[0:47-1:02]
This is mental. Absolutely crackers. And superb. Which is why we stop it dead in its tracks and, with the help of trombones punctuating the sultry summer night air, we continue to paint the wider picture:
Room gets suddenly still
And when you almost bet you can hear yourself sweat
He walks in.
Eyes black as coal
And when he lifts his face every ear in the place is on him.
Startin’ soft and slow, like a small earthquake;
And when he lets go, half the valley shakes
[1:09-1:48]
And when Chrisman starts beating the crap out of that drumkit again [1:47-1:48] you know what’s coming around again:
It’s Love, Brother Love’s, say, Brother Love’s Travellin’ Salvation Show!
(Halle! Halle!)
Pack up the babies and grab the old ladies
And everyone goes
‘Cos everyone knows
Brother Love’s shows
(Hallelujah!)
[1:48-2:04]
Was this really the same man that had written I’m A Believer, sitting at number one for The Monkees precisely two years earlier in January 1967? Where had this come from?
BROTHERS!
[2:06]
To quote Keanu Reeves: “Whoa.”
I-I-I SAID BROTHERS!
[2:09-2:10]
What the fuck?
NOW, YOU’VE GOT YOURSELF TWO GOOD HANDS:
AND WHEN YOUR BROTHER IS TROUBLED
YOU GOT TO REACH OUT YOUR ONE HAND FOR HIM
‘COS THAT’S WHAT IT’S THERE FOR;
AND WHEN YOUR HEART IS TROUBLED
YOU GOT TO REACH OUT YOUR OTHER HAND,
REACH IT OUT TO THE MAN UP THERE -
‘COS THAT’S WHAT HE’S THERE FOR.
[2:12-2:30]
He’s freaked out. The New York Jew is sermonising in the middle of the song like a Southern Baptist. You can’t do this on a pop song.
Take my hand in yours,
Walk with me this day.
In my heart I know
I will never stray.
[2:32-2:45]
He’s calmed down again. We’re back in familiar territory – singing instead of screaming. Soothing piano chords atop the organ. That’s a bit better.
No, it’s not. He’s off again – smacking a tambourine – and this time he’s got the girls in tow:
Halle! Halle!
Halle! Halle!
HALLE! HALLE!
HALLE! HALLE!
[2:46-2:52]
Chrisman must have got through three snare drum skins in those six seconds alone. Leech is no longer just playing his bass – he’s positively spanking its strings. And at 2:53 the trumpet heralds the crescendo of the final choruses.
During this final part of the song, the kitchen sink is thrown at the master tape in a manner that even Phil Spector would admire. Diamond has thrown off all pretence of decorum and is simply yelping out the words to the chorus.
If one of the many criticisms laid at Diamond’s door is that his vocals too often lack soul – that his performances do not reflect the passion at the heart of pop music – his critics are not familiar with much of his output from this time.
This is a sultry and sexy performance, the singer throbbing within the music’s groove. This is a vocal that is utterly convincing, particularly as the song swells through the choruses and when Diamond adopts the persona of Brother Love for the “sermon”.
There is, appropriately, a fervour to the production, arrangement and the playing of this music – and the singing reflects that fervour. The coarseness in Diamond’s voice is undeniable and, if anything, the disappointment is that the record fades a little too soon – might there have been a full-blown vocal wigout if we’d gone round the chorus one more time?
As it is, our SMIP prefaces the final chorus we hear. Repeat to fade. And what a fade. Lost in the moment, gasping for air, Diamond’s voice involuntarily leaps an octave.
I-I SAID!
[3:06]
The “I” becomes a half-strangled, half-screamed howl. He’s in a different place – a magical, mysterious place only music can go – where the only thing that matters is staying atop the cacophony of drums, cymbals, piano, organs, gospel choristers, trumpets, trombones and tambourines that make up the final 40 seconds of one of the strangest, yet most seductive, singles of Neil Diamond’s career.
At the healing hands of Brother Love, that career was reborn. Released on 22 February 1969, Brother Love’s Travelling Salvation Show would reach number 22 on the Billboard Hot 100, ending an almost two-year-long run of six single releases that had failed to hit the top 40. Diamond’s live performances were also revived by that good gospel beat, Brother Love becoming his set’s closing number to this day. (A peerless, stripped-down live version can be heard on Diamond’s March 1970 album Gold: Recorded Live At The Troubador.)
Neil Diamond, March 1970, backstage
at The Troubador club, Los Angeles
[While this paragraph is for completists only, this particular completist would like to note that the best version of Brother Love's Travelling Salvation Show is rarer than hen's teeth in this digital era. The single was mixed in mono, with double-tracked vocals and more prominent brass and percussion than the album's stereo mix. The mono mix is more fevered, urgent and intense... and unavailable outside the original 7", despite being the version that compelled people to listen to the song in the first place. Every available Diamond compilation features the album mix. While the vocal yelp that comprises this SMIP is fully evident in the version featured below, the album mix is nevertheless a flatter and less thrilling concoction than the one featured on the 7"-diameter piece of vinyl sitting in the Minister's now-never-opened record box.]
Emboldened by the creative and commercial success he rediscovered in Memphis, Diamond would return to American Sound in March 1969 to record Sweet Caroline, Emmons in the process improvising one of pop’s catchiest and most distinctive introductions.
You think you know the rest of the Neil Diamond story.
You don’t.
As we shall see in due course.