The Charles Stepney Outrageous

The great producer-arranger ventures into the outer limits with Rotary Connection, Ramsey Lewis and Minnie Riperton

I have always loved music with scope and grandeur so it’s no surprise that I am drawn to the music of producer and arranger Charles Stepney. It could be over-the-top but even when it was, the music was visceral, exciting and alive with feeling.

The below essay highlights three of my favourite Stepney productions: Rotary Connection’s first, Ramsey Lewis’ Maiden Voyage and Minnie Riperton’s solo debut, Come to My Garden, Prior to that, I offer a few observations on outrageousness in music.

I hope you find the essay interesting and as always, please let me know what you think.

---

The Charles Stepney Outrageous
By: Robert C. Gilbert

Outrageousness. That’s a pose of provocation in music and it can be made in many ways.

There’s the delight of the double entendre. A wink of knowingness that can also soar right past the oblivious. For example, ‘Plastic Saddle,’ written by Vic McAlpine and recorded by, among others, Nat Stuckey and Jerry Reed, is ostensibly about a certain kind of horseback riding but, especially when Reed in full wild-man persona drawls, “don’t give me no plastic saddle / just let me feel that leather when I ride,” it’s likely something else that’s being contemplated here. Billy Ward and the Dominos’ ‘Sixty-Minute Man’ is less circumspect about its subject matter but oblique enough so that it still feels subversive to realize that the top being blown off ain’t no roof.

It can also come in the evisceration of form like Brian Wilson constructing ‘Good Vibrations’ and ‘Heroes and Villains’ out of a multitude of fragments recorded over many months. Gustav Mahler’s symphonies, with the exception of the first and the fourth, take form to the breaking point, stretching movements to 20, even 30 minutes, becoming endurance tests for the conductor, the orchestra and the listener too.

Then there’s also outrageousness in sound like the productions of Phil Spector or Shadow Morton, bringing emotion to the forefront amid the sound of guitars, pianos, drums, timpani, castanets or, in the case of Morton’s production of ‘Leader of the Pack’ for the Shangri-Las, a motorcycle rev and its apocalyptic end.

There’s also Marlena Shaw’s recording of ‘California Soul’ from 1969, one of many notable songs written by Nick Ashford and Valerie Simpson. It’s from The Spice of Life, released on Cadet, a subsidiary of Chess Records.

The drumbeat as it begins is thick. The stick hitting the snare drum feels like it is a messenger delivering the beat primordial. Then there’s the scissoring strings and as Shaw reaches the chorus, the brass calling out in a single-note riff blare.

The sound is loud and broad. It comes to the listener rather than requiring the listener to come to it. I’m not sure I would exactly call it outrageous but the impetus behind it certainly was.

If restraint was a motivator in Motown’s brand of soul—smooth and bright for an interracial appeal—as well as Stax’s—resisting sweetening to make it explicitly Black music while still, as Otis Redding proved at the Monterey International Pop Festival in 1967, having a pull that refused to follow any colour line—Charles Stepney, especially in his early years as a producer and arranger at Chess, took restraint out to the wood chipper, reducing it to dust.

Marlena Shaw’s recording of ‘California Soul’ is symphonic soul with an edge. ‘Woman of the Ghetto,’ which starts The Spice of Life, has vocals put through what sounds like a Leslie speaker, similar to John Lennon on the Beatles’ ‘Tomorrow Never Knows,’ a part for kalimba and a running time of almost seven minutes.

The Dells’ ‘There Is,’ a top-20 hit from 1968 produced and arranged by Stepney, has an urgent energy. Muddy Waters’ cover of the Rolling Stones’ ‘Let’s Spend the Night Together,’ also from 1968 and also a Stepney production, is the weirdly appealing (well, maybe just me) attempt to pitch the once-named McKinley Morganfield to the flower-power generation.

Rotary Connection was the beginning of that instinct at Chess. It was the same thing at RCA, Warner Brothers, Vanguard, Verve and Columbia: all trying to catch a whiff of the magic of the burgeoning maturity of rock music. That is primarily why Marshall Chess hired Stepney, mostly a jazz player at the time, for Chess in 1966

Rotary Connection was a vocal group. Four males: Mitch Aliotta, Sidney Barnes, Bobby Sims and Ken Venegas. Two females: Judy Hauff and Minnie Riperton. Interracial too. Backing them were session players: the most well-known being guitarists Pete Cosey and Phil Upchurch.

Their first album was released at the end of 1967. Like the rock group Vanilla Fudge, the music revolved around radical re-workings of well-known rock and soul hits. These came from Stepney. The album’s opening cut was the beginning of his imagination running wild.

‘Amen’ was a spiritual that was featured prominently in the 1963 picture Lilies of the Field and subsequently a big hit for the Impressions. Their version turned it into a gospel march. It’s far more difficult to pin Rotary Connection’s recording of it to any one style or feel.

It begins with a sitar, resolving into an uplifting chorale on the song’s title enlivened by brass and a harp. Its conclusion is signaled by a three-note motif. It becomes a groove when Upchurch, on bass here, and drummer Morris Jennings lock step on it. When the brass punctuates that riff with a two-note response as the chorale continues, ‘Amen’ becomes a mix of James Brown funk, Mormon Tabernacle Choir sweep and Leontyne Price rafter raising.

Simms and Hauff trade the lead vocal on the two verses. Strings from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra are added. Both verses follow an arc, from diffident cool to evangelical heat. It concludes with an orchestral coda not unlike the finale of a symphony.

Stepney’s recasting of ‘Amen’ rests on an edge, maintaining a balance that is precarious. It is both a big recording, large in sound, every texture expressed like an exclamation point at the end of a sentence and a soulful one, its declarative expressions voiced with syncopation. The beat is laid down with a thud but it still bounces.

The other covers on Rotary Connection can be measured by how well they dangle on this edge. John Sebastian’s ‘Didn’t Want to Have to Do It’ is sedate with electronic effects by Bill Bradley appearing at random to disturb the mood. It’s unsubtle but not in the way that being unsubtle makes Rotary Connection such a revealing artefact of its time.

The edge on ‘Soul Man’ is treating the verses like the utterances of two travelling baroque troubadours; in this case, Aliotta and Hauff. The chorus is full throated, Isaac Hayes and David Porter by way of Sam & Dave at a San Francisco Be-In.

What Stepney is doing here is in no way related to the material. Singing lines like ‘I was educated from good stock / when I start lovin’, I can’t stop” like a madrigal from the Middle Ages is ridiculous but that’s also part of Rotary Connection’s appeal.

Stepney is playing with sound, fearlessly flinging himself and everyone associated with the album into new frontiers. Of the two Rolling Stones covers: ‘Lady Jane’ and ‘Ruby Tuesday,’ the latter is especially gonzo. The transition from the reverent verse to the aggressive chorus is marked by a siren sound, a sonic shorthand for the moment when the drugs are meant to kick in, I’d like to think.

It’s a good chance to hear the group sing in unison, a sound that may not exactly be distinguished but it still holds interest—its brazen extraversion is one with the album’s vibe as is the take on Bob Dylan’s ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ that is string-laden for the verses and vocally orgasmic on the choruses; the aesthetics of Percy Faith and Ray Conniff refracted in an acid haze.

There are four interludes on the album that further Rotary Connection’s lineage among the album-length statements that came in the wake of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band—one of them, ‘Black Noise,’ is a blast of the group singing the coda of the Beatles’ ‘Hello Goodbye.’ The concluding title track is a collage of moments from the album, including a flash of ‘Memory Band.’

It’s one of two originals on the album; the other being ‘Turn Me On,’ written by Barnes and Greg Perry. ‘Memory Band’ is the more notable of the two. The opening sitar-like line has an immortality through its sampling on the Fugees’ cover of ‘Killing Me Softly With His Song’ and it is also the only lead on the album for Riperton. Her signature ability to take her voice into the stratosphere is heard wordlessly throughout, most clearly on ‘Amen.’

She is also heard on Ramsey Lewis’ Maiden Voyage, recorded and released in the first half of 1968 on Cadet. It was a transitional record for the Chicago pianist. There were still his trademark soulful, percussive covers of current hits, here including ‘Do You Know the Way to San Jose?’ ‘In the Heat of the Night’ and a clavinet-drenched ‘Lady Madonna’ but something more ethereal began to counteract this accessibility.

Drawing it out of Lewis and his trio mates: bassist Cleveland Eaton and drummer Maurice White pre-Earth, Wind & Fire was Stepney who produced the record and shared arranging duties with Eaton.

The originals Stepney wrote for the album included the smoky ‘Ode’ which also includes a get-down bridge on which Riperton can be heard calling out, “sock it to me baby!” and the spacy avant-garde ‘Ethereal Journey’ on which her falsetto plays a key role. Two of the other compositions on the album from his pen were ‘Les Fleur,’ co-written with Richard Rudolph, soon to become Riperton’s husband, and ‘Only When I’m Dreaming,’ co-written with Barnes of Rotary Connection. On Lewis’ The Piano Player, from a year later, came two other Stepney originals: ‘Rainy Day in Centerville’ with Rudolph and ‘Whenever, Wherever’ with Rose Johnson.

These with ‘Memory Band’ formed one half of Come to My Garden, Riperton’s first album and released in 1970. It’s the ultimate expression of Stepney’s scores of ecstasy. The core group supporting her were Lewis’ trio with Upchurch added on guitar,.

If Rotary Connection’s immensity was to provoke, Come to My Garden’s was to soothe, offering the kind of refuge that the lyrics to ‘Memory Band’ promises. Here, it is a bossa nova anchored by Upchurch upon which Stepney layers on brass and strings so that it’s not simply polite like Astrud Gilberto, for one example, but has an unmistakable sense of the stakes at hand and of the emotions involved.

It’s followed by a lavish ‘Rainy Day in Centerville,’ a song of lost love in which string-swept moments contrast with quite passages of yearning. Lewis’ light tapping on the piano is the key element here with the strings hanging above, another moment from Come to My Garden that is not passive, but reaching out to the listener, beseeching him or her.

The album offers an idyll, full of the flowers of ‘Les Fleur’ where “inside every man [let’s treat this as including anyone] lies the seed of a flower / if he looks within he can find beauty and power.” That leads to a Stepney explosion of Riperton with Elsa Harrison and Kitty Hayward operatically setting up brass punctuations to “ring all the bells, sing and tell the people / everywhere that the flower has come.”

On the title track, Riperton continues to evoke this paradise where there are “no more dreams filled with cries.” ‘Completeness,’ with its orchestrated, momentous beginning and Riperton’s soaring soprano, is a seductive, romantic declaration of blissful love that climaxes at the end of each verse.

There is majesty to this music. The gentle movements between rubato and tempo on ‘Close Your Eyes and Remember.’ The strutting brass figures on ‘Oh, By the Way’ and how Riperton sings with her wordless, other-worldly accompaniment overdubbed on top of it. And there’s also the purity of ‘Expecting’ where each verse concludes with Riperton singing as high as she can, treating the waiting before giving birth as the miracle it surely is.

The album ends with Riperton’s versions of ‘Only When I’m Dreaming’ and ‘Whenever, Wherever.’ Both move from harmonically rich passages of jazz colouring to explosions of horns, strings and Riperton’s voice riding high above it all. Angelic, deeply emotive and powerful. Never a moment that is banal or flat.

Of everything that I have heard that Stepney had a hand in, Come to My Garden is the most earth-shaking and beautiful. He was always about trying to make the listener feel and to feel deeply.