Classic soul music, despite its earthy roots in arduously tended crop fields and lawdy-lawdy Pentecostal churches, and despite its often heart-crushing emotion, is, above anything else, pop music.
It may make you wanna kick your heels up, to throw your hands up, to throw your head back – to “shout!,” as the Isley Brothers showed us so well, but it also sells. Look at the soul-singing chart-toppers these days: Amy Winehouse of tabloid fame, Duffy and Lil Wayne (a genius of hip hop, a soul-music progression).
Lesser-known champions of the genre include British singer-guitarist James Hunter, whose polished style deftly incorporates Latin rhythms, and Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, convincing mid-sixties funk revivalists from Brooklyn.
Now comes Eli (Paperboy) Reed, a Boston-based soul-seeker whom Mojo and Rolling Stone magazines are raving about. The 24-year-old Reed, who is Nick Lowe-approved (and the greatest singer ever named Eli), understands the enduring appeal of the music at its best. “Great arrangements and singers and songs and horns,” he explains from the road. “It's such well-put-together and well-crafted music that you can't avoid it coming up again and again. It's become a part of the American lexicon.”
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Reed and his ensemble, the True Loves, who released their second album, Roll With You, this spring, hit the Horseshoe Tavern on Wednesday, one night before a set at Ottawa Bluesfest. There, despite all the bluesy talent assembled, Reed is likely to be the only player who ever received his mail in Clarksdale, Miss. – ground zero for Delta blues. Raised on a wide variety of music in an artistic household in the Boston suburb of Brookline, Mass., Reed headed for the American South at the age of 18, expecting to have a radio job waiting for him when he arrived. The gig never materialized, but he stayed, working at a variety of jobs to pay the bills while playing area clubs three to four times a week.
In Mississippi, he not only got his nickname (which refers to the newsboy cap he wore at the time), but also met and played with some of the region's most notorious rascals – R.L. Burnside, Paul (Wine) Jones and T-Model Ford, a rough-hewn character whose own shows are infamous for the posted notices warning patrons not to buy him alcohol. The droning hill-country blues of those men differs greatly from the excitable Stax Records-style pop soul of Reed's, but he learned from them nevertheless, as well as legendary drummer Sam Carr and the soul-blues crooners of the region. “As a performer, as an entertainer and a singer, it really shaped the way I play and the way I sing,” Reed says. Still, “it's been a while since I've lived there, and I've developed my own style.”
While the high-energy singer stresses that he's doing his own manner of soul music, even a vinyl-clutching R&B musicologist would be hard-pressed to distinguish Reed's style from the greats that walked before him. On the new album, The Satisfier hustles like Otis Redding's Hard to Handle. Minor-key ballads plead in traditional fashion. The danceable Doin' the Boom Boom has call-and-response horns; Take My Love With You has a familiar baritone-sax chug.
YouTube videos show the band as having a rougher approach than heard on the disc, though, and the analog-insistent Reed probably would have preferred a more reckless record than his producer envisioned. “I think if he had his way, it would have sounded way trashy and as terrible as possible,” says Ed Valauskas, head of the Boston-based Q Records. “There's nothing slick about what these guys do, which I think is good. Live, they certainly have the energy of a punk band, for sure.”
As an indication of the group's grittier side, Reed has been known to pull some obscure covers from the bag – namely, a soul makeover of Motorhead's metal-music anthem Ace of Spades. There's likely more surprises to come from Reed, who cites Ohio soul guitarist Robert Ward as an influence on his watery guitar tone.
When it's suggested that he could have starred in the frat-music classic Animal House, Reed denies any connection to a film set in the 1960s, explaining that scene is gone, even in college-crowded Boston. “We're trying to let everybody know that we're as modern as any other band in the way we perform and the way we put ourselves out there,” he says firmly. “We just want the music to speak for itself.”
Eli (Paperboy) Reed & the True Loves play Toronto's Horseshoe Tavern Wednesday. Doors open at 8:30 p.m. $12.50. 370 Queen St. W., 416-870-8000; They play Ottawa Bluesfest Thursday at 8:30 p.m., 877-788-3267.
