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Category: Dreams and the Supernatural
Article below: DOCTOR Richard Winham (did you know he had a PhD?) compares The Distribution to Sly and the Family Stone. No higher praise than that.
http://www.tnnaturalawakenings.com/chattanoogaarchives/NAChatt1009.pdf(we are on page 15, right after the article on how cows’ gas expulsions spells the end of civilization)
or, you can just read on below:
Channeling the Spirit of Sly
In the summer of 1969, Sly and his Family Stone roused a torpid late-night audience at the Woodstock festival with a thunderous mix of gospel, soul and rock. “All we need is a drummer,” they sang, as the drummer pushed the band from one ecstatic climax to the next, the horns issued a clarion call, and Sly Stone, wailing like a preacher possessed, exhorted the sleepy faithful to rise up and join the party. Even after all these years, their performance is still an irresistible invitation to share in the ecstasy of the moment, to “Get on up and dance to the fonky music!”
This summer Carl Cadwell and his merry band of revelers in the newly formed Chattanooga-based band, The Distribution, are channeling that same spirit. Cadwell, the band’s keyboardist and arranger, grew up listening to Sly’s old studio recordings. He was “fascinated,” he says, by the way Sly arranged the songs. As he puts it, “All the parts interlocked; no part was the lead, the lead was bigger than all the parts.” It could easily have been cacophonous, but as we all know, it isn’t; it serves simply to lock everyone into an unstoppable momentum.
Cadwell and the three singers in The Distribution all grew up playing and singing in the church choir. Listening to Sly’s records, Cadwell heard the same techniques used by those soloists in the choir who “didn’t necessarily step out front. Often they stayed in the background, ad-libbing and adding textures.” To capture that raw energy, Sly made his records with all the singers and players gathered together in the studio, playing “live,” rather than each one recording his part separately, as it’s almost always done now with multitracking. The Distribution made their just-released EP the same way.
The core of the band, drummer Josh Green and keyboardist Cadwell, played together in a great band called Infradig for several years; now they’ve reached the point where they “read each other’s minds.” All they needed, as the song says, “was some bottom” to make everybody move their feet, and they found it in the bass playing of Travis Knight. Listen to “Something New,” the third track on the band’s four-song EP, and you’ll hear what I mean. It opens with Knight playing a thick, meaty line alone for a few seconds before Green slides in beside him, setting the pace with a slightly martial tattoo snaking around the bass, until Cadwell enters, stabbing the keys in a staccato pattern that serves to double the bass line. By the time the singers join in, one after another, each singing over the end of the other, the free-form, gospel exuberance of those old Sly Stone performances is born again. Stevie Wonder’s rubbery keyboard bass lines from songs like “Superstition” are another touchstone, showing up in the latter half of this song and on one other.
The Distribution is a very young band. They have only been playing together for a few months, and yet there is already a palpable buzz about them. Forty years on, everyone still cares about a band that can “make you want to move your feet.” And when The Distribution is on the stand, everyone is up and dancing to the music.
--Dr. Richard Winham hosts and produces
a daily music and interview program for 88.1 WUTC-FM in Chattanooga weekdays
2:31 PM
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