The Monday Long Player #22

Changin' Times - Ike White

I finally completed the alphabetising of my LPs last week, a task that’s occupied sporadic Sunday mornings for the past 4 months or so. Next up is the 12s and 7s, which will likely be trickier but that’s a concern for another day. Aside from the nerdy organisational kick I get out of this task, it’s also been great fun revisiting and rediscovering some of the more remote corners of my collection. In some instances I have records that I have no memory of and as I got to the ‘W’ section I realised that a big chunk of these were Record Store Day purchases. We released our own RSD releases on First Word in the shape of our Nothing Leaves The House series and I have fond memories of the early years of the event, particularly the street parties outside Sounds Of The Universe (see pics below). In recent years I find myself paying less and less attention as lazy major-label reissues have flooded stores with records no-one asked for. I guess it’s still working for the shops though, and it certainly worked on me judging by the number of records I seemingly grabbed without listening to in FOMO-led sprees every April.

Record Store Day 2015 outside Sounds Of The Universe

This Ike White record falls into this category; I picked this up in 2018 when it was first reissued and this year it’s getting another pressing, this time celebrating the 50th anniversary of it’s first release. Ike White’s story is a compelling one: jailed at the age of 19 for the murder of a grocery store clerk in a botched robbery he began playing and writing music with his fellow inmates, ghoulishly being given the prison gas chamber as a rehearsal space. He caught the attention of music producer Jerry Goldstein who persuaded the prison warden to allow White to record using a mobile studio that Goldstein brought in.

A quick aside on Jerry Goldstein - he produced multiple albums for War and also had affiliations to Hendrix (largely through merchandising as far as I can see). He was also in a band called The Strangeloves who released the 1965 hit I Want Candy. This song rang a bell with me as I was sure I’d met someone associated with the band in the last few months. A quick search led me to Richard Gottehrer - founder of The Orchard distribution company who I met briefly in New York last summer. Anyway, back to Goldstein; in more recent times he managed Sly Stone, Isaac Hayes and LFO and appears to still be loosely active in the industry at the age of 86.

Goldstein believed that White had the potential to be the next Hendrix and brought in Sly & The Family Stone drummer/founder member Greg Errico and Santana collaborator Doug Rauch alongside a host of other musicians from the LA scene to work with White. They even persuaded the governor to let them bring in female backing singers and towards the end of ’74 had created Changin’ Times. The record is fantastic - fusing elements of Hendrix, Sly and even some of the expansive strings of Isaac Hayes. War is probably the best reference point though for me - it’s soul music for sure, but simmered in psychedelia with a seam of 70s rock running through it. Personal favourites are the shimmering title track and the bouncing closer Love & Affection.

Emboldened by the success of the record and aided by a campaign led by Stevie Wonder (check the quote on the back of the sleeve), White hired a new lawyer who got him released in 1978. Newly-wed to Goldstein’s secretary his post-prison life was full of promise. That’s not quite how it worked out unfortunately; White disappeared from view, and likely would have stayed that way had his work not found it’s way into the hands of various 90s hip hop producers, who sampled his music for tracks by Snoop Dogg, Ice Cube and OC, amongst many others. Fast forward another 20 years or so, and British film-maker Dan Vernon came across the record and heard a story that White was now working as a lounge act under the name David Maestro. Surprisingly for someone who had seemingly gone out of his way to avoid the public eye, Vernon was able to meet White and stay at his house for three days in 2014, hearing the story of his tough early life, leading to the supposedly accidental killing that landed him in jail.

Two weeks later, Vernon got a call from Ike’s wife Lana with the news that he had taken his own life, for reasons that remain unclear. Lana encouraged Vernon to complete the film, as White was excited about the project and had trusted Vernon with a trove of recordings, photographs and other ephemera to tell his story. What transpired was a story of multiple wives (many who did not know that he had been married to anyone but them), changing aliases and mounting debts, as White seemingly spent over three decades trying to escape his past. Annoyingly the film isn’t currently available to stream (and doesn’t seem to have got a DVD release) - if anyone has a copy I’d love to check it out.

The origin story of the record did get me thinking about how we reconcile the actions and personal lives of the artists we love. A couple of spaces down from White on my shelves I found the first Kanye West album, an artist who is rightly having to face up to the consequences of his horrendous actions over the past few years. Nudging a few spaces forward in my racks I found another current artist (who I won’t name) that was one of the most exciting to come out of the UK in the past decade but has now been revealed as a serial abuser.

How we respond to this kind of thing is quite personal, although I’ll be honest that I find it a bit dispiriting how so many people I interact with online are willing to give the anti-semitism of Ye (and indeed Wiley) a pass. With Ike White it’s several steps removed - it’s easy to assume that he was innocent, or perhaps a victim of circumstance if we don’t have to look too closely. Listening to White doesn’t feel like it’s condoning murder, whereas for me listening to Kanye would feel more pointed - at best it’s displaying indifference to a form of racism that we should be much more aware of in these perilous times. Age plays a part; it’s easier to forgive the actions of a desperate 19 year old as opposed to a 40-something multi-millionaire. Equally White was a much older man by the time he hid his numerous wives and children from one another. Perhaps White’s relative anonymity is a mitigating factor here, but I’m sure that wouldn’t matter to the family of the man who was killed (accidentally or not) in the incident that led to his imprisonment.

Whichever way you land on this it’s a reminder that artists are often flawed, and mythologising or deifying them is often a route to disappointment. I’ll keep this record in the racks and hopefully play it more often. Some of the other records I found I can’t personally countenance keeping and they’ll be consigned to the ‘sell’ pile. Some others will go straight in the bin.

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The Monday Long Player is a weekly newsletter from me, Aly Gillani aka Gilla. I’m a radio host, DJ, A&R and writer. I run First Word Records and am the Artist and Label Outreach Lead at Bandcamp. You can listen to my latest radio show on Rinse FM just here, check out my fortnightly Bandcamp Selects show here and buy my zine The Long Player just here. Subscribe to get a weekly write up of a record I’ve been listening to this week as well as news from my musical world.