episode 5 - Soul Unlimited - Don't Label Me A Black Barry White

The speaker discusses the racial inequality in the music industry, particularly regarding black artists. They express frustration with the way black promotion differs from white promotion and emphasize the need to be recognized and respected by record companies. They mention the significant amount of money made by these companies and highlight the success of Love Unlimited and Orchestra. The episode also touches on the Watts riots and the creation of the KGFJ Soul newspaper. Comparisons are made between Barry White and Isaac Hayes, and the issue of racial inequality in the industry is explored further through an interview with Heather Small. It's amazing, man. It's amazing how they try to treat black people in this industry. It's really amazing. And the difference between black promotion and white promotion, there's a major difference. There's a major difference, okay? And I don't intend to have people label me a blackberry, white, a black love unlimited, a black love unlimited orchestra. We are people, individuals first. We're in the music industry, and we've made a hell of a mark in the music industry. We have contributed very honestly, very truthfully, and very loyalty, very loyal to the record industry, and I want to be recognized for it, man. It's by nobody else but the record company. They make a lot of money. Huh? Yeah. A lot of money. A lot of money. You can print that three times. Can you give me a figure when you say that? Yeah, something like $49 million in three years. That's a lot of money. Nice sounds. Tell me you weren't tapping your foot to that one. You've shown up again. Welcome back to episode five of Unlimited. You're with me, Stuart Large. In the last episode, we climbed on board the Symphonic Soul Train, taking them all stops from east to west coast of America. Stylistically, this music had nuance and sophistication not seen before, and transformed music listeners' tastes. I gave you a sense of just how much impact the music was having, both sides of the Atlantic. With the likes of Gambler and Huff's Sound of Philadelphia, who brought us gifted composer-arranger Tommy Bell, and Motown up in Detroit, by having to raise their game just to stay in touch. I guess you got the gist from the clip at the top. This episode tackles the unsavoury subject of racial inequality, with White happy to pound the table about the absence of a level playing field for black artists in music, whilst telling Sopriety not to burn any bridges. Well, not just yet, anyway. Can you tell me what it is that 20th is doing, or what it is that they're not doing, that's holding us back? Nobody can love Love Unlimited as much as I can, but they gotta at least love them half as much. I know in corporate structures, they look at it different. Everybody got a system, a program, a fucking budget, you know. But it makes the budget realistic. The biggest game going that most record companies, not all record companies, but most of them, is trying to get something for nothing. Whereas you have a few companies, Columbia is one. It's no big secret. They will spend a million dollars on artists and spend another million to promote them. Then they'll make ten million. I just want Love Unlimited and Orchestra Loved by 20th Century and Barry White. I'm in the same shit today. I'm just on a different level of it. Treat it and identify it too with the respect that is due them, as being the three biggest selling artists on a record label. Now cast your minds back, if you will, to the first episode. We heard the powerful testimony of Regina Jones. She was first on hand as a call handler for the LAPD and summoned help for a distressed police officer out in the melee of what would become the Watts riots. I'm going to take us back to that interview so we can hear how events unfolded for Regina during and after the riots. Going home that night was a little scary because I was working in the evening. But the next night going home, they were literally military. So as I'm coming off the freeway onto the street to head home, I'm stopped by the National Guard. Young 20-year-olds with guns pointed in your car and flashlights, and I'm sitting there thinking, if a car backfires, I could be dead. Ken, in the meantime, is out in it as a reporter. Wow. His adrenaline is flying as a reporter. And so he's watching it all happen. And he's up at the radio station, one of the radio stations, up on Sunset Boulevard looking south. And you can see all the flames and everything. And he came up with this idea of doing a newspaper And he came up with this idea of doing a newspaper for us, the people, the black people in the community. It was something good. There's nothing good for us. So that's when he hatched the idea in, I guess it was August. And so came out the following year, 66, in April, the first issue of Soul. So it literally came from the flames. We branched out to San Francisco, and then before a year was up, we had over close to 30 cities across the country that we had an affiliation with. Now, what made it take off so well is Ken, again, being a visionary, got the idea to call it KGFJ Soul, which was the big black radio station. Made a handshake deal where he would give them a page and then eventually two pages inside. And there's all letters on the cover. KGFJ Soul. WVON Soul. K-D-A-Y Soul. And so on the air, the radio, he would have an advertisement, every issue, on sale now. KGFJ Soul. Jackson 5. Barry White. Whatever it was. The people were looking for it. This is Ken Jones. The KGFJ Soul celebrates its fourth anniversary, this issue, with a story on America's most soulful family, the Jackson 5. It's the first of a six-part series. Get all the facts on Michael, Jermaine, Jackie, and Marlon Jackson. Plus a look at the rest of the family, including Joe and Catherine Jackson. It's the world's most soulful family, the Jackson 5, and America's most soulful paper, the KGFJ Soul. Now, Barry White didn't care for backstelling his contemporaries. He knew all about struggle and sacrifice and the 11 years of hard slog to become the symphonic supremo. But he was also honest about the music industry and his contemporaries' limitations. During the orchestral soul boom, there was much comparison made of White with one such, Isaac Hayes. Let's take a closer look at why. Here, the talented Joe Smith puts the questions to Isaac Hayes in another off-the-record interview. When you make it and you're out there playing, you project to the world the most flamboyant image ever. Spending money and putting on shows. What was that, a reaction to it? Well, yeah, you know, when you pool, if you have no shoes, you think of that pair of shoes you want to wear. You have no clothes, you think about that wardrobe you want. You have no car. You walk and you think about the kind of ride you want. I always thought beyond my immediate environment. When did you determine that music was going to be the way out? Well, when I was in the ninth grade and I won a talent contest. You see, music was always a part of my life. I grew up in a musical family. My grandmother, my dad, well, he couldn't sing, but he loved to sing. The loudest one in church and the wrongest one. But my mother, they said, was a great songstress. And my father, they said, he could play harmonica. You heard Never Can Say Goodbye playing underneath there, illustrating the difference between Hayes and White's musical arrangement. On one hand, Hayes' voice is smooth and controlled, but it's altogether more understated and set back in the mix. This next archive depicts Barry White brimming with confidence. Here, the journalist Ken Jones manages to harness that mood with aplomb. I never really got your feeling of the comparison that was made about you and Isaac Hayes. How do you feel about that? The things that Isaac sounded like. Do you know Isaac Hayes and have you ever discussed him? I have rapped with Isaac. I like Ike. You can use it for the beginning of this story, this section of the book. I like Ike. Isaac Hayes is very talented. He's a very outstanding arranger. He is a singing ability. It's his style. I dig his style of singing. People are quick to say what looks like what, who sounds like who. There's two outstanding things about Isaac Hayes and I that is true. Just like there's two outstanding things about the Ford Granada and the Seville Cadillac. They do resemble. One costs $14,000. Another one costs $6,000. I let the people figure out who's who. Was I surprised when I first listened to these archives of Ike describing his struggle for equality as a black artist? No, I wasn't. I expect you're saying to yourself, understandably, yeah, but this kind of thing wouldn't happen in contemporary times, right? Here's Heather Small, the voice of that sophisticated pop actor M. People, and more recently, a campaigner for racial equality. This is taken from an interview recorded in 2021. When people say it's gotten better, that may be so, but do I have parity? Do I have equality? And like you say, to be given something and then it be taken away. And as a person of color, as a black woman in society, we are attuned to that back there, that there's something that could happen that even though it's supposedly a done deal with record companies, you have a deal and it's gone quiet and nothing happens. And suddenly, I don't have a deal, but nobody's thought, given me any kind of respect. You know, it's sometimes, you know, it does make you laugh because it's just so outrageous. You just think to yourself, if you don't laugh, you'll cry. Coming up in episode six. What was the impact of all the sexy stuff that you were doing with women coming at you or anything like that? Jesus Christ. Yeah, that was incredible. Everyone, to me, has to pick a subject to talk about in music, if you're going to be a writer. Mine is love. This episode features Barry White, Joe Smith under Creative Commons or Fair Use policy. All music used under the same license. Background music by Chris Shuroy. Background music by Stuart Zetterberg.