Tastykakes, Soul Songs & Shining Stars: Affections and Reflections 1973–2025
Longtime journalist and A&R man for Sire/Columbia puts together a heartfelt scrap book of his Soul writing
Of the 73 million people that watched The Fab Four move the needle on the Ed Sullivan show, young Joe McEwen was part of that tiny percentage of Americans that weren’t moved by what they’d seen.
“It didn’t make any connection with me at all. But there was something nagging inside. To paraphrase Bob Dylan, something was happening here, but I didn’t know what the hell it was.”
Clarity eventually came to him by way of a small transistor radio. As McEwen writes in the introduction to his “Tastykakes, Soul Songs and Shining Stars” collection, the AM sounds of WDAS and WIBG hotwired his existence – moving him towards a new awareness borne on the back of Philly soul. Then there were DJs; like Joe “The Rocking Bird” Niagara and Jimmy Bishop. Long forgotten by some, their voices were riveted to the broadside of McEwen’s psyche – particularly the very happening Jerry Blavat aka "The Geator with the Heater":
“The Geator is barely in control. Johnny and the Hurricane’s ‘Sheba’ crescendos in the background and Jerry Blavat cannot contain himself. His feet twitch compulsively, spasms rock the wiry body and a high-collar white shirt is already drenched with sweat.”
McEwen parlayed his enthusiasm into a post-college gig writing for the Boston Phoenix, while keeping a nervous eye on the draft. There he wrote first-hand reviews and profiles on legends like Al Green and The Staple Singers. But it’s his up-close look at a pre-Thriller Michael Jackson that becomes one of the book’s “central ornaments”.
“A few minutes later (CBS Records’) Steve (Manning) passes Michael a note. Michael begins shaking his head. ‘No,’ he says in a voice as soft as one of the cushions in the living room. ‘This is hard. I’m invited to dinner by some friends of mine and the guards have to be with me. Everything you say to a person, they have to hear it.’ In the gentlest of voices he adds, ‘There’s nothing private.’”
Jackson was then straining against the collar of his ballooning fame while in the midst of filming "The Wiz", the 1978 role that became a major steppingstone en route to his global Pop domination. Although McEwen only gets a glimpse or two at the amazing amount of pressure that’s writ in bold across Jackson’s slight frame, his editorial sense couldn’t have been more right. Despite his paper’s reluctance, he knew he was signing up to tell more than just the tale of a fading child star.
Later, before they part company, he catches the singer in a plain and unvarnished moment while reviewing a videocassette of one of the Jackson 5’s Ed Sullivan performances:
“On screen Michael grins and sings ‘Sit down girl, I think I love you. No, stand up and show me what you can do.’ Michael stares at his image without showing much interest. Dressed and ready to go, he says goodbye and leave for his friend’s house, bodyguard in tow.”
From there we get looks into the high 1974 Miami watermark of Betty Wright and Henry Stone’s TK Studios; along with a peek inside the George Clinton’s L.A. mothership as he crafts a track for the Brides of Funkenstein 1978 debut. Studio stories are often the juicier side of music scribbling, but here all McEwen gets is the brilliant monotony of the ship’s captain meticulously bleeding four lines out of his singers. He also discovers that it took forty hours to nail the vocal on ‘Tear The Roof Off The Sucker.” But as he smartly points out, Clinton’s magic would often conjure something quite different to what the competition was doling out.
“…unlike Disco, which is generally recorded with a similarly exhausting perfectionism, the music of Parliament-Funkadelic always sounds amazingly spontaneous.”
Other worthwhile moments include his early morning visit to a recently risen Don Convay (who penned Aretha’s “Chain of Fools”), a broad examination of Gamble and Huff, and a brief encounter with former Temptations singer Eddie Kendricks not long after the release of his solo smash “Keep On Truckin’.” The book also contains a number of more recent online pieces McEwen published via PeterGuralnick.com and through his own Facebook page. While some of these entries are decidedly brief and not as engaging as the longer material bound together here, you can tell that McEwen approaches most of the work with much heart and candor.
“Looking back, I didn’t know anything. Later I discovered that simply hanging around observing, listening can often tell you as much or more than just a straight interview. Hanging around gives you a feel, a sense of creative people in the moment.”
And even more directly, as McEwen points out, the book is “…the closest I’ll ever come to writing a love story.”
