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Their first album, 1973’s Show Your Hand, went nowhere. But a lot of their early songs sounded a bit dress-uppy - the work of a band attempting funk, rather than the work of a funk band.
#SOUL SEARCHING LYRICS AVERAGE WHITE BAND HOW TO#
The members of Average White Band were a tight unit, and they clearly knew how to play. A friend heard them playing and joked that it was “too much for the average white man,” and that’s how they got the band name. Two of them played on Chuck Berry’s “ My Ding-A-Ling.” At least one of them played on Johnny Nash’s “ I Can See Clearly Now.” After they all ran into each other at a Traffic show one night, they started playing together, vamping on American-style R&B. They all knew each other a little bit, and many of them had made livings as session musicians. The members of Average White Band were all Scottish musicians living in London, scraping by. It doesn’t need lyrics those horn riffs speak for it.Įverything about “Pick Up The Pieces” is fully improbable, and yet sometimes those pieces fall into place. But it’s a tight and clean groove, played with purpose and ferocity. It’s not quite as nasty as the Ohio Players’ “ Fire,” a song that hit #1 a couple of weeks earlier. And yet “Pick Up The Pieces” is a full-on funk vamp, greasy and hard and immediate. They had the sorts of terrible beards that every man in the ’70s was seemingly legally required to wear. Truth in advertising: Average White Band where white. And since “Pick Up The Pieces” is basically an instrumental - albeit with a bunch of Scottish dudes shouting the song’s title every so often - that groove is all you get. Later on, as the song sinks in and become a part of your life, that intro becomes pavlovian, a subliminal signal to put your drink down and report to the dance floor immediately. At first, your brain doesn’t have time to process it. It’s all there: the vaguely jazzy horn-riff, the strutting bassline, the in-the-pocket drums, the sideways guitar shimmy. It immediately locks in, juicy and full-bodied. The groove doesn’t gradually fall into place. And then the beat drops in and you’re in it. The intro to the Average White Band’s “Pick Up The Pieces” is everything you could possibly want an intro to be. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.