Wilson Pickett

He was part of signing Ray Charles.

He later produced records by artists like Aretha Franklin and Wilson Pickett.

He helped Atlantic sign Led Zeppelin.

He got a Grammy working with Bob Dylan in the 70s.

The list is dizzying.

Among the artists he's documented to have backed are the Eilly Brothers, Little Richard, Wilson Pickett, Solomon Burke, King Curtis, Ike and Tina Turner and others.

In 1964, Hendrix joined the Eilly Brothers and recorded with them in New York, appearing on their single Testify.

You can go and listen to that and pretty instantly you're like, oh, that's Jimi Hendrix playing.

And in the autumn of the year they formed, a young band called the Warlocks was booked here for six weeks, five sets a night, fifty minutes each, five nights a week, think about what that does to a band by the time they walked out of the inn room the warlocks had played something like a hundred and fifty sets in that one dark room they went in as a handful of folkies and a classical bass player and a high school kid on rhythm guitar They came out as something that worked together, without having to look up, and the music that carried them through all those sets was not the music they would be famous for, it was rhythm and blues, dance numbers, bar songs, the things a room like this expected.

Much of it came in through Pigpen, standing at his organ, the one member of the band who had grown up inside that music and did not have to learn it from a record, one of the songs was in the midnight hour it was wilson pickett's song brand new that year and the original has a rolling majestic feel one writer traced that feel to a tiny delay on the second and fourth beats the back beat landing just a hair late so the whole song seems to lean back in its chair the warlocks did not lean back not then But the dead would carry the song for years, and in their hands it became a long loose vehicle, the band sitting on a single chord for minutes at a time, Pigpen calling out lines, and the band answering him, his harmonica slipping in between.

One chord, no hurry, a song that could last as long as the room wanted it to.

here's the part that makes no sense for the first week of that booking the warlocks were not the headliners at all they were the backing band each night for a set they played behind the coasters the vocal group with a string of famous rhythm and blues hits behind them a group of palo alto beatniks who had been a jug band months earlier standing behind one of the great vocal groups of the era in a bar with no windows playing somebody else's arrangements it was a first week and then it was over and the warlocks were on their own for the rest of the run people have been arguing about this for a long time and they are no closer where exactly was the inn room one careful chronicler of the band's early clubs puts it at six hundred and thirty-five old county road a bar attached to a steak-house called the swiss chalet another working from a long-time Belmont resident who said he had been a bouncer there after getting out of the service, puts it farther along at 1048 Old County Road, a few lots north of the old ice rink, Both are confident, both have their reasons.

They are brilliant.

They've played as support acts to people like Wilson Pickett and Maxi Priest, The Commitments, and several of the past band members were people like Ross Hannaford, who, of course, is well-known for being in Daddy Cool, or James Black, who was with Mondo Rock and in Rock Wears, Greg Hamm from Man at Work.

and Gary Young, who was also in Daddy Cool.

So they have got a few gigs coming up.

It was really great.

That was my first gig, and we were doing Wilson Pickett songs and stuff like that, you know, and the Rolling Stones had come out as well.

So, you know, that was our repertoire.

But

Both of these songs have such perfect examples of the Four Seasons vocals and harmonizing, not to mention those awesome high notes.

Wilson Pickett, Silver Bells.

Another terrific example of a singer taking a popular Christmas song and completely making it their own while keeping the essence, the magic of the song intact.

Johnny Cash, Little Drummer Boy, or Christmas With You with June Carter Cash.