Terry Callier
Turn You to Love
[Elektra; 1979; r: DBK Works/Rhino; 2003]
Rating: 6.7

Two friends are walking around in Brooklyn, trying to figure out where to eat: "What about Tempehest?" says one. "Eh, I heard the food's not that good," the other replies. "Yeah," responds the first, "but the DJ is really great!"

As DJ and vinyl culture has infiltrated nearly as many facets of social interaction as Clear Channel, so has it also traveled into the past through the feverish groove consumption to bring forth crates of obscure beats lost to time. And because of such investigation through the dust of record bins, figures that would have been written off to the times-- folks like Les McCann, Ananda Shankar, Idris Muhammad, or even Liquid Liquid-- have gained a renaissance back to sunlit brunch patios.

One of the more curious unearthings was of Chicago singer/songwriter Terry Callier. Arising out of the coffeehouse scene in the early 60s, sporting a cloth hat, beard, and acoustic guitar, he found his way into the studios at Chess and Cadet, cutting three infinite-Saturday-afternoon-in-bed albums with producer Charles Stepney, himself famous for the pink laser light that was Minnie Riperton. Before getting lost a the mix of label mergers and lay-offs in the late 70s, Callier shot up a few warning flares through the oncoming haze of disco and R&B;, as his career began to go awry.

Fire on Ice, from 1978, sputters on so many levels that it's hard to isolate just where things misfire. Is it the heavy-hand of producer Richard Evans, slathering saccharine strings over the funkier charts of jazz players like Eddie Harris and Phil Upchurch? Or is it the extraneous girl choruses fogging over Callier's own smoky, syrup-smooth voice? While it still conveys that gusty Chicago soul, cooing smoothly yet capable of dropping into a guttural growl, it barely salves the pat symbolism and synthesized schmaltz of "Butterfly" and "African Violet".

But even his talents can't escape the foreboding gravity of club kickdrums that had penetrated every genre by that time. With a weighty title neither the Bee-Gees nor Walter Gibbons could possibly have upheld, "Disco in the Sky" cringes as it crashes, Icarus-like, unable to commit fully to disco or focus on the strummed acoustic guitar, forcing Callier, for some reason, to call out to Hendrix and Lorelei in the middle of the song. More than anything else, it's the songwriting of Terry Callier and partner Larry Wade that mars the whole affair, the lyrics too flimsy to do his voice justice, much less bear the bloated arrangements.

Judging from the cover of Turn You to Love, Elektra's marketing focus was ratcheted up a notch the following year, recasting Terry Callier as ladies' man, with two tight bitties on the cover, and the man sizing up booties on the back, ready to mack. There's even social commentary and talk of how much his mother loves him. Sliding across the nasty electro bass, Callier's two-textured throat trembles with warmth on "Sign of the Times" and cools with the Egyptian cotton button-down of "Pyramids of Love". That leads into the satiny rustle of the title track, proving that he could've been a distinct R&B; personality had the breaks gone his way, albeit one more like Leon Ware than Jeffrey Osborne.

The difference here is not in the studio gloss (though it is glaringly polished), but in the songs that Callier's sharp threads hang from. His cover of Steely Dan's "Do It Again", while missing the drugged groove and electric sitar solo, has portions of the Bard-ian verses to brighten with assloads of brass (including Fred Wesley) and a set of pipes that neither Becker nor Fagan could've ever exhaled. And in addition to a Smokey Robinson cover, Callier redresses two old classics, "Ordinary Joe" and "Occasional Rain". The former, already perfect as pop, gets too heavy a makeover, but the latter retains the gentle grace of the original, the gradual touch of other instruments never overwhelming Callier's singular voice and guitar playing.

It's not the best way to turn you on to the excellent soul of Callier's past heights, when his best records could nearly be mentioned in the same sentence as the early works of Curtis Mayfield and Marvin Gaye, but there are traces of his voice that still linger on here. It can be worth a taste, but it does put an overwhelming slick of soft R&B; on your tongue all the way down.

-Andy Beta, June 4th, 2003