The Meters
Trick Bag
(Sundazed)

The Meters
New Directions
(Sundazed)

It is always interesting to trace the career of a prolific and highly influential band. Considering the starting point, the roots, the original vision, the outcome can be surprising, and sometimes unpleasantly so. It is well known that the Meters were taken for a ride on the business side of things, but this is not uncommon. Rarely do artists get their way. They start out treading along, fueled by idealism and the very energy of what they create, but sooner or later they face the ultimatum that ends the party: sell out or get out.

Trick Bag, their sixth album, released in 1976, marks a point in the Meters’ career when they didn’t really know what to do. The title of the first track, “Disco Is the Thing Today,” reveals an attempt to tap into the trend of the moment. Disco was the thing in those days, but what business did the Meters have playing it? Evidently, they were trying new things because, after nearly a decade of holding court as New Orleans funk royalty, they still hadn’t hit it big. So here are the Meters, who had so strongly influenced dance music as a genre, crumbling under the pressure to emulate the watered-down sound it had become. Everybody knows that popular dance music in the late ’70s, disco, was something most unfunky.

The making of Trick Bag, besides a stylistic shift, marked the addition of Cyril Neville (Art’s younger brother) to the lineup, whose vocals on “(Doodle Loop) The World Is a Little Bit Under the Weather,” are a welcome addition to a favorite single from their Josie years. The extra vocal power was the result of what they were hearing from their producers and record companies, that their primarily instrumental tendencies were impeding radio playability, and, in turn, their break into mainstream popularity. This was no problem for a band that now boasted two Neville brothers and already had three other talented singers, but an emphasis on vocals means an emphasis on melody, putting rhythm on the back burner. As a result, while the Meters, in ’76, still sounded like a great band, they had given up their gritty edge for something much more smoothed-out, and, they hoped, lucrative.

Naming their seventh album after Earl King’s chronicle of a wayward wife, however unfitting, proves that the Meters had not, and never would turn their backs on their New Orleans R&B roots. “Trick Bag” is the gem of the album, and the best recorded version of that song. At the other end of the spectrum, “Honky Tonk Woman” is an ill-advised, gratuitous tribute commemorating their six-month slot opening for the Rolling Stones on tour. Trick Bag did not turn out to be the Meters’ big break into the mainstream. Rather, it comes off as an inharmonious collection of stabs-in-the-dark quite unlike the material they had put out just a few years earlier, which had been infused more with quality than variety.

With New Directions, the Meters regained some of their original drive. Says Bill Dahl in the liner notes, “You could take the Meters out of the Crescent City, but you couldn’t take the Crescent City out of the Meters.” It was true. New Directions represents a musical homecoming from the incongruity that had characterized Trick Bag. This new tight, eight-song set, was supported by the Tower of Power horn section, and the Swamp Tabernacle Choir, which was actually the Meters themselves doing a drum-and-voice chant that had developed from live gigs. Still, New Directions exhibits hints of desire for popular acclaim. “My Name Up In Lights,” is a not-so-subtle plea for the superstardom that the Meters had sought for so long. “Funkify Your Life,” a more electronic track, is a would-be bandwagon theme. If enough folks had ever gotten on it, that is. “Be My Lady,” a mellow track with cooing vocals, hit #78 on the Billboard R&B charts, but that was the height of their renown. Soon after, Art Neville quit the band, his brother Cyril followed, and that was pretty much the end of the Meters.

While Trick Bag represents an ill-guided, failed attempt at commercial success, New Directions is a more calculated effort that did have a good balance of original groove and sing-along potential. But that endeavor came too little, too late. There was no motive to hold the band together, no band to support the album, and no telling what might have been.

I was born the year the Meters died. I don’t find it odd that George Porter is a hero among inhabitants of fraternity houses, or that “funkify your life” was a catch phrase in my late-’90s hookah-dotted days of glory. I lament the fate of the Meters when I catch Leo live during Mardi Gras, hear Zig hit the high-hat in popular hip-hop loops, or say hey to Art when I see him around town. But I realize that things happen for a reason, that a story sometimes holds a twist, and that most people just don’t know good music when they hear it. As a result, the Meters hold a special mystique for funk fans of my generation. We collect records, trade bootlegs, and thrive on the urban lore of our elders, clinging to bits and pieces of the fragmented funk force that once was the Meters, longing for the reunion to end all reunions.