Imagine if Aretha Franklin went back into the studio and made an album as good as, say, Aretha Now? Imagine what Otis Redding might be doing had he not gone down in that airplane. Now open your eyes and you have It’s Harder Now, with Wilson Pickett turning the clock back some 30-plus years. Pickett was certainly one of the truly transcendent vocal stylists who defined 1960s soul music.
He matched the raw emotional power of his background singing gospel in the Falcons with a personality as instantly recognizable as Armstrong or Sinatra. It’s no accident that Pickett’s reading of “Mustang Sally” has become as much of an American musical archetype as “St. Louis Blues” or “My Way,” recognized by even the most groove-challenged a generation later.
Like most American native geniuses, Pickett is an elemental force rather than a nurturing leader. His erratic career since the early 1970s reflects the inability or unwillingness of the music industry to provide an appropriate setting for his supernatural talent. But Pickett has kept his powder dry over the years, just waiting to be reloaded, and somebody has done just that. Jon and Sally Tiven, a musical partnership that began in a dedication to the best music from the 1950s through the 1970s and has gone on to become a productive songwriting team for contemporary blues artists, worked up a magical reconfiguration of Pickett’s Muscle Shoals sound and the Wicked Pickett exploded into action with cannonball impact.
The Tivens, Jon on guitar and Sally on bass, lead a smoking, tightly arranged unit where every fill counts and the funk is knee-deep. Eddie Kramer’s crackling remix adds whatever edge the tracks he got his hands on needed. The songs, written by the Tivens with input from Pickett, keyboardist Sky Williams and R&B poet laureates Dan Penn and Donnie Fritts, are all “A” material; the weakest tracks on the album would stand out anywhere else. The songs almost work like a film script about the hero returning from the wars to relive his days of glory. Pickett has been on the “Outskirts of Town” for reasons unexplained, but the story could be directed at his lover or his audience. “Could not believe I would be so easy to replace,” he scolds. “Didn’t take you too long to find a new face.”
Despite the obvious double-entendre of the album, the title song itself is a thoughtful speculation on the themes of soured love and sic transit gloria that Pickett delivers with pulpit-level solemnity, a truly great piece of commentary on the part of the Tivens that Pickett handles like a great actor. But Pickett prefers the double entendre; he’s in it for the Viagra. “It’s all about sex,” Pickett shouts in his glory just after declaring he wants to hang out with the “Bad People.” He cackles as he describes the funky soft porn of “Taxi Love,” with its voyeuristic trucker watching the action.
“I used up all my best lines in my youth,” he admits to the object of his desire in the ultra-horny and ultimately sexually ambiguous “What’s Under That Dress?,” which Pickett ends with the ad-libbed line, “What’s that I hear you say? I’m under arrest!?” “I like it!” Picket exclaims with a gleeful slap of the hands as he finishes the ultra-funk grunts and screams of “Stomp,” with The Man repeatedly coming down hard on the line “I’m goanna bury your rump.”
Penn and the Tivens combine on a tribute to the era with the staying power of Robert Conley’s anthem, “Sweet Soul Music,” a meditation on Don Covay, Otis, Solomon Burke, Aretha, Bobby Womack, Joe Tex and Sam and Dave called Soul Survivor. “I remember 1965,” sings Pickett, “Everybody was still alive. We hit the big time and Memphis but we came up in Muscle Shoals.”
Soul survivor indeed. Pickett has been watching through the window as bland and blatant imitations from the sainted Blues Brothers themselves to the copy band Commitments have trudged across the world stage.
There was nothing he could do about it singlehandedly. He had to get the band back together. Well, here they are, and he knows what to do with them. Now your job is to get your hands on a copy of this record and listen to it.
