Review: Jackie Wilson - So Much (1959)
Tracks: 1) So Much; 2) I Know I’ll Always Be In Love With You; 3) Happiness; 4) Only You, Only Me; 5) The Magic Of Love; 6) Wishing Well; 7) Talk That Talk; 8) Ask; 9) I’ll Be Satisfied; 10) It’s All Part Of Love; 11) Never Go Away; 12) Thrill Of Love.
REVIEW
The second half of 1959 brought no substantial changes to the first for Jackie, but continued to secure his impressive commercial status. His finest single from that era was arguably ‘I’ll Be Satisfied’ – another of Berry Gordy’s contributions which, this time around, revealed a musical intrigue even before Jackie got to sing anything: that opening military beat, accompanied by a lively skating-rink organ pattern, was quite an unusual opening for the world of pop and R&B. Even so, Wilson is still the main star, brilliantly exploiting almost all of his entire range in an ecstatic self-whippin’ trip from the bottom notes of the pleading "just a kiss, just a smile" to the top notes of the exuberant "that’s all I need and I’ll be satisfied". The whole thing, like so many others, clearly takes its musical queues from the then-ubiquitous ‘Hallelujah I Love Her So’, but where Wilson lacks the soulful depth effect of Ray Charles’ vocals, he still aptly compensates for it with his youthful enthusiasm (for all of his greatness, Ray Charles always sounded like he was born a 50-year old man, which gives him great advantage in some areas while hampering him in others).
On a curious note, the B-side to ‘I’ll Be Satisfied’ was ‘Ask’ — the first time ever in his solo career, if I am not mistaken, that Wilson got to release something gospel-related; musically, the song is not so much gospel as a straightahead lush pop ballad, but the subject matter, while totally not new to Jackie (who’d sang with his Ever Ready Gospel Singers in his teens already), would clearly be new to all the fans he’d acquired since ‘Reet Petite’ and ‘Lonely Teardrops’. Totally not my cup of tea, this particular style, but there is no denying the power and the range on that one — Jackie gave a true tour-de-force before the mike on that day.
The other A-side from 1959, included on this album, is the relatively less impressive ‘Talk That Talk’, contributed by Sid Wyche; all I know about him is that he co-wrote ‘A Big Hunk O’ Love’ with Aaron Schroeder for Elvis, but ‘Talk That Talk’ is a far more relaxed number, and Dick Jacobs’ orchestrated arrangement is just a standard pop arrangement, not much to write about. "My baby just walks that walk, talks that talk for me" — mmm, okay, whatever you say, Jackie. We know you don’t demand all that much from your woman, but you were sure more excited about her on ‘I’ll Be Satisfied’.
At least the excitement comes back for ‘So Much’ which, I am surprised to say, was not actually a single — last I checked, it was really just the title track for the LP of the same name, another relative first for Jackie. It’s all «exuberant pop» formula as usual, but when the formula works, it’s great formula: here, he RRRRRRReels you in from the get-go with the opening classic post-alveolar trill, then spends the rest of the song putting as mmmmuccch vocal pressure on the "so much" bit that it would be really hard for any woman with a heart to refuse the gentleman’s urges... particularly since the «song» itself goes on for something like a minute at best, after which it’s just one spasmodic fit after another. Classic!
Another one in the same vein of «let me stun you with another of my vocal tricks» is ‘Happiness’, where he tries out a bit of a «roaring» approach, putting additional pressure on his larynx in an almost proto-Rob Halford style on the verses, later reverting to a more «clean» style of singing on the chorus. Again, nothing particularly inventive about the standard upbeat pop melody, but a great showcase for the «Jackie Wilson Vocal Theater», showing how much that man could wring out of perfectly ordinary material if he really wanted to. And again — you don’t have to love it or anything, but you got to admit that as far as the late 1950s are concerned, Jackie was really doing for the human voice the same stuff that, let’s say, Les Paul or Link Wray were doing for the electric guitar. Most of the good singers around were just content with exploiting what vocal talent Mother Nature had given them at birth, but to Jackie, Mother Nature had first and foremost given a seemingly boundless desire to search, investigate, and experiment.
Unfortunately, other than ‘So Much’ and ‘Happiness’, most of the other LP-only tracks here are rather generic ballads where, sometimes, even the great voice does not really help. For instance, ‘I Know I’ll Always Be In Love With You’ is a Sam Cooke-style exercise where Jackie consciously tries to become Sam for two and a half minutes, and it does not work — Sam can do Sam better than Jackie can do Sam. I mean, Sam Cooke could never do ‘Reet Petite’, so why should Jackie try to sing in the style of ‘Wonderful World’? And then there are all those ‘Magic Of Love’s, ‘It’s All Part Of Love’s, ‘Thrill Of Love’s... could these songs have at least been titled with a little more imagination, so that they wouldn’t get all messed up in my head even despite being musically different?
The only song exclusively credited to Jackie himself is ‘Wishing Well’, a drawled-out, somewhat shapeless plead that does feel a bit more intimate and personal than all those generic celebrations of the magic love, but is not really going anywhere in particular; I think that Jackie did much better on songs like ‘I’ll Be Satisfied’ that kind of pinpointed the right way to go for his vocals, whereas here, on his own creation, he feels a bit lost and meandering. That said, like almost everything on here, it still sounds good — nothing that Jackie recorded in his peak years can be written off decisively, not as long as he was able to contribute 100% in the studio. But only three of the songs (‘Satisfied’, the title track and ‘Happiness’) would go on my personal «best-of» compilation, which still, I suppose, puts So Much on a notch below its two preceding LPs.