#496 Slickaphonic

Description

Next up from Albina Music Trust is a previously unreleased reel-to-reel session

Listen:https://youtu.be/1cFbPMPmbuE

by Slickaphonic, anine-piece powerhouse in Portlands lost funk scene. Recorded in 1975 at Recording Associates by engineer Bob Stoutenberg (The Wipers, Baba Yaga, Mel Brown), this carefully restored collectionplaces the listener in the thick of a watertight disco-funk session done the Albina way.These songs unfold like a dream. The record ignites with Andre Billingsley’s custom break toDoin It, a neighborhood classic written by Pleasure guitarist Doug Lewis. From there, theblistering instrumental Bubba unfolds with symphonic horn arrangements setting the scene. Butits bassist Randy Smith and Jimmy Washingtons locked-in percussion that takes you higher.Throughout the record, this band drops the tempo and mood with ease. Milton Davis’ dynamicvocal burns tracks into flames then swiftly pivots into a ballad zone, sending things out to all theladies in the house. Back Into My Life Again, with its chicken scratch guitar and pithy horns,expands and contracts with Davis’ vocal enmeshed in the point-counterpoint of dueling guitaristsLewis and Kit Garoutte.
“I Shot Him Down” is the group’s take on a canonical Bob Marley cut and features a spoken wordintro from Davis. Set to a brilliant pseudo-country waltz, Davis narrates the listener through a
Green Book-themed sojourn with Southern Gothic underpinnings. In great detail, he describes aroad trip and fateful interactions with law enforcement, tragically no different for Black Americans
in 1975 as it is today. There are cover songs on this record but the listeningexperience is…well,different.
Carefully mastered by Gus Elg (Nu Shooz, Funky Drive Band, First Touch), this diamond in therough has been rescued from a North Portland basement and returned to the conversation in which
Albina’s legacy music belongs. And with current members of Slickaphonic still active in the city’sclub circuit, this record takes the listener back, to a simpler time where the origin of thesemusicians, their stories, and the underrepresented Albina musical culture can once again bediscovered.