Terry Manning "One After 909"

The fact that a guy like Terry Manning even got to release his own album, let alone on Stax, testifies to the unique state of the record industry in the late Sixties and early Seventies, where smaller, subsidiary labels could be headed by iconoclasts looking to diversify their rosters and take chances on relative unknowns. Stax was in such a position in 1968 and 1969. They had made a name for themselves as the grittier, more soulful Motown, but their most successful artist was a group of white kids from Memphis called the Box Tops (“The Letter,” “Cry Like a Baby,” you know who I’m talking about). Manning engineered many of their sessions, and one day hopped on the mic and recorded a piss-take of the song “Choo-Choo Train,” which was slated to be recorded by the band that day. Turns out that Al Bell, the VP of Stax, actually liked it, and signed Manning to a one-record deal. Although he was a pretty talented multi-instrumentalist (he played all of the instruments on Home Sweet Home, save for some guitar work from Chris Bell, later of Big Star), he was far from a songwriter or singer, so what the album turned out to be is a collection of super-strange sounding soul cover versions, produced with the utmost clarity. The record opens with a simply bizarre psych-soul reimagining of “Savoy Truffle” that actually gets at the darker elements of the song by eliminating the Blood, Sweat and Tears horn charts from the original. But the best song on Home Sweet Home is one that’s only available on the re-release; a cover of the Beatles’ “One After 909” (mp3) recorded before the Beatles had a chance to do it. Apparently, Manning got a hold of a demo of the song because he was also a scenester and could do things like that. His version, while not necessarily better than the one that would end up on Let it Be (although maybe), is certainly of a different stripe. Manning disguises the fact that he can’t sing a lick by trying on a proto-psychobilly twang that sounds like an overwrought amateur Roy Orbison (which I suppose would make him the Big Bopper), but it’s the song’s production, Manning’s true talent, that makes it swing like the Beatles’ version couldn’t, and perhaps didn't want to. Listen to how the electric piano melds perfectly with the lead guitar lines, and how great the solo sounds on the lead break. It’s pretty sweet. The rest of the record is just like this—the sound of a strange, weird talent who took advantage of his one chance to come from behind the boards.

Home Sweet Home comes out November 7 on Sunbeam Records.