Out of time

I SAW PUBLIC Enemy perform to a nearly all-white audience in Santa Cruz four or five years after the release of their Afrocentric masterpiece It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, which is as important as any artwork in the annals of popular culture. By that time, gangsta had permanently altered the hip-hop landscape, and black fans – who had put the hip in hip-hop – had for the most part moved on, an injustice so enormous that I had to gasp for breath. If I'd known Chuck D would remain an influential figure, I'd have felt better – nevertheless, the speed at which Nation's moment came and went was bewildering.

There was a night years before that at the Fillmore East in lower Manhattan when singer-songwriter Dion DiMucci was booed so hard he left the stage in tears. The audience expected to find the teenage greaser from the Bronx who 10 years earlier had a fistful of hits and a bad reputation as the leader of Dion and the Belmonts. They sure didn't want an almost middle-aged artist reborn as a thoughtful singer-songwriter, and when they hollered for "Runaround Sue," all Dion could do was run away.

Pop culture makes generation-jumping tough; every moment has an intricately coded language embedded in sound, style, and speech that distinguishes it from any other. Tower of Power epitomized hip when they sang about it in 1971's "What Is Hip," and if they knew the answer they'd still be on top today. When the Vietnam War went out of control and racial turmoil raged, a cultural gap was formed that was so big that artists went over the edge and just disappeared.

I don't miss the old days. I was generally miserable, and most of my memories are bad. But a pair of recent reissues took me back: Jefferson Airplane's huge Surrealistic Pillow, from 1967, and Gene McDaniels's largely unknown Outlaw, from 1970 (out on Pat Thomas's label, Water). I loved Surrealistic Pillow in its day, but I hadn't heard of Outlaw, which made me skeptical. I don't believe in legendary "lost masterpieces," the albums that misanthropic collectors are always hyping. The music business is guilty of failing to nurture talent, systematically undermining ambition, and suffocating imagination. In those days (today's democratic technology has arguably altered the equation), once an album went down on wax, I believed in the judgment passed by the marketplace – a record may not have gotten its due, but, I'm sorry, great music simply didn't get lost. Surrealistic Pillow sold a gazillion copies because it was a brilliant album perfectly suited for the moment it dropped. Likewise, if the Archies' prefab single "Sugar, Sugar" topped the charts in 1969, well, that tells you something, too.

Still, I was intrigued by McDaniels's album, and not just because he wrote the blisteringly soulful "Compared to What," a monster hit for Les McCann and Eddie Harris in 1969, as well Roberta Flack's "Feel like Makin' Love." I loved the four wonderful soul-pop hits he recorded in the early 1960s: "Hundred Pounds of Clay," "Tower of Strength," "Chip Chip," and "Point of No Return."

Like most pop artists in the early '60s, McDaniels had little voice in his career and a contract that ensured eternal servitude (although not eternal employment). You'd have a hit or two and then go quietly into blue-collar life. But when McDaniels – a politically savvy 30-year-old influenced by black nationalist politics of the day – was dropped by Liberty Records in 1965, he had other ideas. Four years later he turned his anger and frustration into "Compared to What," as powerful and specific to the moment as could be. It was, as Thomas recently said, "a retirement plan."

Rock stars in those days sometimes had the clout to boost the keys to the studio and get their artistic freedom on, with results that could give indulgence a bad name (listen to Jefferson Airplane's After Bathing at Baxter's). Success gave McDaniels the juice to record Outlaw – his songs, his band, his way, right down to the trio of well-armed guerrillas on the cover and the Eldridge-style inscription inside: "Under conditions of national emergency, like now, there are only two kinds of people – those who work for freedom and those who do not." With a decade of hard-won experience and a band that included Ron Carter on bass, he was coming from a different place than most of the young hippie musicians. But on this album anyway, he was headed in the same direction.

I'll say this: there isn't a song on Outlaw that doesn't have at least a few bars of pure funky delight – airtight playing, grooves to die for, and a voice made for pop music. But the lyrics (even in an era that had Jim Morrison shouting "Mother! I want to ... aaaugggghhh!") are tough to digest. McDaniels burdens his album with hippie fatwas and ponderous declarations of independence in songs titled "Hey America," "Welfare City," and "Silent Majority," which teeter on the edge of extinction as the grooves battle the lyrics for survival.

When all is said and done, Outlaw is a period piece, nothing more, nothing less; so was "White Rabbitt" (Grace Slick urged the world to "feed your head" – advice that hasn't been heard since). McDaniels deserves a solo joint – hell, they let the Fraternity of Man behind the wheel – but Outlaw makes me think he rolled more than one. Still, I always liked the airtight Stax soul hits better than wild, undisciplined acid rock, so who am I to say? McDaniels probably had all the discipline he could take early on – and if that made him an outlaw later, well, I filed Outlaw on the shelf next to Nation of Millions. It'll grow old in good company.