The Bottle (Drunken Mix)
Twelve"03 – a new series of 12" crate digging
Twelve" - the series
I love a 12 inch single or EP. I’ve always loved them. They give us special tracks and then, if we’re lucky, we get amazing remixes too. The first ones I bought were in the eighties and nineties and were effectively bigger versions of 7 inches, but with better sound quality.
In the 2000s, I bought a lot of house and dance music on 12 inch vinyl – and I found some truly awesome songs – some of them originals, some of them remixes. So this series is going to a dip into my 12 inch ‘crate’. It’ll almost be a lucky dip (almost) and I hope there’ll be some finds that you’d like to follow up!
Twelve"03 – The Bottle (Drunken Mix) - Gil Scott-Heron & Brian Jackson
I’d never heard anything like this! Gil Scott-Heron opens with a slurred intro and then counts in…
If I just (Ha ha ha, ha ha ha)
Oh, uno dos
Uno dos tres cuatro
…and then we’re into the funkiest, sleaziest groove, and this skittering flute line that just carries on through the whole piece. I always thought that Jackson must have been having a wail of a time on this one!1
The lyrics are bleak though. Gil Scott-Heron wasn't afraid to paint things as they are, and he’s a master story-teller, walking us through streets with alcoholics and drunks of all diff’rent strokes, shapes and colours, staggering and crawling through life, running scared, doing time, cussing out and trying to keep their heads.
And don't you think it's a crime
The way time after time
Friends of mine in the bottle?
There's people sure 'nough in the bottle
Come on hit me the lick one time stick, huh 2
The Bottle was one of my first 12 inch purchases around 1981. The original track came out in 1974, so I’m not sure I’d heard it before or just discovered it in whatever record shop I found it. I later went to see him live at the Jazz Cafe in London, though haven’t a clue which year. He’s played there a few times. If I were to take a guess it might have been April 2000, because I was working in London. I can remember that, in between songs, he could barely talk – he was so stoned – but he sat at his electric piano and could definitely play, sing and speak his truth – the gig was electric!
The single came from the excellent 1974 album, Winter in America, which feels so contemporary and relevant fifty years on – musically as well as socially and politically:
The Constitution, a noble piece of paper
Would free society. It struggled but then died in vain
And now Democracy is ragtime on the corner
Hoping for some rain
And looks like it's hoping
Hoping for some rain3
Sound familiar?
And a lot of the best music right now is fusing poetry, jazz and funk sensibilities, hip hop and electronica (think, for example, Further Out Than The Edge by Speakers Corner Quartet, Kae Tempest, Cinematic Orchestra, Roots Manuva and loads more, as UK examples). Gil Scott Heron was one of the pioneers who opened all this up for us…
Next time - the second piece in a two-parter about my 50-plus years musical relationship with my oldest friend, Phil. It starts with us Zigging out to Bowie and continues to the day, in November 2023, that Phil became a rock n’roller at the age of 65… The first piece – He was the Nazz – is HERE.
Geeky bit: This version of the EP, from Champagne Records, has the longer Drunken Mix on side A, and a Short version and a Sober Mix on side B.
The Bottle lyrics from: https://genius.com/Gil-scott-heron-and-brian-jackson-the-bottle-winter-in-america-version-lyrics
Winter in America lyrics from: https://genius.com/Gil-scott-heron-and-brian-jackson-winter-in-america-lyrics