The Meters: Good Old Funky Music : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Soul music has a history of great instrumentals: "Green Onions," "Soul Serenade," "Last Night" – and virtually every early independent-label recording by the Meters. Led by keyboardist Art Neville, the quartet was the reigning New Orleans session team from the mid-Sixties until its breakup in 1977. As the house band at Sea-Saint Studios, the Meters helped the brilliant songwriter-producer Allen Toussaint forge the sound of funky Crescent City pop and became the bedrock on which Art would build a band with his brothers Aaron, Cyril and Charles Neville.

After backing a range of New Orleans performers, from the venerable Fats Domino to the hip Lee Dorsey, the Meters began their own recording career in 1969. Minor hits like "Sophisticated Cissy" and "Cissy Strut," and the just-reissued all-instrumental album Look-Ka Py Py (originally cut for Josie Records and released in 1969), along with Good Old Funky Music, a newly assembled collection of unreleased tracks and jams spanning 1968 to 1972, set the foursome at the nexus of funk, soul, pop and international music.

The Meters' playing – like that of the crack soul bands of the Fifties and Sixties – is clear, unhurried and certain on both albums. The time is rock steady: Leo Nocentelli's guitar speaks mostly in brief, precise fills and sliding chords; Neville's organ melodies stay free of the rhythm mix. And like the canniest pop instrumentalists (think of Joe Satriani and Kenny G), the band members display a songsmith's penchant for hooks and structure. It's the style of musicianship that black Southern bandleaders and audiences of the day insisted upon.

Yet the Meters' musical radicalism emerges at every curve. On "Look-Ka Py Py" and "Rigor Mortis," George Porter's pumped-up bass lays down the kind of fat, saw-toothed grooves that Bootsy Collins and George Clinton plied in Parliament-Funkadelic. ("He Bite Me" – "the story about the knight and the dragon" – sports a simple lyric that's daft enough for P-Funk, too.) Ziggy Modeliste's snare drum, dry and up front, cracking out its stuttering, staggering steps on every cut, sounds like the blueprint for hip-hop's heartbeat. And on the jams, the Meters really unwind, fusing fuzz-wah Hendrix riffs and Yoruba-derived trap-and-conga drum lines into psychedelic workouts.

So why didn't the Meters ever have a smash like "Green Onions"? Truth is, they did better, as the backup band on Labelle's "Lady Marmalade" and Dr. John's "Right Place Wrong Time." But like true studio troupers, they were too busy to take the credit. Now that credit is due.