"If I'm not getting played on the radio and I'm not making any money, I have nothing to lose by telling the truth. I'm not attacking anybody personally. I'm attacking the whole system, the whole mixed-up thing."

"The whole mixed-up thing" is the music business today, and Wilson Pickett, one of the hottest soul singers of the Sixties, feels left out in the cold. Once it seemed like the string of big hits that began in 1965 with "In the Midnight Hour" and continued with "Mustang Sally," "Funky Broadway," "Hey Jude" and so many others would never stop. But in the Seventies, three consecutive albums on RCA stiffed and a fourth on Pickett's personal label was only briefly released due to a contractual disagreement with TK Records, its distributor. Now A Funky Situation, his first on Big Tree, a division of Atlantic, is going nowhere fast.

"Can I tell you what's actually wrong?" Pickett said over lunch at Persian restaurant in New York City. "We no longer make records like we feel. We have to make records according to what they will play on the radio. Anytime you've got artist singing songs, doing grooves that they don't want to do, it's terrible."

The "groove" these days is disco, which Pickett likens to "wild poison ivy." To him all disco artists sound alike. "They don't have no style of music. Now me, I want to have an original style of music. Maybe the kids nowadays don't care about that, but I think it's something they should consider.

"People like me and Aretha Franklin and Joe Tex, we had predicted that inside of five years disco would be all over, that it was just a fad. But we didn't anticipate being knocked out of the pocket altogether. That's what really messed us up. Disco sold too well for the record companies, and they're keeping it too long. They're taking music back a step for blacks, because with that same identical beat -- you're not going anywhere, man.

"I think if Otis Redding and Sam Cooke were alive today, with me and Aretha and all of us, they wouldn't get away with changing the music the way they done today. But I don't have enough help."

A Funky Situation is an acknowledgement, in Pickett's own words, that "I can't keep singing 'Midnight Hour' for the rest of my life. I gotta change." He says that he told the young band with which he cut the album in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, "We wanna come halfway to disco, but let's not go all the way -- then we're just like everybody else." In addition to dance tracks, A Funky Situation includes the blistering "Lay Me Like You Hate Me," the most scarifying song Pickett has ever written, and the autobiographical "Time to Let the Sun Shine on Me," on which Pickett sings "Changed my clothes, didn't change my soul."

The thirty-seven-year-old Pickett has changed clothes before, crossing over to gospel to rhythm and blues, but he's never altered the hard-driving delivery he developed as a teenager on the church circuit.

"We didn't make enough money to press our suits," Picketts reminisced when asked about the Violinaires, the gospel group he formed shortly after moving to Detroit from his native Alabama. "We would sing three programs a Sunday at different churches. We'd sing our hearts out, and so we done sweated up that suit three times -- from the socks all the way up.

"The sisters would get up and they'd put a penny or a dime on the table and say 'Ya'll boys sho' can sing.' And we'd come in the back, and they got all the chicken baskets and pies and stuff to eat, and even occasionally one of the sisters would take you home."

The young Pickett soon caught the eye not only of a sister or two, but also of the Falcons, a local R&B group with whom he later wrote and sang his first hit song, "I Found a Love," in 1962.

"I was scared because these people says that if you leave God and go to the devil, you're going to go to hell. You see, I wanted to sing gospel, but I wanted to make some money, too. So I said, 'No I'll never leave, I'll never leave God.' Until that evening that one of the Falcons came by and I was sitting on the back porch and I went down and tried it out. And from then on I told God, I looked up and I said, 'I'm on my way this way -- would You care to go with me? I'd really appreciate Your being with me. It'd make me feel better.'

"My sisters and brothers were proud of me making pop records, but my grandmother and my mother, they said, 'Oh, he done strayed away from God?' It's scary, you know, because I done got a taste of how hundred-dollar bills feel in your hand. I'm saying to my people now, 'You say that you prosper when you believe, right? Well, I done started prospering, so it must have been in the hands of God!'"

Hurt and confused by his fall from commercial grace fifteen years later, Pickett says, "I will be searching for the answers as long as I desire to be in the business. Everybody thinks that you're hotheaded, that you're a bad guy, just because you're looking for the answers. But just because I'm looking for the answers, that don't mean I'm an asshole, man. Otherwise, I'll just have to be an asshole. I'm going to study and search and find a way to get us back on board."