Heathen Disco Music Reviews #0131 (September 30, 2025)

Happy end-of-Q3 to those who celebrate. We’re in the skid; I’m just about two full months jobless, which I’ve treated as a sort of mini-retirement as I recalibrate for the next move. The time to fuck about is now over. Time to get to (the) work, ascend the next flight. I’m sick of feeling bad about living in the dumbest timeline and I hope most of you are as well — it’s high time people with some sense of reality left start talking to one another again.

One way to cope is escaping into the past, which to be fair, is as rich a seam as any we have. There’s more we haven’t heard, seen, or read than what we have, and there always will be. If you’re reading Heathen D, you probably subscribe to that theory, and want to find what to put on next, or at least honk if you agree.

Hey thanks everyone who clicked on that ad, because it paid for about half the plan costs this past month. As a thank you, today’s missive is FREE.

Do not hesitate to send music to me for review! Preferably it should be new, or newly reissued, just out of the sake of relevance to the reader, or those looking within my canon of perceived works.

Do you know of a record label or artist who should be seeing this, and sending in their music? Great, please push them my way. Forward this email like the fucking plague!

Don’t make this hard or stupid either — clearly label what you got and send it to [email protected] (or even better PO Box 25717 Chicago IL 60625 USA). That way I can cover it without having to resort to lower methods to obtain it. If you think I’m following everyone’s release schedule, you’re insane. HELP ME TO HELP YOU.

As a quick aside, and a recommendation coming straight from my heart, the Applejuice album I was excited about over the summer is being pressed to vinyl. 100 copies, some real fine music from Cleveland. Get it!

THE PEOPLE’S PEOPLE The People’s People Present the Spirit of David LP (The Voice of the People Record Co.m 1976; r. Frederiksberg, 2025)

The natural essence of soul jazz resides in a private press album released by one Jeff Jones, leader of the Oakland, CA outfit The People’s People, back in 1976. Stories tell of a rigorously rehearsed set, composed by saxophonist/bandleader Jones, in which the ensemble members (most of whom, save percussionist Ray Vega, count this album as their only recording credits) were forbidden from gigging, and that the album was cut in a single take. Sounds more Jim Jones to me, but I’ll believe anything at this point, including how collectors were willing to pay over $3,000 for an OG copy of this one. When you hear it, it’ll make sense – the years have burnished this sextet’s lone work, a rich, deep, fully-controlled, turn-on-a-dime soundscape of spiritual jazz/fusion, to a patina that only time can afford. When guitarist Leonard Franklin busts out a crooked yellow Hendrix-esque solo over the warmth of Steve Espanosa’s electric piano, or when drummer Jack Spinovich’s mannered explosions hit, you’ll fully realize what you’re sitting on. Side 2 opener “Fritz” is the hit, an ever-evolving suite reminiscent of Herbie Hancock’s Mwandishi troupe, but all four compositions on here go beyond any reasonable expectation, just another lost history revealing maps of the psyche we’ve never traced before. Outstanding.

BUCKINGHAM NICKS s/t LP/7” (Polydor, 1973; r. Rhino, 2025)

A binary in popular music, you are either predestined to be into or reject the music Fleetwood Mac made when the duo of Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks entered the fold. I’m pro in this argument, and was on the earth when their music made its way out (had my mom’s 45 of their worst song), and it’s literally always been with me, in some of my earliest memories of hearing music of any kind. I can’t really explain it – this stuff just sounds natural to me, for the most part, divorced from the tales and turmoil within, because it’s familiar.

Discovering the Buckingham Nicks album (and listening to their era of Mac with inquisitive ears) some time in the late ‘90s, before my rocket years in NYC, and dovetailing with a love of Steely Dan (which has abated to “ex I’m still cordial with”) and Thin Lizzy (still there, stronger than ever), were likely an important lesson in tolerance, a rumination on my own defiance and strictures that probably didn’t need to be in place to begin with. I know exactly where that militant tendency came from, too: already a fan of hip hop in the butter years (thanks “YO! MTV Raps,” you probably saved my life in the hard yards of middle school), by freshman year there was a collective passion in the kids around me at school for Vanilla Ice. A classmate named Stacy got his zigzag fade as an undercut at the barber at the mall, hidden under her long hair, a search for identity I couldn’t square with. Confused, one day after school I went home and listened to “Ice Ice Baby” with intent, trying to figure out if there was something wrong with me, or the song was like sniffing the toilet paper one just wiped with. It was, ultimately, the latter, and my real clean break with music that was popular or accepted by the masses. I knew the world that made “Ice Ice Baby” possible and the exploitation it took to bastardize it and get that scum all over the people. That wariness ultimately birthed the words I write now, and the critical faculties to examine the world with a trained eye and golden ear. Getting over myself took a long time, but essentially freed me when I’d hit an inflection point with music, where I was consciously avoiding things that may be good for me due to the notion that they were disposable

And still, Buckingham Nicks IS disposable, an EP padded to full-length with some skillful nothing instrumentals, and songs like “Lola My Love” that you’ll never remember no matter how many times you play them. If the participants kept this from reissue for fifty years, it’s because it’s a record that sublimates half of itself, really five or six songs in search of a good home, which one of them eventually found. They didn’t throw any of their later songs away, but they also do anything as strong as “Frozen Love,” a song that proves my hypothesis, a ballad that folds time in a way to make it seem half as long as it is. It’s vampire music, robbing you of seven minutes and telling you it’s three. Whatever. It’s all here for you to examine, do what you want.

TONY JOE WHITE The Real Thang LP (Casablanca, 1980; r. Swamp, 2025)

(out later this month)

End of the line for TJW mk. 1, the funkiest country-soul singer next to Jim Ford, prolific right up to his passing in 2018. I have the full run of his albums from the Monument era on The Real Thang, and as his prolificacy ends with negative-lateral moves through disco labels, what made his music irresistible from the start is present beyond the last of the Warner Bros. years. There are bangers on 1976’s Eyes (reissued, as it seems, by this same imprint this past summer) that seem engineered to move a more open, leftfield dance floor despite themselves, and more purposeful takes in that direction on The Real Thang, which made him unlikely labelmates with the Skatt Bros. Swamp’s resequencing of both these albums is enervating, especially here, with sides disrespected in favor of a few ballads with the texture of a juiced lime rind headed for the compost. This one works best when it’s his flash rhythm guitar and deep-jug drawl laid down on a consistent four-on-the-floor beat, and absolutely on one with the sublime “I Get Off On It,” a freak-flag anthem of acceptance that should be played as often as possible to whatever audience can receive its message; same with “Mama Don’t Let Your Cowboys (Grow Up to Be Babies).” And if you’ve gone there, you’re gonna have to live with “Even Trolls Love Rock ‘n’ Roll.” It’ll be OK.

See ya Friday — Doug M