Soul roots – Neville, Richards breathe new life into rock’s early classics

My True Story was supposed to be Aaron Neville’s “doo-wop” project, a loving tribute to the music that made its deepest imprint in Neville’s musical consciousness. But by the time it was ready for release, it had become a tribute to some of rock’s best-known early classics and some more-obscure R&B hits, all lovingly recreated by an A-list studio band, a handful of backup vocalists from the doo-wop era and a lead vocalist so enthralled by the material that he held back the flourishes and vocal acrobatics for which he has become so well known.

“I really wanted to respect the music I was doing,” Neville explains, “so I didn’t want to go too far from the originals. I just wanted to add my own inflection to it, what I feel in my heart.” Apparently Keith Richards, hired on as co-producer and bandleader, felt the same way, because nowhere in the musical accompaniment is there a lick out of place, a riff played just for its own sake or a musical effect that stands out on its own. Every song feels like a classic in its own right, and the album as a whole feels like a tribute to the early rock-and-roll that gave birth to what we now call soul music.

On the album’s promotional video, Blue Note president and co-producer Don Was admits, “I [first] heard it as a collection of ballads, but somehow we went off-list. Aaron started improvising [song choices], and it became almost stream-of-consciousness.” The truth is My True Story became almost entirely stream-of-consciousness, with Neville and Richards passing their free time talking musician talk (“Remember this one?”) until suddenly an early Clyde McPhatter and The Drifters hit, “Whatcha Gonna Do?”—the first song Neville remembers singing as a kid, with his older brother Art’s doo-wop group—naturally brings them to an even earlier hit by that band, “Money, Honey,” which then becomes the lead-off track on the album.

No doubt there’s a story like that for almost every track here, which includes material from 1952 to 1964 and features, at its apex, the Ronettes/Phil Spector masterpiece, “Be My Baby,” followed by Clyde McPhatter’s “Little Bitty Pretty One,” Little Anthony and The Imperials’ “Tears on My Pillow,” and The Drifter’s “Under the Boardwalk.”

But most of all, there is a sensibility that is at once personal, profound and deceptively simple. “These songs wake me up at three in the morning,” Neville says, “and I can’t get back to sleep until I’ve sung about ten or twelve of them.”

And it consists of the first music made in the modern era for a mixed white-and-black national audience, a reflection of post-WWII optimism that Neville rightly argues should be considered a continuation of the Great American Songbook. And it’s music that in its own time was so carefully crafted by songwriters, musicians, producers and label owners that today, veteran musicians can reproduce it, put their own spin on it, and it still swings effortlessly the way it did more than 50 years ago. Of great art, past or present, you can’t ask much more.

Aaron Neville’s My True Story drops Jan. 22. Neville performed a special concert for the release that PBS taped for broadcast in March.