Black Merda

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.. Detroit, circa 1969: The house lights of the packed Casino Royale dim. The club’s vibe is electric, the fog of cigarette and reefer smoke thicker than a Scottish moor. Four tall figures emerge from the wings of the stage, one settling in behind his drum kit, the other three drifting over to their guitars. As each man passes in front of his gear, the glowing red eyes of the guitar amps seem to wink conspiratorially at the audience..

Cords are twisted. Knobs get adjusted. Then, abruptly, the signature wail of a wah-wah cuts through the haze. The other guitarist replies with a brittle chucka-chucka-chuck-chuck and the drummer fires a machine-gun snare volley. Easing his way into the fray, the bassist nods his head in time with the beat. At the precise moment the stage lights flash on, he leans into the mic to grunt out a primal hunnhh! and the quartet slams into “Cynthy-Ruth,” a thick mélange of Hendrixian psychedelia, Muddy Waters-style chain-gang blues and dirty-ass funk.

This is Black Merda: siblings Anthony “Wolfe” Hawkins and F.C. “Little Charles” Hawkins on guitars and vocals, VC L. “Veessee” Veasey on bass and vocals, and Tyrone Hite on drums. Their visual impact is as arresting as their sound, all towering Afros, striped bellbottoms, flashy shirts and dangling scarves. And their reputation precedes them, with Merda hailed in local corners as being tighter and heavier than Parliament-Funkadelic, and pursued by such Motor City heavyweights as Norman Whitfield and Eddie Kendricks. Later the group will be courted by West Coast legends War, and in years to come the Merda praises will be sung by a choir of hipsters including Julian Cope, the Beastie Boys, DJ Z-Trip and Peanut Butter Wolf.

Merda’s musical fusion was unlike what was coming out of the African-American musical community at the time. Doing the “freaked-out thing” (as Veasey puts it now), the four men of Black Merda were acutely aware of being a breed apart from their Motor City (and national) peers.

“What we were doing was very different,” Veasey says. “These other [black] groups were kind of going into funk-rock then they switched to playing funk-dance music, but we were into doing psychedelic music. We’d play shows around the Detroit area and we used to do the psychedelic dress before Funkadelic were doing it, when they were still the Parliaments and still dressing like the Temptations. We dressed like that off the stage as well. Our dress, those clothes, we used to live like that every day.”Laughing, Veasey adds, “We were young, fairly good-looking guys with these big Afros — and we were good.”

Ellington “Fugi” Jordan, a Merda friend and collaborator, says the band’s style came down to two words. “Black Merda considered the music they were playing a form of ‘black rock,’” he says. “I asked Veasey one day, ‘Veasey, why do you call it black rock?’ VC is a very straightforward guy, and he just said, ‘Because that’s what it is. We’re black and we’re playing rock!’”

Black rock: Author/deejay Rickey Vincent, in the chapter titled “Black Rock: Givin’ It Back” from his 1996 treatise Funk, correctly notes how rock ’n’ roll, despite being pioneered by Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley and Little Richard, had essentially become a white phenomenon by the early ’60s. With the eventual ascent of the hippie counterculture, however, intermingling of black and white styles was inevitable, and he cites in particular the hybrid music of Jimi Hendrix and Sly & The Family Stone as integral to the cross-pollination. Vincent writes, “Uprooting racial (and musical) stereotypes with each new release, Jimi and Sly utilized the freedom inherent in rock and roll to expose thriving new visions of society — visions induced by the social revolution of the black man in America and articulated by these black men.”

That’s precisely the cultural nexus Black Merda and a handful of other black artists of the era found themselves at. Some — the Chambers Brothers, War, Buddy Miles Express, Mandrill and Santana (the latter, arguably, more in a Latin-rock genre of its own) — made names for themselves. Others, Merda among them, were destined to be remembered primarily in regional circles: outfits such as Rasputin Stash, Black Heat, Iron Knowledge, Gran Am and the descriptively-named Blackrock. Still others, from Parliament/Funkadelic, the Isley Brothers and Stevie Wonder to the Ohio Players, Earth Wind & Fire and the Bar-Kays (whose 1971 album was actually titled Black Rock), had de facto rock material in their repertoire, but as Veasey suggests above, they eventually moved to funk and disco.

Black Merda, however, was the real deal. According to Chicago-based journalist James Porter, currently researching a book on black rock and co-author of liner notes for a new Merda CD reissue, it boils down to matters of authenticity and musicality. “Merda had the attitude,” Porter says. “They weren’t coming out in tuxedos and looking Vegas-y — they were kind of like a black answer to the whole new irreverence in rock, like not smiling for the camera or anything, and being raw and regular.

“One thing that further set them apart was the guitar,” he continues. “Most black bands who did the psychedelic thing back then, like the Chambers Brothers and Funkadelic, they really laid it on thick — like they went down to the instrument store and bought every foot pedal that Electro-Harmonix came out with. But those guys, Merda, they were playing with their bare fingers. They had that twang to their stuff. Not only that, they were originally from Mississippi, and they really did sound like they learned at the seat of actual blues musicians — just playing with the raw talent that God gave them.”

Fugi, who’s working on a book of his own, a musical/social memoir to be titled The Making of a Black Criminal, adds, “They never considered themselves [part of] mainstream America. They considered themselves guys who had their own personal view of reality. They were cool with everybody — no hatred among them. They weren’t racist or any of that stuff. I just thought they were the most unusual guys I’d ever met.”

During their relatively brief 1968-72 career, the Motor City foursome mustered only two albums, 1970’s Black Merda and 1972’s Long Burn the Fire. Yet while neither platter made any commercial impact, both went on to near-mythic afterlife in record-collector heaven. Copies of the LPs routinely trade on eBay for upward of $90, and bootleg CDRs dubbed from the records have turned up in Europe — this even after New York-based funk/soul specialists Tuff City officially reissued the albums on vinyl in 1996. When in 2002 an underground CD of rare early ’70s black rock called Chains & Black Exhaust appeared, a lysergic shudder of delight rippled through the collecting community; among the choice tracks was Merda’s “Cynthy-Ruth,” and no less a tastemaker than Britain’s The Wire magazine would enthusiastically liken the tune to “Charles Stepney’s controversial late ’60s arrangements for Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters, but with Billy Childish’s production values.” With Tuff City finally giving the albums their first official CD release this month, a fully remastered 2-on-1 affair (The Folks from Mother’s Mixer) complete with unseen photos and detailed liners from Porter and New York musicologist Dan Nishimoto, the Merda buzz will only get louder. ....

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Black Merda rehearsing for Detroit Winterblast Show 2005. Right: VC L. Veasey, Left: Anthony Hawkins