This is an article about funk. It’s not about the kind of funk that casual music fans are familiar with — bands like P-Funk, Sly Stone, James Brown, the Meters — or even the type that connoisseurs might recognize — acts like Cymande, Jimmy Castor, and the Ohio Players. It’s about funk that’s so rare and so obscure, it was just a tiny blip on the pop-culture radar some 30 years ago. But now a community of collectors, record labels, and musicians is reviving, reissuing, reinterpreting, and re-creating the mostly forgotten sound of what has come to be known as garage funk.

In the years between soul music’s slow downward slide and disco’s petulant rise, the syncopated virus unleashed by James Brown burrowed deep into American soil, birthing countless semi-professional funk bands. Between 1967 and 1972, hundreds of ragged funk 45s were released by tiny regional labels: recorded cheaply and pressed in small batches, these records filled jukeboxes and fueled dance parties for a brief period. And then they were kicked to the curb.

In the ’80s, European collectors began to exhume these forgotten recordings from mom-and-pop record shops, garage sales, and defunct radio stations. Bringing them back to the continent, these crate diggers cashed in on Europe’s Americana fetish, feeding the burgeoning acid-jazz scene and creating a market for the now ubiquitous “rare groove” compilation. At the same time, hip-hop producers like DJ Shadow and Pete Rock began to sample the same funk 45s, prizing the red-line horn blasts and rugged drum sounds. Over the past few years, an entire subculture of American crate diggers has grown up around these miniature Rosetta stones of flat, black plastic.

What draws people to the garage-funk sound is the same thing that got Nuggets compiler Lenny Kaye all revved up about garage rock back in the early ’70s. Listening to a raw and gritty garage-funk cut is like mainlining a shot of pure groove. There’s nothing extraneous — no pretentious jazzbo solos, no overdubbing, barely any chord changes, and definitely no Fender Rhodes piano. Just the jagged interplay of greasy horns, chukka-chukka guitars, bumping bass, and, of course, stuttering, hesitating, thundering drums. As Phillip Lehman, the French-born funk fanatic behind New York’s Soul Fire label, an imprint dedicated to the garage funk sound, explains over the phone from his NYC home, “I like really hard-hitting drums, a consistent rhythm guitar, and a band that sounds good as a group, not everyone soloing all over the place and shit. Really repetitious, and definitely no blues changes, that ruins it. Simple stuff, not sophisticated.”

Garage-funk cuts can be a little amateurish, but that’s half the appeal. Besides, what the low-budget funkateers who recorded these singles lacked in chops, they made up for with soul and feeling. Charging out of the gate like a bucking bull, the Highlighters’ “Poppin’ Pop Corn” (b/w “The Funky Sixteen Corners”) is a near-perfect example of the æsthetic. Recently reissued by West Coast hip-hop indie Stones Throw, the single is one of the most coveted funk 45s of all time — only 10 or 20 original copies exist, so prices are way above the $1000 mark — and it’s easy to understand why. The A-side is an “answer” to JB’s hit of the same year (“Mother Popcorn”), and it’s sticky and slippery in all the right places. Plus it’s got a roiling breakbeat that could shake the foundation of a skyscraper. The flipside is even better. The Indianapolis-based septet were attempting to jump-start a new dance craze (the “corners” was a hot dance at the time); instead they distilled the energy of an all-night house party into 3:20 of drunken screams and sharp horn hits.

Garage-funk enthusiasts don’t just prize the heartfelt playing on these old seven-inches, they covet the gritty, lo-fi sound quality. Lehman sums up the garage-funk sonic fingerprint: “rough, fucked-up, shitty little productions done in someone’s basement.” And that’s what Lehman has been attempting to emulate for the past 10 years, first with the Desco label and now with Soul Fire. He and Desco co-conspirator Gabriel Roth recently split because, in Lehman’s words, the Desco material was becoming too “goody-goody-sounding.” No one will accuse Lehman’s new Grazing in the Trash Vol. 1, which collects the initial run of Soul Fire’s limited-edition seven-inches, of being goody-goody. Defiantly bad-sounding, this compilation of minimalist funk vamps sounds as if it had been recorded with a shit-encrusted microphone in a moldy Detroit basement in 1969.

Going back to his days with Desco, Lehman has also been fooling funk-hungry crate diggers with manufactured authenticity: he turns out scarily accurate reproductions of garage-funk 45s complete with appropriately low-budget artwork, a gritty sonic stamp, and intentionally misleading liner notes. Picking up Grazing in the Trash, you might think you’ve stumbled onto a collection of rare late-’60s gems by JD & the Evil’s Dynamite Band, the Soul Command, and Calypso King & the Soul Investigators. Except that the entire disc was recorded in Lehman’s apartment by his house band. “I started to do it like that because funk fans, including myself, wouldn’t give new recordings a chance. So I figured if I made it look old, then people would give it an objective opinion.”

MILES TACKETT, the multi-instrumental mastermind behind Los Angeles’ Breakestra, is a hip-hop head who discovered old-school funk through the archæological work of sample sourcing. He formed the Breakestra as an act of “cultural preservation.” But Tackett’s archival techniques are a bit skewed: instead of re-creating an entire song, his 11-piece group reduce the old cuts to their bare funktionalist essence, playing only the short sections and vamps that have been sampled by the likes of A Tribe Called Quest, Boogie Down Productions, and Busta Rhymes. On their latest, Live Mix Part Two (Stones Throw), this post-rap, retro-revisionist funk act string together 28 cuts in 50 minutes, working more like a quick-cutting DJ than a typical band. With a tart horn blast or a quick drum hit, they segue from one funk classic to the next. Occasionally they stretch out to play a chorus or two (Sly Stone’s “Sing Me a Simple Song”), but the Breakestra never settle for too long — this is a funk revival for the hip-hop generation, short-attention-span kids brought up on Atari and mix tapes.

“I was completely influenced by hearing DJs like Cut Chemist, Mixmaster Wolf, and Starski,” Tackett points out over the phone from LA. “They did these rare-groove funk mixes, and they in turn were carrying on the tradition of Kool Herc’s Bronx parties, where hip-hop came from. I write out the live sets conceptually, as if someone were planning a DJ set. In fact, the Breakestra is a DJ. We are the DJ. But, instead of cutting and scratching to express ourself, we have soloists.”

BROOKLYN’S ANTIBILAS are another band who look to crusty, old-school funk for inspiration. Except this stage-crowding 13-piece aren’t mining Middle America for forgotten 45s, they’re digging into the agit-pop Afrobeat of legendary political activist, womanizer, pot smoker, and rabble rouser Fela Kuti. On their latest, Liberation Afrobeat Vol. 1 (Ninja Tune), Antibilas re-create the swirling, polyrhythmic mess of Afrobeat, using Fela’s visionary synthesis of James Brownian funk, West African highlife, traditional Yoruban rhythms, and jazz improvisation as a template for their lengthy excursions.

Speaking over the phone from New York, drummer Phillip Ballman explains Antibalas’ mission: “We’re really trying to play Afrobeat as Fela laid it down and then compose new songs in that spirit. One writer described us as a ‘generative,’ not an ‘imitative’ band. And I like that description — we’re not just making a stylistic gesture, we hope to absorb the original influences and carry them forward.” Antibalas have the Afrobeat blueprint down pat — the chit-chattering guitars intertwining like double helixes, the expansive solos unfolding over a thick rug of percussion, the call-and-response vocal chants, and, most important, the relentless Afrobeat groove, which is filled with a million rhythmic secrets that reveal themselves only after countless listens.

One could conjure complex theories to join the resurgence of these dusty grooves to the yearning for authentic, acoustic music in our post-everything, cut ’n’ paste musical universe, but I suspect the real message here is a simple one. Our carnivorous culture can be unkind to great music, chewing it up and spitting it out before it has a chance to fight back. We need these compulsive trainspotters, obsessive crate diggers, and dedicated revivalists to help bring great grooves back from the grave. Within trash, there is treasure.

Issue Date: May 31 - June 7, 2001