always been about time.
The Meters have had considerable success in the R&B singles charts with hits like "Sophisticated Cissy" and "Chicken Strut," and they've been backing up New Orleans singers like Lee Dorsey and Ernie K-Doe for some time. They call the particular New Orleans rhythmic feeling "second line," which places it in the perspective of the second line of drummers and horn players who marched behind the mourners/celebrants in the city's traditional funeral parades. Metrically (no pun intended) second line consists of a pattern of 16 notes with unequal stresses, and it seems to have re-emerged only recently, after a long period of rhythms based on accented triplets. Maybe it's the difference between a slow song, say Fats' "Blueberry Hill" with its distinct three-against-four tensions, and a fast one like "When My Dreamboat Comes Home," which with its syncopated-16th accents is much closer to second line as the Meters play it today. At any rate, the uniqueness of the rhythm is not the number of notes per bar, but the emphasis given to certain beats, the added stresses that result in such a funky, slippin' and sliddin' kind of kinetic energy.
The development of reggae out of the collision of Jamaica's lilting calypso and the New Orleans R&B of the Fifties is well-documented in Trojan records' three-record History of Reggae set, but that story is far from over. There's been some reggae influence in the work of the late King Curtis and of Aretha Franklin (whose "Rock Steady" was inspired by a Jamaican hit of the same name), and now we have Cabbage Alley, which features several distinctly reggae-styled tunes as well as generous helpings of the more fashionable second line and its bastard child boogaloo. "Soul Island" is the most reggae-like Meters tune so far; the chunk-a-chunk bass and guitar unisons and basic organ lead are redolent of the music of the Islands both texturally and melodically, and the beat differs from that of reggae only insofar as it is not so stiff and much more aggressive. "Do the Dirt" has the same type of instrumentation and approach, but when it gets into the bridge the time slides easily into a North American soul groove.
Contrasting with these tunes are the rockish "Lonesome and Unwanted People," which features a fine vocal by organist Art Neville, and instrumentals like "The Flower Song" and "Smilin'." The latter two have the flavor
