Music defined the era of Blaxploitation filmmaking as much as the garish fashions, punchy, profane dialogue, or lurid, pulpy plots. Ron O’Neal’s Youngblood Priest would still have been a fly-ass hustler in his Flagg Brothers boots and giant ‘71 Cadillac Eldorado (complete with customized Rolls Royce grill), but it was Curtis Mayfield’s soulful yet gritty soundtrack that made him “Super Fly.” Richard Roundtree’s hard-chargin’, hard-lovin’, take-no-bullshit portrayal of John Shaft in a time when audiences just didn’t see confident, powerful, sexual Black men on the silver screen, was the pack of dynamite beneath the Blaxploitation revolution, but it was Isaac Hayes’ theme that’s kept the flame burning three decades later. Just like you can’t think of James Bond without humming the first notes of Monty Norman’s “James Bond Theme,” whenever you think of John Shaft that famous hi-hat and the funky wah-wah guitar riff inevitably comes strutting through your head.
So what would happen if you wrote a Blaxploitation soundtrack but didn’t have a movie to go with it? Would it still work? According to the band Cadillac Jones, the answer is “Yes.” In 2006, the Atlanta, GA-based jazz-funk group released the concept album The Big Takedown. The concept? The Big Takedown is the soundtrack for a previously unreleased Blaxploitation-era movie. The band even has a link to the “original movie treatment” posted on their site. The treatment is a weathered, stained, hole-punched, 3-page document that looks like it was drafted on a real typewriter, reproduced on carbon paper, then run through a mimeograph machine multiple times(You can almost smell the purple ink!), and buried in a stack of old Ebony and Jet magazines for 25 years before it was finally posted on their site.
The “movie’s” plot is a seedy little crime thriller involving Ike Power, a gangster prodigal son returning to a dangerous, corrupt, unnamed city after being away for several years. He’s returning at the request of his old boss and surrogate father, Earl “Tarzan” Watkins, in order to wrap up some unfinished business. (I particularly liked the touch that Ike spent his exile with family in Barbados. It’s a nice unexpected touch that adds a layer of depth to his character.)
The secondary concept behind Cadillac Jones’ concept album is that every song is intended to accompany each scene from the movie, so we get to follow Ike’s journey through this dark criminal underworld with Cadillac Jones right beside him, slinking, grooving, and swinging from one song to the next. For example, the first cut, titled “Intro” is only 26 seconds long, but it sets the tone of the story by just employing the sound of an airplane landing as the muted cacophony of an airport terminal rumbles in the background. In short, it tells us Ike Power has arrived. The next cut, “Narq,” starts off with a “tsah-tsah-ta-tsah” hi-hat reminiscent of “The Theme from Shaft” before a guitar and brass kick in. ”Narq” then segues into a nice, jazzy groove that rolls along for the balance of the song. ”Narq” is obviously Ike Power’s theme, and the band even closes out the album with “Return Of The Narq,” a slower, more haunting adaptation of the opening number, that you could easily see playing over the closing credits of The Big Takedown.
One of my favorite aspects of The Big Takedown is Cadillac Jones’ use of a REAL horn section! The brass is used to great effect throughout the album, adding rich, brassy, funky flourishes, particularly in the mid-tempo head-bopper “Power.” ”Ike’s Regret” begins with a mournful baritone saxophone as a subway train rattles in the background. The sax actually sends you back further in time to a 1950s noir film instead of a Blaxploitation movie. If The Big Takedown had any drawback it would be scattered anachronistic touches like this or the occasional use of scratching, that pull the listener out of the ’70s era the album is meant to evoke. When the album’s third song “Tarzan” introduces Beastie Boys “Brass Monkey”-ish scratching early into the cut, I felt like Scott Bakula from Quantum Leap, lurching from the era of bellbottoms and fringed vests to a time of Kangols and dookie rope chains.
Overall, I felt The Big Takedown was a tremendously successful concept album. Although I generally prefer my funk a little more propulsive and grimy than jazz-flavored, Cadillac Jones kept me hooked from beginning to end. The Big Takedown is not available on iTunes, but that’s to the advantage of you and your local record store. You really need to enjoy The Big Takedown as a cohesive whole with plot in hand, in the song order laid out by the band, because it makes the listening experience even better. When you do, give me a call. I’ll bring the popcorn.
- JEP
