The enthusiastic crowd reaction to Gladys Knight & the Pips got me thinking about other notably enthusiastic crowds, and one of the best is on Cannonball Adderly’s album “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy - Live at ‘The Club’.” The entire album is great, and solos on the track “Sticks” are so intense and breathtaking, and the crowd is so electrified that you can almost see them standing, clapping, shouting. But for the SOTD, I’m going to go with the more popular, more laid back title track, “Mercy. Mercy. Mercy.” Written by Josef Zawinul, the cunning Austrian keyboardist who later featured prominently on Miles’s “Bitches Brew” and later founded Weather Report, it has a groove that cannot be denied. Cannonball Adderly’s introductions to songs on live albums are great, but this is one of the best:
“You know, sometimes we're not prepared for adversity.
When it happens sometimes, we're caught short.
We don't know exactly how to handle it when it comes up.
Sometimes, we don't know just what to do when adversity takes over.
And I have advice for all of us, I got it from my pianist Joe Zawinul who wrote this tune.
And it sounds like what you're supposed to say when you have that kind of problem.
It's called mercy, mercy, mercy.”
Preach!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9mYN0Tkoik
True story:
Live at “The Club” was not really a “live” album and was not recorded at “The Club.” The Club was a new club in Chicago owned by a friend of Cannonball Adderly, and Adderly wanted to give him some free publicity. But, I learned many years after first purchasing the album, after countless listens imagining how wild the atmosphere in The Club must have been that night, that the entire album was actually recorded in a sound studio in LA, with a bunch of Adderly’s friends and music industry folks who had been bribed to attend with an open bar in order to give it a live recording feel. When I first learned this, I was disappointed for about two seconds, feeling like this masterpiece of a live album was somehow inauthentic. But then I thought about how I would feel if I had been invited to watch Cannonball Adderly record one of the best albums of his storied career, and I was given free booze on top of it all. Well, god damn, I’d be going nuts too, and there would be nothing contrived about it.
