Dennis Coffey & The Detroit Guitar Band: Hair and Thangs

40 years ago today in 1968 butt naked hippysploitation rock musical 'Hair' opened at the Shaftsbury Theatre where it played 1998 times until 1973. The musical score, by Galt MacDermot, is pop psyche-soul par excellence, and produced THE HIT RECORDS 'Aquarius' and 'Let The Sunshine In'. Since the release of the Original Cast Recording there have been 4672 Hair covers LPs produced. Actually I made that figure up. I don't know if it's 4672, but it's loads. Some Hair covers LPs just plain suck, like the Moogtastic drum machine hell of Mort Garson's 'Electronic Hair Pieces.' Some of them are just plain trad jazz, like the tradtastic trad jazz hell of Sandy Brown & His Gentlemen Friend's 'Hair At It's Hairiest.' Some of them are by James Last. Basically, if you were a musician in 1971 and you'ld run out of ideas and your record company was on your back demanding some new product, you had two options: Beatles covers LP, or Hair covers LP.

Dennis Coffey & The Detroit Guitar Band couldn't even be bothered to make that decision, packing 'Hair and Thangs' (Maverick, 1969) with covers from both the Hair and Lennon/McCartney songbooks...and producing a raw-as-hell garage-funk monster.

I ain't gonna bore you with how Dennis Coffey was a Motown guitarist who pioneered the use of heavy wah-wah and overdriven fuzz as an integral part of Norman Whitfield's psychedelic soul experiments, playing on landmark records like The Isley Brother's 'It's Your Thing' and a whole buncha Temptations, Freda Payne stuff etc etc, how he had a million selling hit with the heavily sampled instrumental 'Scorpio' and how it's his buzzing siren riff which kicks off JVC Force's all-time hip-hop jam 'Strong Island.' I'll just tell you that 'Hair And Thangs' is brilliant. This is THE Coffey LP. It's the stuff Coffey did at Motown (before Hair & Thangs) and Sussex stuff afterwards that get all the press, but this is still my fave Coffey LP, the grungiest, fuzziest, most bare boned record he put out. Hammond, drums, bass and loads of guitar. Hair covers: 'Let The Sunshine In,' (a really great track) 'Aquarius' and 'Sodomy.' A couple of Coffey originals. 'Hey Jude'. A bunch of tracks called 'Thang': 'Iceberg's Thang', 'Do Your Thang'... you get the idea. 'Electric Thang' is a short-ass groove less than a minute long, and one of my fave things on here, just a hefty backbeat, some odd-ball ray-gun sound FX and it's gone...ace. This is a consistently great instrumental funk record, heavy on the breakbeats and extended head nodding mid-tempo jams, positively lo-fi compared to the big budget Motown numbers Coffey was previously involved with. Forget the recent 'Big City Funk' comp of Coffey's 70s Sussex material, and grab yourself a copy of this instead. (Paul Fuzz)