Numero’s Eccentric Soul Revue

SOUL ECCENTRICS Chicago crooner Syl Johnson, below, and NYC rapper Missy Dee represent different eras of an ongoing pop revival.

Photograph: Courtesy of the Numero Group

The Chicago label Numero Group is the kind of company a Nick Hornby character might dream up after being dumped by his girlfriend. Hatched by a trio of music geeks in 2004, the label has devoted itself to pop’s finer also-rans and never-weres: compilations of power-pop flops, the funk artists of Belize and, especially, soul music released on regional labels in the ’60s and ’70s. “We’re trying to document these scenes as they disappear beneath us,” says Ken Shipley, one of Numero’s founders. “Soul music probably has another 15 years to be documented before we start having almost everybody involved being dead.”

While Numero Group concerts have proved scarce, this week the label launches its debut tour. A proper revue show torn from soul music’s heyday, the concert features the young Chicago band JC Brooks and the Uptown Sound backing veterans of the label’s signature “Eccentric Soul” series, including Curtis Mayfield associates the Notations and the silky Chicago crooner Renaldo Domino.

The night’s biggest name, however, is Syl Johnson, who scored substantial R&B hits in the late ’60s. Johnson, 73, lives in Chicago, fat off royalties from the innumerable artists who have sampled his wares. He is the cartoon portrait of a soul man: Whereas the average American proclaims something “cool,” Syl Johnson proclaims it “Kool and the Gang.” (An example: “Time Out magazine?” he says, answering the phone. “Kool and the Gang! Do you like old-school soul, man?”)

Johnson’s life changed in 1967, when the Chicago label Twilight issued “Come On Sock It to Me,” his first hit. “The day my record came out was the day my younger brother overdosed,” he recalls. “He was a rough little punk. Me and my mom went to the morgue, and when I dropped her off, ‘Sock It to Me’ came on the radio. I almost wet my clothes! I cried, but it took away the hurt.”

Johnson’s second, arguably larger break came three decades later, when his other 1967 hit, “Different Strokes,” resurfaced as a favored hip-hop sample—perhaps most memorably in Wu-Tang Clan’s “Shame on a Nigga.” The singer got in touch with RZA. “He talked loud and cursed every other word,” Johnson says of the rapper. “But he was true to his word. I’m living in a house that I built with the Wu-Tang money.”

If Johnson fits the prototype of a revivalist’s darling, the revue’s special guest—Missy Dee—suggests a generational turning point. While nerds of previous eras unearthed lost bluesmen or folkies, Missy Dee is a bona fide Harlem MC who cut her teeth rapping in her school’s lunchroom during hip-hop’s infanthood. Still in high school, she was recruited by an eccentric neighborhood impresario to record a 12-inch single, issued in 1981 and largely unknown until the Numero Group’s rediscovery.

Missy Dee is now 44 and a resident of Staten Island; in civilian life, she goes by the name Dawn Sutton. “None of us thought hip-hop was going to turn out to be what it became,” she says, sipping soda downstairs from her midtown office. “It was really just a way of expressing ourselves and having fun—and respect for women was included in that.”

Sutton hung up her microphone ages ago, never even mentioning her MC days to her children. “What makes it so bad,” she says, “is that my daughter started liking rap. I would be giving her pointers, and she’d go, ‘Mommy, how do you know this?’ I’d say, ‘Ah, trust me! I listen to the radio!’ ”

Numero Group exhumed Missy Dee two years ago—a hip-hop star forgotten even by herself. “When rock & roll first started, the parents were all like, ‘This is just noise,’ ” Sutton says. “Well, my mother was saying the same thing about hip-hop.”

And now? “Oh! She has invited everybody and their mother to the show,” the rapper says, laughing. “Can you believe that crap?!?”

Numero’s Eccentric Soul Revue is at the Music Hall of Williamsburg Fri 13.

RELATED
“Different Strokes” for different folks

See more recommended shows