Lee Michaels: From Soul to Shrimp
Grant Britt
Posted On December 21, 2018
Back in the day, he was a white soul prince with a top ten hit that still gets airplay on the classic oldies wavelengths. Today, Lee Michaels is a shrimp mogul, proprietor of Killer Shrimp, a sprawling 5,000-square-foot restaurant in Marina Del Rey Harbor that serves as the anchor for five more restaurants in California and Nevada, buoyed by his spicy shrimp recipe he boasts is simmered for 10 hours.
But in 1971, his soulful, ebullient, funky romp “Do You Know What I Mean,” embroidered with churchy pulses from his Hammond organ, had him straddling the line between gospel and R&B, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the black soul-slingers of the day.
But it took a while for Michaels to take hold. Three albums in, his self-titled 1969 effort produced “Heighty Hi” and a crusty cover of “Stormy Monday” that got him FM airplay, aided by the bombast of drummer Bartholomew Eugene Smith-Frost, or Frosty. But it wasn’t until his fifth outing,5th, with “You Know What I Mean” onboard, that Michaels became a player. Although he continued to put out albums until 1975, he never rose to those heights again.
Manifesto Records has released two of Michael’s earlier records on CD for the first time, 1973’s Nice Day For Something and 1974’sTailface. Theformer is kind of a snooze but Tailface has some tasty quirky rockers embedded in the grooves. “Met A Toucan” has the same stutter-step, second-line feel of “Do You Know What I Mean” on the verses, changing on the chorus to Southern rock that keeps trying to run to Jamaica for a reggae vacation.
“Politician” is a protest song hung on a reggae framework with Michaels putting aside his Hammond for some wiggly, string-bending guitar.
“Slow Dancin’ Rotunda” sounds like a crustier, more soulful version of Bachman-Turner Overdrive, Michaels once again doing some serious string-squeezing.
The bust-out single on this one is “Roochie Toochie Loochie,” with Michaels pounding away armed with both guitar and Hammond, cranking out static organ bursts between his crunchy leads and slack-keyed rhythm guitar accompaniment. It’s as quirky and cool as “Do You Know What I Mean,” and oughta be a fixture on classic rock solo lists as well.
Michaels strokes the keys of a cash register today, but his youthful key pushing, string-stretching musical exploits still linger, defining him as clearly as the briny smell of his more recent successes.
