Wilson Pickett – The Definitive Collection

The scream was there from the start, but the context needed a little time. “I Found A Love”, the song that leads off this two-disc set, features an athletic vocal, crazed guitar, and those screams. The second track, “It’s Too Late”, hangs a choice recitation on a ballad: “I didn’t appreciate that woman then, and you know what?/I had to run and chase after every little girl around town,” Pickett declaims in a typically double-edged moment of repentance.

Where things start to heat up — where the Alabama-born and Detroit-bred Pickett starts to sound like a feral beast whose exhortations, grunts and screams inspire ever more tactful and oblique backing from his band — is on mid-’60s performances such as “In The Midnight Hour” and “Ninety-Nine And A Half (Won’t Do)”, recorded with the Stax house band in Memphis. A two-chord blues, “Ninety-Nine” is relentlessly formal, with an unhinged singer.

What’s fascinating about Pickett, and what this collection briskly illustrates, is his myth — his boundless appetite for sex, self-assertion and destruction — and the way he adapts material that in the hands of, say, Sir Mack Rice, came across as piquant, understated, regional in its musical vocabulary, and somewhat less than boundless in its appetite for world domination. Pickett’s 1969 rendition of Rice’s “Mini-Skirt Minnie” takes the song apart and inserts a dirty two-bar guitar break; it’s a high-octane gloss on Rice’s 1967 Stax single. Rice envisions a girl whose legs inspire traffic snarls; Pickett sees a possibility for gladiatorial conquest.

Pickett’s interpretations of his friend Bobby Womack’s “I’m In Love” and “I’m A Midnight Mover” are instructive. Both men recorded at Memphis’ American Studios, and while their versions are similar, Womack’s originals reveal an abstract edge, the mind and soul of an experimenter. But when Pickett sings about Broadway, you can see him strutting down the street like a heavyweight boxer, or like Miles Davis — encased in arrogance, on top of the world.

On disc two, Duane Allman’s liquid guitar cuts Pickett’s hoarseness on “Hey Jude”, while the ominous “Engine Number 9” and the outre, almost prog-rock “Call My Name, I’ll Be There” bring to mind Miles Davis’ Jack Johnson album. There’s the same feeling of a giant talent raging against the ending of an era that allowed beasts to roam the earth and never got in the way of a great rhythm section.