In Kentucky, several members were jailed for not being able to pay hotel charges. Niambi Steele, one of the new members.Ģ4-Carat Black hit a new low in 1975: Stax went bankrupt while the group was on the road. “We were going from town to town, just trying to survive,” says singer C. With the Stax cash dwindling, Warren attempted to keep the group afloat with his own money. Undaunted, Warren assembled a new lineup and promoted Ghetto with a revue-style stage show. The drama prompted much of the band-all except Hearn and two others-to quit during a scuffle in a Holiday Inn parking lot and return to Cincinnati. By that point, Stax’s mounting financial problems were keeping records from actually reaching stores. The label either couldn’t or simply didn’t promote it, and Warren refused to edit the songs down to single length. Organized into eight songs (or “synopses”) examining different aspects of the black inner-city experience, Ghetto struggled to find a market among Stax listeners seeking breezy soul hooks.
JAY Z REASONABLE DOUBT ORIGINAL SAMPLES FULL
In 1973, they entered the studio with a full orchestra to record Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth. With Hayes’ label, Stax, footing the bill, Warren promised the Ditalians fame, changed their name, and reimagined their entire repertoire. By the beginning of the ’70s, he was riding high on the success of Isaac Hayes’ masterpiece, Hot Buttered Soul, for which he created dazzling orchestrations. Warren got his start arranging string parts for the Supremes and other Motown acts. That was a slick use of words and imagery that evoked something ancient, mysterious, dark, bright.” “The name was always right to me: 24-Carat Black. But for Butler, even the inky-black cover and band name seemed charged with meaning. The tracks were long, and, from Stax's view, not easily marketable. “As I got older, my impression of it was, damn, this shit really is good-and really outside the normal approach to R&B.” Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth, released on Stax Records in 1973 and reissued just this year by Craft Recordings, paired hard grooves with unflinching soliloquies about black poverty and despair. “When I was young, I heard the album a lot,” says Butler, who was once known as Butterfly from Digable Planets. Somewhere in his record collection was 24-Carat Black’s only studio release, a bleak concept album called Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth. Shabazz Palaces’ Ishmael Butler first heard it when he was a kid in the mid-1970s: the woozy, apocalyptic funk of 24-Carat Black.īutler’s father, a history professor, routinely brought home avant-jazz LPs of the day, exposing his son to Sun Ra and Pharoah Sanders before he was even old enough to read.