Roy Head - Treat Him Right! The Best Of Roy Head (2007)

This collection, a solid representation as any of Roy Head's earlier canon, shows that the very thing that gave him strength as a performer is the very thing that prevented him from figuring more prominently in musical history: that is, his defiance of genre lines, particularly lines that were tethered to notions of race. He was known primarily for the lusty, slinky blue-eyed R&B masterpiece "Treat Her Right" (released in 1965), but unlike other blue-eyed soulsters of the mid-'60s (Righteous Brothers, Box Tops, Rascals), the Texan was edgy, not gentile, smooth or cute. (He was somewhat like a white James Brown.) Troubling the picture more, his roots were in '50s-style rock & roll, and (post-R&B) he would eventually eke out a living as a mutton-chopped, cowboy-hat-wearing country singer. The earlier tracks on this collection come off like a roving, nomadic clinic on early rock & roll: there's the perfect approximation of Buddy Holly (or Bobby Fuller) rock & roll on "One More Time"; the lean, feral drag-tempo "Don't Be Blue" with leather-bluesy accents of Gene Vincent all over it; and "Live It Up," which is pure Jerry Lee Lewis. Then there's "Yes I Do," which could fit easily on an Everly Brothers collection and the Eddie Cochran-meets-Buddy Holly "Summertime Love." Then, mid-collection, we hear Head finding his voice, a voice that (while resonant of black R&B) is distinctly his own. "Your Turn to Cry" pits bright, raw guitar trills up against Head's almost fragile, deep soul crooning. The best song of the collection -- and the one most illustrative of Head's brilliant iconoclasm -- is "Woe Woe," a slab of wailing, horn-fueled dynamic soul, with Head's high-wire vocals and the band's dime-stopping histrionics. Elsewhere, the rhythmically challenging "Night Train" is pure James Brown, while "Boogie Down Sunset" is (yet another) variation on John Lee Hooker's "Boogie Chillen" principle. The highlights of this collection are evidence that Head did something quite disruptive to the rock & roll paradigm in the mid-'60s: he turned the clock back on Elvis Presley, on Sun Records, and on rock & roll itself by paying direct (not hybridized) tribute to the black music that inspired rock & roll. In his R&B leanings, Head was an unfettered, raw, soulful spirit, much like the black artists who begat him. By 1975, he was placing country hits on the charts, and he continued in that vein until the mid-'80s. (That latter era is not represented here.) Head proved himself once again to be something that historians can't handle: he was beyond category; his was not a "neat" history.

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