#Let5D0It 8: “Hold On! I'm Comin’” (1966)

Label image via Discogs

8. Sam & Dave, “Hold On! I’m Comin’” (1966)
(Hayes/Porter) prod. Jim Stewart
Stax 189 | #1 R&B, #21 US

“Call my name, yeah, for a quick reaction, yeah-ha YEAAHHH”

Let’s get this out of the way first: fuck The Blues Brothers (1980) as a staff, record label, and as a motherfucking crew. Rich white comedians paying tribute to the music of black Southerners is somewhat inevitable, and ultimately bearable in limited doses — Woody Allen’s dixieland jazz, Steve Martin’s banjo stomps, Hugh Laurie’s piano blues — especially when it ends up pointing people back to the originators of the music. But the soul-destroying thing about cult classic movies is that they end up being prisons of solipsism instead of slipstreams in dialog with the broader river of culture. A generation that seemingly only ever experienced Southern soul and blues (not to mention Cab goddamn Calloway) through the prism of a shaggy Saturday Night Live spinoff, and constantly feels the need to interpose it between the actual music and their own ears, mind, and limbic system is all the more noxious to me because it’s my own generation. So then. Once you divorce the music from a couple of schlubs in sunglasses, black ties and porkpie hats, what’s left? A universe: from the lyrics’ passionate declaration of steadfastness to the way both men seem to sing with not just one voice but one mind, trading off shouts and exclamations live as crisply as sample-based music would electronically, “Hold On! I’m Comin’” is such a towering masterpiece of the Stax sound that it feels almost etched in granite rather than vinyl or acetate. Some of Al Jackson’s most powerful drumming, Steve Cropper’s wickedest barbed-wire guitar solo, and the Mar-Key horns erecting vertiginous backdrops against which Sam Moore and Dave Prater act out a volcanic passion play from the very depths of their vocal chords. No amount of Hollywood bombast could improve the crackling electricity of two men who hated each other but were locked into a partnership by the chains of success forged by singing their hearts out about being your joint salvation. Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, and a half-dozen other Stax stars could perhaps have been here instead; but nothing shoots to the heart like Sam & Dave.

First encounter: I heard “Soul Man” on oldies radio first, I think, and then when I looked it up I also downloaded the other high-seeded Sam & Dave mp3. Aft first I liked “Soul Man” more because the tempo is slightly faster and it does the terrible 1967 cliché of namechecking Woodstock, so it felt Important; but I was soon beguiled by the more working-class grit of “Hold On,” not to mention an arbitrary kind of pop originalism that favored earlier, first-big-hit work over later flourishes. And every time I’ve listened since has only confirmed it.