Artist:     Bernard Fowler

Album:     Inside Out

Label:     RARR

Release Date:     4.19.2019

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You’ve never heard Rolling Stones’ songs rendered this way. The band’s long-time (30 plus years) backup vocalist, Bernard Fowler, delivers a spoken word treatise on select, deep-in-the-catalog Stones’ songs that’s a mashup of the Last Poets, Gil Scott Heron, modern day Robert Glasper, and the beat-jazz poet artists like recently-passed Ken Nordine. Fowler’s emotive delivery is bathed in percolating percussion on every track, as he enlists the support of famed Hispanic percussionists and heavy funksters for the band tracks. It’s a sweaty, gritty urban sound.

Fowler, who has backed artists as diverse as Herbie Hancock, David Bowie, Yoko Ono, Alice Cooper, Bootsy Collins and more, has made solo rock-oriented albums but this is his first venture into spoken word. His background certainly pointed in this direction as he sung with the groundbreaking dub-electronic band Tackhead, avant-funkers Material, New York Citi Peach Boys, and DJ Larry Levan. Here he does not sing one note but delivers the lyrics in a dynamic way that only a lead vocalist could.

The album got its start rather serendipitously, as Fowler was reciting Stones lyrics poetically while he practiced his congas during a Stones’ sound check. Mick Jagger, impressed by Fowler’s beat inflection of the lyrics and funkified percussion encouraged him to cut the record, now timed for release just as the Stones, with Fowler in tow, go on tour. As Fowler dug into the material, he found that most of the hit songs were not conducive to the project, but he found what he felt were lyrical gems, saying, “These lyrics weren’t from the cats I’d been working with for the last 30 years, but from some chthonic place by someone new. I didn’t know the cats that wrote this, and I wondered how many of their fans knew these cats that I seemed to have rediscovered…Could it be that the Stones are actually black guys disguised as English gentlemen?” The songs are not done in tribute, more in the mode of autobiography and social commentary. For example, “Dancing with Mr. D.,” which has two versions, as well as “Sister Morphine” are present due to both the opioid epidemic and Fowler’s witnessing addiction while growing up. Topics of prejudice, drugs, violence, injustice, love, lust, and morality are all here—and given the clarity of the words, may be more impactful than they’ve ever been.

Fowler grew up in the predominantly black and Puerto Rican Queens Bridge Projects where funk, R&B, and salsa were blaring form boomboxes. Those touchstones reveal themselves in “Dancing with Mr. D” (James Brown),
“Time Waits for No One” (War, Chambers Brothers), “Sister Morphine” (Curtis Mayfield) and less obviously in others too. The salsa influence is reflected in percussion aces Walfredo Reyes Jr. and Lenny Castro who play rhythms from Africa, Brazil and the Caribbean. ”Tie You Up” has just percussion backing and aside from Tim Ries’ engaging saxophone riffs. “Must Be Hell” features just percussion too.

The full band tracks have some familiar names including long-time Stones bassist Daryl Jones, former Miles Davis drummer/producer Vince Wilburn, Jr., guitarists George Evans and Ray Parker Jr., rock/pop/R&B session stalwarts pianist Michael Bearden and drummer Steve Jordan. Drummer Clayton Cameron, renowned as ‘the Brush Master’ added additional textures. Listen for Parker on “Time Waits for No One’’ and “Sister Morphine.” Throughout, Stones melodies are forfeited for a funkified approach, some like “Time Waits for No One’ akin to ‘70s blaxsploitation soundtracks. “Sister Morphine” stands apart due to the Miles Davis-like trumpet of Keyon Harrold who played in the acclaimed biopic Miles Ahead and currently plays with folks like Robert Glasper and Gary Clark Jr. Another clear standout is pianist Mike Garson from David Bowie’s band who authors a killer solo on the disc’s best known track “Sympathy for the Devil.”

The album title is apropos. These Stones’ songs have been transformed, many beyond recognition, a testament to Fowler’s creativity.

—Jim Hynes