I String the Body Electric: Melvin Sparks 80

Melvin Sparks - Midnight Creeper

As the last embers of the weekend fade, we'll celebrate a milestone berfday for another superman of string driven things.

Today's guitar god has been gone 15 years, but today he'd have been 80.

If you love all that Prestige and Blue Note Soul Jazz stuff, where guys take turns playing wicked solos over New Orleans-style second line grooves, today is your day and this is your guy.

For he was kind of Prestige house guitarist in the late 1960s and early 1970s when all that was hot, contributing to seminal sessions that are now the stuff of Hip-Hop sampling lore.

All those Leon Spencer and Charles Earland platters feature him heavily, and he was such a smoking player that it wasn't long before he began recording as a leader.

By the time he passed, from hypertension and diabetes in 2011, he had 15 of his own records under his belt.

Back in the '90s, when I was learning the drums, I must have practiced daily to 30 songs he's on.

If you had a dollar for every time I worked out to Rusty Bryant's Fire Eater -- wherein the legendary drum deity Idris Muhammad attempts to remove everyone's clothes using only his tom-toms and kick drum -- you'd be able to open the Strait of Hormuz by making the dudes an offer they couldn't refu$e.

Anyway he toured relentlessly throughout his life, and there's a whole bunch of recordings of him on the Internet Archive from various audience captures and whatnot.

There's even a couple of really nice DAT soundboards, including a couple from the same week 20 years ago this Fall.

To celebrate our departed stringslayer, I brewed those two shows up into a nice 2 1/2 hour Master Class in Pure P Funk Power.

Melvin Sparks

The Big Easy

Portland, Maine USA

10.21.2006

01 Alligator Boogaloo

02 Fire Eater

03 Charlie Brown

04 Pick Up the Pieces

05 Conjunction Mars

06 Miss Riverside

07 Midnight Creeper

08 Thank You

09 The Governor

10 Funky Good Time

11 Let the Music Take Your Mind/closing Sparks remarks

Total time: 2:27:40

disc break goes after Track 06

Tracks 06-08 are from the Thunderbird Café, Pittsburgh PA 10.27.2006

Melvin Sparks – guitar & vocals

"Big" Paul Wolstencroft - Hammond B-3 organ

Shawn "Doublefoot" Hill - drums

Judd Nielsen - Hammond B-3 organ (replaces Big Paul on Tracks 06-08)

The Nigel Hall horns guest on horns and vocals on Tracks 10 & 11

master soundboard DATs

edited & remastered for unity by EN, March 2026
904 MB FLAC/direct link

I've got one more for next Thursday to close out the month in synthtastic style for you, with some of that lush pre-broadcast vinyl you always see me out working the corner, in a King Biscuit Flower Hour miniskirt, to acquire.

Tune in in a few days for that, after you've hooked up to the powerplant and absorbed some of these Melvin Sparks from the birthday boy, born this day in 1946 and still lighting up the dancefloor from The Great Beyond!--J.

3.22.1946 - 3.13.2011