G-love and Special Sauce

Sharps & Flats is a daily music review in Salon Magazine

By Natasha Stovall

Nov 11, 1997 | In the age of Phish and the continuing mythology of the Grateful Dead, the meaning of "jam" in pop music has telescoped, coming to mean a series of meandering, spacey instrumentals that weave themselves together and unravel in unison. Philadelphia guitarist/singer/harmonica player G-Love takes a different view. "Yeah, It's That Easy" returns to the original spirit of jamming by stuffing each song full of loose musical interplay that feels rich enough in possibilities to be stretched out to twice or three times its length.

The songs on "It's That Easy" run the usual three to five minutes, but they feel much longer. Working with 10-plus musicians -- including longtime collaborators Special Sauce and the All Fellas Band, as well as New Orleans icon-cum-saint Dr. John -- G-Love creates a loose, bouncing improv sound -- too mellow to be rock and too hyped to be soul, though it has the spirits of both running in its veins. "It's That Easy" is a summer kind of record (good for surviving East Coast winters) that mixes rap, folk-rock and jazz.

There's always a new element coming out of nowhere -- an acoustic guitar strum, an a cappella harmony, a hip-hop scratch, a harmonica solo -- to fill in when the melody thins out. It's an uncomplicated vibe with an incredibly complex background. Mostly, G-Love deals lyrically in the pleasures and disappointments found in everyday things like romance and basketball and friendship, but he couches it in sophisticated, high-octane arrangements that sound beautifully simple in the way that only intensely intricate things can.

The album's best is "Lay Down the Law," a bittersweet ode to a junkie friend who's simultaneously the object of worship and pity. Jazzy-soul guitar is fused with a laid-back high-hat/snare beat and joined with tenderly harmonized vocals. The effect simultaneously twists a knife in the heart and warms the ears from the inside, evoking the painful nostalgia of lost friendship in the same masterful way that Sade's "Maureen" and Pete Rock & C.L. Smooth's "They Reminisce Over You" did.

Though G-Love tends to favor a good-time atmosphere in his playing, his lyrics often fall on subjects of sadness: murder ("Slipped Away"), the fucked-up world ("200 Years") and race relations ("Yeah, It's That Easy"). On the latter subject, G-Love lays out his personal political analysis: "You and me used to run ball in the league/We ran the championship team/The best they had seen ... Now that we've grown/We've been in different scenes/And in fact we sold out to the social contract/Meaning we don't hang." The integration G-Love experienced as a white youth in Philadelphia turned into segregation as he grew up, but he was left with an understanding of the grays between blackness and whiteness, as well as a deep identification with black music. To some people, the raps and jams on "It's That Easy" will sound like minstrelsy. But what it is really is the sound of memories from that short-lived period of '70s urban integration, which makes G-Love a lot more like Tower of Power than like Vanilla Ice. G-Love probably won't find many people who would agree that racial harmony is "that easy," but his hot-buttered jams sure make it sound easier than it seems.

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