The pioneering Northern Soul artist, Nolan Porter, is remembered by his peers
DJ and photographer Brian Cross, aka B+, during the 1990s in Los Angeles, was a crate digging vinyl collector of jazz and soul records that resulted in classic hip hop tracks — a status they’ve kept to this day. Think Ice Cube’s It Was A Good Day, which sampled The Isley Brothers’ Footsteps in the Dark or Will Smith’s Summertime which sampled Kool & The Gang’s 1974 classic Summer Madness.
These crate digging, vinyl devotees became hip hop’s griots, the keepers of musical knowledge when it came to soul, funk and R&B music — the music that sustained and inspired hip hop.
Cross, who hails from Limerick, Ireland, in a recent interview said buying these records was his casual way of participating in hip hop history. He continued to describe his encounter with Nolan Porter’s music.
“I remember seeing the Nolan record a few times and picking it up and being enamored by it,” Cross said. “It’s really an unusual thing that he was doing. I knew the records primarily because of the label they were on — Lizard. What Nolan was doing was really quite unique, in the sense that he was really a soul singer leaning into rock.”
Vocally, Porter’s voice was as smooth as Smokey Robinson’s but much throatier on tracks like What Would You Do If I Did That to You and Travelin’ Song.
Porter died at his Van Nuys home on Feb. 4, 2021. He was 71. What follows is a story of a seemingly obscure American artist and beloved northern soul star who traversed land and ocean to find fame and triumphed in sharing the power of music.
“This was during the era of Sly and the Family Stone and he [also] had a folk thing going on,” Cross said. “Nolan had a larger community around him. I know one of his records was done entirely with Frank Zappa’s band [The Mothers] which was an interracial band. Both George Duke and Ernie Watts played with Zappa, which [at the time] was unusual. Frank Zappa fostered a unique and original way of thinking about music and Nolan was part of that larger community.”
When Frank Zappa was asked to take over R&B band the Soul Giants, after two band members had a fight, Zappa insisted that they perform his original material. And on Mother’s Day in 1965, the group changed its name to the Mothers [later to become The Mothers Of Invention]. The band’s first lineup, popular in California’s underground scene, included Roy Estrada and Jimmy Carl Black. Estrada and Black, along with later member and future Little Feat guitarist Lowell George, eventually went on to meet and record with northern soul singer Nolan, who also later married Zappa’s sister, Patrice Zappa-Porter.
Community Grows
In the mid-1990s Cross moved to Silver Lake, where he lived next door to and became good friends with Lee Boek. The writer/actor was and continues to this day to be an integral part of Public Works Improvisational Theater as its artistic director. The Los Angeles-based theater is one of the great improv schools in the country that fed the casts and writers’ rooms of ’70s era shows like Saturday Night Live as well as late-night talk programs, films, podcasts, web series and sketch shows of today.
Nolan and Lee became long-time fellow collaborators who worked together in theater and music periodically across 30 years. Their last show together was Lee’s play Confessions of A Pulpiteer in 2019. Lee said Nolan recorded with the best even on his own albums. The two artists started doing shows together about 1982 at The Grassy Knoll on Sunset, an underground “cabaret in the hood.”
After Nolan died, Lee said that his friend’s life story and excellent spirit needed to be told. He said Nolan deserved the credit for his music. He wrote it but never got all of his royalties, only some. Unsure on the complete details he explained Nolan’s music had someone else’s name on it. He said from early on much of his music was credited to someone else.
Nolan’s first release, titled Nolan, contained a cover of Van Morrison’s Crazy Love, which became a minor hit. His second album Nolan, No Apologies was recorded under Gabriel Meckler’s Lizard label. Meckler helmed albums for Steppenwolf, Three Dog Night and Janis Joplin. Apparently Nolan recorded under several names; including Nolan, N.F. Porter or Frederick II. This was the cause of confusion with the original vinyl releases of Nolan’s music on the Lizard, Vulture and ABC labels.
Fast forward to 2021, in terms of Nolan’s larger community, Cross pointed to famed English DJ Giles Peterson, for teaching him a very important fact about Nolan. Cross heard Peterson pay an homage to Nolan on his BBC radio show the week that he died. It was then Cross realized Nolan’s music crossed the Atlantic and created a resurgent northern soul scene there.
“What I did know was that Nolan’s records were distributed and were very popular in Brazil,” he said.
He’s another figure like [Sixto] Rodriguez, [of 2013 Oscar winning film Searching For Sugar Man] whose music was only celebrated in South Africa,” Cross said.
Rodriguez’s two early 1970s albums went nowhere in America, but found a huge audience in Apartheid-era South Africa. Similar to Nolan, Rodriguez had no idea he was a legend there until a group of fans found him on the Internet and brought him to the country for a series of successful concerts.
“Nolan is someone with a unique sound [who] was celebrated in [various] pockets but for whatever reason, he always struck me in the way that Bill Withers had quite a difficult relationship to fame,” Cross said. “He was somebody that was not cut out for the record industry but that had nothing to do with his artistry. This was somebody that was extraordinary.”
Cross noted Nolan has many fans in Britain, where he travelled to after he discovered a tribute band was playing his music.
“It’s just a beautiful story about the power of music,” Cross said. “The way music can somehow, beyond marketing, beyond hype, beyond everything, somebody making a rudimentary expression, travel on its own legs and find its way into places that you would never expect.
“That’s the story of music. It was wonderful that [it happened to] somebody out of our community.”
What Is Northern Soul?
Cross described northern soul as a genre defined by what works on certain dance floors in the North of England. The area is home to many casinos which would close during winter. So the kids rented them for what they called “Weekenders.”
“Friday and Saturday nights were locked out, and for 24 hours they played music really loud and danced,” he said. “Northern soul is music that worked in that environment, amongst working class interracial kids who were part of a dance scene that was particularly influential in the late ’60s to mid ’80s.”
Cross noted how strange it was that 45s [records] that were overlooked in the U.S. otherwise became huge, expensive records — because of the northern soul scene.
“By virtue of the fact that those songs became hits [on] their own, even if they never sold records, they were classics,” Cross said. “Those legendary songs had a really strong impact on popular music produced in Britain at that time.”
White working class youth, some even traveling hundreds of miles, danced to obscure Black American soul records until dawn. This scene became a way of life with its own unique fashions and dance styles — indeed a radical alternative to British mainstream culture. Its genesis came from the south of London, SoHo and West End with the British mods who found something new and different in jazz, bluebeat and R&B. They were also enamored with the heavy beats and fast tempos coming out of Detroit and Chicago and the new sounds of Motown.
For example, Cross pointed to the song Tainted Love, by Gloria Jones. It wasn’t a hit. But then the group Soft Cell did a cover of it.
“Massive song,” he said. “And in the case of Nolan, one of his songs, If I Could Only Be Sure, was adapted by Joy Division, [1978] which in that period of a post punk moment, are probably the most influential British group.”
Joy Division used the guitar riff from Nolan’s best known track for their song Interzone on their debut album Unknown Pleasures. Cross posited it’s fair to say that song would have been heard in the northern soul scene and then adapted by these kids who were astute enough to hear something in Nolan’s music. And they were able to adapt a new song, which then became an important song in their genre.
“This … is a very common story,” he said “But for me it’s a measure of the kind of importance that certain musicians have that goes further than the kind of accolades or fame or wealth that potentially we often use as the measure of who is important in terms of our music culture. It’s really about impact, and clearly this is somebody who had a much bigger impact than he had fame or wealth. That’s what’s beautiful and interesting about music.”
Details: Brian Cross, www.mochilla.com/bplus