Over the decades, Scottish musicians have made many classic, cult or under-appreciated albums that have stood the test of time. Today, we look back at AWB, by the Average White Band

WHEN the legendary record producer, Jerry Wexler, died at the age of 91 in August 2008, his son Paul promised that the words ‘He changed the world’ would be engraved on his headstone. “I don’t think I’m overreaching,” Paul said, with more than a little justification.

Wexler, after all, had not only coined the term ‘Rhythm and Blues’ while working as a music journalist but had gone on to become a key figure in the hugely influential record label, Atlantic. He produced landmark sessions for such greats as Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles and also produced the classic Dusty Springfield album, Dusty in Memphis. Acting on a tip from her, he signed Led Zeppelin to Atlantic. No wonder that one obituary said he left a discreet but indelible mark on the popular culture of the second half of the 20th century.

One day, at a friend’s house party in Laurel Canyon, attended by Donovan, Graham Nash and many others, Wexler came across the Average White Band for the first time. “I walked in and couldn't believe what I was seeing and hearing”, he recalled in his memoir, Rhythm and the Blues. “This band of Caledonians was so tweedy and Scottish I expected to flush a covey of grouse. Their funk hit me where I lived, their tape was great, and I wanted to sign them on the spot”. Moving with his customary speed and decisiveness, he bought them out of their contract with a rival label.

MCA Records had released the band’s debut album, Show Your Hand, in 1973, but disliked the follow-up project. Now, under Wexler and Atlantic, the second album was re-recorded and released as The White Album, otherwise known as AWB. It soared to number one on the Billboard Pop and R&B album charts (it peaked at number six in the UK), while its superb single, Pick Up the Pieces, was a worldwide hit, topping the US Billboard chart and receiving a Grammy nomination for Best R&B Instrumental Performance. And the band's sound was such that they appealed to black audiences as much as it did to whites.

This first-rate soul and funk band, which drew upon influences as diverse as Herbie Hancock, Marvin Gate and Wayne Shorter to create such a distinctive R&B approach, had had its beginnings in Dundee in the mid-Sixties.

Alan Gorrie, formerly of The Vikings, a Perth-based outfit, had co-founded the Blue Workshop, a jazz, blues and soul club. Among those who were drawn to it were the horn players Molly (Malcolm) Duncan and Roger Ball, Gorrie's friends from Duncan of Jordanstone School of Art and Design. A precociously talented 15-year-drummer, Robbie McIntosh, scorched through a couple of times. In Glasgow, meanwhile, Onnie McIntyre and Hamish Stuart were among the musicians who visited the Picasso Club in Buchanan Street, where the DJs played the latest Atlantic and Motown records.

Read more on AWB

Gorrie and McIntyre worked together, in London, in a band called the Scots of St James (Stuart was briefly a member, too). By 1970 the various musicians who would make up AWB were all working in there capital, in different groups. They came together as the unofficial ‘house band’ at the highly-regarded label, Island, where they worked on such singles as Johnny Nash’s Top Five 1972 hit, I Can See Clearly Now.

In 1971 Gorrie, Duncan, Ball, McIntyre and McIntosh were so encouraged by the fruits of a recording session of their own that they formed a band, taking the name from a catchphrase favoured by a diplomat friend. In 1972, the same year in which Stuart joined as second vocalist, McIntyre and McIntosh recorded with Chuck Berry on what turned out to be his only British number one, the novelty hit, My Ding-a-Ling.

In January 1973 the Average Whites won acclaim as the opening act in Eric Clapton’s comeback concert at London’s Rainbow, in which he performed with such names as Pete Townshend and Ronnie Wood. MCA snapped up the band three weeks later. Work began on the debut album as the band honed their live sound.

“The Average White Band work in a very narrow well-defined area of music, but within that context they excel”, Martin Hayman wrote in Sounds in March that year, reviewing a gig at London’s Marquee. “Their music is tough and funky all the way and uses many of the tricks of James Brown's Famous Flames — the insistent bumping bass, the spiky guitar fills, the cliff-hanging drum breaks, the dramatic saxophone sortie".

When Show Your Hand (most of which was done live) came out that summer, Chris Welch, in Melody Maker, observed: “… now, for the first time in years, a band of hip Scotsmen have clanned together in pursuit of the laid-back rhythm section, the tasteful soul vocal, and turbulent brass sound. The Average White Band have got into a groove long believed lost to man and beast, and they are doing it so much better than was 'ere tried before”.

Read more On The Record

Though the album was well received in the UK and the States, it wasn't a mainstream hit. After Jerry Wexler’s intervention, however, things began looking up. The band assembled at a Miami studio, where they were awed by the presence of Aretha Franklin and worked with the noted producer, Arif Mardin. Two tracks were re-recorded there, and the others were redone in New York, with engineer Gene Paul performing wonders. "When we heard Arif and Gene's mix, it was wow!", Hamish Stuart told Mojo magazine a few weeks ago. "It was like moving a rocket".

From its opening track, You Got It, to the closer, There’s Always Someone Waiting, via Pick Up the Pieces and (the Isley Brothers-written) Work To Do, the White Album was a soulful, funky and infectiously joyous classic. The voices of Gorrie and Stuart, the driving rhythm guitar-work of McIntyre, the saxophones of Ball and Duncan, the expert drumming of McIntosh: when produced as immaculately as it was here, it was an accomplished, unbeatable combination.

Bud Scoppa, writing in Rolling Stone in October 1974, summed it up: “If it wasn’t apparent from its first album (on MCA), it is from the second: Scotland’s Average White Band is one of the best self-contained soul units in existence. Every track on Average White Band pulsates with a tightly reined energy, and several weave a low-keyed poignancy through the thick, churning rhythms. From every conceivable angle – original material, vocal/instrumental arrangements and performances, production and the establishment of a clear-cut identity – the AWB impresses here in an assured, forceful way”.

The tracks, Scoppa concluded, "are sequenced in such a way that the first half of the album emphasizes rhythmic energy while side two is dominated by a bitter-sweet romantic intensity. The second side, in fact, plays through like a soul suite, with Gorrie’s 'Keepin’ It to Myself' (distinguished by Molly Duncan’s wistful, Jr. Walker-style sax) and Stuart’s 'I Just Can’t Give You Up' particularly affecting. The LP’s single non-original, a faithful rendering of the Isleys’ 'Work To Do', shows off the group’s power, timing and finesse as well as anything they’ve recorded".

The band celebrated the completion of the new album. Bob Harris, at the time the host of TV's Old Grey Whistle Test, remembers coming across Stuart and McIntosh in the well-known LA hang-out, a disco named Rainbow Room. Frankie Miller had a table there, and Phil Lynott, of Thin Lizzy, was holding court.

AWB’s ascent, fully deserved, was capped by a week-long, sold-out residency that September at the Troubadour, the famed venue and musicians' hang-out on Santa Monica Boulevard, in West Hollywood. It had opened in 1957 and everyone had played there: Elton John, Neil Young, Led Zeppelin, James Taylor, Tom Waits, Bruce Springsteen, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison. It was also where Glenn Frey first met Don Henley.

Read more On the Record

Elton himself was in the AWB audience one night at the Troubadour. "They were so fantastic that I got onstage and jammed with them, dragging Cher and Martha Reeves up with me", he writes in his autobiography, Me. "After the gig, I took the band out to a place called Le Restaurant, which served great food and didn't frown on outré behaviour... There was something lovely about spending time with them, a young British band just on the verge of becoming huge, playing a residency at the Troubadour and boggling at the prospect of making it in America; they reminded me of me five years before".

"We were the hot ticket", Hamish Stuart told Mojo magazine. "Cher, Martha Reeves, Jack Nicholson and Glenn Frey were there and every night we got better. And then that last night, it was immediate crash and burn".

What happened was that the band's drummer, Robbie McIntosh, took an accidental heroin overdose at a party after the final night. He was just 24 years old; his colleagues and family were devastated by the loss.

In a January 2022 interview with the Dundee Courier, Hamish said: “Everybody loved Robbie. I know that he loved to play the ‘good time Charlie’ and stated at least once that he didn’t think he would make it past 30, but we thought that he would be there forever. His death was a tragedy and it was something that was hard for all of us in the band and all his other friends to come to terms with.

“The last week we played together, we were on top of the world", he added. “The album and the show reviews were great and we were being treated as the ‘Toast of Tinseltown’ with a sold-out, star-studded audience every night.

“We were all peaking on the playing front with Robbie leading the charge. He played out of his skin that week and had so much still to say, but at least with the success of that first Atlantic album, he was noticed throughout the musical community and is well remembered amongst his fellow drummers. He is one of the truly great musicians that Scotland has ever produced.”

The White Album/AWB had been released the month before McIntosh's death; the single, Pick Up the Pieces, topped the US charts in February 1975. 

"Atlantic were good to us", Onnie McIntyre told Mojo. "They sent a representative to take care of  us and they got us straight back out on the road and then back in the studio".

Robbie McIntosh was replaced by a friend of his, Steve Ferrone. Ferrone occupied the drum stool for subsequent AWB albums: Cut the Cake (1975), which went to number one in America; Soul Searching (1976), which went to number two; Benny & Us (1977), which they made with the great Ben E. King; Warmer Communications (1978); and Feel No Fret (1979) with its hit singles Walk on By and Atlantic Avenue, which re-energised the band. It was their last album for Atlantic. Their next album, Shine (1980) contained the brilliant single, the Gorrie-penned Let's Go Round Again.

By then, however, the band was losing its way. They broke up in 1983 and did their own projects; Hamish Stuart went on to work with such people as Paul McCartney. AWB reformed in 1989 and recorded the first of a series of albums.

In 2021 Gorrie released a four-song EP entitled The Blue Workshop, the venue that plays such a key part in the AWB story. Earlier this year AWB, with McIntyre and Gorrie joined by Cliff Lyons, Rob Aries, Brent Carter, Rocky Bryant and Fred Vigdor, embarked on a farewell tour. Venues included the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, Edinburgh's Usher Hall and London's Royal Albert Hall. Currently, AWB is on its last-ever US tour. 

The band's Facebook account quotes a Scottish reviewer as saying “we will not see their like again”. This, the account adds, is a "very poignant but apt tribute to what the group has meant to millions of people worldwide". A few months ago it was reported that a documentary is being made about the group.

averagewhiteband.com

Next week: The Cutter and the Clan, by Runrig