ALBUMS: ‘War & Peace’
MVC Ratings 3.5/$$$
War! Good God, y’all! What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing!
That slam-bam line by Edwin Star on his War & Peace album is probably known by more people than the opening of the Beatles ‘Hey Jude.’
It’s been on movie soundtracks, commercials and radio shows and samples. The song was the US No. 1 hit for three weeks on Billboard in 1970. Bruce Springsteen covered the song and it became a concert staple for Bruce for many years. Motown originally gave the song to the Temptations but thought it needed a grittier treatment for success. Starr was there to oblige.
Well, I wanted to know what else this singer did so I bought the album sometime in the mid-1970s with the Vietnam war still fresh on everybody’s mind.
What I found were some tuneful soul songs sung by a man in the shadows of James Brown, Wilson Pickett, Joe Tex, and Otis Redding.
‘War,’ though, changed everything by becoming a worldwide hit.
Other standouts on the album: ‘All Around the World,’ ‘I Just Wanted to Cry’ and ‘She Should Have Been Home.’ There’s also a surprisingly straightforward version of ‘Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head.’
Some of Starr’s earlier work is considered part of the ‘Northern soul’ subgenre and is quite collectible. The Northern soul songs were especially popular in England and Germany. Starr moved to England in 1971 and died there at 61 in 2003.
25 Miles was a minor hit for Starr before War.