Heavy Beats in the Woodland of Weir

Little Boy Blues "Seed of Love"
From In The Woodland of Weir [Fontana, 1968]

The days of producers pulling old funk and jazz records for sample material are over; for the most part anyways. Sure they'll continue to loop and chop the fuck out of "Apache" or "Nautilus," but let's face it, that gets boring fast.

Enter the wonderful world of psych rock, a resource that many producers are finding relatively untapped, proving that there is definite heat a lurking under the wailing vocals and fuzzy guitars of the genre. Motown67 from Soulstrut played this for me a few weeks ago, a track called "Seed of Love" by Little Boy Blues which was sampled by Just Blaze for Jay-Z's The Black Album. The piano riff on this one is just nasty, while the keys, horns, drums, guitars, and vocals all fall nicely into place. This is the type of record every producer wishes they found first, and that everyone is after once somebody does.

Keep your eyes open for this one cause the album as a whole is rock solid.

Since posting this it was brought to my attention that another track on this album, "Dream Weaver," was sampled by Diamond D on Xzibit's "Bird's Eye View" way back in 1996. No surprise that Diamond of all people was up on this first, but I'm surprised he didn't hear any potential on "Seed of Love." Oh well, it just goes to show that it was in a producer's hands long ago, but it took eight years for it to hit the mainstream.