Consumer Guide Album

Spinners: A One of a Kind Love Affair [Atlantic, 1992]
Through high-res doowop and mutant Motown, Bobbie Smith, Henry Fambrough, and Pervis Jackson have been at it since 1961. But they achieved greatness by providing late arrivals Thom Bell and Philippé Wynne a battlefield. Producer Bell was cool, calm, commercial, and classically trained; lead-singer-by-acclamation Wynne was a free radical, a soul man more out of it than Al Green. Midway between his departure in 1977 and his death in 1983, I saw Wynne do a P-Funk cameo that remains one of the most electrifying live performances I've ever witnessed. But neither his solo nor his group recordings do more than suggest this high-voltage charge. Instead, Bell--who used to give him the go-ahead to sing what he wanted and then not run the tape--works him for a creamy tension that sounds richer two decades later than it did when the Stylistics and Blue Magic were there to distract us. And Smith, Fambrough, and Jackson are what Wynne tenses against for two hour-plus discs. A