Day 96: McFadden & Whitehead - McFadden & Whitehead
Today, I had about two hours of dead time during my workday. I thought instead of sitting around doing nothing, I’ll just go and clean my kitchen instead – a boring task usually, but it’s a little bit less tedious to scrub when you know you’re doing it on company time. It’s also less tedious with the right tunes, and today that was McFadden & Whitehead by McFadden & Whitehead.
Album cover courtesy of Philadelphia International Records
Gene McFadden and John Whitehead met when they were in school, and they both became a part of a soul group called the Epsilons, who toured a little bit with Otis Redding until his untimely death in 1967. The group got a recording contract in 1970 after they had moderate success with the song “The Echo”, but the group ended up going their separate ways. McFadden & Whitehead went on to work for a studio as songwriters and producers before officially becoming a recording R&B duo in 1977.
McFadden & Whitehead is the pair’s debut studio album. It was released in 1979, and it charted at number 5 in the Billboard 200, largely propelled by the success of the single “Ain't No Stoppin' Us Now” which became an immediate hit and spent a week on top of the R&B singles chart.
The record opens with the jubilant “Ain't No Stoppin' Us Now”, which McFadden & Whitehead wrote to signify getting out of their contract writing songs for other people and getting to be performers themselves. Since there’s not much out there about these guys, you’d think that their big hit would be a bit of an anomaly and the rest of their work would be pretty average, but it’s not – the record stays consistently good from beginning to end.
Even though all the songs aren’t particularly happy, there’s just such a joyfulness to the whole record itself that you can’t help but to move around when listening to it. It’s a top-tier album for pottering around the house. It’s probably honestly impossible to stay still during songs like “Mr Music” and “I Got the Love”. I find myself wanting to listen to their other two releases, just in case they’re as good as this one.
McFadden & Whitehead is one of those albums to listen to when you just want to have a nice day. There’s albums for certain moods and situations, there’s albums that are High Art, and then there’s the ones that you whack on when you just want to hear something nice to keep you going when you’re doing chores or going from point A to B. This is definitely in the latter category. It’s going into my repertoire of albums that make you just that little bit happier to be alive.
This is such a fun record. Why weren’t these guys bigger? I could swear that they had everything to hit it big, and yet it seems like they just had that one big hit. McFadden & Whitehead is an 8.5/10, it’s one of those where I’ll buy the vinyl if I see it. I want this record playing in my house.