Minnie Riperton “Perfect Angel”

Besides being one of the classic album covers of the Seventies (Minnie Riperton holding a melting ice-cream cone like it’s a… microphone. Or, an ice cream cone). It’s an image that makes me feel the melting ice cream running over my fingers—I’d say that anyone who’s eaten an ice cream cone has had that experience. Despite her warm weather ware (bib overalls with no shirt) the image doesn’t have to be sexual, okay? I mean, if someone gave me the choice between sex and ice cream—well… I don’t know. That has never happened. This is a great sounding record—it sounds like 1974 to me. I mean that in the best way. Probably no more charged year in my life (I was 14, a crazy year for anyone, but also… I won’t go into personal details. Both sadness and that transition between child and adult). Great songs on this record, and they’re all very different. There’s even a little bit of country, there’s ballads, rock, funk, soul, pop. They’re all by Minnie Riperton and Richard Rudolph—except for two, which are by Stevie Wonder. Among my favorites are “The Edge of a Dream,” “Every Time He Comes Around,” and “It’s So Nice (To See Old Friends).”

I guess Minnie Riperton is famous for being able to hit those otherworldly high notes—which is impressive—but there’s some other quality to her voice that I particularly like—it’s too easy to say “soulful,” which it is—maybe there is something weirdly familiar about it. I don’t know why I think that… I only have a few of her records. I don’t know. The playing on this record is particularly good, throughout, too. Who’s that bass player? Reggie McBride, on every song. A young guy, from Detroit—he’s played on a million records. Also, a lot of piano and some other instruments credited to the mysterious (*). (That’s an asterisk inside of parentheses.) Which you, of course, follow down the bottom to learn is: “El Toro Negro.” Good luck figuring out who that is, in 1974, but the internet of today tells me it is Stevie Wonder—performing under this alias because of a conflicting label affiliation (something like, he was with Motown, and this is CBS?—but don’t quote me). The most well-known song is “Lovin’ You”—that’s the one with the bird sounds—credits say: Mocking Bird—credited to God. And I’ll take that mocking bird over harmonica any day. The title song is one of the Stevie Wonder compositions, which is nice and breezy, cool and jazzy—and his other song, “Take a Little Trip,” is my favorite here—it’s the weirdest—very odd, kind of off-kilter, also a bit jazzy, and very quite cosmic.

10.27.23