Unlimited Love: Barry White 80

Barry White - Just the Way You Are

Let's rejoinder the Johnny Too Bad post yesterday with one that's just as big on a message of love as John Martyn's music is, but in a completely different, if equally as sensual, way.

Today's musical behemoth had quite a journey from the gang streets of 1950s LA to the artist to whose music the most children have been conceived.

I can tell you this: when I was a kid in the 1970s, the music of Barry White was literally everywhere.

Something about that basso profundo voice coming out of this classy looking, giant dude lit up the dance floor, the charts and the boudoir like almost no other guy you could name.

A guy whose tunes concerned a single subject -- perhaps the single subject -- of l-o-v-e.

They say about the greatest singers and songwriters that they experience the massive success they do because their songs sound like they are being sung directly to you, the listener.

This applies to the full emotional spectrum of subject matter, and includes the brooding, isolated melancholy of a Nick Drake, all the way to the passionately intoned Words Of Love and Intimacy someone like Barry White is famous for.

Anyway say and think what you want, but there'll never be another singer who'll cause people to just spontaneously rip off their clothes and reproduce themselves into a gooey stupor like this man did.

Of course ROIOs of his performances are rarer than that necklace of hen's teeth you wore to the disco in 1977, but I excavated this satellite broadcast -- I think bits of this show were issued on a VHS tape back in the mists of time -- of this 1990 Belgium show to celebrate his big 8-0.

Barry White

Flanders Expo 

Ghent, Belgium 

10.6.1990

01 Never Never Gonna Give Ya Up

02 What Am I Gonna Do with You?

03 Playing Your Game, Baby

04 You See the Trouble with Me

05 You're the First, the Last, You're My Everything

06 I Wanna Do It Good to Ya

07 Just the Way You Are

08 Can’t Get Enough of Your Love, Babe

09 Let the Music Play

Total time: 49:41

Barry White - vocals

with The Love Unlimited Orchestra, musical director John Roberts

players unidentified

192/48k audio extracted from an unofficially issued DVD of a 1990s European satellite TV rebroadcast

spectral analysis goes way past 20k, making this equivalent to a preFM source

converted to 16/44, edited & remastered by EN, September 2024
362 MB FLAC/direct link

For whatever reason, when I extracted this one I found that even though it said 192/48, the spectral analysis had it past the range of human hearing anyway, so call this a preFM if you wanna.

I'll be back in 10 days to continue the September remembrances, but I thought you could use a liberal dosage of unlimited love, courtesy of today's woulda-been octogenarian Love Master! You know you're iconic to the power of legendary when you get your own Simpsons shoutout.--J.

9.12.1944 - 7.4.2003