Check out some of their finest covers below! Love the One You’re With (Stephen Stills cover)Īh yes, “there’s a rose in a fisted glove.” Love it or hate it, Stephen Stills’ 1970 #1, the eternal, evergreen, interminably infectious, free-lovin’ hippie anthem “Love the One You’re With” is here to stay. As grand and sweeping as it may sound, you would be hard pressed to find any band that has ever married Rock to Soul as fluently and convincingly the Isleys have throughout their career. Over their next few LP’s, the Isleys served up even more ridiculously fine cover versions. Even without every song being overtly political, the album at its core was a powerful statement, with the Isleys acting as musical envoys, connecting and acknowledging all sides of the counterculture (with the added bonus of sounding incredible).
The band waded tentatively into the world of politically charged pop on 1971’s Givin’ It Back, an album of then contemporary covers of hits by James Taylor, Bob Dylan, and Neil Young, amongst others. While the latter’s incendiary “Ohio” is the album’s most definitively political song, it’s the big picture here that is most noteworthy: five of the album’s seven tracks were originally performed by white artists. And just like that, the Isleys’ days of recording songs like “Vacuum Cleaner” (“My love is like a vacuum cleaner, it keeps pulling’ me in”) were well and truly done.
Now artists began chiming in and using their respective platforms as a means of bringing attention to the myriad of social injustices, attempting to both rouse and inspire. And the power structure meant to hold everything together showed itself to be fatally out of step, foregoing the concepts of equality and empathy in favor of maintaining the status quo at all costs. The Vietnam War, the still-recent assassinations of MLK and Robert Kennedy, the Kent State massacre, the growing idealogical divide between old and young – all contributed to a justifiable and overarching frustration throughout the country. It is there you will meet O’Kelly, Rudolph, Ronald, Ernie, Marvin and Chris Jasper, the real Isley Brothers.Īs the ’60s rolled into ’70s, the health and future of the world felt desperately unsettled. There were 6 in total over that time, beginning with Givin’ It Back and running on through to 1976’s Harvest For The World. This is just a roundabout way of saying if you want to know what the Isleys are really about sonically and philosophically, it’s best to avoid the greatest hits playlists and head straight for the string of positively seminal studio albums the band released from 1971-1976. A classic old school, turn the amp up to 11, self-contained, smokin’, genre-defying band. Make no mistake (and with all due respect to their former Motown label mates, The Temptations and The Four Tops), The Isley Brothers were a proper band. & 2” remain their highest ranking tracks in terms of Spotify plays, they are hardly reflective of the true, signature Isley sound, a perfect melding of topical Rock & Soul that remains unmatched to this day. Which is to say, while their ’60s hits “This Old Heart of Mine (Is Weak For You) and “Shout Pts. But in the case of the Isleys, this cut-and-dried categorization is exceptionally misleading. And because their most popular songs are of the soul shouter-disco/funk-quiet storm variety, they have been conveniently stuffed into the singular genre of Soul/R&B. We all know how this works: basically, whatever genre your biggest hits fall into will then by default define who you are to the world forevermore.
While The Isley Brothers are commonly filed under Soul or R&B, that categorization only partially reflects what they have delivered soundwise since the release of their first album way back in 1959.
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