'I need to spread love with the gifts God gave me': funk master Steve Arrington returns
Yellow Springs, Ohio, is buzzing, despite it being a weekday afternoon in a pandemic. When Steve Arrington and I meet at a cafe on the town’s main strip, we instinctively reach out our hands to shake. And then, midway, we remember. As we switch to the now-common elbow bump, he sighs. “We do what we can to get by, I guess.”
Arrington, 64, is no stranger to adaptation. His career as one of the greatest funk stars in the US began on the underground scene in nearby Dayton just as it began to take off in the mid-1970s. Arrington’s older brother was in bands, and some of the best funk drummers of the era would come to the family home and play while a young Steve sat on the steps. They would give him permission to play on their kits when they weren’t using them, and this is how Arrington drummed his way into bands throughout the area, most notably joining Slave in 1978 as a drummer before sliding in as a backup vocalist and eventually taking over as lead singer.
He became a local legend in an overlooked city full of them. When we, two Ohioans, get to talking about Dayton being disregarded, Arrington leaps to life, going on a long, glorious run of language that ends with “… and there was a point where the best band in the world was from right here in Dayton! You know what I’m talking about!” He doesn’t even have to name the Ohio Players for me to slowly nod in affirmation.
What made Dayton unique during funk’s most flourishing era was that its sound was hard to pin down. The bands influenced each other, but their sounds were each distinct – by the time Arrington took the lead singer spot with Slave, the band was leaning more into swelling soul songs with deep bass grooves. He left in 1982, embarking on a career as Steve Arrington’s Hall of Fame and as a solo act – he reached the Top 5 in the UK with Feel So Real in 1985, and appeared on Top of the Pops in a purple toga, kicking off his sandals to dance barefoot. This career chapter produced songs which made for enticing samples, including Weak at the Knees, sampled by rap groups NWA and Three Times Dope.
Speaking of adjustments: before the pandemic, Arrington was in California, working with a new generation of funk musicians he has inspired, namely LA’s Thundercat, Flying Lotus and Steve Lacy. They had performed on Jimmy Kimmel’s US talk show in March, and were planning to tour together overseas. “Man, we came back from the Jimmy Kimmel show and two days later, bam, hear about the coronavirus hitting hard in California and all of that.” Arrington pauses for a moment to shake his head and glance around at the patio, swelling with more people. “Then it just … well … Now it’s today.”
Arrington’s new album, Down to the Lowest Terms: The Soul Sessions, is out this week, his first solo output in more than a decade, and packed with a lineup of producers – including Knxwledge, J Rocc, Shibo and Jerry Paper – assembled by Peanut Butter Wolf, the founder of LA label Stones Throw. When I ask him about the journey to a new solo record, Arrington shrugs. “I had to find myself, on the long road in between Dayton and the South Side of Chicago,” he tells me.
Arrington is a self-professed disciple of late bluesman Muddy Waters, and gathered a blues band in Chicago in 2009. When he wasn’t touring, he made the road trip from Dayton to Chicago and back every week. “I had been in gospel. I needed that blues, and I needed that oo-wee blues,” he says. “I had to go where Muddy took that little amp, and said, ‘I’m about to rewrite this whole thing.’”
The word that Arrington continually uses when talking about this nine-year stretch is “absorption”. He and his band didn’t play clubs, even though they could have, and didn’t record anything new. They just rehearsed old blues songs. Arrington walked the same streets Muddy walked, touched his hands to the same brick buildings. This, Arrington insists, is what he came to Chicago to get: making the dry, flat, six-hour drive every week to get closer and closer to a new version of himself, cast in the blues.
Before this pilgrimage, though, Arrington went on a search for God. In the 80s, he became a licensed minister, and in 1990, he stepped away from music altogether, resulting in a two-decade gap in his career. When I ask about his time away, he shrugs. “I come from a family of preachers and that’s always been a part of my life,” he begins. “My
connection with the creator is important to me – but I am also very much influenced by the great John Coltrane, the great Carlos Santana, who taught me about the ways that the music and the spirit can come together. I go with my heart, always. In the 80s, my spirituality was coming front and centre, so I had to follow it. Then, after nearly 25 years, something hit me. I needed to get back into music and spread love with the gifts God gave me.”
When Peanut Butter Wolf got in touch about making a new record, Arrington said: “Yeah, but I don’t want to make a straight song record. I want to do this thing where all these different vibes that’s been going on with me through the years, culminates into this whole new thing –” He pauses, and takes a deep breath before putting his hands over his chest. “It’s only a soul record because all of the different chambers I’ve been able to get into in here. They’re all alive now. I can deliver myself the way I’ve always wanted to.”
This is palpable on Down to the Lowest Terms. Soulful, despite its title, is a swaggering, boastful funk track; Keep Dreamin’ is an airy, tender R&B ballad that feels as if it could be from the 90s. On the mechanic and experimental You’re Not Ready, Arrington’s voice achieves an almost robotic whisper, a series of affirmations hummed in the background over bursts of lyric; in the chorus, the sounds flourish and collapse in on each other until something like harmony is achieved. The album is richly cohesive, despite no two tracks sounding alike, or even like they were born from the same ideas. You can hear those chambers Arrington mentions turning with the movements of each song.
An immediate takeaway is, plainly, how good Arrington’s voice sounds through all he’s demanding of it. “The connecting factor of it is my voice,” he says, leaning into a confident smile. “In the way that Miles Davis did all these different things, but the connecting factor was the tone and the sound of his horn brought the pieces together – that’s the way I see it with my voice.” He is a technician in this way, explaining how being in Chicago allowed him to go into his deeper registers – “like body punching, like a Curtis Mayfield vibe, Chicago gave me that” – and then going into the pleasures of floating above ballads that he didn’t know he could ascend to. “I’m also absorbing a lot of hip-hop flows in terms of sitting back on the beat, sitting front, and moving in and out of pocket,” he says, weaving back and forth in his chair with excitement. “Things like that, that I’ve absorbed – I hear them showing up. But the essence of it is that Chicago vibe,” described as having “just a little sludge in it”.
In conversational moments like this, you see how suffused with music Arrington is. He clearly works with younger artists with admiration and excitement instead of ego, and is still such an eager listener – he can’t wait to tell me about the rabbit hole of Chicago drill rap he went down, or how he hears the 80s in Kendrick Lamar’s delivery. (“It’s heavy – aggressive, like the guys I remember from the old days.”) He’s a student of not just himself, but of an entire musical ecosystem. There’s a magic in these artists, who remain excited about being in the room, and it’s why Down to the Lowest Terms sounds so fun.
“A thing with me is that Ihaveto make music,” Arrington tells me. “Not everyone has to. But I do. If you have something you have to say, you’re going to have to figure out the vehicle and the way to say it that people can hear you, no matter how young or old you are. If I understand what makes me tick, if I understand these chambers, I understand what puts me in my best place to win.” With any luck, those chambers will remain unlocked.
• Down to the Lowest Terms: The Soul Sessions is out now on Stone’s Throw. Steve Arrington plays the Jazz Cafe, London, on 22 October 2021.
The way Miles Davis did all these different things but the sound of his horn brought the pieces together – that’s how I see it with my voice