Music

The early '70s were a golden age for the Bay Area music scene. Artists like Sly & the Family Stone, the Grateful Dead, Santana, and Joy of Cooking enjoyed tremendous critical and/or commercial success by blending disparate musical styles in new ways. Meanwhile, the area's vibrant club and recording scenes overflowed with countless bands that went largely unnoticed.

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• Berkeley
• Santana (Band)
• Sheila E.
• Ray Obiedo
• Lonnie Hewitt

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The Welcome to the Newsroom compilation, released by Berkeley's 7 Bridges label, taps this latter wellspring, collecting 13 unreleased soul and funk tracks recorded locally between 1970 and 1976. There are a few name players on the album -- a pre-Prince Sheila E. on percussion, a pre-smooth jazz Ray Obiedo on guitar, Cal Tjader sideman Lonnie Hewitt on keys, and '60s soul man Freddie Hughes on several vocals -- but the main attraction is the music itself, a uniquely bay-ish amalgam of soul, rock, jazz, and blues.

Electric Church, a horn-driven band that sounds like it could have put a scare into Tower of Power, offers four songs, while a group called Plight checks in with three minutes of lo-fi funk mayhem ("Soul Duck"). The remainder of the tracks are by Paul Tillman Smith, a singer/songwriter who later made his mark as the leader of the obscure local acts Vitamin E and the Bridge, and more recently helped spearhead Berkeley's annual Juneteenth festival. Here, Smith's numbers range from "Country Flower," a Latin-tinged ballad reminiscent of War, to the primitive and aptly titled "Ready to Live Raw Funk."

Audiophiles may want to avoid Welcome to the Newsroom, as the master tapes were forgotten in a backpack in a garage for 25 years. Having grown moldy and weak, some of the reels deteriorated upon transfer, with the resulting tracks sounding muddy at times. Still, the songs and the performances shine through, leading to heightened speculation as to what other treasures might be buried in Bay Area garages amongst old magazines and abandoned tricycles.