Lou Johnson - With You In Mind & more

 After the Sweet Southern Soul session and album one might think Jerry Wexler would have kept Lou around, but timing is everything and around this time two factors conspired against Lou. First, Wexler had become dazzled by a new talent named Donnie Hathaway, second Johnson had developed an increasingly problematic heroin habit. I would guess that both were in play in Atlantic dropping Johnson.

Johnson struggled with the habit until 1970 when he moved home to his mother's house in NY to get clean. By 1971 Lou was clean and looking for work, when in the lobby of the CBS building he ran into Allen Toussaint whom he knew from a 1966 session in New Orleans. Once he had confirmed that Lou had put his habit behind him, Toussaint invited Lou down to New Orleans for 30 days that resulted in this album.

I'm guessing that most of you know by now that the SeaSaint band of the time would have included The Meters, the horn section would be Gary Brown and company, the backup singers include Eldridge Holmes and Toussaint....you get it. Oddly enough, the excellent Toussaint penned ballad that is used as the album title, isn't on the album!

Anyway, once the album is finished, Marshall Seahorn deigns to release the album on one of his own labels, but instead sells it to Isaac Hayes and Dave Porter at Stax/Volt. Well okay, they had a better distribution network, but be it intentional or not there was a prejudice against non-homegrown products at Stax and the promotion/distribution teams never really got on board behind the album. The album went predictably nowhere and that was essentially the end of Johnson's solo career.

I am going to tack on here a goody from Kent records that our Shares Ninja patsoul kindly left in the shares - it contains all of Lou's earlier work with Burt Bacharach and his first New Orleans tracks with Toussaint from 1966. Together with the earlier post, this pretty much completes the Lou Johnson story.