Things Have Got to Change

Apparently, back in 1971, someone at Impulse! Records fucked up on the job. They posthumously issued John Coltrane's previously unreleased Sun Ship album, but managed to run at least one pressing of the album with Side Two of Archie Shepp's Things Have Got to Change as Side Two of the Coltrane album. 

To some ears, free jazz is free jazz and it all sounds alike, but there's really a huge, oceanic difference between what the John Coltrane Quartet was playing in 1965 (when Sun Ship was recorded) and what Shepp was doing in 1971. But anyway, there are still copies of Sun Ship out there with Things Have Got to Change as Side Two.

In 1975, one of my housemates. Bruce, owned a Chevy Vega with an eight-track player. As a side note, it was Bruce who first introduced me to the music of Terry Riley and Harry Partch, and hence minimalism and 20th Century composers, and was also instrumental in my awareness of avant-garde jazz and other "out there" forms of music. In any event, that misprinted version of Sun Ship managed to make it to the eight-track format - someone apparently used a mispressed vinyl of the album as the master for both the eight-track and cassette versions - and Bruce had unknowingly bought a "wrong" copy of the album for his Vega's eight-track player.

The first time I heard Sun Ship was riding around Long Island with Bruce in his Vega. Yes, we were the kind of guys that rode around in a 1975 Chevy Vega blaring John Coltrane in suburban  New York. But we had no idea about the pressing error and innocently assumed that Shepp's Change was something by Trane. The label incorrectly said Side Two contained the tracks Attaining and Ascent, and although I couldn't hear a break anywhere in Change indicating the start of a new track, that wasn't all that unusual for late-period Coltrane, when one song in a suite might flow seamlessly into the next. 

But what was unusual was the looseness of the music, all that percussion, the choruses of voices chanting "gotta change" and "goddammit," and even the subtle washes of electronic sounds. Coltrane had gotten that funky?, I wondered. That angry? Bruce and I concluded that's probably why the material never got released until after Trane's passing. 

So all my life, at least since 1975, I had always assumed that late in his life, John Coltrane had embraced a streetwise, anarchic style of revolutionary free jazz, a style that could only be heard on Side Two of Sun Ship. The trouble was, I could never find a copy of Sun Ship with that radical Side Two. By the time of the CD era, all versions of Sun Ship only contained the quartet tracks - no choruses, no electronics, no small army of percussionists. The MP3 era didn't have the mystery track either, and even all the voluminous box sets didn't provide an answer, nor did the streaming era.

Any time I asked Google about a 1960s or '70s free-jazz track with voices chanting a chorus of "goddammit," it would always tell me I was thinking of Nina Simone's Mississippi Goddamn, a great song to be sure but a completely different animal, not to mention no chanting.    

I was starting to question either my memory or my sanity. Was I just plain wrong, and while Bruce had a copy of Sun Ship, could the track I remembered be one of his other tapes? Could he have been playing a trick all along, switching the tapes when I wasn't looking? Or were we just so high (hey, it was the '70s, man) that we were "hearing" all those voices and electronic effects, but it wasn't on the tape? Okay, that might happen once, but every time? And just on Side Two? Not likely (but we were serious stoners back then). 

Last weekend, 50 years after the fact, I finally posed the question on Reddit as to what that mystery track was, and within an hour, someone posted a reply about the mispressing. I tracked down Shepp's Things Have Got to Change on Spotify and almost instantly recognized it as that long-lost "Coltrane" track. Oddly, while I'm familiar with much of Shepp's discography, I've somehow always managed to skip past the Change album. 

But mystery solved, sanity confirmed, and crisis averted. Someone at Impulse! had fucked up.