Snatch And The Poontangs (Johnny & Shuggie Otis) - Snatch And The Poontangs (1969) LP

Snatch and the Poontangs' sole, self-titled album was actually done by the band of famed R&B bandleader Johnny Otis. You didn't think that a band with a name like Snatch and the Poontangs was likely to do much touring and get much airplay, did you? The record couldn't have gotten much airplay either, filled to the gills as it was with profane and sexually explicit language. In that sense, it was something of a groundbreaker, with extemporizing as blunt and filthy as almost any to be heard on rap records several decades later. The language was barrier-busting (or should we say ball-busting), much more so than the somewhat faceless blues-soul backup music. Otis did have the wit to rework his "Willie and the Hand Jive" hit as "Hey Shine" (with suitably no-holds-barred lyrics), and the spoken narrative "Two Time Slim," set against lonesome blues guitar, is a little more inventive in its delivery and musical track than much of its surroundings. The wordless "Two Girls in Love (With Each Other)," with its orgiastic female moans and improvised jazz-blues licks faintly in the background, also sticks out for the relative difference in its construction. Snatch and the Poontangs and the Johnny Otis Show's Cold Shot, also from 1969, were combined onto one CD on an Ace reissue in 2002, with the addition of two previously unreleased Snatch and the Poontangs tracks.