Even after
Get It While You Can, his fine 1967 LP for
Verve, failed to capture a commercial audience or a substantial fan base,
Howard Tate continued to work the nightclub circuit to large audiences. One of his biggest fans was fellow
R&B veteran
Lloyd Price, who owned a New York club named
Turntables where
Tate often appeared. The club was actually an adjunct of
Price's
Turntable record label, which formed in 1968 and signed
Tate as one of its first artists.
Howard Tate's Reaction was the result, produced by
Price and
Johnny Nash, and featuring a similar lineup to
Get It While You Can -- augmented by members of
Price's band plus drum legend
Pretty Purdie. Singing a batch of songs largely from the pen of
Price,
Tate and the band pursue a smoother vision of
uptown soul, tempering the grittier
Southern soul of
Get It While You Can but still allowing plenty of room for
Tate's unhinged vocals. The choice of material, though, may have reined in the mighty testifier;
Tate remade
Price's
"Come into My Heart" and
Nash's
"Hold Me Tight" (both were big hits for their respective performers,
Nash's just one year before
Tate's version and with a nearly identical arrangement).
"My Soul's Got a Hole in It" earned
Tate some action on the
R&B chart, but it's a generic performance; far better is the uptempo
go-go "Have You Ever Had the Blues," with the band spurring
Tate on with every chorus. Reissued by
Koch after the
soul singer's early-2000s resurrection,
Howard Tate's Reaction isn't a revelation like
Get It While You Can, though it does display a performer who deserved much more attention than he received during the late '60s. ~ John Bush