The two Hamilton natives met in 1969. McNutt had taken a job at the Mosler Safe Company with the specific intent of saving money to produce a record, a dream of his. After six months as a clerk, he was given a promotion but had to stick around to train a replacement.
“I was sitting at my desk one day and this shirt little guy in a wild shirt came strolling in,” he recalled. “That was the first time I met Wayne Perry.”
The two became fast friends because of their mutual interest in music.
“He was singing four nights a week at the Half Way Inn on Route 4 between Hamilton and Middletown,” McNutt said. “I wasn’t really interested in recording soul music, but I was telling him about my goal of cutting a rock record one night after work in late November of 1969 and he said, ‘Hey, man! Why don’t you cut me?’
“I didn’t have the nerve to tell him no,” McNutt said.
To find a compromise so that he would feel better about spending the $500 he had saved up, he suggested that they record music that would include elements of soul and rock music, a genre that has become known as “blue-eyed soul.”
Their first collaboration was “Mr. Bus Driver,” a song by Wayne Carson, who also wrote “The Letter,” a hit for both the Box Tops and Joe Cocker. “Souled Out” includes both their original recording, which was released as a single on the Counterpart label in 1973, and an unreleased version recorded with the Young Breed.
The McNutt-Perry partnership continued through much of the ’70s, and together they produced tracks by Westbound Freeway, Soul Limited, Rick Bam Powell and other regional artists. Some of them were released as singles and some even made the regional charts.
“After every session, I would make a copy of the mix for myself,” McNutt said, “and started collecting them in a big plastic bag. Some of them didn’t even have notes or labels about what was on them.”
After Perry died of cancer in 2005, McNutt started taking the reel-to-reel tapes from the bag and getting them transferred to digital format so he could listen to them. When he had enough of them transferred, he took a collection to Fraternity Records in New York, a label he had worked with back in the day, and they agreed to release them as a CD and revive the Counterpart label for the release.
“It was a fitting end for all these masters,” McNutt said.
“Souled Out” is available for digital download or on CD at cdbaby.com and amazon.com.
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