24 Carat Black - 1975 The Promises Of Yesterday

the record didn’t approach radio’s pop standards and wasn’t near white enough for the mainstream press. Warren’s brainchild band simply pushed past their concept’s conclusion, piling up dozens of reels for an intimate follow-up album that no one in the world wanted to hear. Yet. With their ambitious debut LP downgraded to cutout status when Stax finally shuttered in 1975, 24-Carat Black found themselves watching their moment recede in the rearview. 

For 35 years, the sketches for 24-Carat Black’s sophomore release hibernated in keyboardist and session engineer Bruce Thompson’s basement below the south side of Chicago. Abandoned by Warren when the studio bill darkened his mailbox, the tapes, over decades, had fallen into soggy disrepair, useless save for the six tracks featured on our release. Because Gone: The Promises Of Yesterday is by no means a sequel to Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth. 

Missing are the poignant and bleak sermons on the pain of inner-city existence, replaced by dusky, sensuous re-workings of tainted love songs Warren had written as far back as 1965 during his time as a songwriter at Shrine and Motown. Still, his unfinished self-reinvention, even heard through the prism of these skeletal remnants, delivers on a remarkable purity of vision: one man’s corner of black culture, 24 carats pure and mishandled perhaps until now, finally a bit less misunderstood.

music now with  B2 - I Begin To Weep  here