Author Archive

Mojo’s Cold Shot: Mike Bloomfield, “Try It Before You Buy It”

Mike Bloomfield’s a guitar player blues fans know and appreciate, but he’s one of those guys whose name many rock fans have heard but couldn’t necessarily explain his place in history like they could, say, Eric Clapton or Stevie Ray Vaughan. By all rights, Bloomfield shoulda been elevated somewhere up in the Clapton-sphere — his chops were that fierce and his forceful championing of blues with Paul Butterfield, the Electric Flag, Al Kooper’s Super Session and a laundry list of other seminal Sixties sessions opened doors for lesser players to become blues-rocking heroes.

Street drugs, however, got the best of him, robbing him of career opportunities and, ultimately in 1981, his life. Vaughan and Clapton both survived their drug addictions; Bloomfield didn’t.

His music, however, survives, which brings us to this week’s Cold Shot, Legacy’s digital-only reissue of his 1975 solo album (his second), Try it Before You Buy It. It’s one of those times when the downloading culture actually helps bring great lost recordings to light—back in the day when Bloomfield was alive and touring, CBS had a difficult time selling his records, and now? It’d be a lot cheaper to not release his CDs and just sit on the tapes in the vault. But ripping a remastered version and distributing it via iTunes and other digital retailers? It’s cheap enough for Legacy’s parent company, Sony, to get behind. (more…)

Mojo’s Cold Shot: Heavy Trash, “Midnight Soul Serenade”

Jon Spencer’s the reigning court jester of blues, a smart-aleck white guy who is part clown, part serious musician, part genius, and 100% fan of raunchy electric blues. His joyous, lo-fi music is sometimes so over the top that it’s hard to take seriously. It’s hard to tell if the weird, sometimes creepy words that come out of his mouth are one big put-on, or not. And either way you go on that, is it legit, or just glorified porn featuring smokin’-great guitars?

That’s the difference between Spencer and his peers working the same rock-n-blues space (Presidents of the United States of America, Amazing Royal Crowns, and the Reverend Horton Heat come to mind): Their lovable, campy acts leave no doubt, and don’t quite sink to Spencer’s depths of raunch.

Maybe it’s Spencer’s hard-edged attitude that leaves us unsure of how to parse the music he made with bands such as Boss Hog, the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, and now Heavy Trash, a collaboration with Matt Verta-Rey. The group’s third album, Midnight Soul Serenade, recently hit record stores. (Sample the songs here.)

But there’s no denying that the guy:

  • Is popular.
  • Has done many good deeds by lending his name to projects (i.e., R.L. Burnside’s A Ass Pocket of Whiskey) and helped bring national reknown to otherwise obscure black artists who might have gone to their graves with their talents unrecognized in the greater blues world.
  • (more…)

Mojo’s Cold Shot: Goodbye, Saffire

I love these women, this sassy trio of honeys calling themselves Saffire. They sometimes gently poke and prod at societal ills and at other times, smash them with a hammer. Whatever they do, they always do it smiling.

But not for much longer, as they’re retiring, performing their last concert Nov. 9—after 22 years. While that might sound like a short career for a blues group, these gals started as middle-agers.

I’ve interviewed Ann Rabson (the piano player, on the right) and Gaye Adegbalola (the Grace Jones-looking leader of the group, who flashes her gospel roots with her powerful voice and plays rhythm guitar). Listening to their music, Saffire might come off as brash and uncompromising, but talking to them one-on-one, they’re refreshingly approachable.

On stage, Saffire talks nasty, giggling at the same jokes night after night as if they’d just thought them up in the van en route to the gig. By design, Gaye’s raunchy show staples like “Silver Beaver” and “Bitch With a Bad Attitude,” or Andra’s feature song “Lightning (In These Thunder Thighs)” crack up the women and embarrass the men they dragged to the show. (more…)

Mojo’s Cold Shot: The Albert King Pencast

Giving my man Albert King a little love this week and doing my best to fulfill that unrealized dream of making embarrassingly bad college radio through the use of my smartpen.

Go full screen and have yourself a Cold Shot of epic proportions!


Mojo’s Cold Shot: Bo Diddley, “Drive By: Tales From the Funk Dimension”

One of the many things I love about Popdose is our collective freedom to write different kinds of posts: Sometimes you gets yourself a Cold Shot related to some bit of blues news, or sometimes we reach back into the archives to espouse the greatness of an evergreen-but-bona-fide classic.

And still other times, such as this week, we share discoveries that might not be new—but they’re new to us.

Not long ago, cruising Bomp’s spam of the week, this tasty little CD came up for grabs: Bo Diddley’s Drive By: Tales From the Funk Dimension 1970-73, compiling tracks from four lost classic Chess albums issued in the early 1970s and available on—get this—Australian import.

Are you kidding me? After buying roughly 8,000 albums and being graced by probably as many promo copies, record titles alone rarely—if ever—sway an album purchase. But with a name like that, even in these cash-strapped days, it sounded just too good to pass up. Blues-funk of the early 1970s can be fantastic, as the old guard like Bo Diddley, Albert King, and Buddy Guy latched on to the urban sounds coming out of Chicago blues clubs and the second wave of the Memphis Stax soul sound led by Black Moses himself. So Mojo laid his money down. (more…)

Mojo’s Cold Shot: Paul Reddick

Ahh, the kids are back in school and out of my hair, which opens up wide vistas of time to revisit some old favorites on the iTunes playlist, stuff with which Mojo can whistle while he works. Probably new to you—indeed, we of Popdose love to dote on lesser-known but wonderfully talented musicians—is the one and only Paul Reddick, a Canadian harp player whose vintage gear propels his sound back into the late 1950s.

As a solo artist, Reddick’s put out four albums on Northern Blues, but I first came in contact with this monster—and I mean a big personality as well as a big talent—while he was playing with the Sidemen, who released the album Rattlebag in 2001. (more…)

Popdose Concert Flashback: Big Ass Truck, Northampton, Mass., 1997

There’s no ticket from this show to scan; I was just one of the guys on the guest list. Turns out that when this band came to the Iron Horse in Northampton, Mass., touring off their album Kent, me and my sidekick Jack—the funk-loving, fun-loving concert pallie who lived downstairs from me in the godforsaken burg of Rowley, Mass.—didn’t have to elbow through a mass of devotees at the club to find a seat: It was literally me, Jack, a couple other people, and some barflies who probably didn’t have to pay a cover to see the gig.

But this group threw down some of the most innovative funk rock this side of the Average White Band: Hailing from Memphis, Big Ass Truck jammed hard, with a DJ in tow punching in samples and scratching records to great rhythmic effect. Their groove and stage vibe looked a lot like this rendition of “Theem From,” one of Kent’s cuts: (more…)

Mojo’s Cold Shot: James Booker

If Mojo don’t love you baby, then grits ain’t groceries, eggs ain’t poultries, an Mona Lisa was a man. Yeah, that’s right, that’s what my man the late James Booker used to sing in “All Around The World” while wearing that sexy eye patch with the star on it.

It just stuns me that more people don’t appreciate this New Orleans great, he’s a footnote, an afterthought in the hall of fame of American pianists (not just blues or jazz players, I mean all-time greats). Heck, he’d weave classical motifs into his blues, like in “Gitanarias” and the “Black Minute Waltz.” From the sounds of things, he took these musical side streets just for the sport of it.

And of course early in his career he played a little B-3 and did the James Brown thang on cuts like “Beale Street Popeye.”

But he was at his best playing cuts like “Something You Got” and “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” in the classic New Orleans doctor-professor impresario style. His complex left hand rhythms complemented the furious, ornate melodies coming out of the right, making most other blues cats look like ham-fisted piano-beaters. Dig yourself some live “Tico Tico/Papa Was a Rascal” and listen to the interplay between his steady left and deadly right. (more…)

Mojo’s Cold Shot: Super Session Live at the Fillmore East

Something about vintage blues performed by the original artists thrills me; resonates in my bones. For many years, I tried to listen to a lot of well-meaning white musicians playing the same songs and tried get the same kicks, but with a few exceptions, most of the recordings just didn’t do it for me. Elmore James is Elmore James, and you can’t duplicate that, no matter how many expensive guitars you own and how many lessons you take. Or J.B. Lenoir and that gorgeous, fuzzy sound. Or Bo Diddley’s bouncing grooves. Or Junior Wells’ harmonica, messin’ with that kid. Buddy. B.B. I don’t have to even finish the names, they’re so good. You know exactly who I’m talking about, don’t you?

While some folks would call that the very definition of a blues purist, I came to realize it was just me being a blues dickhead. Some white guys can bring just as much blues game, I now admit (but not Clapton, yet).

Still, I have a hard time enjoying much blues outside the classics, despite trying to keep an open mind on the matter. Lately–like, say the last five years–I’ve become a 1960s garage rock junkie, collecting as many obscurities in that realm as I can afford. Sifting through that stuff, I can testify that there are some smokin’ renditions of Bo Diddley and Muddy to be heard in garage milieu, performed with more joy and respect than some of Muddy’s peers who were out on the touring circuit at the time, doing pat run-throughs of “Hoochie Coochie Man” just to please the crowd and getting the college kids to yell dope-fueled “YEAHHHs” and “AMENs” between phrases. (more…)

Popdose Flashback: John Cougar Mellencamp, “Big Daddy”

Sometimes it’s hard to reach into the dark, dank, spiderweb-glazed swamp of memory and grab something from 20 years ago, but this much I remember: In the 1970s through the early 1990s a few select artists like Springsteen, Michael Jackson, Def Leppard, Madonna, Metallica, and yes, Journey, could inspire such rabid devotion in rock fans that they’d flock to stores holding special midnight openings to sell a new record the first minute it was allowed.

Today, the music-biz is so fragmented, rock radio is so weakened, and leaked MP3s/digital streams make the concept of a “formal record release” a notion antiquated as the corset — or at least Valley Girl talk. People buy CDs not for the tactile experience but as a backup hardcopy. Hard to imagine staying up for a midnight record-release party for that.

While Popdose commenters might have their own recollections of when this particular Event-with-a-capital-E stuff died, my official day is March 31, 1992, the day Bruce Springsteen’s Human Touch and Lucky Town CDs hit stores. As a reporter for an indie record-store trade tab, ’twas my job to call a dozen stores and get the vibe for the turnout. While traffic was fairly steady during the first full day of release, store owners said, the midnight openings were lightly attended, and didn’t pay off for store owners.

Right below that top tier of 1980s “Event” artists was a fistful of all-stars who might not be worth camping out for, but we’d make time to get to a record store the day a new CD came out — or the next day, at the latest — so that we could rip it open, play it, and dig it.

John “Johnny Cougar” Mellencamp was one of those. 1989’s Big Daddy was the last in a string of five albums in which he dominated the charts. His success had come after he shed the pretty-boy rock star image shaped by his early manager Tony DeFries, followed his muse, and morphed into a midwestern poor-man’s Dylan. Once comfortable in his own skin, Mellencamp wrote lyrical themes and stories that hit home, served on a bed of tasty power chords with a side order of Kenny Aronoff’s never-too-intrusive precision drumming.

While some rock-ologists give much (deserved) credit to Uncle Tupelo and the Cowboy Junkies for advancing the alt-country movement in and around 1990, it could be argued that Mellencamp’s 1980s output at least provided some inspiration for it, with its folky leanings, featured fiddles and dobro, and its social conscience that stuck out — in the Reagan era, at least — like a milk bucket under a bull. The guy started Farm Aid with Willie Nelson and Neil Young in 1985, an annual event that’s bagged $33 million for family farmers to date. (more…)