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…)
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.
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…)
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!
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the prosecution will prove that Eric Clapton has committed numerous crimes against rock, namely:
• Making music way more derivative than legally permissible for a rock god
• Exploiting fans by releasing milquetoast pap
• Squandering monstrous talent
Clapton is not God, contrary to the Islington graffito proclaiming it during his tenure in John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers. He is, however, an excellent blues mimic, taking compositions like Robert Johnson’s “Crossroads,” William Bell and Booker T. Jones’ “Born Under a Bad Sign,” and for Mayall, Freddie King’s “Hideaway.” He can derive like few others on earth, in a musical milieu where creatively covering other compositions is the best way to connect with the audience.
Yet great blues musicians contribute at least one or two original compositions–or the definitive interpretation of someone else’s song–to the canon of blues standards. B.B. King has “The Thrill Is Gone” and “Every Day I Have the Blues.” Junior Wells, “Messin’ With the Kid.” John Lee Hooker, “Boogie Chillen’,” “Boom Boom” and “One Bourbon, One Scotch, and One Beer.”
Clapton’s got nothing. “Layla” is known for its innovative coda written by Domino Jim Gordon and a legendary main riff written and co-performed by Duane Allman. “Sunshine of Your Love” was co-written by all three members of Cream. Its undisputedly legendary guitar solo opens not with an original Clapton-improvised phrase, but the melody from “Blue Moon.”
Left to his own devices, Clapton churns out total dreck. There’s a lot to choose from; I’ll keep it brief by offering the “greatest whiffs” from three different decades: (more…)
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 1970sand 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…)
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…)
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…)
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…)
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…)
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.
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.
