Posts Tagged ‘Mojo’s Cold Shot’

  
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Thursday, April 16th, 2009

Mojo’s Cold Shot: Naomi Shelton & the Gospel Queens

by Mojo Flucke

Be still my soul. Lawd have mercy. When soul first came out, so many social issues made so many people so PO’d (civil rights, Vietnam, rioting in seemingly every urban area, drug abuse, the specter of nuclear war) that retreating into gospel-sounding soul music was a welcome respite–and a way to constructively vent the emotions that otherwise might drive a man or woman to commit an act that was, er, socially nonconstructive.

Welcome to 2009, the post-Bush wasteland of scorched-earth economics, war and pestilence, terrorism, drug abuse and bad, bad pop music. Along with acts like Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings, James Hunter, Amy Winehouse and a fistful of other neo-soul artists my peers have been writing up on Popdose (Ken Shane’s Black Joe Lewis piece is one example), Naomi Shelton & the Gospel Queens have come to rescue us from the stuff we hear about on the radio and see on the TV and flat-screen computer monitors that just plain don’t make no sense. Like a shooter going off in Binghamptom at a facility whose sole reason for existence was helping noncitizens become citizens here in our land of milk, honey, and executive bonuses. I mean, WTF? (more…)

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Thursday, March 19th, 2009

Mojo’s Cold Shot: Setting the Record Straight on Etta James

by Mojo Flucke

To the hardcore fan of 1950s blues, R&B, and soul, Etta James can be vexing. To anyone following the news lately, her calling out of Beyonce for singing “At Last” at an Obama inaugural ball was completely annoying–especially since Beyonce probably did more to increase awareness of the great soul singer among today’s pop fans through her depiction of James in the Chess Records movie Cadillac Records.

Just to get the obvious comparisons out of the way, here’s Etta:

Here’s Beyonce:

Clearly both are gifted singers, one a currently popular diva and the other a well-traveled soul singer with more breadth, depth, experience and nuance than any current diva will likely ever have. In fact, some people could argue that James blazed a path through the music industry so the Beyonces of today could be successful. If we were talking baseball, Beyonce might be Grady Sizemore–who might some day be an all-time great–but Etta James is Roger Maris. Or Frank Robinson. Or Reggie Jackson. (more…)

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Thursday, February 5th, 2009

Mojo’s Cold Shot: Jimmy “Duck” Holmes, “Gonna Get Old Someday”

by Mojo Flucke

Even in these crushing economic times, blues fans can count on three things: Death, taxes, and until they spend every last red cent they fish from the ashtrays and couch cushions in Mississippi, Fat Possum Records gonna dig up, record, and release records from obscure originals performing the blues, whether they’re commercially viable or not.

Enter Jimmy “Duck” Holmes, whose juke joint The Blue Front in Bentonia (home town of blues legend Skip James) dates back to segregation times and is now on official stop on the Mississippi Blues Trail (below: Duck and his crew celebrate).

His new record on Fat Possum, Gonna Get Old Someday, finds Holmes sharp of spirit and handy with the acoustic guitar. A casual player up until the last few years, Holmes preferred to work the Blue Front, which has been open since 1948, when he was one year old and his father launched it. No doubt Duck himself helped move a bottle or two of his dad’s famed bootleg ’shine.

Today, however, he’s a working musician, and his style is way-gone old skool but his voice is clear and beautiful, as evidenced in “Hurry, Hurry.” It’s not really important that Duck isn’t a longtime fixture on the circuit, someone with a pedigree of B.B. King or Buddy Guy. What he is doing is preserving a fiercely local blues style that James created and Duck’s in a position to understand–and feel.

And in these economic times, we know for sure that he’s doing it out of love for the blues, because there’s no money to be made playing Skip James style during boom years. Bless you, Duck and Fat Possum. Keep it real. You too can keep it real by checking out Jimmy “Duck” Holmes at his MySpace and at his Mississippi Arts Commission home page.

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Thursday, November 6th, 2008

Mojo’s Cold Shot: Nathaniel Mayer, RIP

by Mojo Flucke

Nathaniel Mayer passed away last Saturday, from complications due to a stroke suffered back on April 13.

The Detroit soul singer was a powerful voice on the scene during the years the Motor City’s soul evolved into what eventually became the Motown sound of the Supremes, Stevie Wonder, and Marvin Gaye. Mayer, however, recorded for the less well-known Fortune Records, a regionally popular label back in the day whose seminal recordings still haven’t made it to CD—one of the factors relegating Mayer to obscurity until the good folks of Fat Possum records rediscovered him in 2004 and recorded his comeback CD I Just Want to be Held, followed up by Why Don’t You Give it to Me? last year on Alive.

The tenor crooner’s pleading, melancholy voice had a raspy quality in the Otis Redding vein, as opposed to the smooth Sam Cooke style—perfectly suited to the gritty grease and metal shavings paving the highways and byways of greater Detroit. Perfectly suited to the Fat Possum primitive sound that propelled old-skool players like R.L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough into the limelight in the 1990s and their newer disciples like the Black Keys and Black Diamond Heavies. (more…)

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Thursday, October 23rd, 2008

Mojo’s Cold Shot: Restaurant, “Joe D”

by Mojo Flucke

Meet Restaurant, or Restavrant, depending on how the person writing about this crazy Texas duo interprets the band’s logo. Equal parts Flat Duo Jets, Timbuk 3, Black Keys and Chickasaw Mudd Puppies (yeah, you read that right), these frenetic nutballs are a little bit country and a little bit rock and roll.

And a lot blues.

Here’s the group’s first single, “Joe D” off the recently released album Restaurant Returns To the Tomb of [sic] Guiliano Medidici. Rock on with this lo-fi craziness the group itself bills as “electro-country-punk.” Whatever it is, I wants me some more of it.

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Thursday, October 9th, 2008

Mojo’s Cold Shot: R.L. Burnside, “First Recordings”

by Mojo Flucke

The blues aren’t dead yet. But, compared to, say, 1971, they’ve got one foot and two thirds of the other in the grave. Let’s admit that.

Blues fans haven’t heard as much groundbreaking stuff in recent years as we did in previous decades, when dinosaurs like Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker roamed the earth and were still cranking out new material — or at least phenomenal reinterpretations of old stuff.

In fact, the whole tribute-duets era of the 1990s really turned this hardcore fan off to new blues recordings altogether for a time, with a few exceptions. B.B. King paired with hip-hop producers and rappers? Give me a break. Undignified for everyone involved. Made me quite sad. I fled to the box-set aisle and fortified my collection, diving deeper into the blues and R&B from the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s.

Not making the blanket statement saying that all these collaborations were all junk. Just saying, it wasn’t, for example, the quality of Hooker and Canned Heat throwing down the awesome blues rock they did back in the 1960s, back when I was literally in my infancy.

The one exception in the groundbreaking department was Fat Possum Records, which, to be fair, also did its share of undignified remixing in an attempt to get the Jon Spencer Generation hipped to ancient treasures like R.L. Burnside and Asie Payton. The remix/duet stuff was a little interesting, but not really earth-shattering. (more…)

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Thursday, October 2nd, 2008

Mojo’s Cold Shot: Robert Bradley’s Blackwater Surprise, “I Thank You”

by Mojo Flucke

I’m not much of a modern blues guy; in fact a lot of my pals like to refer to me as a crusty-old, close-minded, purist curmudgeon. ‘Tis true, I’d much rather listen to old Chuck Berry blues instrumentals, ancient John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters,  early ’70s blues-funk throwdowns from Albert and B.B. King, or even early- 50s R&B than polished, slick Robert Cray or horned-up 2008 urban blues. Because to me, nothing says “hard luck and trouble” like a perfectly digitally sparkling pristine recording by some white dude who grew up in suburbia. Not.

That being said, I am a sucker for a fine soul crooner, no matter the vintage, race, creed, or city of birth.

One such singer who fits this bill perfectly is Robert Bradley, whose fine fine recordings of the last decade or so make me shiver with admiration. For the record, he is blind, was raised in Alabama by a single mother, and was a street performer before he was discovered in the mid ’90s by a group of guys who couldn’t believe their ears.

Also, for the record, they were cranking out bluesy soul records before Amy Winehouse and her ilk brought soul back into vogue (and I thank her for doing so). Bradley was making the rounds with his retro sound when Kid Rock heard him, and sampled him on “I Got One For Ya” in 1997. (more…)

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Thursday, September 11th, 2008

Mojo’s Cold Shot: The Scissormen, “Luck in a Hurry”

by Mojo Flucke

A couple months back, I interviewed the Scissormen for Popdose. They’re a raunchy blues-rock duo in the vein of Black Diamond Heavies or Black Keys, except masterminded by an even older soul, rock journalist Ted Drozdowski.

Well, as luck would have it, this month the group’s new record, Luck In A Hurry, hit the shelves — whichever shelves are still open to blues duos scratching out a living in southern juke joints and selected fine watering holes in New England.

Drozdowski’s deep blues, like many of his compadres out there, carries the torch not so much for the polished Chicago gentry like Buddy Guy or his Memphis peer B.B. King as much as rough-and-tumble Mississippi Hill Country originals like Junior Kimbrough and R.L. Burnside, rediscovered and immortalized on Fat Possum Records in the 1990s. In fact, Drozdowski credits Burnside — who encouraged him to follow his dream and play the blues — for inspiring the riff on the new record’s “The Devil Is Laughing.”

On the new record, the Scissormen play mostly the sparse, forlorn blues we’ve come to appreciate from the milieu, oddly suitable for these times of economic war, woe, and social inequity, much as they were back in the mid-20th century when blues dinosaurs roamed the South’s back roads practicing their art.

But on “Whiskey and Maryjane,” they bring in a ringer: Dicky Barrett of the Mighty Mighty Bosstones, who you can hear clearly appreciates joining a punky little slide tune from which you can practically hear the rust chips fall. Morphine drummer Billy Conway makes an appearance on Luck in a Hurry, too. These guys not only help change things up sonically and put their stamp of approval of the proceedings, but they also help make the connection from ancient blues to modern rock. Drozdowski’s the bridge from old to new, the impresario, his guitar the catalyst. There’s some kind of magic in those grooves that no digital studio creation can replicate.

One area where the Scissormen have digitized is their media: Check a heapin’ helping of tuneage, video, and other stuff at both the band’s download page and MySpace.

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Thursday, August 7th, 2008

Mojo’s Cold Shot: Buddy Guy & Junior Wells, “A Man of Many Words”

by Mojo Flucke

I think I speak for all of Popdose, going through a painful migration to the latest version of Wordpress, that we have had the freeeeeeekin’ blues this week. To my compadres at the site, I offer this phenomenal cut, “A Man of Many Words,” from one of the tastiest blues records of the 20th century, Buddy Guy & Junior Wells Play the Blues.

The album finds both artists are at their absolute, positive critical and popular peak. In fact, you just can’t go wrong buying any of their legendary collaborative albums from this period, most of which have been re-released on Rhino.

The sad thing for us writers is that, in the end, this song isn’t about writing. Buddy really isn’t sympathizing with us and our tribulations. The writing in this song — itself a transparent rewriting of the Stax/Otis Redding joint “Hard to Handle,” later remade by the Black Crowes — has nothing to do with pens, quills, keyboards or Black-freakin-berries. In fact, it’s just another song about the protagonist’s stamina in the sack.

Anyway, it’s a blues song. It’s about writing. It fits our week here at Popdose. If you don’t have this record, go get the sumbitch. Here’s a video of Buddy Guy performing the song live sans Wells, which if you had any doubt about how blues evolved into rock (and how Hendrix learned his entire fucking act at the altar of Buddy Guy) you got it all in one sweet little clip. It also is proof that the most Wordpress-ig’nant writer of the staff can embed YouTubes in the new era…if it indeed shows up in this post:

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Thursday, July 31st, 2008

Mojo’s Cold Shot: Cephas & Wiggins, “Sounds of the Blues”

by Mojo Flucke

I am an unabashed fan of Cephas & Wiggins, who bring a modern take on traditional folk blues. In interviews, they’re gentlemen, who love telling their stories and giving thoughtful takes on where blues has come from, where it’s going, and what they’re doing.

Guitarist John Cephas is 78, while harmonica player Phil Wiggins is nearly a quarter-century his junior. They met at a D.C. festival in 1977, and record for Alligator Records. In the three decades they’ve recorded their brand of Piedmont folk blues, they’ve slowly, quietly built a fan following who might not know of all the traditions from which they draw–but they know talented musicians playing good music when they hear it. For the record, they go wa-a-a-y back in the blues canon, styling their tuneage after ancient greats like Blind Boy Fuller, Reverend Gary Davis, and Blind Willie McTell.

You gotta decide whether their sound’s up your alley, but a great sample with which to start is “Sounds of the Blues,” which elegantly uses onomatopoeia to describe the last chapter of what seems to be a long relationship. But we’ll never know, because these guys do what the best songwriters do: Leave enough to the imagination to make the listening a very personal experience.

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