Blue Monday

When the Rolling Stones paid their first visit to the United States, they arrived as dyed-in-the-wool blues purists. They made a point of visiting the Chicago headquarters of Chess Records — where Brian Jones made a pest of himself asking if Willie Dixon would be coming in — and recording tracks in its studio, including “2120 South Michigan Avenue,” an instrumental named after the address of the Chess office. And when the Stones were booked to appear on the TV show Shindig, they made a bit of television history by demanding, and getting, the assurance that one of their idols, Howlin’ Wolf, would appear as well.

At the time, Howlin’ Wolf — aka Chester Arthur Burnett — was doing just fine, financially. A canny businessman with simple tastes and a wife who managed his books with an eagle eye, Wolf earned enough in royalties and concert fees to pay his musicians extremely well, even giving them health insurance. Unlike his in-law Sonny Boy Williamson, who drank and gambled away money as it came in, Wolf always knew which side his bread was buttered on: starting out, he recorded simultanously for two different labels, and made so much money that when he decided to quit the South and head for the big time in Chicago, he did so in his own car instead of a train — no small point of pride. So when the Stones brought him onto Shindig in 1965, the gesture was one of respect for a key influence, rather than a bunch of white guys doing a favor for an over-the-hill bluesman.

Listen to Wolf performing “How Many More Years,” the 1951 tune that was his first hit, and tell me if he sounds over the hill. Always an imposing physical presence, Wolf took on an extra dimension of intensity when he sang, and though he’s easily twice the age of anyone in his audience, Wolf looks like he take on the whole room single-handed. The overly busy camera work (which focuses on the backsides of the seated young women as often as Wolf) obscures the fact that the Stones made a point of sitting in a circle at his feet as he sang. Considering that the Stones were already competing with the Beatles as the young lords of rock and roll, this was a remarkable gesture, and Wolf never forgot it.

Blue Monday

The Duke Ellington Orchestra’s performance at the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival is to jazzbos what the Jimi Hendrix appearance at Woodstock is to rock fans. In each case, a fairly routine and not particularly inspired concert suddenly caught fire. At Woodstock, the spark was Jimi’s howling, feedback-drenched rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” At Newport, it was Paul Gonsalves and his long saxophone solo on “Diminuendo in Blue” and “Crescendo in Blue.”

Despite the legends that have sprung up around them, neither performance was a bolt from the blue. Hendrix had tried out the national anthem at an earlier show without provking much comment. Similarly, Ellington had already used the idea of using the transition between the tunes — which had been issued as separate sides of a 78-rpm disc — as a wailing interval and showcase for Gonsalves. The idea had gone over well at a low-profile concert, and Ellington promised Gonsalves he’d get to do it again when the time was right.

The time could hardly have been better at Newport. As Gonsalves took his solo, a woman in a black dress suddenly jumped up and started dancing, and the most tightly wrapped audience in the Western hemisphere started coming loose and swinging along with the music. Ellington, a showman to the core, kept the moment alive and built the performance into a wild climax that sent the crowd into ecstasy and nearly gave the festival’s promoter, George Wein, multiple aneuryms out of terror that the audience would run riot. The show was a sensation: Columbia rushed out Ellington at Newport, which became Duke’s bestselling record, and Ellington — who had come to be seen as an aging warhorse coasting on past glories — saw his career reborn.

The clip posted above is not the Newport show, obviously, but Gonsalves does a pretty decent job with his wailing interval anyway. The real performance that slayed Newport is available in two different versions, and it presents listeners with a real-life “Is it live or is it Memorex?” dilemma. As originally issued on a single vinyl disc, Ellington at Newport is a studio re-creation of three portions of the Newport show, with the Gonsalves solo dubbed in and a tape-loop of Ellington shouting to the crowd at the end of the performance. The solo is noticeably faint: Gonsalves aimed his horn at the wrong microphone, which ended up hightening the illusion of a genuine concert recording. Word quickly got out that the show had been taped for a Voice of America radio broadcast, and bootleg copies quickly circulated among jazzbos.

In 1999, Columbia released a two-disc CD version of the entire concert, with Phil Schaap creating an acceptable blend of the VoA tape and the original Ellington at Newport recording. The complete version makes it plain that this was just another night out for the Duke Ellington Orchestra, with “Festival Junction,” the original composition slapped together to show that Duke wasn’t just churning his back catalogue, getting little more than polite attention. The irony of the 1956 concert is that Ellington’s career was rescued not by his new music, but by a performance of one of his oldest works, made fresh by an ace sideman.

Blue Monday

The old line “When they made him, they broke the mold” might well have been coined to describe Big Joe Williams, a squat, quarrelsome, broad-chested man who even in old age could have broken the mold himself. He is best known for “Baby Please Don’t Go” and “Crawlin’ King Snake,” songs that have been covered by everyone from Muddy Waters to Ted Nugent. Joe’s heyday was the 1930s and 1940s, and after his star faded he stayed more or less continuously on the road, and the folk revival of the late 1950s and early 1960s gave him new fans and even a chance to record.

This footage offers a pretty good look at Big Joe’s battle-scarred nine-string guitar, which was the core of his distinctive sound. Big Joe played country blues in a hard, percussive style in which the guitar served as a drum as well as a stringed instrument. On some occasions he was known to dangle a beer can against the strings to impart a buzzing tone to his playing. Big Joe was also fond of using strange guitar tunings to throw off anyone trying to imitate his style. “When I saw him playing at Mike Bloomfield’s ‘blues night’ at the Fickle Pickle,” recalled Barry Lee Pearson, “Williams was playing an electric nine-string guitar through a small ramshackle amp with a pie plate nailed to it and a beer can dangling against that. When he played, everything rattled but Big Joe himself. The total effect of this incredible apparatus produced the most buzzing, sizzling, African-sounding music I have ever heard.”

One of the more curious blues documents is a pamphlet called Me and Big Joe, Michael Bloomfield’s account of times he spent with Big Joe during his days in the early 1960s as a young blues freak in Chicago, before he became known as the razor-sharp guitarist of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, “Like a Rolling Stone” and Highway 6 Revisited. The two met at a Chicago nightclub called the Blind Pig:

Joe would get a few beers or a little hard liquor in him (peppermint schnapps and Gordon’s gin were his choices) and suddenly you wouldn’t be dealing with a normal man — he couldn’t talk coherently and nothing would make sense to him. Behind larger amounts of alcohol he could get physically violent. But as nasty as he could get when he was drunk, that’s how compassionate and big-hearted he could be when he was sober, and often his ways were a real Southern gentleman’s. His manner could be touching — very sweet, gallant, courtly.

At times the booklet reads like a collaboration between Flannery O’Connor and Hieronymous Bosch, as with this account of a visit with harmonica player Jazz Gillum:

Joe took me to see him on a very uncomfortable summer day, with both the temperature and the humidity up in the nineties — the kind of day when doing nothing makes you sweat; when dirt forms up under your fingernails for no reason at all. We drove out to the West Side and stopped in front of a tiny frame house, just a shanty, really. Wen we walked into the place I thought we’d hit Hell City — as hot as it was outside, it was insufferably worse within. All the windows were shut down tight. Clad in a huge brown overcoat and sweating profusely, Gillum stood outside a woodstove, stoking a raging fire. He was extremely paranoid. He’d written the very successful “Key to the Highway” and had never gotten the publishing money for it, and was afraid I’d come to steal his other tunes. We didn’t stay long enough to change his mind.

There are plenty of Big Joe samplers out there, most of them worthwhile as an introduction to his singular take on blues. (Just don’t get him confused with Joe Williams, the swing-band shouter who’s an excellent performer in his own right.) One of my favorites is Hand Me Down My Old Walking Stick, recorded in London at the end of his career, which opens with a big, raunchy slide note so loud that one imagines coffee cups and papers flying around the studio as the engineers scramble to adjust the sound levels. Whenever he had a guitar in his hands, Big Joe more than lived up to his nickname.

Blue Monday

The American Folk Blues Festival tours through Europe in the early 1960s were an amazing cultural watershed. American blues musicians who were pretty well washed up in the States found themselves being treated like kings on the other side of the Atlantic. Artists who’d spent their careers playing nightclubs and juke joints, routinely humiliated and degraded by Jim Crow, were suddenly playing in concert halls and television studios before polite, attentive audiences. Some of them never went back.

One of the biggest beneficiaries was Rice Miller, aka Sonny Boy Williamson (II), who stayed on in England for a few years, enjoying the adulation of scores of young Brit musicians who diffidently sought to play with him, hoping some of that authentic blues life would rub off. There are recordings of the early Yardbirds backing up Sonny Boy; the R&B era Moody Blues toured with him and covered one of his tunes on their first album, before they reinvented themselves as the sons of Sergeant Pepper.

Since Eric Clapton led Sonny Boy’s backup players back in his scuffling days, I looked forward to reading Clapton’s autobiography for some tales of life on the road with the legendarily irascible bluesman. We should be so lucky — Clapton tosses off his Sonny Boy residency in a couple of sentences. Very disappointing.

Though he was having a great time in the U.K., Sonny Boy finally went home — literally — to die. While in Arkansas he crossed paths with the musicians who would later become The Band, which makes for one of the most extraordinary anecodotes in Levon Helm’s memoir This Wheel’s On Fire. That story deserves a post of its own, one of these days.

Blue Monday

One of my favorite moments on my favorite Mingus record, Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus, comes during the penultimate track, “What Love.” About two-thirds of the way in, Mingus and Eric Dolphy get into some instrumental byplay that evoked their frequent disputes on stage and in rehearsal. Mingus plunks out “Dolphy!” on his bass, Dolphy purrs “Yeah?” on his bass clarinet, and then they’re off. When the tape was replayed in the studio, Mingus and Dolphy mimed their argument along with the music while everyone in the studio cracked up.

Though the album was recorded in the studio, producer Nat Hentoff permitted Mingus to treat the session as a performance in what Mingus considered the perfect nightclub: i.e., a joint where nobody talked while the musicians were on stage, no cash registers jangled, no patrons called out for drinks and no telephones rang during performances. The lights were kept low during the session, and Mingus recorded intros — remarkably polite ones for him! — in which he thanks the imaginary audience for keeping quiet during the show. Those intros, along with the captivating musical byplay (and the fact that we finally get to hear the anti-segregation lyrics on “Fables of Faubus”) , make the record an essential item in the Mingus catalogue.

Strange as it seems, the Mingus-Dolphy exchange is not available on YouTube. (”Strange” because I was starting to think nothing had ever happened that couldn’t be posted on YouTube.) Instead, you can see Dolphy at work on this extraordinary saxophone solo, coming after Dannie Richmond’s drum explosion. The song, appropriately enough, is “So Long, Eric,” a feature of Dolphy’s final tour with the Mingus band. Mingus played with many great musicians, but it’s safe to say he never had another sideman as versatile as Dolphy.

For another taste of Dolphy’s artistry, see the clip below: a solo performance of “God Bless the Child” on bass clarinet. If you like what you hear, Dolphy’s Out to Lunch — recorded only a few months before his untimely death — is a great place to continue exploring.

Blue Monday

I have this fantasy that John Sayles will buy the film rights to my book The Last Three Miles. That’s because I extravagantly admire Matewan, an epic film about the West Virginia coal mine wars of the 1920s that is waaay overdue for remastering and reissue (preferably with a detailed commentary track by Sayles himself), and I think the subject matter is right up his alley — a midway point between the labor strife of Matewan and the urban politics of City of Hope. On the other hand, if there’s one thing to be said about the Sayles ouevre, it’s that the man hates to repeat himself, so maybe I should abandon this fantasy and go back to hoping Shakira will invite me over for a foot rub. A man’s gotta have a dream, you know.

Meanwhile, I am eager to see the next John Sayles film, Honeydripper, which I gather is set in 1950s Alabama and concerns a juke joint owner (Danny Glover) who hires a young electric guitarist to juice up his business. The film’s soundtrack is drenched in country blues, and there’s even a spin-off bad from the film called the Honeydripper All-Star Band, featuring young hotshot guitarist Gary Clark Jr. Here they are playing “Don’t Throw Your Love On Me So Strong.”

There’s now a Web site for Honeydripper, which is due out on Feb. 1. I hope there’ll be a soundtrack release, just so I’ll have something to listen to while I sit by the phone, waiting for that call.

Blue Monday (Bonus)

I’ve been holding off on doing a long post about Hand Me My Travelin’ Shoes, Michael Gray’s wonderful biography of Blind Willie McTell, because I’ve been waiting for word on a U.S. edition — it’s still available only in the U.K., though that doesn’t mean you can’t order it online. Meanwhile, Gray has been doing the promotional rounds, and clips from his appearances have been cropping up on YouTube, as evidenced above.

Blue Monday

During a particularly troubled time in the mid-1990s, it became a ritual of mine to play John Fahey’s “Dry Bones in the Valley” (from his 1975 album Old Fashioned Love) before starting my day. Workday, weekday, whatever. I’d eat breakfast to it, iron my clothes to it, head off to work with it echoing in my head. To this day, I couldn’t tell you why. It’s a magnificent instrumental track: just Fahey on his steel-stringed acoustic guitar, playing a three-part epic that starts as an ambling country blues, then descends into a dark passage that resolves into an intricate circling figure that fades into the distance. Nothing else on the album measures up to it — certainly not the dim Dixieland tracks that were Fahey’s characteristically self-sabotaging response when mainstream record companies took an interest in his work in the early 1970s. Similarly, when Fahey found himself the focus of renewed interest two decades later, he responded with albums full of tedious sound collages and musique concrete dabblings.

Infuriating as it could be, Fahey’s mulish, contrarian temperament went hand in hand with his music, which at its best was a meeting ground between the blues, world music and free-form improvisation. His blues credentials were impeccable: not only were his early records steeped in country blues, he wrote a scholarly treatise on Charley Patton and helped return Bukka White to the limelight after years of obscurity. As an offshoot of this scholarship, Fahey invented a mythical bluesman, Blind Joe Death, and celebrated his work with liner notes so poker-faced that some fans took him at face value. For all his forbidding mystique and fuck-you sarcasm, Fahey could be a great concert act when he was in the mood: the first Fahey album I bought, Live in Tasmania, captures him in a warm, fully engaged performance with wry asides to the audience.

The video shown above amusingly sets Fahey’s “Desperate Man Blues” against some vintage film clips — the poster did the same trick with “I’m Gonna Do All I Can for My Lord,” “America” and “Tell Her to Come Back Home.” (Whoever you are, kkerins, you’re definitely on Fahey’s wavelength.) To see the man himself at work, here’s a clip of a concert performance of “Candy Man.” There are plenty of other film clips on YouTube.

As for the records, novices can start with the anthology Return of the Repressed, then check out earlier works like The Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death. There’s plenty of room for exploration: Fahey left a lot of work behind, and even when the junk is discarded, what remains is one of the most intriguing bodies of work in American music.

Blue Monday

Today I’m turning over the microphone to With Comb & Razor and Undercover Black Man, who are ready to tell you what you need to know about Otis Taylor, a man whose completely original take on blues has put When Negroes Walked the Earth and Definition of a Circle in heavy rotation on my CD player during my daily commute.

I like WC&R’s description of Taylor’s sound:

Taylor explores that space between the acrid purgatory of the slave ship and the osmosis of English and Scots-Irish folk ballads into the African-American musical lexicon . . . you will hear . . . the original instruments on which the blues were played: the harmonica, the mandolin, and the African-derived stringed instrument known as the banjo. When Taylor picks up the guitar, he often coaxes from it the loping, mellifluous tones of the ancient African kora — or plays muscular, hypnotic riffs evoking the chug of locomotives and other fearsome engines that drive the relentless progress of the New World.

Taylor eschews “my woman done left me” blues cliches, instead weaving narratives drawn from folklore, legend and true history to conjure a long-ago age when violence and loss were commonplace features of the American landscape and the blues was not yet a sophisticated pop music style but a form of sorcery.

With Comb & Razor has some choice cuts from White African and Respect the Dead, while Undercover Black Man has some links to free MP3s that will fill you in even more.

Blue Monday

In the morning, contemplating my drive to work, I feel like staying home. Tonight, the workday behind me, I’ll feel like going home.

In other words, I’ll feel like Muddy Waters, Yo La Tengo, Mark Knopfler (and the Notting Hillbillies), and Mark Knopfler (and Tom Jones).