Blue Matter

Savoy Brown

Parrot (record label), 1969

I bought this record from my roommate when he decided to hit the open road. He bought it when it came out. This was before he had much taste in blues. It isn’t very good. I read in Wikipedia that one of the founding members left soon to start Foghat. I can tell. There are some tunes here that might have been melodic; the band just played them loud. A recurring problem for English blues bands was that when the singer wanted to be soulful, such as Muddy Waters and Elmore James (whose songs are on the record), he mostly sounded strained.

Cool album cover. Was Blue Matter a play on gray matter (that is, brains)? The monster on the cover looks like the creature from the Black Lagoon to me, but monsters tend to look alike. This was the first record I owned with the lyric “if the river were whiskey, and I were a diving duck/I’d swim to the bottom and drink myself back up.” I thought I was sophisticated.

The way the music business worked. The band wanted to tour in the U.S. They and the record company thought they should release an album before they toured. They rented some studio time but didn’t finish enough material for the record. The fastest way to get the new songs recorded was to play them at a concert. They set up an unpaid appearance. The lead singer got sick, but they were committed to that date, so another band member handled the vocals that night. None of that was what they planned.