Category: Music

I inherited this record a couple years ago and had no idea how good it was. I was skeptical about a young English woman with granny glasses trying to cover Son House. My mistake—she didn’t want to sound like him, she BECAME Son House when she played. Such a sad story—she died of a brain tumor about 10 years after this album came out. Listen to her on YouTube.

The lyrics to Fingerprint Blues sound like an episode of CSI or Law and Order. I’m a good child, but now I’m prison bound … when they found my gun, they found my switchblade knife, oh lord, they had my fingerprints twice … I’ve been skippin’ and dodgin’, goin’ from town to town, my friends have left me, lord, my fingerprints have been found … if you can’t come to the courtroom, please come to the prison walls.

I heard somebody refer to BankAmericard recently. It’s been 50 years or so since they changed the name. (I raised my kids to call Nissans Datsuns, but I don’t care about credit cards.) I thought of Albert Collins, whose 1978 album Ice Pickin’ contains Master Charge, a song that used outdated names for Mastercard and Visa to complain about the bills his wife ran up shopping with them. He said it was $500 the first day (about $1900 in today’s dollars). Me, I live near a fancy shopping block in Chicago, and the prices in the windows there are very high. I don’t know what’s expensive any more.

Collins was a superb blues performer. I saw him at Biddy Milligan’s on Sheridan Road in the late ‘70s. He earned his nickname of Master of the Telecaster that night. He was part showman, part shaman as he used all of his 100-foot guitar cord to dance through the revolving door as he was playing a solo. He encouraged the folks on the sidewalk to come on in, and then danced back through the door without missing a note.

I’ll get to the four albums of his I have. I wanted to tell the story about BankAmericard and his remarkable performance while Master Charge was stuck in my head.

He’s 80. He announced the return of Bachman-Turner Overdrive to touring (plus a concert film and an album). Joining him is his 55-year-old son, Tal, and touring musicians. Fred Turner is around and involved, the press release said, but won’t be touring.

I saw BTO playing with Burton Cummings at SARSstock in Toronto in 2003. The Rolling Stones got top billing; AC/DC played the best show, says me. As the band started Takin’ Care of Business, my 19-year-old son’s face lit up—finally a song he recognized. “Staples commercial, right?” he said.

I have a BTO record—Head On, released in 1975. Little Richard played piano! Take It Like a Man was about the drudgery of touring small towns in out-of-the-way places where people would come to see the band. Lookin’ Out For #1 expressed the same point of view. That was serious existential dread for a rock band. The world is different with Prozac.

I realized today that I haven’t engaged in this playthrough of my records. ‘My uncle took the message and he wrote it on the wall,’ yeah, sure. That doesn’t make me think of Chuck Berry trying to get back with his ex; I’m thinking of mix tapes of songs with operators, party lines, 10-cent calls from pay phones in booths—all gone. The songs have gone meta.

Roy Acuff pulled me back into the music. I didn’t expect it—he’s country about one step removed from the yodeling brakeman, but I reacted to the emotionally honest songs. He did Titanic as if it were ripped from the headlines, but it happened 40 years before he wrote the song—both World Wars occurred in the interim, nuclear weapons, the rise of communism; it wasn’t top of mind.

Streamlined Cannonball is a song about a fast train, and he played it like a dirge. Acuff wrote it, and I don’t rush to criticize an auteur, but Doc Watson’s version leaves it way up the track.

I should be embarrassed by how much I like Don’t Worry ‘Bout the Mule (Just Load the Wagon). It is a great break-up song (but my read is that he really doesn’t mean it). When I was producing copy for a living, the design manager would sometimes ask me if I could make the deadline if she assigned me another project. I always said, don’t worry ‘bout the mule, just load the wagon.

Tradition Records, 1957 (my rerelease is on Everest Records recently enough to include a ZIP code)

Here is an open-book quiz. Where was Odetta at the Gate of Horn recorded? A) At The Gate of Horn folk club in Chicago or B) at a recording studio in New York. Take your time; remember you can check the title of the record. If you’ve heard the record, you know it is a studio album which just happens to be named for a folk club. Marketing was strange in the ’50s.

I love Odetta’s voice. Some people might have wanted her to specialize in important songs, such as spirituals, gospel, and civil rights tunes; I love the way she did silly songs just as much, such as the children’s song about the fox raiding the hen house. She is bold enough to sing two Leadbelly tunes just like Leadbelly, and she doesn’t need to apologize. The liner notes and the label have them in the wrong order—there are many mistakes on liner notes if you look closely. The only time I gave notice on a job I sang bits from “Take This Hammer” for the two weeks. [By the end of my working days my employers gave me notice.] It’s a work song, I know that, but the manifest content of the lyrics is that the singer is getting out of prison (by dying).

Women were underrepresented in music during the vinyl years, and they are underrepresented in my record collection. I have a fair amount of Judy Collins and Grace Slick, Ella Fitzgerald and Lotte Lenya, but there isn’t much balance for the Rolling Stones, Grateful Dead, and Bob Seger. I’ll sneak in some Lydia Loveless, say, from streaming for balance.

How many songs use “vouchsafe” besides Green Sleeves? I don’t remember ever using it in conversation.

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.