Category: Music

The songs were recorded between 1952 and 1960, but I didn’t see any evidence that this was a reissue. The first sentence of Little Walter’s Wikipedia article says he was a revolutionary like Django Reinhardt, Charlie Parker, and Jimi Hendrix. Me, I was just going to say that every harmonica player since Little Walter sounds like him. The article also said he got into fights and even had some run-ins with the police. His picture on the cover of the record shows a scar on his forehead that looks as if the wound had been sewn up with monofilament fishing line.

I like his Key to the Highway. I’m fascinated (and stumped) by Mellow Down Easy. He says his baby jumps, shakes, wiggles, then mellows down easy before she blows her top. I have no idea how the kids on Bandstand would to that. The online lyrics providers didn’t listen very closely to Blue and Lonesome. I can clearly hear ‘I’m going to cast my trouble, yeah/down into the deep blue sea/let the whales and fishes have a fuss over me.’ Most of the sites have ‘I’m going to cast myself into the deep blue see [sic].’ That’s about the opposite meaning.

He had some hits after this collection: Mannish Boy, The Blues Had a Baby and They Named It Rock and Roll, and Champaign and Reefer with the Rolling Stones. Despite those not having those later arrivals, this is great record.

When my roommate played it for me in 1969, he said the line in I’m Ready was ‘Hope some schoolboy wants a fight.’ He made a crack about the backlash against hippies. I have better speakers now, and I say it is ‘screwball.’ There weren’t any schoolboys in blues clubs in the 1950s to punch. The line before that is a favorite—‘I’m drinking TNT, I’m smoking dynamite.’ I said that when I was slamming down bar gin, and no one ever stepped back. It’s the singer, not the song. In Hoochie Coochie Man, Muddy said he had $700; that’s $8000 today. Can’t say I’ve tried that in a bar.

Muddy wasn’t the kind of guy who expected an exclusive relationship with a lover. In Honey Bee he says ‘I don’t mind you sailing/but please don’t sail too long.’ In Still a Fool, he says, ‘I been crazy, oh, all my life/well, I done fell in love/with another man’s wife.’ In I Just Want to Make Love to You, he says ‘I don’t want you to be true/I just want to make love to you.’ Also: ‘I don’t want you because I’m sad and blue,’ good to know before you get serious. In Standing Around Crying, he says ‘Oh baby, I ain’t gonna be riding you around in my automobile/you got so many men/that I’m afraid you may get me killed.’ Me, I’d have given Muddy Waters the Nobel in Literature.

McTell is notable for playing 12-string guitar in Piedmont fingerstyle. He never had a hit, but he played on the streets of Atlanta into the 1950s. Jack White’s Third Man Record has reissued four LPs of McTell’s work. Bob Dylan wrote a song about him. McTell played a lot of kinds of songs, but you can recognize them all. If you listen to one old bluesman, you can do a lot worse.

One side of this record is mostly religious songs/spirituals. You Got to Die is a version of Pascal’s Wager—you don’t know when you are going to die, so you should live according to Christian doctrine to make sure you are ready.

The other side is more about the pleasures of life. Broke Down Engine Blues contains ‘I went down to the praying ground/and dropped down on bended knees/I ain’t crying for no religion/Lordy, give me back my good girl please.’ He also says he loved his woman because she could really do the Georgia crawl. I couldn’t find it in my Dictionary of American Regional English, but I’m sure it’s sex.

Not a snappy title for a great record. As Doc Watson put it in one of his songs: Did you love John Hurt? Put me in the group voting yes. Hurt always had a beautiful sound from his guitar (people like to call it gentle) to go with his sweet voice, and his lyrics had plenty of sex and violence. What’s not to like. He did plenty of spirituals, too. His I Shall Not Be Moved is outstanding. My only complaint about the material he left us is that he wasn’t able to record much when he was young.

This record’s version of Oh Mary Don’t You Weep has one of my favorite phrases from a spiritual—Moses stood on the Red Sea shore/smote the water with a 2 X 4. That’s not how Charlton Heston did it in the movie. Wikipedia says the song predates the U.S. Civil War and that 2 X 4s became a thing about 1915, so some clever soul worked the joke into an old song.

It’s not a loud noise to tell you to move out of the ambulance’s way, it’s a pretty woman on a rock to lure sailors to destruction. It’s arty, not punk.  Wikipedia says the woman on the cover of the album is 19-year-old Jerry Hall, Brian Ferry’s girlfriend at the time. I never knew.

I bought this record used in the early ‘80s because it had two songs I liked. The bass and drums in Love Is the Drug are hypnotizing. When I played it just now, I realized that the vocals and horns are very strong too. Ferry can sing. Rolling Stone put Siren in the top 500; I wouldn’t go that far. I am generally more comfortable with two or three chords with a beat and lyrics that are as subtle as a mallet. Some of this is syncopated; my sprung rhythm detector went off as I listened. Man, I even liked Sentimental Fool, which opened with a long slow instrumental intro that is sorta spacey. I admit that I have no idea what ‘jungle red’ is.

James White is a name used by James Chance, musician and singer in New York, says Wikipedia. He played with the Contortions, whose shows often ended with a fistfight. Contort Yourself is the first song on the record. Lydia Lunch appears on the album as Stella Rico. The Blacks turned into Defunkt, which has 20 albums in its discography. See how playful this bunch is—a band that has been together a long time is named’ defunct.’ Lunch and White use pseudonyms. As I recall, Rolling Stone said sometimes the band played as James Black and the Whites.

[Tropical] Heat Wave is easy to like; it starts at 11:42 on the album. Side B is mostly jazz. For those of you who missed New Wave, White’s pose on the cover is classic. He wears a white dinner jacket, continuing the playing on words.

This was the third Jefferson Airplane record, the second one after Grace Slick joined. Surrealistic Pillow had White Rabbit and Somebody to Love on it, both boffo hits. Baxter’s (I’ll call it) was an album that sounded like Dada to most Top 40 fans. (Some people said it is what tripping on LSD sounded like. Other people repeated that to sound cool.) Mainstream rock critics didn’t like it.  As I recall, Life magazine said it wasn’t as good as Strange Days by the Doors. In a previous post in defense of Paul Kantner I said it is an all-time great. I am unwavering. I do remember that college friend, after hearing me rave about the record, said he’d played it and it was awful. Was I talking about the same record, he asked.

The Ballad of You & Me & Pooneil has the spoken word ‘armadillo’ in it. I will remember that after I forget who I am.

I heard the Byrds play at the University of Chicago in October 1969. They spent more time tuning than all the bands I’ve heard live put together. I thought they were high or showing off. As they tuned again after the third song, a voice from the balcony ordered them to cut the country shit. That seemed harsh at the time. I hadn’t heard this record.

Me, I like country music, but the Byrds were terrible at it. Why would they record I am a Pilgrim and The Christian Life? A friend told me that the Byrds were a gateway to country music for kids who had grown up on Top 40 songs such as Mr. Tambourine Man. I said folks who heard the Byrds do Life in Prison would never listen to Merle Haggard. I bought this record used for a buck in 1981 because so many people said it was great. I still don’t get it.