John Lee Hooker, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Dinu Lipatti: where else would you find these three artists together, performing back to back, besides a cyberstage?
John Lee Hooker, “Blues For Christmas” (1949)
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Rahsaan Roland Kirk (tenor saxophone, manzello, flute, stritch), “We Free Kings” (1961)
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Dinu Lipatti, “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” Johann Sebastian Bach/Hess transcription (1947)
. . . I want to be your Santa Claus even if my whiskers ain’t white.—Blind Lemon Jefferson
Blind Lemon Jefferson, “Christmas Eve Blues” (1928)
Yesterday’s clip roamed all over the world. Today we travel to one city, Chicago. This is the Chicago of another era, where, on Sunday morning, on the near west side, on Maxwell Street, you could hear—right on the street—some of the greatest musicians in the world, including this man, one of the finest slide guitar players of all time.
Robert Nighthawk (AKA Robert Lee McCollum; 1909-1967), “Eli’s Place,” live, Chicago’s Maxwell Street, circa 1964
Moment for moment, this record, made in 1931 (up north in Wisconsin), remains one of the most astonishing performances in all of blues.
Skip James (1902-1969), “I’m So Glad” (1931, Grafton, Wisconsin [famously covered by Cream on both their first and last albums: Fresh Cream, 1966; Goodbye, 1969])
Here’s another record, featuring another of blues’ greatest voices, that was made in Memphis in the 1920s.
Sleepy John Estes (1899[or 1904]-1977), “The Girl I Love She Got Long Curly Hair” (1929, Memphis)
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i’m standing there watching the parade/feeling combination of sleepy john estes. jayne mansfield. humphry [sic] bogart/mortimer snerd. murph the surf and so forth . . .—Bob Dylan (liner notes to Bringing It All Back Home [1965])
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. . . Bob Dylan stalked [Ry] Cooder for months asking him for advice on how to play one particular Sleepy John Estes lick.—Paul Duane
Old records, where everyone involved is long dead, don’t just appeal to the senses—they’re springboards for the imagination. Here’s a record that was made, in Memphis, over 80 years ago. It features one of the greatest voices in blues.
Close your eyes.
Open your imagination.
They’re just about ready to record.
What’s the room look like?
What’s the last thing they say before they start?
Tommy Johnson (1896-1956), “Cool Drink of Water Blues” (1928, Memphis)
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lagniappe
On the deepest level, a recording . . . is an invitation to time travel, a chance to resurrect the voices of the dead, a way to indulge a deep instinctual yearning to slow the passage of time. With a recording, we can preserve that fleeting moment, and play it again and again, according to our will. In his penetrating book “The Recording Angel,’’ Evan Eisenberg calls record listening “a séance where we get to choose our ghosts.’’—Jeremy Eichler, 12/13/09
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For about twenty years Tommy Johnson was perhaps the most important and influential blues singer in the state of Mississippi. He was one of the few black musicians to whom that much abused epithet ‘legendary’ rightfully applies.—David Evans
This take?
Or that?
Move the voice forward?
Back?
Make the guitar brighter?
Darker?
Enough bass?
Too much?
Enough room sound?
Mixing a record, as I learned when I worked at Alligator Records (back in the 1970s), involves a seemingly countless number of decisions. After a few hours, everyone starts to get a little punch-drunk. By the end of the night, for instance, this track had morphed—in the warped warble of engineer Freddie Breitberg (AKA, in his personal mythology, Eddie B. Flick)—into “Serve Me Rice For Supper.”
Jimmy Johnson, “Serves Me Right To Suffer” (Living Chicago Blues, Vol. 1, Alligator Records, 1977 [Grammy Nominee])
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reading table
The ’net’s filled with enough dreck for a thousand lifetimes; but then, as happened the other day (after hearing about it on the radio), you come across something that’s simply stunning—like the new, complete collection of the letters of Vincent van Gogh.
. . . Van Gogh’s letters are the best written by any artist . . . Their mixture of humble detail and heroic aspiration is quite simply life-affirming.—Andrew Motion, The Guardian (11/21/09)
Here’s another musician who, like Dinu Lipatti (Tuesday’s post), died way too young: the great Chicago blues artist Magic Sam (AKA Samuel Maghett). He suffered a fatal heart attack just months after this performance. He was 32.
Magic Sam, live (TV broadcast), Germany, 1969
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Facebook seems to have expanded into new markets. “Sign up,” they say, “to connect with [t]he late, great Magic Sam.”
The first time I stood before a judge at Chicago’s Criminal Courts Building at 26th and California—this was back in the ’70s (when I was working at Alligator Records)—it was to speak on behalf of this man, Hound Dog Taylor. The day before, during a drunken argument at his apartment, he’d shot his longtime guitarist Brewer Phillips (who survived). In his own way, Hound Dog was a pretty canny guy. When he told me about this incident over the phone, shortly after it happened, he put it this way: “Richard, they say I shot Phillip . . .”
(No, don’t touch that dial; these stills are way out of focus—which, for Hound Dog, seems just right.)
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Hound Dog Taylor and the Houserockers, live, Ann Arbor Blues Festival, 1973
“Wild About You Baby”
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“Taylor’s Rock”
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“I Held My Baby”
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Hound Dog . . . . [would] play things that are technically wrong, and [he’d] . . . make people like it. . . . [He’d] just get up there and go for it.—Elvin Bishop
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When I saw Hound Dog Taylor and the HouseRockers as a three-piece, I said, ‘There it is. There’s your future right there.’—George Thorogood
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Hound Dog Taylor is one of my favorites. He used this raw dog blues, you know.—Vernon Reid
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A Facebook page devoted to Hound Dog, who died over 30 years ago (1975), currently lists 434 “Fans” who come from, let’s see, Orlando and Indonesia and Cedar Rapids and Sweden and Austin and Australia and . . .
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When I die, they’ll say ‘he couldn’t play shit, but he sure made it sound good!’—Hound Dog Taylor
These clips really take me back, as I worked with blues guitarist Albert Collins, co-producing his 1978 album Ice Pickin’, when I was at Alligator Records. Not only was he an absolute joy onstage; he was, offstage, a real sweetheart.
Albert Collins, live, Germany (late 1970s)
More:
Albert Collins, “Frosty,” live, Germany, 1988
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odds & ends
MacArthur “genius” grant winner John Zorn composed a piece for Albert, “Two-Lane Highway,” which appears—with Albert on guitar—on Zorn’s album Spillane.
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Amaze your friends with your ability to answer this (seldom asked) question: Who’s “the first blues guitar book published in Hebrew in Israel” dedicated to?
music clip of the day 