Octogenarian blues master remains vital, funky and blue
Your should hope to have this much life force at the age of 82. Sixty years into his career, and still logging more than two-hundred live dates each year, bluesman Bobby Rush sounds as vital as he did in his twenties. Born in Louisiana and musically schooled in Chicago clubs, he finally broke out as a solo artist in the early 1970s, adding soul and funk sounds to a blues base as he released a long string of albums and singles. This first release for Rounder teams him with producer Scott Billington and a slate of New Orleans musicians who double-down on Rush’s funky brand of the blue grooves. Rush’s voice is strong and his harmonica says as much as his lyrics.
The last studio recordings of a New Orleans legend
Though often cited as one of three primary New Orleans piano legends, James Booker’s popular renown never grew to the size of Professor Longhair’s or Dr. John’s. Launching his career in the mid-50s, he was sidetracked by a late-60s drug bust and continuing brushes with the law. One of those brushes, apparently, was with legal counsel Harry Connick, Sr., whose son became one of Booker’s students. The mid-70s roots revival brought renewed opportunities for Booker, particularly in Europe, and upon returning to the U.S. he took up residency at the Maple Leaf Bar. At the end of this run, in 1982, he hurriedly recorded this last studio album, and the following year succumbed to the physical and mental ravages of his drug use. Rounder’s remixed and expanded 2013 reissue adds ten bonus tracks to the original dozen, including nine previously unissued performances.
Booker is heard here playing solo as well as with a quartet of Alvin “Red” Tyler, James Singleton and Johnny Vidacovich. Playing “with” the quartet may be an overstatement, as they often seem to be chasing songs that he selected on a whim. Still, his playing and singing both show a lot of verve in each setting. The material is drawn from an incredible array of sources, including R&B (Lloyd Price’s “Lawdy Miss Clawdy,” Doc Pomus’ “Lonely Avenue,” Leiber & Stoller’s “Hound Dog” and Titus Turner’s “All Around the World”), country (Roger Miller’s “King of the Road”), classical (Richard Addinsell’s “Warsaw Concerto”), jazz (“Angel Eyes”), film (Nino Rota’s “Theme from the Godfather”) and the great American songbook (“Yes Sir, That’s My Baby” and “Baby Face”). Booker also drew from the New Orleans repertoire with Allen Toussaint’s “All These Things,” Fats Domino’s “One for the Highway” and a Professor Longhair medley; but even when he was playing outside material, the Crescent City was always in his fingers.
The fluency with which Booker plays this wide range of material is breathtaking. He’s equally adept at classical fingerings, florid jazz changes, blue R&B chords and the rolling arpeggios of New Orleans. There are many highlights among the original album tracks, including a lighthearted take on “Baby Face” that shows more finesse than Little Richard’s 1958 hit, with a vocal that maintains the spark of Al Jolson. The reading of “Yes Sir, That’s My Baby” added to this reissue is even funkier, with Booker on organ, a wicked second-line drum beat from Vidacovich and some fat sax from Tyler. There’s little hint of Eddie Cantor here (and perhaps a touch of Ricky Nelson‘s sax man), but the core emotion is swing. Booker’s classical training comes forward for dramatic readings of the Rachmaninoff inspired “Warsaw Concerto” and the title theme to the 1966 Lana Turner film Madame X. Note that “Madame X” was listed by its subtitle, “Swedish Rhapsody,” on previous reissues, but it’s the same track.
From the pop songbook, Booker tears into Leiber & Stoller’s “Hound Dog” and Roger Miller’s “King of the Road.” The former is played with great percussiveness, the latter as a haggard ballad. Booker’s singing never really matched the easiness of his piano, but it serves both of these songs well, the former coy and sassy, the latter a bit shopworn. The bonus solo take of “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” is speedier than the band version included on the original album, but each approach has its own merits. Booker’s originals include the album’s title song, the bonus track “I’m Not Sayin’,” and the original closer, “Three Keys.” The first two have edgy rhythms and unusual fingerings that bring to mind Thelonious Monk, the third weaves “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” into a rolling New Orleans’ piano solo.
George Thorogood unleashed his Delaware-born and Boston-bred blues just in time to catch a transition in FM radio. Pressured by the growth of AOR stations, and striving to maintain currency with younger audiences, freeform stations were both tightening their playlists and stretching beyond their heritage artists. Thorogood’s tradition-laden blues (eight of this debut album’s ten cuts are covers) was an easy bridge from alternative FM’s roots, and the ferocity with which he and his band (not accidentally christened “The Destroyers”) played was fresh, powerful and a surprisingly good fit with the punk rock and new wave that were just starting to pick up commercial notice. The eight-minute “One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer” quickly became a bathroom-break staple on both commercial and college stations, and covers of Earl Hooker, Elmore James, Robert Johnson and Bo Diddley sent DJs to the stacks for some history lessons. Thirty-six years after its initial issue, the album hasn’t lost a bit of its drawing power, and the steady, unrelenting drive of “Ride on Josephine” will still make your feet move. Rounder’s 2013 reissue is a straight-up reproduction of the album’s original ten tracks, with a four-page booklet that includes a double-panel gatefold photograph and back-panel credits.
Acoustic string band that goes beyond Bluegrass convention
This Boston-based quintet sports a traditional string band lineup of guitar, banjo, fiddle, mandolin and bass, and though that adds up to the acoustics of a bluegrass band, their original material is something distinct from that of the typical festival players. The differences likely stem from the varied background of the band members: fiddler Mike Barnett, bassist Sam Grisman (son of mandolinist David) and mandolinist Dominick Leslie had traditional childhood immersions in acoustic music, while banjoist Greg Liszt had a dual life as a picker (with the Crooked Still) and a scientist (including a Ph.D. in molecular biology from MIT), and guitarist Stash Wyslouch followed a route through rock and heavy metal before settling into country and bluegrass.
The band’s moved closer to traditional song structures over their five years and three records, but the remnants of earlier experiments are still to be heard. Their harmonies, for example, range from traditional high-low bluegrass singing to unison passages they’ve characterized as “gang vocals.” There’s also a helping of country that suggests harmony acts like Alabama and the Statler Brothers. There’s a hopefulness to their tone, even when singing lyrics of failed love, buoyed by rolling banjo, sawed fiddle and fluttering lines of mandolin. The tempos leave little time for dwelling on failure; “Bored of the Raging” emerges from a crawl to a run, and “A Faded Star” waves off inevitability in favor of the changeable present moment.
An anthology of Tony Rice’s recordings of Bill Monroe’s songs
The centennial anniversary of Bill Monroe’s birth has produced an outpouring of tributes (e.g., 12345) from many of the musicians who’ve descended from the master’s vision. Each of the disciples has played Monroe’s tunes on stage and recorded them sporadically, but with these tributes they’ve made album length statements about their relationship to the music and the man. Tony Rice has also played and recorded Monroe’s music, but instead of recording a purpose-built tribute, his label has cherry-picked fourteen tracks from nine albums released between 1981 and 2000. This includes solo titles and sessions with David Grisman, the Tony Rice Unit, the Rice Bothers and the Bluegrass Album Band.
Mellencamp visits country, blues and rock ‘n’ roll ghosts
John Mellencamp is an artist whose depth continues to impress and surprise. His populist anthems of the 1980s demonstrated heartland roots that Springsteen could only write of, and even as he was charting with “R.O.C.K. in the U.S.A.†and “Lonely Ol’ Night,†he was filling out his albums with the social commentary of “Rain on the Scarecrow†and co-founding Farm Aid with Willie Nelson and Neil Young. His commentary continued to mature and turned naturally introspective, and though he continued to place singles on the charts, his albums became increasingly whole in tone. He explored urban soul sounds, returned to rock ‘n’ roll basics, explored historic folk and blues songs, and wrote through a dark streak of social and eprsonal commentary on his last few studio albums.
In many ways, the winding path of his career, the early malice of the record industry, the misunderstanding of music critics, the fight to regain his name and his artistic bona fides, is the road that led to this collection of original songs. The roots introduced on Lonesome Jubilee and explored on Big Daddy are now taken for granted, both in Mellencamp’s music and across the Americana scene. The mountain sounds, slap bass and vintage blues tones are no longer seen as affectations or anthropological explorations, but as the foundation that’s always underlined Mellencamp’s music. On this new, brilliantly executed album, Mellencamp visits and records at three historical locations: the First African Baptist Church in Savannah, Sun Studios in Memphis and room 414 of the Gunter Hotel in San Antonio.
There’s a bit of fetishism in toting along mono analog equipment, lining up on the marks laid down by Sam Phillips, and reinstalling a wood floor in the hotel room, but the connections made to the musicians who first sounded out these spaces famous was worth the effort. Mellencamp doesn’t attempt to raise ghosts as much as he amplifies the echoes that have always threaded through his music. The slap bass of “Coming Down the Road†catches the excitement of mid-50s Sun records without imitating them. Best of all, the minimalistic live recording – no mixing or overdubs – is mostly shorn of T-Bone Burnett’s influences as a producer. What this record (and yes, it is available on vinyl) shows is that it’s not the recording, it’s what’s being recorded. The primitive sound serves to focus the listener’s ear on the artist’s lyrics and moods.
Mellencamp wrestles with the existence of life-after-death, opting to appreciate his time on Earth in the opening “Save Some Time to Dream,†and taking a more laissez-faire attitude (“I’ll see you in the next world / If there is really oneâ€) in the defeated “A Graceful Fall.†The latter’s misfortune would play more darkly if not for Mellencamp’s large, near Vaudevillian vocal, as would the self-pity of “No One Cares About Me,†were it not sung to a country-rockabilly backing and tagged with an optimistic hint of redemption. That optimism segues into the album’s most touching song, “Love at First Sight,†which is matched by the heartbreaking wistfulness of the 50-years-later “Thinking About You.†The opening lyric of the latter proclaims “It’s not my nature / To be nostalgic at all,†but it’s only a device within the song’s story, as Mellencamp medicates on missed opportunities, unfulfilled desires and youthful lessons that only become clear with age.
Octogenarian blues master remains vital, funky and blue
