Blues Enthused grew out of the notion that I’d like to dig into this sound that was the cornerstone of a lot of the music I’d been listening to throughout my life.
It’s a truism that blues music is a simple form, even a constrained form. Knock out a I-IV-V chord progression over 12 bars, with an AAB rhyme scheme for the lyrics, and there you have it – that’s the blues.
But of course like many truisms, it’s simplistic. For one thing, the blues isn’t a single, uniform tradition. It stretches across different styles connected to particular times and places: eg urban blues, country blues, guitar rag, Chicago blues, Texas blues, jump blues, rhythm and blues, hill country blues, blues-rock - and whatever you want to call the stuff that came out of the one-off
melting pot of New Orleans. Bearing in mind that I’m not a musician, the last ten years (or more, counting the period preceding the blog) has been a voyage of discovery getting my head around all that, plus a heap of other ingredients that bring different spices and flavours to the whole gumbo.
As it turned out though, contemplating all that stuff was really just a starting point. Once upon a time, Muddy Waters sang that 'The Blues Had A Baby And They Named It Rock & Roll', and in the same song added that “Otis Redding said, the blues got a soul”. Which got me thinking about the different genres “fathered” by the blues, and how they developed. Memphis was key to the emergence of both rock’n’roll and Southern soul – the kind that for me has more kinship with blues music, and R’n’B, than Motown – good as the latter might have been. Reading about Sam Phillips and the artists he groomed at Sun Records, flowing through Howlin’ Wolf, Elvis, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis, provided a wonderful insight into the evolution of rock’n’roll (and rockabilly) out of blues and country sounds. Meanwhile Robert Gordon’s Respect Yourself history of Stax brought Soulsville to life, while his more wide-ranging book It Came From Memphis joined the dots.
Memphis was really a fount of not just one but two “scenes” in popular music – those moments when groups of movers and shakers collided in a particular location to kick things on and move the music in new directions. Lenny Kaye’s book Lightning Striking: Ten Transformative Moments in Rock & Roll is a terrific survey of some of these “scenes”. It’s a phenomenon that I find fascinating, and I wish that in addition to his chapter on Liverpool in 1962 Lenny had devoted some space to London around the same time, where the Stones, The Yardbirds and The Who were also starting to make things happen.
The two chapters in Kaye’s book that coincided with my own adolescence though, were New York 1975 and London 1977 – the two almost coincidental explosions of punk. As a kid who had responded to glam rock, and then started to devote himself to hard rock, heavy metal and prog rock, I was pretty resistant to punk – or at least spending my money on it. All the same, its presence was inescapable at the time, and it generated a new zeitgeist. Reading Kaye’s chronicles of those scenes, and also Allan Jones’ often hilarious tales of his times as a Melody Maker writer in the mid-Seventies^, took me back to my teens as an inveterate reader of Sounds and the other weekly music “inkies” – though I was more interested in reading about hard rock
bands, whose albums I bought when I could afford it, and who I would see live at venues like the Edinburgh Odeon, and then (having moved south for a couple of years), the Retford Porterhouse, and Sheffield City Hall.
I recall a kid in school in Retford who was heavily into punk and New Wave, who stood up on a chair one day by the record player in the Sixth Form common room, waving a 45 in the air and declaring “Singles are the future!” All the hard rock, heavy metal and prog rock album listeners among us duly rolled our eyes. But looking back from this vantage point I can see his point – up to a point. Drawing a line between the immediacy of rock’n’roll hits by the likes of Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry, through the fun of glam-rock and the grit of Dr Feelgood, to the punch of iconic songs from the punk and New Wave era - and let's not forget that punk enabled a resurgence of rockabilly, led by the Stray Cats - sometimes it’s enough to have a classic track crystallised in a single, and not bother with albums by the artists involved.
Whatever, recognising the vigour of some of those inescapable punk, post-punk tunes, over the last year or two I’ve been dabbling in them again, and relishing their often cacophonous charms. At the same time this interest began to re-tune my antenna to pick up on more current artists who channelled some fresh energy. Not that I’ve dived in indiscriminately, but now and then my ears have pricked up and I’ve been bowled over by some new names. Often the sounds in question are pretty retro – rock’n’roll that harks back to glam rock and garage rock, for example. Some of these artists have made their way into these columns, like The Peppermint Kicks, His Lordship, The Courettes, and Tuk Smith & The Restless Hearts, for whom my enthusiasm has been pretty obvious. Old names like MC5 and The Dictators have also resurfaced, who fit in the same raucous bracket. And there are some newer hard rock bands like Wayward Sons and Scarlet Rebels that have grabbed my attention with their sharp, direct sounds that aren’t in thrall to all too prevalent “heavy metal” tropes. But some other sounds have caught my ear now and
then that I want to delve into but would be an uncomfortable fit for Blues Enthused. Any takers for Yannis And The Yaw or The Mysterines?
It's partly with these different directions in mind that I’ve decided to wind up the blog. I want to have more time to explore the full gamut of my music collection, and also to following my nose down some different avenues. I think too, that this emerging desire to freshen up my musical palate offers a perspective on one of the challenges faced by blues music these days.
I said at the start of this piece that the blues isn’t a uniform sound, and that’s true. But much of its potential audience is predominantly focused on blues-rock, and privileges guitar wizardry above all else. A few years ago Joe Bonamassa observed that: “I have learned unfortunately that people want to hear me overplay over blues-rock changes. So this is what we do.” He had his tongue slightly in his cheek, but it’s telling that he made this comment in the course of a ‘Rig Rundown’ video devoted to exploring at length the technicalities of his guitars, amps and pedal board.*
The likes of Bonamassa, Eric Gales and Philip Sayce may be classified as blues-rock artists, but if you go to one of their gigs you’ll find that a large part of the audience are primarily guitar fiends, who go batshit crazy over displays of breakneck soloing. No harm to these artists – I can certainly wig out over a bit of axe madness, and wouldn’t want to eradicate it.
But it’s not enough. I like songs, and I like wit, emotion and imagination – a more varied diet if you like. Of course there are blues and roots artists – even some blues-rock artists – who cater for those diverse expectations one way or another, but increasingly I find myself looking further afield.
In a similar vein some blues artists may also feel the need to broaden their horizons, not just artistically but in order to make a sustainable living. A couple of years ago I went to see Joanne Shaw Taylor, who was touring Britain on the back of her impressive soul-inflected album Nobody’s Fool. She was 37 at the time, but from a cursory look round the (not sold out) hall it was clear that most of her audience was considerably older – balding heads like my own abounded. If I was her that would have worried me, seeing my target audience become more advanced in age. Was that a trend that encouraged Taylor to try out the soul leanings of Nobody’s Fool, in search of new listeners? Maybe yes, maybe no, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
I still love blues music in many of its different manifestations. And the blues will endure, no doubt. As I’ve said before, the House of Blues has many rooms. In some of those rooms devotees will continue to cherish its roots and traditions. In others they’ll experiment with new possibilities, giving the blues fresh energy and keeping it current. But there’s a big musical world outside the House of Blues too, and maybe we’ll bump into each other out there from time to time.
It’s a truism that blues music is a simple form, even a constrained form. Knock out a I-IV-V chord progression over 12 bars, with an AAB rhyme scheme for the lyrics, and there you have it – that’s the blues.
But of course like many truisms, it’s simplistic. For one thing, the blues isn’t a single, uniform tradition. It stretches across different styles connected to particular times and places: eg urban blues, country blues, guitar rag, Chicago blues, Texas blues, jump blues, rhythm and blues, hill country blues, blues-rock - and whatever you want to call the stuff that came out of the one-off
 |
| Muddy Waters has a vision of the rock'n'roll future |
As it turned out though, contemplating all that stuff was really just a starting point. Once upon a time, Muddy Waters sang that 'The Blues Had A Baby And They Named It Rock & Roll', and in the same song added that “Otis Redding said, the blues got a soul”. Which got me thinking about the different genres “fathered” by the blues, and how they developed. Memphis was key to the emergence of both rock’n’roll and Southern soul – the kind that for me has more kinship with blues music, and R’n’B, than Motown – good as the latter might have been. Reading about Sam Phillips and the artists he groomed at Sun Records, flowing through Howlin’ Wolf, Elvis, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis, provided a wonderful insight into the evolution of rock’n’roll (and rockabilly) out of blues and country sounds. Meanwhile Robert Gordon’s Respect Yourself history of Stax brought Soulsville to life, while his more wide-ranging book It Came From Memphis joined the dots.
Memphis was really a fount of not just one but two “scenes” in popular music – those moments when groups of movers and shakers collided in a particular location to kick things on and move the music in new directions. Lenny Kaye’s book Lightning Striking: Ten Transformative Moments in Rock & Roll is a terrific survey of some of these “scenes”. It’s a phenomenon that I find fascinating, and I wish that in addition to his chapter on Liverpool in 1962 Lenny had devoted some space to London around the same time, where the Stones, The Yardbirds and The Who were also starting to make things happen.
The two chapters in Kaye’s book that coincided with my own adolescence though, were New York 1975 and London 1977 – the two almost coincidental explosions of punk. As a kid who had responded to glam rock, and then started to devote himself to hard rock, heavy metal and prog rock, I was pretty resistant to punk – or at least spending my money on it. All the same, its presence was inescapable at the time, and it generated a new zeitgeist. Reading Kaye’s chronicles of those scenes, and also Allan Jones’ often hilarious tales of his times as a Melody Maker writer in the mid-Seventies^, took me back to my teens as an inveterate reader of Sounds and the other weekly music “inkies” – though I was more interested in reading about hard rock
 |
| Stray Cats - rockabilly revitalised by punk |
I recall a kid in school in Retford who was heavily into punk and New Wave, who stood up on a chair one day by the record player in the Sixth Form common room, waving a 45 in the air and declaring “Singles are the future!” All the hard rock, heavy metal and prog rock album listeners among us duly rolled our eyes. But looking back from this vantage point I can see his point – up to a point. Drawing a line between the immediacy of rock’n’roll hits by the likes of Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry, through the fun of glam-rock and the grit of Dr Feelgood, to the punch of iconic songs from the punk and New Wave era - and let's not forget that punk enabled a resurgence of rockabilly, led by the Stray Cats - sometimes it’s enough to have a classic track crystallised in a single, and not bother with albums by the artists involved.
Whatever, recognising the vigour of some of those inescapable punk, post-punk tunes, over the last year or two I’ve been dabbling in them again, and relishing their often cacophonous charms. At the same time this interest began to re-tune my antenna to pick up on more current artists who channelled some fresh energy. Not that I’ve dived in indiscriminately, but now and then my ears have pricked up and I’ve been bowled over by some new names. Often the sounds in question are pretty retro – rock’n’roll that harks back to glam rock and garage rock, for example. Some of these artists have made their way into these columns, like The Peppermint Kicks, His Lordship, The Courettes, and Tuk Smith & The Restless Hearts, for whom my enthusiasm has been pretty obvious. Old names like MC5 and The Dictators have also resurfaced, who fit in the same raucous bracket. And there are some newer hard rock bands like Wayward Sons and Scarlet Rebels that have grabbed my attention with their sharp, direct sounds that aren’t in thrall to all too prevalent “heavy metal” tropes. But some other sounds have caught my ear now and
 |
| The Courettes - bratty chutzpah and exotic guitars |
It's partly with these different directions in mind that I’ve decided to wind up the blog. I want to have more time to explore the full gamut of my music collection, and also to following my nose down some different avenues. I think too, that this emerging desire to freshen up my musical palate offers a perspective on one of the challenges faced by blues music these days.
I said at the start of this piece that the blues isn’t a uniform sound, and that’s true. But much of its potential audience is predominantly focused on blues-rock, and privileges guitar wizardry above all else. A few years ago Joe Bonamassa observed that: “I have learned unfortunately that people want to hear me overplay over blues-rock changes. So this is what we do.” He had his tongue slightly in his cheek, but it’s telling that he made this comment in the course of a ‘Rig Rundown’ video devoted to exploring at length the technicalities of his guitars, amps and pedal board.*
The likes of Bonamassa, Eric Gales and Philip Sayce may be classified as blues-rock artists, but if you go to one of their gigs you’ll find that a large part of the audience are primarily guitar fiends, who go batshit crazy over displays of breakneck soloing. No harm to these artists – I can certainly wig out over a bit of axe madness, and wouldn’t want to eradicate it.
But it’s not enough. I like songs, and I like wit, emotion and imagination – a more varied diet if you like. Of course there are blues and roots artists – even some blues-rock artists – who cater for those diverse expectations one way or another, but increasingly I find myself looking further afield.
In a similar vein some blues artists may also feel the need to broaden their horizons, not just artistically but in order to make a sustainable living. A couple of years ago I went to see Joanne Shaw Taylor, who was touring Britain on the back of her impressive soul-inflected album Nobody’s Fool. She was 37 at the time, but from a cursory look round the (not sold out) hall it was clear that most of her audience was considerably older – balding heads like my own abounded. If I was her that would have worried me, seeing my target audience become more advanced in age. Was that a trend that encouraged Taylor to try out the soul leanings of Nobody’s Fool, in search of new listeners? Maybe yes, maybe no, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
I still love blues music in many of its different manifestations. And the blues will endure, no doubt. As I’ve said before, the House of Blues has many rooms. In some of those rooms devotees will continue to cherish its roots and traditions. In others they’ll experiment with new possibilities, giving the blues fresh energy and keeping it current. But there’s a big musical world outside the House of Blues too, and maybe we’ll bump into each other out there from time to time.
^Brought together in his book I Can't Stand Up For Falling Down.
*You can find the quote from Joe Bonamassa at about 31:09 in the video, if you're interested.
