Blues Enthused Christmas Stocking 2020 - Part 2

Still full of Christmas cheer, people?  Well, here’s Part 2 of the Blues Enthused Christmas Stocking to keep you smiling.
Now, you might think that live music is a curious choice for this piece to focus on, at the end of a year that was almost a total write-off for gigs from around mid-March.  But hey, there were a few live albums this year, from artists old and new, to remind us of the power of live music.
At the very top of the tree is Check Shirt Wizard – Live In ’77, by Rory Gallagher.  Released in March, I said in my review that I’d be dumbfounded if there was a better album this year, and I stand by that statement.  Check Shirt Wizard is a breath-taking document of what Rory brought to the stage back then – a four piece on full throttle, barnstorming, dynamic form, led by a man with a musical mojo of mythic proportions.  If you want to get in the mood, check out this footage of ‘Calling Card’, from a Hammersmith Odeon performance that year.

Another in concert collection from a late Irish legend arrived in January, with Gary Moore’s Live From London.  Recorded in 2009, it’s not without its flaws, but it’s still a testament to how rediscovering the blues back in 1990 brought a much stronger focus to Moore’s work.  Hard core fans will love the guitar pyrotechnics for which he always had a penchant, but for me it’s when he lays back a bit and captures the emotion in songs that he’s at his best, whether it’s the heartache of ‘Still Got The Blues’ or the humour of ‘Too Tired’.  Here he is having some fun with ‘Walking By Myself’, at the 2010  Montreux Jazz Festival.

A more contemporary live recording released this year came from Albert Castiglia, with Wild And Free, recorded in Boca Raton in November 2019.  Now Albert, like Gary Moore, is fond of letting it rip in the guitar stakes, and he certainly does that a few times in the course of this set.  But there’s light and shade in there too – as well as some special guests.  This performance of Johnny Winter’s ‘Too Much Seconal’, filmed in Poland a few weeks before the Boca Raton gig, is a pretty good illustration of the Castiglia style.

But lest anyone think that quality live albums are the sole preserve of guitar slingers, singer Sari Schorr chipped in with a goodie back in February in the form of Live In Europe.  At its best it serves up sassy, rockin’ blues with a dash of funk, decorated by quality guitar from Ash Wilson and keys from (depending on the cut) Bob Fridzema and Stevie Watts, as a platform for Schorr to do her forceful vocal stuff.  Here they are giving it some welly on the brooding 'Damn The Reason', back in 2018.

If there’s someone who really should have released a live album in 2020, to fill the void in touring work, it’s the woman who probably does around 200 gigs in the course of normal year – Samantha Fish.  Let’s face it, she and her management must have piled up some decent recordings of her incendiary live shows by now, and her fanbase have been drooling at the prospect for a good while now.  On the plus side, I did manage to catch a couple of British shows early in the year, including the London gig at Islington Assembly Hall, before she had to pull the plug on her European tour in mid-March.  Here she is in Denver back in February, having fun on ‘Bitch On The Run’, complete with compulsory singalong.

One of the few other bands I managed to catch before live music came to a crashing halt was Wille & The Bandits, in their new four-piece incarnation.  To my mind they're a band who deserve considerably more attention than they currently seem to get, as they manage to extend their blues foundations into prog rock terrain, with world music influences thrown into the mix for good measure.  To demonstrate my point, here they are with 12 minutes' worth of the epic instrumental 'Angel', from a 2020 performance in France.

I can't say I've devoted a lot of time to watching the streaming of live shows, though naturally quite a few artists have gone down this road in an effort to keep the home fires burning.  Sometimes that's just been a matter of timing - shows in the States often hit our screens in the middle of the night here in Europe.  But there's also the missing ingredient to contend with - the magic of simply being there, in the room when the music is being made, and being part of the interaction with the artist.  And with that in mind, let's hope this pandemic beats a retreat before too long, so that we can all get back to enjoying live music for real.

You can find Part 1 of the Blues Enthused Christmas Stocking here.

Rory Gallagher - Check Shirt Wizard - Live In '77

Where do you begin with this?  I mean, really, where in the world do you begin? Check Shirt Wizard – Live in ’77 comprises 20 tracks and lasts two hours, and it’s got my brain buzzing like a jar full of wasps.  Well, here goes . . .

First thing is, this is my favourite Rory Gallagher line-up – not that he ever had a bad band.  But here we have not only his long-standing right hand man Gerry McAvoy on bass, but also somewhat unsung piledriving drummer Rod De’Ath, and also Lou Martin’s keys, which add some flavours I like.  Others will prefer his power trio period, but for me this is the best of the best.

Rory Gallagher - a wizard, a true star

Such a great songwriter as well, who was so fresh lyrically - Rory is never a peddler of the usual clichés.  Here you get a great reading of the near-jazzy yet infernally catchy ‘Calling Card’.  ‘Tattoo’ed Lady’ is so evocative, but economical, with lines like “I spent my youth under canvas roof, as I roamed from town to town”, and set to such an original, swinging tune.  And of course ‘A Million Miles Away’ is incomparably atmospheric.  Hell, even when it’s just a matter of riffs the man is a magician - witness the high-tension-wire tautness of ‘Moonchild’ and the crackle-and-jab of the high octane ‘Secret Agent’.

Rory’s inventiveness and playfulness are a joy.  Take ‘Bought And Sold’ for example, a chunk of boogie that Quo might have chugged away at merrily in a straight line for several minutes.  But in Rory’s hands it takes off in fresh directions like a kite in a stiff breeze.  McAvoy and De’Ath put the hammer down at one point, but Rory’s playing remains relaxed, like a genius footballer who always seems to have more time than anyone else, before they take it down into a great ‘pizzicato’ passage and then one of his trademark guitar/voice harmonising segments.  Your jaw will drop at similar excursions on a regular basis.

Rory was doing ‘unplugged’ segments before the term had even been coined, and here he straps on his acoustic for ‘Out On The Western Plain’, which sounds like it must have been around forever.  I’d normally run for the hills in response to ragtime guitar, but Rory makes it work on ‘Barley & Grape Rag’ because he finds the earthiness and fun in it, whereas to my ears most exponents just sound twee. ‘Too Much Alcohol’ is a raucous slide affair, on a resonator methinks.  Then there’s long-standing favourite ‘Going To My Hometown’ on which the rest of the band gradually reappear.   I mean, where the hell did he get this from?  He barks away enthusiastically over rattling mandolin, while the audience claps along in anticipation of the stomping beat, and Lou Martin adds a fun piano solo, combining to create a classic that’s a one-off if ever there was one.

The energy levels are staggering, notably on ‘I Take What I Want’, a Sam and Dave soul hit that gets shaken’n’stirred and turned inside out and upside down, with chords flying around like shards of metal and needle sharp lead playing, some Celtic leanings, and a mind-boggling second solo.  I’m listening to it again as I type, and I’m breathless.

But they really get into the red zone when Rory lets rip with fiery slide playing, as on the unstoppable foot-to-the-floor rock’n’roll of ‘Souped-Up Ford’, where he whips up a veritable storm and Martin boogie woogies away on the Joanna.  Or of course on the climactic, surging ‘Bullfrog Blues’, with its iconic “Well did you evvaaah” opening.

But slide or not, Rory’s guitar is a joy to listen to, right from the glorious fuzzy warmth of both rhythm and lead playing on the opening ‘Do You Read Me’ to the encores ‘Used To Be’ and ‘Country Mile’, by which time I’m recalling the famous phrase describing the playing of the jazz cornettist Bix Beiderbecke - like “shooting bullets at a bell”.

Enough.  I’m worn out with enjoyment.  If there’s a better album than Check Shirt Wizard in 2020, I’ll be dumbfounded.  This is the work of a rock’n’roll genius, sitting on top of the world.

Check Shirt Wizard - Live In '77 is released on 6 March, and can be pre-ordered here.

Flashback #3 - Rory Gallagher

For reasons passing understanding, for many years I only owned two Rory Gallagher albums – Against The Grain, which I absolutely cherished, and the live album Stage Struck (with bonus 7”).  And disappointingly, I never managed to see the great man live.  But I still have a few fond memories of him from my teenage years, principally a terrific Old Grey Whistle Test ‘In Concert’ performance from the BBC Television Theatre (aka the Shepherds Bush Empire), which was what sold me on Against The Grain.  The energy displayed on ‘Souped Up Ford’ - which I can now enjoy again, courtesy of YouTube - was a key ingredient for me, and the line-up with Rod de’Ath on drums and Lou Martin on keyboards continues to be my favourite even now.  I also remember broadcasts of him doing ‘Rock Goes To College’ (I think) and the Montreux Jazz Festival, but that first encounter still stands out.

But I also remember reading, in Melody Maker if memory serves correctly, about a celebrated incident relating to a performance by Rory at Birmingham Town Hall.  He’d arrived there a day ahead of the band and crew, apparently because of some publicity commitments, only to find on the night of the gig that band and gear were all stranded on the motorway because of fog.

So what did the bold Rory do?  He went on stage with an acoustic guitar, apologised for the problem and promised to come back and do a full gig for free – and then delivered a set that brought the house down.  There are various accounts of this performance, such as these from the forum on the Rory Gallagher website.   Oh, to have been in the audience that night!

This story came back to me last year, after going to see Eric Clapton play at the SSE Hydro in Glasgow.  Notoriously, Clapton found the sound not to his liking, and walked off stage in the middle of ‘Cocaine’, which turned out to be the last song in his main set.  When he came back he offered a quick “Sorry about that”, did an encore, and that was that - not even a reprise of ‘Cocaine’.  And you ask yourself, would Rory Gallagher have done that?

Happy birthday Rory – a class act.

Journey to the Blues #1

Mainstream superstars the Strolling Bones

The enthusiasm for the blues was a long time coming, and at the same time always there.  I latched on to hard rock during my teenage years in the mid-Seventies, becoming a fan of Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple and Bad Company when they had already peaked.  I was too young to have encountered Cream at the height of their influence, and the Stones were now mainstream superstars, their evangelism for Chicago blues part of their early history.  The Allman Brothers were just a name to me.  But it didn’t take much to recognise that the blues was obviously an essential ingredient in much of the music I liked.

So it was natural for me to take in blues music through the likes of Rory Gallagher, Jimi Hendrix, Whitesnake (of the classic Moody and Marsden period), AC/DC, Pat Travers, Lynyrd Skynyrd et al. But my enjoyment was still filtered through the lens of heavy rock, without much direct connection to its roots. Still, I took on board the fact that Zeppelin had, shall we say, leaned heavily on a number of blues artists for much of their early material.  I noted too, that ‘Ain’t No Love In The Heart Of The City’, a key song in Whitesnake's repertoire, was a cover of a hit for some blues-soul singer called Bobby Bland.

And that’s pretty much the way things stayed for a couple of decades.  My love of rock music took a back seat at times.  But when I did give it some attention I would occasionally bump into the blues in one form or another.  Until a few things began to come together that started me more directly on a journey to the blues . . .

You can read Journey To The Blues #2 here.