Rockin’ Blues Sunday (and Monday)

It’s been a while since we wailed the blues on a Monday. So let’s do it on a Sunday – with a dozen guitar rockin’ blues.

MP3: “Buried Alive In The Blues” by Nick Gravenites

MP3: “Blues Before Sunrise” by Elmore James & the Broom Dusters

MP3: “Little Red Rooster” by Sugar Blue

MP3: “Good Rockin’ Tonight” by Wynonie Harris

MP3: “All Your Love” by John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers (w/Eric Clapton)

MP3: “Rockin’ Daddy” by Howlin’ Wolf (w/Eric Clapton)

MP3: “What’d I Say” by Steve Cropper, Pops Staples & Albert King

MP3: “Sweet Little Angel” by B.B. King

MP3: “The Blues Had A Baby (And They Called It Rock and Roll)” by Muddy Waters (w/Johnny Winter)

MP3: “Bound For Glory” by the Tedeschi Trucks Band

MP3: “Dirty Pool” by Stevie Ray Vaughan & Double Trouble

MP3: “Hear My Train A’ Comin'” by Jimi Hendrix

The Most Bad-Ass Riff

Muddy Waters at the Houston Juneteenth Blues Fest, 1977.

Rock and roll has some killer riffs, mostly played on the electric guitar, and there is no riff more bad-ass than the da-dum-da-DUM riff from songs like Bo Diddley’s “I’m A Man.”

Bo had some killer riffs in some of his songs, but the original source seems to be “(I’m Your) Hoochie Coochie Man,” by Muddy Waters from 1954. Written by Willie Dixon, it seems to be the first use of this motif that has shown up in blues and rock music ever since. Bo Diddley, a Chess Records label mate of Muddy Waters, cut his “I’m A Man” in 1955 and Muddy actually answered that record with his own “Mannish Boy.”

Remember Muddy singing “Mannish Boy” in The Band/Martin Scorsese film The Last Waltz? That was actually Muddy’s own remake, modeled after his version on the 1977 album Hard Again. The Rolling Stones copped that same song and riff the same year, for their album Love You Live.

Many others have used the same riff, either covering the blues classics of Bo and Muddy, or doing their own originals. “Bad To The Bone” by George Thorogood to the very recent “Early Roman Kings” by Bob Dylan have used this riff.

It’s lasted this long, and shows no sign of ever going away. That is because it’s bad-ass.

MP3: “(I’m Your) Hoochie Coochie Man” by Muddy Waters

MP3: “I’m A Man” by Bo Diddley

MP3: “Mannish Boy” (live) by the Rolling Stones

MP3: “Bad To The Bone” by George Thorogood and the Destroyers

MP3: “A Night With the Jersey Devil” by Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band

YouTube: “Early Roman Kings” by Bob Dylan

Video Du Jour: The Rolling Stones w/Muddy Waters

In November 1981, in the middle of their mammoth American tour, the Rolling Stones arrived in Chicago to play three nights at the Rosemont Horizon. Long influenced by the Chicago blues, the band paid a visit to Buddy Guy’s club the Checkerboard Lounge to see the legendary bluesman Muddy Waters perform.

It wasn’t long before Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Ronnie Wood and Ian Stewart jumped on stage and later Buddy Guy and Lefty Dizz also came up. Of course it was all captured on tape, and it’s now available on DVD as Muddy Waters & The Rolling Stones Live At The Checkerboard Lounge, Chicago 1981.

With sound mixed and mastered by Bob Clearmountain, this amazing blues night is being made available in an official release for the first time. Check your local video store or Amazon.com, or you can order at the link below the video.

Muddy Waters & The Rolling Stones Live At The Checkerboard Lounge, Chicago 1981 web site from Eagle Rock Entertainment

A Mess O’ Monday Blues

The apocalypse has come and gone, we’re still here. Gasoline prices are still high, the bills are still unpaid and we have to go to work. What better reason to have the blues on a Monday …

MP3: “Snatch It Back and Hold It” by Junior Wells

MP3: “Fixin’ To Die Blues” by Bukka White

MP3: “Liberation Conversation” by Marlena Shaw

MP3: “Key To The Highway” by Big Bill Broonzy

MP3: “Fattening Frogs For Snakes” by Sonny Boy Williamson

MP3: “Gun Slinger” by Bo Diddley

MP3: “Tom Cat” by Muddy Waters

MP3: “Whiskey and Wimmen” by John Lee Hooker

MP3: “Tears, Tears, Tears” by Gregg Allman

MP3: “You’re My Best Poker Hand” by T-Bone Walker

MP3: “Bright Lights Big City” by Jimmy Reed

MP3: “I Got What It Takes” by Koko Taylor

Blues for Monday

We haven’t done this in a while – just wailed with some blues. Perfect for a Monday, don’t you think?

MP3: “Boom Boom” by John Lee Hooker

MP3: “Forty Days and Forty Nights” by Muddy Waters

MP3: “Make A Little Love” by Lowell Fulson

MP3: “Little Red Rooster” by Sugar Blue

MP3: “Key To The Highway” by Little Walter

MP3: “Gonna Pull A Party” by Lightnin’ Hopkins

MP3: “Rock My Baby Right” by Elmore James & the Broom Dusters

MP3: “I’m A King Bee” by Slim Harpo

MP3: “Stop Breakin’ Down Blues” by Robert Johnson

MP3: “4:59 A.M.” by Magic Slim & the Teardrops

Your Sister’s (Record) Rack: Willie Dixon

My sister’s been sleeping in these days – she didn’t get a job this summer and she’s been hanging around the house all day.  So I haven’t been able to sneak in and see what she has in her record collection.  So today I have a dusty, forgotten album from my own closet, one that I had to reach way in the back to locate.

It’s Peace? by Chicago bluesman Willie Dixon, and it came out in 1971.  Now Dixon is one of the all-time great American songwriters – he penned such blues classics as “Hoochie Coochie Man,” “Evil,” “Spoonful,” “Back Door Man,” “Little Red Rooster,” “My Babe,” “Wang Dang Doodle” and many more.  As performed by Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Little Walter and Sonny Boy Williamson, these songs put Chicago and Chess Records on the map in the 1950s and influenced thousands of young rockers in the 1960s.

Willie Dixon’s fingerprint on rock and roll is indisputable.  Not only did he work with seminal rockers like Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, but songs by Dixon were covered by bands like the Rolling Stones, the Doors and Jimi Hendrix (and stolen by Led Zeppelin).   But while he is considered one of the all-time great songwriters, as a performer he’s not that great.  He can carry a tune and he has a passable sing-shout style appropriate for blues, but when guys like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf are in the same room a singer like Dixon doesn’t have a chance.

So we get to Peace? which was recorded by Dixon for his own label, Yambo, in the early 1970s.  By this time Chess had gone into decline as a label and in fact it was sold in 1969 to General Recorded Tape (GRT).  The classic blues artists were having a hell of a time getting attention with their albums but people like Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry were doing OK on the revival tour circuit.  Dixon thought it would be cool to get all timely and write songs that had some social significance for the time.

Good idea, but that means the music would have a relatively short shelf life.  “Peace” is an agreeable shuffle and it’s still fairly listenable today because its lyrics are broadly written:  “Peace is what I’m tryin’ to get/Peace I haven’t found it yet/Peace all the world needs/A peace for you, a peace for me.”  And with its sweet female chorus and fat horn section, this is a long way from the Wolf’s electric Chicago blues.

“It’s In The News” gets more topical, name-dropping Richard Nixon and Chiang Kai-shek to tell the story of Nixon’s reaching out to China with his so-called “ping pong diplomacy.”  The song is a mess; Dixon attempts to interpret world events in a down-home language, punctuating his verses with the chorus “It’s in the news/Everybody in the world got some kinda blues.”   And that’s the song message – it comes off about as profound and deep as the local loudmouth down at the corner bar.

Your Sister’s (Record) Rack: Woodshedding at Woodstock

Editor’s Note: We are expanding this feature for this week only, to help call attention to Record Store Day on Saturday.  Independent record stores are dying on the vine, go out on Saturday and show ‘em that you love them by purchasing some vinyl.

Today we travel about 1,500 miles to the hamlet of Woodstock, New York, comfortably situated in the rustic Hudson Valley north of the Big Apple.  Now this isn’t the place where the big Woodstock festival took place (that was in Bethel, about 40 miles to the northeast) – the town of Woodstock is a haven for artists, musicians and the like.  One of the town’s most famous residents is Levon Helm, best known as the drummer for the Band.

The stories are rock legend: about the Band backing Dylan as he went “electric” in the mid-1960s, how a discouraged Helm quit, how the group reunited with Dylan in Woodstock, then finally how Helm rejoined and recorded the landmark Music From Big Pink.  By 1975, Levon Helm was a big-time rock star.  He had just married a young lady he first met while working in L.A., and he moved back to bucolic Woodstock to make his permanent home. On his 20-acre homesite, Helm built a huge timber-framed barn with only wooden pegs and locally quarried bluestone.  Overlooking a bass-filled lake and shadowed by Overlook Mountain, Helm’s barn was to double as a recording studio.

The studio was nearly complete in 1975 when Helm welcomed his first client, Chicago blues great Muddy Waters.  Helm and his business partner songwriter/producer Henry Glover invited some of the A-list musicians to sit in on the sessions with Waters and his touring band.  The result was The Muddy Waters Woodstock Album, released in 1975.  Among the musicians on the album were guitarist Bob Margolin and pianist Willie “Pinetop” Perkins from Muddy’s band, blues-harp monster Paul Butterfield and hot session guitarist Fred Carter as well as Helm and Garth Hudson from the Band.

The album kicks off with “Why Are People Like That,” written by Louisiana singer/songwriter Bobby Charles (who was also living in Woodstock at the time).  Waters wrote five songs his own bad self, including “Born With Nothing” (on which Muddy plays a wicked slide guitar) and “Going Down To Main Street” (with Garth Hudson on accordion).  The accordion wasn’t known as a blues instrument (outside of  Clifton Chenier’s neighborhood, of course) but Hudson turns it into a blistering blues tool, particularly on “Caledonia,” a cover of the hot Louis Jordan tune.

Lost Classics! Chuck Berry

We all know Chuck Berry as that duck-walking, guitar-slinging rocker from the late 1950s-early 1960s, the guy who wrote and recorded classics like “Maybelline,” “Johnny B. Goode,” “Roll Over Beethoven” and many, many more.  Berry did all of these for Chess Records, the seminal Chicago blues and rock label that was also home to Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf.

But many people know little about Berry’s excursion away from Chess in the late 1960s: by 1966 Chuck wasn’t cranking out top-selling records any more.  Berry thought if he left the small Chess label and signed with a bigger label, more money would be spent on getting his records onto the radio and back atop the charts.  So in ’66 he signed with Mercury Records, much to Berry’s disappointment.

The more corporate label had ideas about making Chuck Berry more “relevant” to audiences starting to dig the crazy sounds coming out of San Francisco.  Berry, on the other hand, wanted to make records like he did in the early 1960s.  So it was a constant battle for Chuck Berry – with producers, with label bigwigs – and the four years he spent at Mercury were mostly aimless.

In 1967, Berry released a couple of live albums for Mercury, the second of which was Live at the Fillmore Auditorium.  He was backed by the Steve Miller Blues Band, which would later become the Steve Miller Band and earn a number of its own hits in the 1970s.  Looking back, this album isn’t bad – it focuses on the slow blues that was popular at the time and which Chuck Berry played in the first place.

Lost Classics! The Greatest Blues Album in the World

In 2003, acclaimed movie director Martin Scorcese produced a series of seven films, each created by another acclaimed director, and they called the whole thing “Martin Scorcese Presents The Blues.”  The series aired on PBS and my favorite episode was “Godfathers and Sons,” directed by Marc Levin (not the idiot right-wing talk radio guy).

Levin paired Public Enemy rapper Chuck D with Marshall Chess, son of Leonard Chess and heir to the Chess Records legacy, in Chicago and the film followed them as they produced an album combining contemporary hip-hop musicians with veteran blues and jazz players.  But along the way the film explored the rich history of Chicago blues as recorded by Chess Records, and there was great footage of Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson, Bo Diddley and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, along with original performances by Koko Taylor, Otis Rush, Magic Slim, Ike Turner and Sam Lay.

As good as the film was, the soundtrack CD is even better: it could be the greatest blues album ever released.  Among the 22 tracks are a couple of hip-hoppers and white boys, but when I’m playing the blues I always seem to gravitate back to this album.  There’s a couple of genuflections each to the two gods of Chicago blues – Muddy Waters is represented by “Mannish Boy” and “(I’m Your) Hoochie Coochie Man,” while Howlin’ Wolf checks in with “Spoonful” and “Little Red Rooster,” classics all.  And the killer lineup includes Koko Taylor with “Wang Dang Doodle,” Jimmy Rogers, Buddy Guy, Magic Slim, Little Walter and Jimmy Reed performing their best-known songs.   And what would a Chess anthology be without the late, great Bo Diddley – he could fill an album all by himself but here he’s represented by “Diddley Daddy.”

Lost Classics! “The Back Door Wolf”

Blues great Howlin’ Wolf revealed himself to be a somewhat bitter and angry fellow with The Back Door Wolf, released on Chess Records in 1973.  The Wolf, real name Chester Burnett, was incredibly popular in the late 1950s and early 1960s – his 1962 album Howlin’ Wolf (the “rocking chair” album, because there’s a rocking chair on the cover), with classics-to-be “Wang Dang Doodle,” “Little Red Rooster” and “Spoonful,” was his biggest hit and one of the greatest albums ever made.

But by the late 1960s-early 1970s Howlin’ Wolf wasn’t as popular and the big shots at Chess kept trying to find ways to keep their artists current (and selling records).  The Back Door Wolf as a result features some “topical” songs of the day written by the Wolf his own bad self.  “Coon On The Moon” speaks to the prejudice still evident in the time and with the lyrics “You gonna wake up one morning/And a coon is gonna be President” he sarcastically predicted the election of the nation’s first black President 35 years later.

Later in “The Watergate Blues,” Wolf celebrates the black security guard who found a little piece of tape on a door and started into motion a series of events that brought down that era’s president.  The lyrics of these topical songs are rooted in a particular time but they’re still listenable today for their passion and fury. 

Wolf is supported by the great Hubert Sumlin on guitar, but Detroit Junior’s use of the harpsichord on some of the songs is a little odd.  And Wolf himself plays a mean harmonica.  The Back Door Wolf turned out to be Howlin’ Wolf’s final studio album; he died in 1976. 

MP3: “Coon On The Moon”

MP3: “The Back Door Wolf”

MP3: “Moving”

MP3: “The Watergate Blues”

Howlin’ Wolf Home Page