Bright Lights

“The Blues had a baby and they called it Rock’n’Roll”. Blues booms have passed with their sonic wave reverberating behind them, with the first OGs less original gangsters and more hardworking geezers making a crust. The shock of 1960’s London dragging itself out of the oppression of Macmillan’s 50’s and into an electric world was fittingly a metaphor for the brave few “folk blues” practitioners washed up on those grey shores in that decade. John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, Son House came, sang and conquered the eager young men and women in coffee shop BoHo style turtle necks and pipes. Traditional folk music in England had its elements of hard times, hard scrabble existence and the ‘man’ in the Lord of the Manor and Droit de Seigneur. So southern folk blues resonated, as did the urban Chicago more swinging electric blues, whether you came for the picking or for the raw excitement you came and you were never the same.

I had the odd chance to share a beer with Lee Brilleaux of Dr Feelgood fame, a band whose name was taken from a song of the 50’s made famous by Etta James. It was in the 80’s in a pub in Sydney and we were both a long way from home. Lee was still wearing that shitty white jacket and was dying of lung cancer, unknowingly. I was a lone Brit in a sea of youthful tanned Aussies who happened to love both his band from their glory years a decade prior and his chosen vocation.

He talked of being a teenager in Essex going up for a night to Wardour Street and watching the Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated sharing the bill with Hooker and Waters and never being the same. Now god bless Alexis, great DJ and spreader of the word of the Church of Blues but he was never that great a blues shouter but he did pick some amazing sidemen. So I asked Lee who had he seen back then who made the most impression and he replied the Wolf. Howling Wolf, Chester Burnett, was as Bill Graham once said of another great axe man, a ”devil, devil, devil of a man” he was big, very fucking intimidating, he had a voice that could be used in LOTR voice overs and he sang about working class life where whiskey was cheap and so was the price of a man’s life.

I hung around coffee bars playing table football and pinball as a kid and young teenager listening to the jukebox playing classics like “When My Left Eye Jumps”, “Hellbound Train”, “Black Magic Woman”. This complete genre of music was fashioned by white working class kids stealing riffs and in some cases – I am looking at you Robert Planet – the whole words of songs and making it their own. Mix in a pop perspective in terms of time signature and the benefit of guitar and amp technology and we have the original blues boom in all its glory. It spawned Cream, Zeppelin and from those blues riff and drums grew forth heavy metal and rawk, Merkan style. It always amazed me that most of US so-called rock’n’roll actually got its lead from those poor pale English waifs rather than the original inspirations. The men who started electric blues in segregated America, in the 50’s, that spread the word with those great early tours of England under the auspices of Mike Vernon’s apocryphal Blue Horizon label. It was almost as if the color bar in the US needed the transatlantic mutation for music via John Mayall’s Blues Breakers, The Yardbirds, Savoy Brown, Fleetwood Mac and the like to then return to the land where the music had its roots to allow young white American kids to be able to access it. The Kings, Freddy, Albert and BB carried on regardless as did the originals, suffering near bankruptcy along the way other than Hooker who was smart enough to keep the songs and the copyright to himself. There was sadly an element of truth to the Cheech and Chong sketch about Blind Melon Chitlin being paid a “bottle of whiskey and a hooker” for a recording session.

Since that time only one black man has really spanned both worlds like Waters, Hooker and Burnett did and sadly he also had to do it in the UK to get a break first and that was Hendrix. He broke through with a band put together by the very astute former bass player of the Animals. Chas Chandler saw the young Jimi in the US when he was making his living on the Chittlin Circuit playing for Curtis Knight as a band guitarist but ripping the soul out of his cheap Fender through a wah-wah pedal. Took him to Swinging London, promised him and delivered unlimited white girls for pleasure, lashings of drugs and then put him in a studio with a very accomplished jazz drummer and a versatileguitarist who could also play bass. Jimi found his own path and his own band of gypsies to back him but still died in a damp hotel room in London.

So since that time African American artists have been great singers, great songwriters, great rappers, great dancers, a couple of brave outliers have been instrumentally outstanding but usually in the soft and preserved world of Jazz but nobody has taken the Blues for themselves as their culture, their word, their sound. I am sorry Robert Cray but you were just too easy listening to qualify.

So the baton has since been carried by the Vaughn Brothers, Roy Buchanan, the great Jack White and the Black Keys with no little commercial success. But look, what is that in the night sky? A new blues hero? A young amazingly talented African American who actually gunslings an axe and writes real blues songs? Really? YES. And lo his name is Gary Clark Jr and he is the real deal. He can sling as hard as anyone, out Stevie-Raying newcomers, with a voice that’s the perfect bridge between R&B and slow blues and oh, damn, he is cool looking like Jimi was so this dude is TV friendly too. At a time when the UK is enjoying a new blues boom with blues music being played in clubs again by young men and an amazing bunch of women (check out Chantal McGregor, Joanne Shaw Taylor and Jo Harman), there is hope yet for the US to wake up and acknowledge its own amazing blues heritage. And if they cant do that at least recognize the immense talent that Gary Clark represents. Listen to his update of “Bright Lights” or “When My Train Pulls In” and you have living kicking snarling guitar blues. By a young cool intelligent black man not some balding 60-year-old English guy.

So if you are listening to some hard ass blues by Gary what should you be drinking? My advice is a “Fucked Up” beer and shot a la Rio Grande Bar, which is on the edge of civilization i.e. near the Civic Center in downtown SF. So take a can of beer, Dos Equis works fine, dip the top edge of the can in salt, pop it, pour in two shakes of hot sauce, grab a Hornitos Tequila shot or Rye Whiskey, your choice and you are ready to get numb with Gary guiding you down that emotional path. If you go to the Rio Grande that will cost you $7 and worth every penny.