Superb meeting of two blues guitar legends with added DVD
This 1983 live performance summit meeting between a legend and a soon-to-be legend has been reissued a few times on CD, including a hybrid SACD in 2003 and a remastered CD edition in July 2010. This latest version augments the original eleven audio tracks with video of seven performances, adding “Born Under a Bad Sign,†“Texas Flood†and “I’m Gonna Move to the Outskirts of Town†to the song list. At the time this pair met in a Canadian TV studio, Vaughan was blazing a trail into the blues world with his debut album, Texas Flood. King was long since a legend, and though he apparently didn’t recognize the name “Vaughan,†he immediately recognized the young guitarist who’d sat in with him whenever he played in Austin.
The video dimension turns this session into a master class for both Vaughan and the viewer. Vaughan is seen soaking up lessons from King’s guitar playing, stage manner and the verbal notes he provides between songs. What was previously a musical conversation now becomes a visual one as well. King is often seen marveling – almost in surprise – at Vaughan’s playing, and Vaughan’s expressions capture the joy he feels in so clearly making the grade. Without a live audience, the two bluesmen play for each other and for the blues. The ease of King’s play, the naturalness with which the guitar forms an extension to his soul is awe inspiring. The snippets of dialogue between the CD’s tracks have always shown the personal bond that complemented the guitar slingers’ artistic connection, but the visuals shed new light on the deep affection they clearly have for one another.
King and Vaughan are backed by the former’s tack sharp road band, and run through a set drawn mostly from King’s catalog. You can hear what was on the horizon, though, as Vaughan rips into his own “Pride and Joy†with monster tone and a gutsy vocal. Throughout the session the players trade licks and prod each other with solos that quote all the great players from whom they learned. King’s influence is clear in Vaughan’s playing, but hearing them side-by-side gives listeners an opportunity to hear how the same fundamentals change as they filter through different fingers and hardware. As Samuel Charters points out in one of the three sets of liner notes, Albert King fans will particularly savor the rare opportunity to hear and see him play rhythm guitar. The audio does a nice job of keeping their guitars separated slightly left and right, and the video lets you see exactly who’s playing what.
At the age of 46, Lucky Peterson has already had a forty-year long career. Discovered by Willie Dixon at three-years of age, Peterson was recording and appearing on television by the age of five. His apprenticeships with numerous blues legends led to solo albums on Alligator, Verve and Blue Thumb, culminating in 2003’s Black Midnight Sun for the Birdology label. It was at this point that Peterson’s drug problems began to affect his career, and the next several years were spent making releases on small European labels and, eventually, getting clean. Lucky for Lucky that the blues revere their elder statesman, and at middle-age he’s primed to reintroduce himself to American audiences.
This latest album was waxed with a number of Woodstock-area players, but it’s his triple-threat talents as vocalist, guitarist and organist that provide many of the highlights. The buzz of Peterson’s resonator guitar fills Blind Willie McTell’s “Statesboro Blues†and Robert Johnson’s “I Believe I’ll Dust My Broom,†begging his way inside on the first and forcefully calling out a cheating mate on the second. He turns to his piano for a cover of Ray LaMontagne’s (and Travelers Insurance’s) “Trouble,†giving the song a deep gospel groove steeped in his personal recovery. Salvation is also the theme of Bill Calahan’s “I’m New Here,†a line of which provides the album’s title; Peterson finds room for a new interpretation between the plain folk styling of Smog’s original and the quick-paced cover recently released by Gil-Scott Heron. The music is more lush and Peterson’s connects with the lyrics’ portrayal of physical and spiritual rebirth.
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.
On last year’s Sea of Tears [review], Eilen Jewell stepped up from folk and country sounds to electric twang. She dropped the fiddle and harmonica of her earlier releases and sang solo with a rockabilly-styled trio of guitar, bass and drums. That same trio format, with the thoroughly stellar Jerry Miller on guitar and pedal steel, is employed for this terrific salute to Loretta Lynn. The band plays blue and lightly rocking across a dozen covers, melding Jewell’s jazz-tipped vocals with twang-heavy guitars and tempos that turn the ballads into sorrowful two-steppers and the rest into perfectly restrained rockers. You can hear Lynn in every track, but what you won’t hear is Jewell copying the subject of her tribute.
Jewell isn’t as feisty a singer as Lynn, which keeps “Fist City†and “You Ain’t Woman Enough (To Take My Man)†from delivering the originals’ heat. To be fair, Lynn wrote and sang these songs when such outspokenness, at least from a female country singer, delivered a shock and element of liberation that’s not available to a contemporary vocalist. Jewell’s cool approach works perfectly on the sly “You Wanna Give Me a Lift†as she brushes off an overly amorous suitor with the lyric “I’m a little bit warm, but that don’t mean I’m on fire.†For “Don’t Come Home A- Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ on Your Mind),†Jewell offers a promise of forgiveness in place of a half-cocked frying pan, and it works very nicely.
Another live side of Johnny Winter’s post-Woodstock band
Johnny Winter has always been a potent stage performer, as documented on numerous live recordings. His set at Woodstock, which has only recently been released in full, was a star-making turn, and after two studio albums for Columbia he formed a new quartet with members of the recently disbanded McCoys: Rick Derringer, Randy Jo Hobbs and Derringer’s brother (performing under the original family name), Randy Zehringer. That group recorded under the name “Johnny Winter And,†and with Bobby Caldwell replacing Zehringer, broke in their self-titled debut album with this 1970 set at New York City’s Fillmore East. The set includes only two tunes from their then-new album (Winter’s “Guess I’ll Go Away†and Derringer’s “Rock and Roll Hoochie Kooâ€), with the remaining titles drawn from Winter’s two previous albums.
The 1971 album Live Johnny Winter And documented the same line-up, repeating “Good Morning Little School Girl†(with improved fidelity here) while trimming “It’s My Own Fault†and “Mean Town Blues†to half the length of these extended Fillmore jams. Another difference is that this 67-minute set forgoes the ‘50s rock covers that dominated the 1971 release. This disc opens with a pair of blues on which Winter takes incendiary, extended solos, and “Rock and Roll Hoochie Koo†is played harder than Derringer’s later hit single. The twenty-two minute “It’s My Own Fault†is low and slow, providing more of the emotional shades Winter could bring to both his guitar playing and singing. Unfortunately, it’s the only slow number in the set.
The King of the Twist gets his soul heavily psyched
