| AS ORIGINALLY PRINTED
IN RHYTHMS MAGAZINE -
AIN’T NOTHING BUT A FEELING
Maybe it’s the weather, but lately the hellhound
on my trail has found me delving into my blues collection &
that got me thinking about my journey with the blues & how long
that it’s been part of my life.
Like most of my generation I came to the blues
secondhand via the Rolling Stones, The Animals, The Pretty Things,
Fleetwood Mac & John Mayall covering the greats like John Lee
Hooker, Robert Johnson ( my first purchase), Muddy Waters, Bo Diddley,
Howlin Wolf & wherever cover versions, cover notes & interview
mentions led me. If you looked hard enough there were signposts
everywhere, leading to the crossroads & beyond but always to
that feeling; the grit, the lonesome wail, the universal sadness,
the soul.
In the early 70s Melbourne underwent a blues (rock)
boom, bands like Chain, Billy Thorpe & Carson gigged, recorded
& charted with great success & perhaps because of that Melbourne
also played host to tours by greats like Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy,
Junior Wells, Arthur Big Boy Crudup, Otis Spann & others playing
to a couple of hundred seated & devoted fans in the Lower Melbourne
Town Hall. But it was a strange cultural divide. On stage immaculately
coiffured, sharkskin suited, shiny shoed, incredibly stylish upwardly
mobile mature black men, effortlessly laid down the blues as if
it were second nature, which of course it was. Meanwhile the universally
white young scruffily hirsute audience fidgetted in their deliberately
downmarket dishevelled denim & sneakered feet as they gazed
in awe & incomprehension at their recorded heroes, both sides
heading in 2 very different directions but united in their love
of the music.
And then after that it seemed that the greats
began to die off, blues became a style rather than a feeling, the
notes more important than the groove, the flash covering the dirt
at the roots. But then in 1981 New York Times journalist Robert
Palmer released his book “Deep Blues” a passionately
written immaculately researched & obviously deeply felt history
of the blues & it’s rise up the Mississippi delta &
his personal encounters with the living blues & the musicians
still rooted in the tradition. It was a revelation, rekindling the
excitement & interest in the blues & to this day still stands
as one of the great music texts. As it turned out it was the first
part of a trilogy.
A decade later Eurythmic & blues fan Dave
Stewart was setting up a film company & as his first project
wanted to do something on the blues, a fan of the book, he contacted
Palmer about filming a road trip through the south in search of
the parallel hidden world of the living blues, he enlisted veteran
documentary cinematographer Robert Mugge & together they created
Deep Blues the movie.They visited jukejoints, bars & anywhere
the rural blues was being played & introduced the viewers for
the first time to the still primitive rhythms, distorted detuned
electric guitar & gruff simple incantatory vocals of people
like RL Burnside, Junior Kimbrough & others as well as vividly
capturing the dirt poor country environment in which they struggled.
It was a triumph. In conjunction with the movie
they also put together the Deep Blues CD, a collection of down &
dirty, raw & ragged gutbucket blues from those practioners in
the movie. It was a triple whammy. Around the same time young white
sometime college student Matthew Johnson fell in love with the largely
unrecorded Mississippi Hill Country blues & with $400 leftover
from his student loan decided to set up Fat Possum Records in order
to record the practitioners for the first & sometimes only time,
calling in Robert Palmer to help finesse some of the early releases.
Sadly Palmer died at 52 of liver failure, although really he failed
his liver, but Fat Possum Records has beaten the odds & continues
to this day, after intially preserving people like the elderly RL
Burnside, Junior Kimbrough, Asi Payton, Robert Pete Williams &
more before it was too late onto disc, the label has since branched
out to a younger generation white & black of blues performers
& lovers.
It’s one of the few record labels whose
quality control ensures that each release becomes essential for
the genuine blues fan, as the company slogan says “ We’re
trying our best “ & indeed they do. As an adjunct to the
recorded output the company has also released a splendid book, Darker
Blues, a remarkable collection of black & white, colour, portraits
& candid photographs of their performers & their environment
coupled with cryptic descriptive text & biographies, that gives
an almost visceral textural experience to the reader & as if
that wasn’t enough, it also includes a humourous comic &
a compilation CD & a CD of otherwise unavailable RL Burnside
material!
Most recently they’ve also released a DVD
called You See Me Laughing, a documentary that follows Johnson &
his partner as they try to deal with their irascible & often
difficult artists, as well as capturing the unique almost like a
foreign country trapped in time, Mississippi Hill Country. Both
joyful & poignant, prompting laughter & tears, it’s
an enthralling document, a testimony to the human spirit of all
those involved & perhaps the passing of people & an era
the likes of which will never appear again.
As to how the blues will mutate in the 21st century
is any one’s guess, but thanks to the keepers of the flame
like Robert Palmer & Matthew Johnson with one foot in the past
& one in the present, it’s legacy will not be forgotten.
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