Trans Atlantic Blues.

Trans Atlantic Blues.

Bob Stark

Ask a typical British blues fan who the best blues band playing today is and he’s likely to answer that it’s Fleetwood Mac or John Mayal Ask him what he thinks of B.B. King or Butterfield, and his answer is likely to be that they have a couple of nice sould bands. The attitude reflected in these two answers is significant in that it is indicative of the attitude of most fans of the “blues revival” in Britain, that is, that the blues as a musical form ended its development in America in 1956 with the coming of commercial soul music and rock and roll, not to be revived again until the emergence of John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers (although pushed along by the early Rolling Stones, Pretty Things, Downliners Sect and Yardbirds). This attitude is as parochial as the attitude in Americans that the British often attack—that you have to be black to play the blues.

The fallacy in the British belief is that the blues didn’t really die in 1956, it only appeared to die, and the thing which almost killed it was its own monotony. The years after World War II brought large scale migration of blacks from the South to the industrial centers of the North. They took factory jobs and settled into the slum ghettos. Many of these men had played blues in the South for extra money and it seemed only natural for them to continue playing in the bars of the North. But the new location exposed them to both larger black audiences and also a new white audience. So the scenes in several cities, especially Chicago, began to thrive. Many of the musicians found they could afford to quit their factory jobs and play full time; and many of the bars found it not only profitable, but, in fact necessary to provide entertainment seven days a week. But most of these men were self-taught musicians. They could only play what they’d learned and there were only a few good examples to follow. Consequently, many (if not most of them) sounded disturbingly similar—both to each other and within their own repertories. Soon, much of the audience saw that the music was stagnating, that monotony was only breeding more monotony, and began to look elsewhere for their music. Much of the unsophisticated segments of this audience turned to the more commercial, and more accessible, soul groups that were now emerging, while the more sophisticated segment, including most of the whites, turned their interest almost exclusively to the new jazz forms that were emerging. Most of the bluesmen went back to the factories, gigging only on weekends, and the scenes almost everywhere except Chicago virtually died. Only the best of the bluesmen survived. B. B. King and Bobby Bland toured constantly, and occasionally made the R&B charts with a record. Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson, and a few others, continued to play and record in Chicago, but even that was dying. The white kids now had Elvis and Buddy Holly, and rock music—a

music that, even if it wasn’t any “good” at least was theirs; and the black kids had soul—a gospel based musical form which stressed the ability to sing over the ability to play. And ask any kid if it ain’t easier to sing than it is to learn to play.

Then, about 1961, a little in America, but mostly in Britian, a lot of the kids came to realize that rock’n’roll was no longer their music—it was the province of a lot of old men who provided the kids, not with music that was meaningful but with music that they could sell and get rich from. In America, this led to the folk revival—a short-lived sidestep in the development of rock, which all but died of its own excesses just as the blues had. In Britian, the reaction was slightly different.

The British kids decided that if professionals weren’t making music for them, then they’d make it themselves. But most of these kids were just that—kids. Hardly capable of playing, let alone composing original material, they looked for songs amongst their old 45’s and 78’s, and built their repitors around songs by Buddy Holly, Carl Perkins, Little Richard, and Chuck Berry, often copied directly from the original records. Soon they’d gone about as far as they could with these songs and began to look for new sources of material. This brought them back to the recordings of Elmore James, Sonny Boy Williamson, and a few others that were available in Britian. But, at about this same time, most of the groups that were to achieve prominence in the first wave of the British rock invasion found either within their own membership, or among their friends, a source of enough good original material to build an act around, so that much of the blues material was absorbed as an influence, rather than copied directly as the early rock’n’roll had been.

All this was occuring at just about the time these groups began to gain national prominence in Britain (late 1962 and early‘63) and predated the British invasion of America by almost a year, so that by the time American audiences got to hear the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Yardbirds, Who, Kinks, Moody Blues, and Zombies, they had developed at least a style which audience could identify them with and which differentiated them from all that had gone on before. They were all rock’n’roll bands, and their music appealed to a significantly large segment of the American kids, so—rock’n’roll was back.

But meanwhile, back in Britain, something else was happening. A lot of people had begun to listen to mid-50’s blues records and there developed a demand to hear this kind of music performed live. Some early attempts were made to bring these people over to Britain. (Sonny Boy Williamson played and recorded with the Yardbirds at the Crawdaddy Club during his second British tour) but by the time the movement really got going, most of the performers it idolized were either dead, or into different things with their

music, so the answer again became— play your own. This was all well and good, except that somehow, most of the musicians and their followers, rather than openly admitting that what they were doing was recreating a ten year old musical form began to claim and even believe that what they were playing was the blues, the one and only blues, and that anything else that portended to be the blues was some cheap imitation. This was unfortunate, because at almost the same time this was going on, another blues revival was going on among the folk music set in America.

Paul Butterfield emerged from the south side of Chicago (about the only place in America where there was a thriving blues scene) and into national prominence in 1965, appearing at Newport and releasing his first album. This was followed by an increased interest in the music of Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and B.B. King, and in the new generation of Chicago bluesmen like James Cotton, Buddy Guy, and Butterfield. By early 1967, there were full-fledged blues revivals going on in both Britain and America, but the music going down was separated by about ten years development.

Anyone who sa\V the film “Festival” (about the 1965 Newport Folk Festival) will probably remember the interviews with Mike Bloomfield and Sun House which were intercut with each other. At first, it seemed funny to hear Mike, a Jewish kid from Chicago, talk about the blues in terms of getting in the groove, moving with the music, gettin into until you’re there, and then cutting quickly to Sun House, one of the originals, who went into a long rap about the blues being when you’re alone, and your woman’s run off with another man, and you’re sitting home with nothing to do—that’s the blues. But after thinking carefully about what they said, they were talking about the same thing. The blues of men like Robert Johnson and Sun House became 12-bar blues, not because that was the only musical structure which would work to bring out the feelings they wanted to convey, but rather, because they were untutored musicians who worked within the forms which seemed most natural and allowed them to improvise solos on their guitars, harps, and pianos. The music was not about its own structure—it was about feelings and emotions, specifically the “blues” and the sound of the music tried to approximate the awesome sadness of these emotions. And that’s what both Bloomfield and Sun House were saying. The music is about feelings, not about how well, or how fast, you can string together twenty-two different Elmore James riffs, or whether your drummer cn do a 12 minute solo. Yet these are the things which the British stress, though only the Cream and maybe Ten Years are willing to admit it. The cream made almost no pretense of being a blues band (playing live they never even tried to be) — they were three solo musicians who played against each other instead of together, and everybody knew it, although their studio recordings were marred by attempts at being “serious” musicians. But even when they are together, the British are either imitating old blues

or showing off how well they can solo. They’re too affluent, in velvet and lace, to even try to work within the blues, as Sun House laid it down, and they just can’t seem to get it together playing the blues. They sound dull and uninspired because the music they’re playing is not the music they grew up with-it’s music they learned. Because of this, there is, to a lesser degree, the academic coldness which makes classical music interesting to listen to. The early Stones and Yardbirds avoided this because even when their material was straight blues, they never lost their identity as rock and roll bands. They were loud and tinny, and their British backgrounds dominated their stage presence. Which brings us back to Fleetwood Mac, who, for the purposes of this article, serve well as a representative British blues band.

They have appeared in Detroit at the Ballroom five times. Their first appearance was last summer at just about the time that the American version of their first album was released. They were virtually unknown and the performance was on a Thursday night, so the crowd was very small—200 or so. They started in playing slow blues—not a bad job of imitating Elmore James records, but almost no one, including the band seemed to care at all about what was happening. John McVie, the bass playr, was standing in one corner of the stage with his eyes closed, not moving at all and playing virtually the same bass line in every song. The rest of the group was only slightly more awake. The audience, conversely, was very mobile;most of the people walking around not really listening to the misic. A lot of people left early. Then for no apparent reason at all, everything changed. They announced their last song and went into “Shake Your Moneymaker,” one of the best songs on their first album. All of a sudden they came to life, jumping and shouting and playing like crazy, playing rock’n’roll like the early Stones, out of Chuck Berry, and everybody came to life. The audience got to its feet and then onto benches and chairs. Everyone was clapping and shouting and the band was really getting it together. They did two more songs which sounded pretty much the same, and easily sustained the same fevered pitch in the crowd. The last three songs lasted as long as all that had preceded it and made everyone who stayed forget how boring it had been at the start. And, though their blues playing in their subsequent appearances has been considerably more inspired and their style has become far more their own, they still fail to generate anywhere near the excitement playing the blues as they do playing rock’n’roll. And the same is true in varying degrees of all the British blues bands. For the most part, the musicians heard and played rock first, but they seem to be afraid to let this influence enter into their blues playing. They try to keep their blues “pure” and generally end up sounding like all they can do is copy other people’s styles. Yet, when they stop playing “blues” they can do dome fantastic and creative things because they don’t have to play with a form that someone else has defined.

Well, here we are again, talking about blues, and whether English blues is copy or original, or if B.B. King is a better guitarist than Peter Green, because Green is white and never picked cotton. Dung!

In another popular tabloid of this city, I have already given a comprehensive history of English blues, but I guess no one read it, so here we are again. First of all, I don’t want anyone to write and say that I don’t know what I’m talking about ‘cus I’m English, because that kind of attitude is nowhere! So:

British blues started in the wool mills and textile markets of England and Scotland, as more what most people call folk than blues. Now, these people had never heard of south side Chicago. They starved— they had diseases—they lost their women. So let’s get rid of “ya gotta be black” and “ya gotta have a Les Paul” and “Mike Bloomfield jammed with B.B. King, he must really be outasite.”

To coin a cliche, “blues is a feelin’. ” You’ve got it or you haven’t. And any guy who has | worked seventeen hours in a Lancashire cotton mill to come home to a wife, and two children under fifteen years old, who have just worked the | same shift, hacking coal out of a pit that’s likely to collapse at any moment, has that feelin’! The difference between him and Lightnin’ Hopkins is that Hopkins is a spade.

Now, in technique, color doesn’t I matter. But spades have more soul.

Why? I don’t know. But they do.

I That, however, doesn’t mean that | white blues is inferior. It’s still | blues—it’s still that feeling.

So, when the folk revival of the | 1940’s began in England, the people | who had previously sung “the blues”

i became prettier and more stomachable. Like, my mother is not gonna like “Let Me Squeeze Your Lemon,

Baby” because it’s too raunchy. The I Seegers, Peter, Paul and Mary, early 1 Baez, and Hester are saying the same | thing with lyrical sugary wrapping $ paper that makes the brand of blues & into folk, and therefore acceptable j as part of their social heritage.

mat left, a big gap in England which nobody filled. This state continued until people around 1955 began to hear old Bessie Smith 78’s along with tapes of Tampa Red, Hopkins, Lone Wolf, Memphis Minnie, Elmore James, Guitar Slim, and B.B., Albert and Freddie King. These names are household words in most parts of England, as they have been now for almost two decades. You will have noticed that I have not mentioned rock and roll yet, and that is because people who played the blues in England did not listen to R & R. They heard it and it added another dimension to their styles, but it was treated, as it should be, as just another form of blnesra louder and faster rhythm, but nothing more. The hoppers blew up the R & R bubble.

The next step in British music, around 1957, was skiffle—a coagulation of jazz; folk and blues, and out of this form came the New Orleans names and styles, later to be superimposed into blues. Names such as Pete Fountain, Jelly Roll Morton, early Satchmo, some Art Tatum, Earl ‘Fatha’ Hines, were added to the minds of bluesers in Britain in conjunction with their accompanying styles being infiltrated into the systematic chronological development and evolution of individual styles. Thus, when Alexis Korner formed his band, in early ‘62, he used the people who, as far as he knew, had taken every American style possible and combined then all with the British folk-blues styles, so as to be playing good and meaningful blues. Good meaningful blues is that when the artist in question has the aesthetic ability to convey his emotions to the listening audience. If the artist is blessed with technical ability on his instrument, then that makes it better, but without the spiritual feeling, the technique alone is meaningless. So Alexis, John Mayall, Cyril Davis, Rod Stewart, and Nicky Hopkins played the blues in England in ‘62. His stand-in guests are the entire Who’s Who of English bluesmen. Some small distance away, Graham Bond started his band, featuring Peter Baker on drums. From these two bands came almost every blues group in Britain. Now the sound that was put out at this time has often been said to be copied off Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley. This, however, is not correct. Berry and Diddfey developed their styles by combining the melodies and styles, from the old bluesmen in the USA, with the rhythms and beats of the new rock and roll sound. The British bluesmen did the same. This can be proven by the fact that neither Berry nor Diddley were heard in Britian until ‘63, by which time the blues bands were already playing the same style drawn from the same roots. This is not to say that Mayall played Berry before Berry, but that Mayall played Berry before Mayall heard Berry. The bluesmen took their sound from the same place that Chuck Berry did.

(The following few paragraphs are reprinted from my earlier Fifth Estate article:)

“So the snowball gathered speed. Mayall left to form his own band featuring Davy Graham as his first lead guitar player. (Davy would later become one of the country’s finest writers of acoustic guitar music. Listen to “Angie” from the Simon and Garfunkle Sounds of Silence album for example.)

“Rod Stewart left to sing with Long John Baldry and Julie Driscoll who, with the Brian Auger Trinity, formed the Steam Packet. Eric Burdon, Zoot Money, Georgie Fame, and Stevie Winwood also formed their own highly sucessful groups. Peter Baker left Graham Bond, changed his first named to Ginger, and eventually joined the Cream.

“John Mayall found a rough, amateurish guitarist called Eric Clapton—fresh from the dizzy heights of stardom with the Yardbirds-took him under his wing and trained him to the blues.

“When Clapton left Mayall to

form Cream with another “pop” player, Jack Bruce, he took with him as fine a knowledge of blues styles as was possible. Thus when Cream was first formed it was the hardest, most incredible blues group anywhere.

“Before long, the leprositic rot of high finance set in and Cream started to die.

“And what of Mayall? Well, he simply took Peter Green into his band and carried on business as usual.

“Graham Bond took Jon Hiseman as a replacement for Ginger Baker.

“Alexis Korner just carried onnever spectacular, but always the originator.

“So then Peter Green just stumbled across Jeremy Spencer, a small, compact, powerhouse of musical ability and a great artist when it came to feeling the blues. Peter had gone, -by this time, as far as John Mayall could take him, so he took Jeremy, and Mayall’s long standing bass player-John Me Vie—and formed Fleetwood Mac with Mick Fleetwood.

“As this activity continued, Long John Baldry became sick of destitution, cut a ballad record and had a hit. Rod Stewart joined Jeff Beck to form a soul/blues band and Alexis Korner just carried on.

“Mayall added horns and Mick Taylor on the lead guitar, cut another album just as one of his old drummers formed the Ainsley Dunbar Retaliation.

“Still not finding the sound he was truly looking for, John Mayall made Blues Alone through the miracle of engineering-released two albums recorded live—dropped some horns and added Jon Hiseman on drums and a violinist and a trumpet player and made Bare Wires.

“And very recently, he has slashed his Bluesbreakers down to four people including himself.

“To return to the ear of the Alexis Korner Band, his original line up fell apart a little more when two of his vocalists and a drummer left. Mick and Charlie formed the Rolling Stones and Paul Jones formed Manfred Mann. Then, Viv Prince and Ray Sone appeared out of nowhere to form the Pretty Things and the Downliners Sect respectively.

“Manfred Mann at this time was made up of: Paul Jones, vocal/harp; Mike Vickers, guitar/sax/flute/clarinet/vocals; Mike Hugg, drums/vibes; Tom McGuiness, bass/rhythm guitar; and Manfred Mann, vocals and keyboard instruments.

“Having played a “jazzy blues” sound for some eighteen months, Paul Jones left to pursue a solo career as a singer-actor; Mike Vickers became musical director to the British Symphonia Orchestra and later became the leader of his own orchestra.

“Manfred Mann then turned to pop. The Pretty Things lived on as blues people up until last year when they cut “Emotions”, still blues based but somewhat more psychedelic in its approach. The Steam Packet disbanded leaving Julie and Brian to do their own thing. Cream have now broken up, the Stones are together but are no longer a blues band. ”

The Yardbirds split, and Jimmy Page formed the Led Zeppelin with some other session men: Robert Plant (ex Robert Plant and his Band of Joy), John Bonham (ex Band of Joy), and John Paul Jones (ex Jet Harris and Tony Meehan). Rod Stewart has signed as a solo artist with Mercury Records although he will still work with Beck. Peter Green found another “unknown” named Danny Kir wan, who was too good to find a back-up band for, so the Mac now has two lead guitarists and one slide guitarist.

So, that’s British blues! And what of American blues?

B.B.’s still there—so is Albert. Anybody seed Freddy King? Butters has a nice soul band going, as does Buddy Guy. Don’t try and tell me that “Knock on Wood” is blues, man, ‘cus it just isn’t. Big Brother is nowhere without Janis, and not much further with her. Micheal Bloomfield is now almost a hermit, by popular request, and A1 Kooper is way away. Steve Katz is developing as a very tasteful guitarist and is learning communication of emotion out of his head, instead of off Bobby Bland albums.

Nobody seems to remember that Ray Charles is still the “guvnor” and Mama Thornton, Nina Simone and Ella Fitzgerald do a good job as his harem. Carolyn Franklin and Erma Franklin are still underexposed. People will shortly realize what a good blues band Pacific Gas and Electric are. Jimmy Cotton is a good dancer and so on. Siegel Schwall finally gave up, and the Colwell-Winfield Blues Band took their place as “Top 40” bluesmen.

The real names are now session men or winos, or dead or doped, or very occasionally, playing the Fillmore complete with light show and psychedelic back-up group. Otis Spann, Willie Dixon and Walter “Shakey ” Horton have just cut three albums with the Fleetwood Mac, as session men. Lightnin’ Hopkins, B.B. and Albert are doing their ballroom thing, Ray Charles is living off Coke commericals, and Ella has gone to the top and stayed there, still swingin’ and scat singin’. Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley are around somewhere. Memphis Minnie lives alone in the South. (If you wish to write to the gal—and I’m sure she would like you to, drop me a line at Creem and I’ll give you her addressno cranks please.)

And that’s about it! Blues is blues. It’s always there, always was and always will be. People will always dig it but never will anyone just leave it be, and stop dissecting it into white and black, American and British and African.

It’s a feeling—that’s all.

Tony Reay