SPECIALS

SPECIALS

RECORDS

The Blues Project: making the mid-sixties connection,

Ken Emerson

by

Their moniker came from an Elektra anthology album (A Compendium of the Very Best on the Urban Blues Scene) on which Danny Kalb had exhibited some quite proficient acoustic picking. John Sebastian, then utterly unknown, had played harp on one cut. Back when Kalb was a Greenwich Village folky, second guitar on Phil Ochs� first record, among Dave Van Ronk�s Ragtime Jug Stompers, and with Sam Charters something called The New Strangers, He was in earnest too. �I play the blues because it is my most natural form of expression. I love the blues because . .. they�re real,� some liner notes quote him as declaring. This of course was silly, because Kalb wasn�t playing blues so much as good-time folk, and he haled from suburban Mount Vernon, New York, where he�d wielded lead guitar for a rock band called The Gay-Notes. If blues was his most natural f form of expression, mine is Urdu. But then, hypocrisy would be one of the hallmarks of The Blues Project. The fact is, the band Kalb formed (A1 Kooper on keyboards, Steve Katz on rhythm guitar, Roy Blumenfeld on drums, Andy Kulberg on bass and flute, and Tommy Flanders, at the beginning, on vocals) was downright subversive.

You see, the folksingers and their audience had hung around college )ong enough to know that rock �n� roll was just kids� stuff. So we were all sitting there in The Cafe Au Go Go, Thanksgiving vacation, 1965, acting real cool and listening to Bukka White and Judy Roderick and I forget who else, when these guys, who were to close the show, came on and in no time at all ripped the place .apart. In retrospect, this wasn�t so hard to do, the basement being so cramped and low-ceilinged, but anyway, The Project made it impossible to play it cool anymore. By the time they got to �Who Do You Love� I was yelling my head off, and I still like to think I can hear myself in the background of the group�s first and best albqm, Live At The Cafe Au Go Go.

What The Project did was take a blues and pretend to play it. But actually, for them the blues was not something to reverently recreate, it was not at all a means of expression, it was a pretext for rock �n� roll excitement. Everyone else - The Stones, John Hammond, Paul Butterfield - took the blues with some degree of seriousness. The Blues Project (along with, to give them their due, The Yardbirds on Having a Rave Up) was the first band to realize how ridiculous it was for middle-class whites, especially if they were Jewish, to try to play the blues. So they caricatured and melodramatized it, distorting it into rock frenzy. The Project and The Yardbirds started something, and to them may be traced every pseudo-blues group and every thirty-seven minute version of a Howling Wolf tune. Decide for yourself whether these granddaddies are to be honored or execrated for their offspring.

Moreover, Danny Kalb wasn�t wasting his time memorizing old bluesmen�s licks. While Eric Clapton (who left The Yardbirds because they weren�t serious enough), Mike Bloomfield, and even Keith Richard were polishing their imitations, Kalb was making fast and furious noise. In fact, you were never sure he knew how to play electric guitar. His thick clusters and frenetic flurries of notes seemed uncontrolled. Were his jazzy discords intentional or mistakes? He was unpredictable and therefore exciting, a rock �n� roll manic. In 1965 and �66, right up to his breakdown and the arrival of Jimi Hendrix, Danny Kalb was arguably the most original rock guitarist going. But he was too far ahead of his time, and only later would we learn that purity, discipline, and technical skill are less essential to rock guitar than energy, speed, and volume. Danny was a trailblazer.

Live At The CAGG was also important in that it was one of the very first rock albums to sell respectably without AM air-play. In a sense The Project was the first underground rock group. Previously the underground, by which I mean that market indifferent to AM radio, had been devoted to folk music and blues; The Project nudged it into rock. And The Project tried to appeal to college kids, not just teenagers. They themselves had been to college - Danny spent two years at Wisconsin - and they signaled a crucial turning point in American pop music, when bands were no longer composed of high school, but of college dropouts. The bifurcation of American rock into an above-ground AM audience and an FM underground generally comprised of older listeners who dismissed their juniors as teeny-boppers, dates back to The Project, although it was preeminently Frank Zappa who a year later would exploit and institutionalize this split.

For all its significance and merit (it remains even today quite a listenable album), Live At The CAGG was utterly eclipsed by the band�s second record, Projections, which marked the end of American rock�s innocence in very much the same way that The Beatles� Revolver exploded the naivete of British pop music. These two albums, appearing in the latter half of 1966, were self-conscious, eclectic and intellectual as rock records had never been before. In The Project it was A1 Kooper who was responsible for this, and Projections was his album just as Live At The CAGG had been Kalb�s. Kooper, like the Beatles of Revolver, brought to rock a new cynicism and detachment that were fatal to its earlier exuberance and vigor. Rock became something to manipulate.

The most striking thing about Projections was that, as on Revolver, the individual cuts had nothing to do with each other. The jazz instrumental, folk-rock ditties, blues extravaganzas, ballads, and flat-out but highly structured rockers were not the out-pourings of an integrated consciousness, but rather, diverse and dispassionate exercises designed to impress the listener with the chameleon-like versatility and virtuosity of the band. This sort of ostentatious eclecticism is diametrically opposed to that of The Byrds, for example. McGuinn has always drawn upon many different kinds of music and turned them into music that is distinctly his own. His work has been a triumph of unity and personality over multiplicity. But the fragmented and discontinuous eclecticism of Projections dissipates identity and wholeness; it�s debauched. The title is terribly apt. The plural indicates the album�s lack of singlemindedness, the Latinate abstraction reflects the intellectual pretensions of the music, and the record is a series of projections, anticipations and portents of what much of pop music, largely as a result of the influence of Projections and Revolver, would become: meaninglessly multifarious.

Projections was also one of the very first rock albums on which a group asked to be taken seriously as musicians, artists even, who were more than mere rock �n� rollers. Their emphasis on soloing was entirely new in pop music. Outside of Sandy Nelson, Roy Blumenfeld�s drum solo was, I believe, the first ever (and a poor one to boot). Suddenly rock was no longer fun and games, but a performance to be judged critically. Is this solo deft and imaginative, or a plodding imitation? Is X a better guitarist than Y? Questions such as these had rarely occurred to the pop audience; they had always seemed more appropriate to jazz or blues. Sure, I knew that Chuck Berry was an adept guitarist, but I didn�t think about it very much, and I certainly didn�t try to analyze his solos. But Projections provoked such critical examination and helped create the climate which would make Cream, Yes, and so many other groups possible. The Project drew attention to its instrumental dexterity in part because it lacked a decent vocalist, and ever since its success the vocal has been a less important element in rock. No one takes exception to �Layla� because Eric Clapton can�t sing.

There are a lot of interesting things on Projections. �I Can�t Keep from Crying� and �Wake Me, Shake Me,� particularly the former with its painful dissonances, are extremely exciting because of the tension between the rigorous discipline of Kooper�s arrangements and the anarchy of Kalb�s aggressive guitar. And Kalb�s solo on �Flute Thing� is remarkably sophisticated and lyrical. But the album, like Revolver, is slick and hollow, and this was the price The Project had to pay for its �advances.� They forfeited the spirit of rock.

The clash between Kooper and Kalb was not restricted to �I Can�t Keep from Crying.� Volatile Kalb, with a genuine understanding, I believe, of the vital personality and dynamism of rock, and Kooper, the shrewd and anonymous arranger and mechanic, the author of Gary Lewis� �This Diamond Ring,� tore the band apart. They managed to release a third album, Live at Town Hall, which consisted mostly of old material, and then they dispersed. Kalb seems,to have suffered a complete breakdown, and he disappeared. Kooper planned to go to England and become a superstar, but finally he joined Steve Katz, who was assembling Blood, Sweat and Tears. Meanwhile Blumenfeld and Kulberg persisted as The Project, adding at one point a black vocalist, and gradually metamorphosizing into Sea Train. This last grouping made an album, Planned Obsolescence, while still calling itself The Blues Project, but the personnel (Blumenfeld and Kulberg, John Gregory on guitar and vocals, Don Kretmar on bass and sax, and Richard Greene on violin) is exactly that of.the first Sea Train album.

CONTINUED ON PAGE 80.

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 73.

BS&T and Sea Train are legitimate progeny of Projections. Both have numbered among their many members musicians who are very skilled, but in a way that elicits respect yet never emotion or affection. Each of these groups is of course very eclectic, and their albums are hodge-podges of hoedowns, funk, jazz, rock, folk, classical music, and the kitchen sink, incorporating everything but character and spirit. The same pertains to what Kooper has done since striking out on his own.

If there was one man in The Project who might have been expected to create something as exciting as Live at The CAGG, it is'TCalb, but he is the most disappointing and pathetic of all. Whatever the details of his collapse (presumably drugs played a jiart), he has never recovered. Now he plays and even looks as if he has been lobotomized.

His first effort after The Project was Crosscurrents, a decorous acoustic collaboration with folksinger Stefan Grossman. It�s a pleasant album which may have appealed to Kalb because it recalled a more tranquil era before the hassles of The Project. But Kalb couldn�t forsake rock, and three years ago with the assistance of Kretmar and Blumenfeld, who had disembarked from Sea Train, he launched The Blues Project II. Soon the Roman numeral was dropped and an album, Lazarus, released. Despite its title, Lazurus is a stiff, and Kalb a very pale shadow of his former self. Most of the time he plays anemic, conventional blues/rock lines, utterly unlike his earlier idiosyncratic attack.

Kalb has since expanded his band to a sextet of losers, welcoming back ertswhile Project vocalist Tommy Flanders and adding David Cohen (Country Joe�s organist) and guitarist Bill Lussenden. I guess misery loves company, but that Flanders has returned to the^ fold is really a shame, for as a folksinger/songwriter he made an excellent album in 1969 called The Moonstone which he evidently lacked the energy to promote or follow up. Flanders has a lovely, languid falsetto which is admirably suited to fare such as Moonstone. As a rock singer he is inadequate, but then so is everyone else on Blues Project, the group�s 1972 album, and he fits right in. If possible, this record is even worse than Lazarus, and Kalb�s guitar even more flaccid. The decision to do a new version of �Back Door Man,� one of the stand-out cuts on Live at The CAGG, and another slowN Jerry Reed tune, like �Caress Me, Baby� on Projections, was unfortunate, because it invites comparisons which can only be detrimental to the current Project. The* group survives today as little more than a name, but its influence and significance are still very much with us. ^