Samuel James - And for the Dark Road Ahead

New Blues

Virtuoso blues guitar playing on dobro or nylon acoustic [Camus is great example], Samuel James complements this excellence with the most meandering storytelling – no so much in the narrative line, though this can be complex and expansive – but in the way it dictates variations in the pace and playing of the blues guitar, which is finger-picked and slapped and strummed [all brilliantly] in tandem with the shifts of the telling. His voice too ranges from spoken to crooned within these evolutions in each song. There’s even the spoken comic poetry of The Execution of Big Black Ben, Parts 1 and 2. Superb.

Eric Burdon and Jimmy Witherspoon - Soledad Blues [1971]

Blues Brothers

A great pairing for performers who have felt and sung the blues genuinely in their own ways, this is a pleasing rather than brilliant collection. However, it is its relative ordinariness – considering their names and reputations – that makes it so effective. Every track is solid, no more and no less. There are two interesting covers of others’ well-known blues offerings, James Taylor’s Steamroller and John Mayall’s The Laws Must Change. The original album, released in 1971, was titled Guilty and had eleven tracks; this version released in April of last year [though there may have been another earlier compilation/variation] has fourteen tracks, including four live cuts, one of Going Down Slow where Witherspoon introduces Burdon as a gentleman responsible for that great group called War – it’s a damn shame an Englishman had to come all the way from London to get a bunch of soul brothers, you know, and make a big star out of them when nobody in America would touch ‘em. Not the greatest outdoor recording [the wind is a-blowin’] but it’s got character. There’s also a good bar-room version of Chuck Berry’s Have Mercy Judge and some cool wah-wah guitar on Soledad.

Stepping Stones

This ritual of stepping on stones out of the dark

has been imagined into existence by a god

or an oddball trickster – and I must cross daily

believing only the latter could create such a

precarious escape. If my two-faced provider

chanced them into being, then I too gamble on

their pattern when nights are the worst – not

just for not seeing [it is a different yet act of

faith all the same] – but because the next day

inevitably follows. When I fall, that too is a

coin-flip away from splatter or levitation, though

either is as fleeting as the occasional winnings.

Here is a rite of passage where the step away is

always ended on a stone stuck in its beginnings.

Reg Presley [The Troggs] - 12 June, 1941 - 4th February, 2013

Seminal Songs

It would be easy to over-think this, so I won't, but there are songs you remember from your youth that made their extra impact at the time of hearing. For me there's Roy Orbison's Oh, Pretty Woman, The Kinks' You Really Got Me and All Day And All Of The Night, and The Troggs' Wild Thing.

I know that's quite a conventional quartet, but they did spring immediately to mind, and guitar riffs seems to connect them, as well as melody and the other mysteries of time and place.

And over-thinking interrupted before I could stifle, so Elvis Presley's Return To Sender entered my head and pattern, breaking it from the guitar point of view, but I guess melody and surname will have to do as a link in also thinking of Reg.

Steve Earle - Calico County

Aperitif 

Because he is so genuinely cool, and writes both the greatest righteous rock struts and sensitive ballads, here’s a listen to Calico County [here] from Earle’s latest album The Low Highway due out in April.

The Holy Modal Rounders - If You Want To Be A Bird

Holy Sacre Bleu

The Holy Modal Rounders song If You Want To Be A Bird was made famous when it appeared in the film and on the soundtrack of Easy Rider. It’s a playful, anarchic tune and you can analyse the lyrics as, most likely, a paean to being free, or an encouragement to taking drugs, to get ‘high’ – but it is basically one helluva lotta fun.

Founding members Peter Stampfel and Steve Weber joined The Fugs for a short time and that helps in characterising their musical inclinations, Weber writing The Fugs ‘hit’ Boobs A Lot.

So whilst it’s predictable enough as it has been done before, it is still a shame to see their irreverent and/or happy-go-lucky song being used in a current William Hill Bingo advertisement, with, even worse, some dick dressed up as a bird – such silly literalism stripping the song of its original purpose even further.

And what’s next – an advert for school kids swapping their Dairylea cheese sticks/strips/whatever at lunchtime to the cannabis joint-sharing anthem Don’t Bogart Me by Fraternity of Man, also from Easy Rider? 

I know, I know. But sometimes you still have to say something.