AllenLowe

I second the Mary Beth Hamilton book - and I would caution you to ignore the reviews, positive and negative, because I swear, these guys never read the book. Every review I have read is a completely inaccurate reflection of it - and I personally found it quite a brilliant work.

recordings - like a writer whose books are read but who remains at home - but these would have to be more limited than they tend to be today, when everybody in jazz-land is recording 4 cds a year.

I would argue, by the way, visa a ve the prior post, that Muddy and Little Walter were the new electric down homers, not the opposite.

A recent revelation: it has taken me maybe 40 years to figure it out, but I have come to the conclusion that the reason "contemporary" American performers hit so many stylistic and artistic walls is the fact that we know all too well who they are. At some point the ego of audience reception takes over, due to financial or whatever other reasons. We see the need to tour and record and repeat the process - particularly in rock and roll, but also in jazz. The result is repetition and boredom and more repetition and boredom (think also, Bob Dylan and Lou Reed, both of whom should have quit while they were ahead. And then think of all the crappy jazz CDs of all genres that come out month after month after month....) This, I now think, is at the root of the failure of so many musicians to grow - and if not grow, than to just STOP. The best performer is the invisible performer, physically anonymous, and just not present. I think it's finally time for almost everyone to disappear. -your faithful musical burnout, Allen Lowe

just to go back - John L I agree with a lot of what you say, but Bloomfield the guitarist was superior to BB King in every way. Just the most compelling guitarist of the 1960s, black or white. And one only had to listen to BB that night I heard them together at the Fillmore to know this was true - Bloomfield turned him inside out, played his own stuff back at him with more finesse and swing and variation. Ingenious stuff. As for what I think was the OVERWHELMING influence of white boys on black musicians in the 1960s, well, for many African American performers it was simply a matter of trying to go where the $$ were; certainly many thought they were trying to reclaim what was rightfully theirs. I might disagree with this idea, but it is certainly the way they felt they needed to go.

well, there's a few crazy white boys, who could/can play the blues - Bloomfield, Peter Green, Winter, et al. Bev's point about post-'76 rock is interesting because the Punkers, with some exceptions (Quine was one) tended to look at guitar virtuosity/solo skill as a dead issue. Of course things changed during No Wave, as with Arto Lindsay, et al, but rockers like the Ramones had little interest in the old-fashioned concept of the guitar solo.,

I've always felt that the "blues had a baby" lineage was oversimplified. More reasonably, in a true analogy to Darwin - whose theory of evolution says NOT that men evolved from apes but that they had related ancestry - rock and the blues had related ancestry. But there was lots more to it. It's like what an African American friend said to me years ago (and this was a guy, a former Black Panther, with an intense racial consciousness), "I never understood why people thought Elvis had stolen everything from black people, Because what he did was so completely different. "

the British mods were an interesting bunch, taking as much from Mingus as Ray Charles - and than moving toward the "pure" blues. Graham Bond's group with Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker was probably the best of these hybrids.

the white boys did more than popularize the blues, they revived in every way - and I saw Mike Bloomfield one night outplay BB King, and BB knew it - and Jimi Hendrix would have gotten nowhere but for the path blazed by people like Bloomfield and even Roy Buchanan in the 1950s, and but for the fearlessness of the new white guy guitarists, rock AND blues - and if you want to hear the future of the blues, listen to James Gurley's work on Ball and Chain with Janis Joplin on a SF television show - this was new and this was important. And Winter just gave it his own personal spin, which was not only unlike anyone else's but which was completely idiomatic at the same time that it was brand new - like with any great avant gardist. And yes, the recording I was referring to was the Woodstock Mean Town Blues - and also, btw, there are plenty of good white blues singers, from Frank Hutchison to Dave Van Ronk to Al Kooper.

I still think that 1960s rock blues woke up the older blues guys, who were getting old and complacent - I'll tell you a little story - when I was trying to sell my rock and roll history to Duke University Press, I explained, to the editor. about one thing in my book which I thought was unique in terms of historical perspective - in American music, the usual paradigm is that of White musicians saved, stylistically, by black musicians, in terms of impact and influence - in Jimi Hendrix's case we have something of the the opposite, a black musician who is facing the growing conservatism of the black bar circuit in the 1960s, who is slowly drowning in the disapproval of bandleaders like Little RIchard for his daring musical ideas - and what happens? He goes to England and gets rescued by WHITE KIDS, as part of those who, in the middle 1960s, were growing intellectually and musically. He finds acceptance and fame under the wing of white guys like Chas Chandler, Eric Clapton, Pete Townshend, et al who, unlike black audiences, recognize the importance of what he is doing. (and read Greg Tate on Hendrix; Tate acknowledges how out of it African American audiences were when it came to Jimi). The opposite of our usual historical experience. well, in that explanation I managed to convince Duke University to NOT publish my book, which is politically incorrect. So what happens? A few years later I'm reading a book which includes an interview with George CLinton, who started out as basically a soul musician but who ended up on the avant garde side - and what does George say? He thanks those "white kids" who allowed him to do what he wanted to do musically. And guess who published that book? Duke University Press. and that's how I feel about '60s rock, which had far-reaching musical impact, and which woke up the sleeping giant of the blues. And once again, listen to Winter CLOSELY, listen to Bloodwyn Pig, Bloomfield, Peter Green - these guys were all engaged in taking a tired old form and bringing new life into it - for that matter,listen to Buddy Guy in the film Festival Express. This was a new man, post '60s rock. This was an entirely new aesthetic.

well, as I said earlier, there's a difference between a wanker like SRV and Winter - but saying it all sounds the same is, to my ears, like saying Charlie Parker sounds like Cannonball Adderley sounds like Phil Woods. It takes a little time to discern within the boundaries of a particular style.

I think she's really Frau Verbissener -

Dan, you gotta listen to it - it's the kind of thing that's been tainted by a 1000 bad hair-metal guitarists, but his time is just incredible, the facility and ease - and the respect for the idiom - this is much deeper than the things you guys are talking about - it's got nuance, and sense of vaiable touch - the way he goes into different registers, the sudden slide use - and, once again, his rhythm is just the end of it all. It's not the same, this has dynamics and feeling. a lot of jazz people have trouble with this stuff; it's like your parents hearing rock and roll (or free jazz) and thinking it all sounds alike. It does not. also - 1)I don't hear any semi-Eastern modality, and 2) John Hurt played a 6 string -

it's good to have this stuff around, Lester, my only comment is that I'd rather hear YOUR response to the music than one quoted from a third source. I think you'd change your perspective and get more out of it.

amazing, too, is how he seems to go from picked to slide - though maybe he's using the slide in a picking style, I don't know...

bumping for the benefit of human-kind.

this recording (released about 40 years later) is the reason that it is so hard to write music history based on available, primarily studio, sessions - this particular performance is simply one of the greatest blues performances ever put out - goes from the Delta to Chicago to Blind Willie Johnson, to wherever the hell else he feels like, in about 11 minutes. It is the perfect balance of virtuousity and feeling. Everything you need to know about the post-1960s blues is there. if you have not heard it, run, don't walk, to some place you can acquire it. Thank goodness I heard it before I finished editing my 1960s rock history. This is monumental. as I said elsewhere, it makes you wonder why ANYONE needs Stevie Ray Vaughan. this is genius -

all righty - 5 b5 4 b3 3 1 6 5 (1-6-5 descending at end)

no, though he probably does that one to death, too. If you listen to the Spoonful tune, it's the first 8 notes of the intro -

"Dear Kenny Weir, I need to get hold of you reg Bear Family. Please contact me off list at royal.beat@telia.com" uh oh, Kenny's in trouble now - I always wondered why he had an Andorra address.

Fountain isn't bad, but there is one riff he plays over and over which drives me up a wall - though I can't do notation on this post, it's almost exactly the same as the riff the Lovin' Spoonful use on the opening of Did You Ever Have to Make Up Your Mind - Pete plays it several times in just about every song he does.

I, like Chris, have had my skepticim held in check by some weird personal experiences - the night my father died I woke up in the middle of the night with what was like a stabbing pain in my back - like a deep spasm, and I woke up my wife, who rubbed it to no avail until it went away by itself a few minutes later - and then about three hours later I got a call and, as near as I could figure it, the pain occured at the exact moment that my father had died. so stuff happens, I think, and maybe we should not go crazy trying to explain it. On the other hand, Dan's experiences are a little more fundamentally disturbing than mine was. on the other hand, Dan, it might be Lester Perkins getting his revenge -

Rivers' versions of The Poor Side of Down and Baby I Need Your Loving are excellent. I first heard them in the late 1960s on one of his lps. I wonder what Lester Perkins thinks.

interesting, because there is a disembodied feeling to his posts. And Brad, I understand your point, and likely we should have been more direct initially in our objections, rather than being ironic, let us say. But there is just something about canned info that I find as troublesome as canned music.

well, I disagree - these are more than nits, they are really fundamental to the way one approaches history (and the way you, Chris, approach history). And I'm not saying that everyone has to do great in-depth research, or has to be a specialist, only that unattributed claims or historic citations don't really give us much.