Johnny Winter at Woodstock: Mean Town Blues

[JSngry]

Why when Coltrane plays 'My Favourite Things' for an hour is it a artistic and spiritual high; but when a white guitarist plays a 13 minute guitar solo it becomes a 'wankfest'?

It's pretty much gonna be what each individual wants/needs it to be at any given moment.

[A Lark Ascending]

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.,

It also explains why quite a few of us rock fans of the early-70s became jazz fans in the later 70s.

[i'm always amused by the way that the punks who reacted against early 70s rock but got successful enough to fill stadiums ended up playing 70s rock...without the guitar solos! U2, REM etc!)

Edited February 27, 2010 by Bev Stapleton

[JSngry]

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.

"Dead" is often confused with "not relevant at the time". At the time of the Ramones, and for what the Ramones (and by extension, "their people") needed out of music/life, it wasn't particularly relevant. You get enough people for whom it's not particularly relevant for a long enough time and it will appear "dead", often for quite a long time. But nothing really "dies"... eventually everything will become relevant to enough people again.

[A Lark Ascending]

Why when Coltrane plays 'My Favourite Things' for an hour is it a artistic and spiritual high; but when a white guitarist plays a 13 minute guitar solo it becomes a 'wankfest'?

It's pretty much gonna be what each individual wants/needs it to be at any given moment.

I think it's 'received wisdom'!

[JSngry]

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.,

It also explains why quite a few of us rock fans of the early-70s became jazz fans in the later 70s.

I was a late 60s rock fan who became a jazz fan, but for me the main impetus was rhythm. Rock pretty much stopped swinging for me, and jazz, well, hey...

But now, most jazz has stopped swinging for me, and its the House/DJ scene that really swings to me now (when it in fact does, which is far from always...)

Which is not to say that all I need is a good beat, far from it, but any idea delivered without what to me seems the grace of the dance impulse (notice i said "impulse") generally strikes me as being aggressive, oppressive, regressive, and/or any other number of tendencies with which I prefer not to engage. That much dance music does deliver these negative qualities speaks to me more of the "ain't what you do, it's the way that you do it" ethos, in which I am as firm a believer as I can be of anything.

[A Lark Ascending]

It was definitely the soloing that drew me to jazz. The hardest thing I found at first was the relative 'simplicity' of the tunes - early 70s (non-blues) rock modulated all over the place, strung different tunes together etc. I was hooked to key changes as to sugar! Jazz seemed to have a much simpler structure - obviously to alow much more complex improvisation to happen.

I think what jazz (and classical and English/Irish folk, which I started exploring at the same time) did was introduce me to much subtler ways of using rhythm - but that was a side effect. It had enormous consequences as I now find four-square rock beats very hard to take. And if anything they've got more four-square and been pushed much further to the front of the mix.

I think I have very European ears when it comes to rhythm. It's always been secondary. My ideal is Stravinsky rather than James Brown!

[JSngry]

Why when Coltrane plays 'My Favourite Things' for an hour is it a artistic and spiritual high; but when a white guitarist plays a 13 minute guitar solo it becomes a 'wankfest'?

It's pretty much gonna be what each individual wants/needs it to be at any given moment.

I think it's 'received wisdom'!

Well yeah, based on who receives it from who and what they need it to mean.

I mean, there is no shortage, I mean, no shortage at all, of people who get a "spiritual high" when a white guitarist plays a 13 minute guitar solo, or for that matter, when a tenor saxophonist (of any color) plays a 13 minute solo. still plenty of people who want/need that, and still no shortage of people to give it to 'em. Maybe not enough to dominate the world market and make it seem "important", but still plenty enough for everybody to get what they're looking for. Trust me on this one...

But really, if I have a choice between a nicely-crafted 2:15 pop record or a 13 minute wankfest, I'm going for the pop. And if I have a choice between a 13 minute solo of substance and a 2:15 piece of shit popslag, I'll invest the 13 minutes.

Now, who decides which is which? That's the real question, and ultimately people make their own choices, received wisdom or not, unless they're total mind-zombies, and even then, I'm sure that there were Nazis or Khemer Rouge Cambodians or any such group who would tell you that the real "zombies" are the ones who fall for the lie that there isany other way than therir won, so really, hey, follow your bliss, let others do the same, enjoy responsibly, and don't expect a friction-free life, because without friction, there would be no life.

[Joe]

Well, since Texas is not really part of the "South", I mean, it is in some crucial ways but not in others, I think you have your answer!

I thought so. As a kid I could hear that in the music anyways.

It also depends upon which part of Texas we're talking about / looking at. San Antonio, Austin and Houston are all within about 3 hours driving distance of each other, but Doug Sahm does not equal Roky Erickson does not equal The Red Krayola.

[JSngry]

I think I have very European ears when it comes to rhythm. It's always been secondary. My ideal is Stravinsky rather than James Brown!

But Stravinsky interpreted "correctly" (at least how I perceive it as correct) makes the rhythm no less important than any other element. Now, with prime JB, what happens (for me) is that the focus on "pure rhythm" allows for that rhythm to then take on more of a harmonic and textural life all its own that putting more on top of it would otherwise allow. People not attuned to that ethos don't hear it that way, which is totally cool by me, but when people try to tell me that it's not there, that harmony can't be heard/created entirely through a certain way of feeling/creating a certain type of rhythmic process, that's when I throw down the challenge. Because you can.

But Stravinsky, yeah, Stravinsky swung. Bartok swung. Bach swung. Mozart swung, but more like George Shearing.

Point is, every people have rhythm, it's just that not all people have the same rhythm. And now that there's very little room left in which to hide, things can either get really groovy, really ugly, really confused, or all of the above, often at the same time.

Definitely interesting times, these are....

Edited February 27, 2010 by JSngry

[A Lark Ascending]

But really, if I have a choice between a nicely-crafted 2:15 pop record or a 13 minute wankfest, I'm going for the pop. And if I have a choice between a 13 minute solo of substance and a 2:15 piece of shit popslag, I'll invest the 13 minutes.

Do you take a 2:15 pop record over a 13 minute Coltrane solo?

My view is that it depends on the pop record and depends on the 13 minute solo! The authorised version of rock history has asserted, however, that the former is approved and the latter (especially if played by a white player) is not.

My problem has always been an impatience with repetition - each verse being identical to the next with little variation. I recall being annoyed by this as a musically ignorant 14 year old. Now you can deal with that via composition or improvisation. With improvisation each chorus will automatically be different; pop/rock records that hold my attention tend to be the ones where each chorus has variation written in via added instruments, harmonic changes, a richer vocal harmony line or whatever (I don't think I could sustain my interest in 'Desolation Row' without the acoustic guitar obbligato!).

Whether it is 2 minutes or 13 minutes is neither here nor there for me. But does it change, develop, vary. That's where I get my interest.

Edited February 27, 2010 by Bev Stapleton

[JSngry]

Well, since Texas is not really part of the "South", I mean, it is in some crucial ways but not in others, I think you have your answer!

I thought so. As a kid I could hear that in the music anyways.

It also depends upon which part of Texas we're talking about / looking at. San Antonio, Austin and Houston are all within about 3 hours driving distance of each other, but Doug Sahm does not equal Roky Erickson does not equal The Red Krayola.

Go a few miles north and none of them equal Bugs Henderson, who does not equal Bnois King.

Then again, a lot of people do not equal Bnois King...

[JSngry]

But really, if I have a choice between a nicely-crafted 2:15 pop record or a 13 minute wankfest, I'm going for the pop. And if I have a choice between a 13 minute solo of substance and a 2:15 piece of shit popslag, I'll invest the 13 minutes.

Do you take a 2:15 pop record over a 13 minute Coltrane solo?

In all honesty, I take both, depending on what i want/need at the time, and if that means going back-to-back, then back-to-back it is!

And sometimes, I take neither, for the same reasons.

[A Lark Ascending]

But really, if I have a choice between a nicely-crafted 2:15 pop record or a 13 minute wankfest, I'm going for the pop. And if I have a choice between a 13 minute solo of substance and a 2:15 piece of shit popslag, I'll invest the 13 minutes.

Do you take a 2:15 pop record over a 13 minute Coltrane solo?

In all honesty, I take both, depending on what i want/need at the time, and if that means going back-to-back, then back-to-back it is!

And sometimes, I take neither, for the same reasons.

Me too!

Which is why I'm impatient with those who would tell us that one approach is right, the other wrong.

[JSngry]

Hey, I hear ya' on that one!

I mean, subjective as it is, we can discuss individual substance all we want & probably have a decent enough discussion whether or not any agreement is reached, but when it gets into discussing "style" as substance, as if any one style of anything has merit over something else just because it is what it "is", then hey, no thanks.

[kenny weir]

Johnny Winter = Wynton Marsalis

Each to his own. I'm no fan of either, but this strikes me as both absurd - and inaccurate, in the sense that the cultural landscape was so different. Even if you consider Winter a "white boy playing (at) the blues", he nevertheless came up in era quite different from navel-gazing that attended WM's career.

Each is concerned with only a small fraction of the past of the music that they love, which they believe to be the crucial bits of those kinds of music.

For example, has Johnny Winter ever shown any interest in Joe Liggins, Charles Brown, Roy Milton, Harmonica Fats, Esther Phillips, Big Maybelle? (I don't know the answer to that question, by the way, so it isn't rhetorical.)

MG

I simply don't see it as either/or situation.

And as for the examples you cite:

But it seems to me that the big influence on the Blues in the sixties was Soul music ... Magic Sam, Junior Parker, Bobby Bland, Lowell Fulson, Slim Harpo, Junior Wells, Koko Taylor, T-Bone Walker, Jimmy McCracklin, Albert King, B B King, Freddie King, Buddy Guy, Jimmy Dawkins and Albert Collins

... well I can't talk about a matter influence here when I consider them part of the same thing. Sure, some of it was more downhome and country, but Muddy Waters and Etta James recorded for the same label and appeared on the same charts.

For example, has Johnny Winter ever shown any interest in Joe Liggins, Charles Brown, Roy Milton, Harmonica Fats, Esther Phillips, Big Maybelle?

I don't know either, but I DO know that among the likes of the Allams and the Muscle Shoals guys in their formative years, Bland's Two Steps From The Blues album was a massive influence. So, no, I don't think they spent all their time digging Elmore James.

Edited February 27, 2010 by kenny weir

[kenny weir]

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.

There's been a fantastic doco series screening - easily the best of its kind I've seen - called The British Invasion.

I've seen three of them - Dusty Springfield, Herman's Hermits, The Small Faces.

*All over 1 1/2 hours long.

*No gratuitous talking heads (sociologists, ageing rock hacks, contemporary stars paying homage) - all those interviewed are leading players in the story.

*Each one I've seen has made me rethink the artist concerned.

*Best of - this series PLAYS WHOLE SONGS. This is unknown to me in a lifetime of watching music docos.

Anyway, despite being a lifelong Faces fan - Itchykoo Park was the second record I ever owned - the Small Faces episode was a revelation in terms of the live footage: I had little idea before this just how much of a great R&B singer Mariott was.

Edited February 27, 2010 by kenny weir

[Joe]

Well, since Texas is not really part of the "South", I mean, it is in some crucial ways but not in others, I think you have your answer!

I thought so. As a kid I could hear that in the music anyways.

It also depends upon which part of Texas we're talking about / looking at. San Antonio, Austin and Houston are all within about 3 hours driving distance of each other, but Doug Sahm does not equal Roky Erickson does not equal The Red Krayola.

Go a few miles north and none of them equal Bugs Henderson, who does not equal Bnois King.

Then again, a lot of people do not equal Bnois King...

Or Brother Vernard Johnson, for that matter.

[JSngry]

Wellsir, Vernard is from Ft. Worth, and I know you know that Fort Worth does not equal Dallas...

[John L]

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.

Some of the white boys, especially the British crew, indeed did more than just popularize the blues, even though a lot of them started out doing little more than that. They developed it in new directions. I think that is more evident in the best of the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin (as yes, James Gurley) than in the works of those more purely oriented to playing straight American (usually Chicago) blues. The latter group includes a number of highly accomplished instrumentalists, but few really new voices in the grand tradition. Stevie Ray was one (IMO). Maybe a case can be made for Winter as well. Mike Bloomfield, a great guitar player for sure, will still never be a BB King no matter how many times he outplayed him. And that is not because of race.

As Dan, MG and others have indicated, blues rock was not the only thing going on in the 60s and 70s that was breathing new life into the blues. The gospel based sound of blue soul of people like Little Johnny Taylor, Aretha Franklin, Bobby Bland, Clarence Carter, Johnnie Taylor, O.V. Wright etc., etc. arguably had as much, if not more, to do with the future of the blues than did blues rock. Of course, their music was not entirely a black product either.

The blue funk of James Brown et al arguably WAS the sound of the future, and it had quite a lot to do with the blues back then.

Edited February 28, 2010 by John L

[A Lark Ascending]

It's right to point out how blues music mutated over here into something completely 'inauthentic' in many cases - by Led Zeppelin III there were large dollops of country and English folk starting to surface. And in Birmingham it was turned into Heavy Metal which owed little more than the song structures and lyrical content to the blues model. One of the most intriguing was Fleetwood Mac who seemed to be evolving a quite wonderful concoction that used the blues as a basis but with a rich and melodically broader approach around the time of 'oh Well!"...and then they split up and the band turned into something else.

The other side of the coin was the reaction against blues based music. Many of the more creative bands of the early 70s quite deliberately tried to avoid blues based music (there's not much in Genesis or Yes, Caravan or Henry Cow) as did the folk-rockers. Very much a strike for independence from the model they'd all loved and grown up on.

I learned to love the latter and had very little time for blues based music - it was Led Zepp's folky side that got my attention! I had to learn to love jazz before I could start to see the beauty and power that lay within blues based music. When I was first listening it seemed like a tired formula.

If I'd been born ten years earlier...even five years earlier...and exposed to the blues/soul boom I'd have heard it all quite differently.

[kenny weir]

If I'd been born ten years earlier...even five years earlier.

So you didn't dig the blues-based bands much at all, but you were born Ten Years After?

Confusing!

Edited February 28, 2010 by kenny weir

[A Lark Ascending]

If I'd been born ten years earlier...even five years earlier.

So you didn't dig the blues-based bands much at all, but you were born Ten Years After?

Confusing!

Ho! Ho!

'Love Like a Man' was one of the first singles I bought...more, I think, because I was trying to locate a taste outside the pop norm than any real liking for it (I also bought Black Sabbath's 'Paranoid' around that time...another dead end for me!). I know I soon found it repetitive and never followed up with an album purchase.

Growing up in a house full of 'The Light Programme', Broadway/Hollywood musicals and light opera/classics (and in places that were all white-British [with a dash of Irish]) the whole blues/soul thing just had little soil to grow in. I suspect my compass is still steered by those early influences, regardless of the places I've chosen to visit outside their orbit.

Maybe if I'd grown up on the back streets of Leeds or Newcastle I'd have been an animal!

Edited February 28, 2010 by Bev Stapleton

[Big Beat Steve]

Johnny Winter = Wynton Marsalis

Each to his own. I'm no fan of either, but this strikes me as both absurd - and inaccurate, in the sense that the cultural landscape was so different. Even if you consider Winter a "white boy playing (at) the blues", he nevertheless came up in era quite different from navel-gazing that attended WM's career.

Each is concerned with only a small fraction of the past of the music that they love, which they believe to be the crucial bits of those kinds of music.

For example, has Johnny Winter ever shown any interest in Joe Liggins, Charles Brown, Roy Milton, Harmonica Fats, Esther Phillips, Big Maybelle? (I don't know the answer to that question, by the way, so it isn't rhetorical.)

MG

I simply don't see it as either/or situation.

For example, has Johnny Winter ever shown any interest in Joe Liggins, Charles Brown, Roy Milton, Harmonica Fats, Esther Phillips, Big Maybelle?

I don't know either, but I DO know that among the likes of the Allams and the Muscle Shoals guys in their formative years, Bland's Two Steps From The Blues album was a massive influence. So, no, I don't think they spent all their time digging Elmore James.

Let's face it, through most of the 60s and 70s that particular kind of the blues that had that BIG "Rhythm" in its name was very much a no-no to those "real" blues fans - not only the Whites who took their inspiration from the ol' Black masters but also to the (younger) Blacks with whom R&B had fallen out of favor even before that "classic" Chicago, "electric" blues (or whatever you call it) had become outdated when Soul bcame the #1 music with the Black people. R&B did live on in a way in some elements of Soul but still ...

So how were those young Whites really to discover R&B if everybody else just proclaimed all those (rediscovered) down home / country blues artists on the one hand and the modernized Chicago-style bluesm en ont he other were what the ENTIRE spectrum of blues was all about? R&B somehiow ended uop in a sort of no-man's land and it must have taken some special appreciation and awareness to really get deeply into rediscovering R&B - which by the late 60s was very much a "historical" style of the blues in the same way that "hown home blues" actually was a historical style too, eccept that quite a few "down home" blues artists still were around (or had been rediscovered) and still playing their music, whereas those R&B men who still were around had gone on to much more modern styles (cf. Johnny Otis etc.).

[kenny weir]

when Soul bcame the #1 music with the Black people. R&B did live on in a way in some elements of Soul but still ...

So how were those young Whites really to discover R&B

Sorry, everything I've read and heard, then and since, leads me to believe that R&B (in the way it's being discussed here) and soul (ditto) are part of a continuum. Yes, there were differences - a Civil Rights factor, for instance. But for many, many of the participants at the time, I doubt such a "change" was barely worth remarking on. Bobby Bland and Solomon Burke are just two that come to mind as having s stake on both camps. Bland and Little Milton recorded for Sun before going to Duke and Chess/Stax respectively. To me, Bobby is an R&B artist AND a soul singer.

As for R&B, well in one of those odd twists, it may have actually been easier for a teenager in NZ to latch on to that stuff than a likeminded soul in the US, at least one who wasn't already to scouring joints for 2nd hand discs or hanging out in black clubs.

Not that we had the records in our shops (plenty of blues, but no R&B).

But through reading the likes of Blue Unlimited, I certainly became quickly aware of the likes of Joe Liggins and Floyd Dixon.

And this Specialty comp (and its Vol 2), from the early '70s, were hugely influential on me:

And after that came the Route 66 label with releases by Wynonie Harris, Dixon, Roy Brown and many more.

(Yeah, yeah, I know - this timeframe is a little later, just saying ...)

As well, while the Brit R&B/mod bands did a heap of Muddy and wolf, as well as Burke and Irma Thomas and so on, it wasn't unknown for them to also cover this type of R&B - as well as Buddy Holly.

Edited February 28, 2010 by kenny weir

[kenny weir]

Let me add that while I find this sort of hair-splitting - and this thread - fascinating, at this point I'm very much into finding connections, where previously such connections may have been denied me through my own bigotry/snobbishness, lack of knowledge of and exposure to the relevant music, colonial cultural baggage, entertainment industry disinformation and no doubt other factors as well!

(Which isn't the same as finding connections where none exist.)

And so I'm a little surprised that so many posts seem determined to hold to what I consider old-hat, outmoded stances and the upholding of yes/no black/white right/wrong delineations.

Is it really such a stretch to say that rock influenced blues/soul/R&B? Doing so, for me, in no way minimises let alone rejects the presence of other influences