Hardline Blues

That's cool blues

The cool thing about talking to Michael Powers this week was the humility he radiates. Sean Carney, who bumped into Michael at the Blues Music Awards, had already told me the creative New York guitarist and frontman was a nice guy; but, tempered as he is by his faith, he's also deeply appreciative of his recent success.

It's doubly pleasant because he belies the stereotypical image of the jaded New Yorker. Like any full-timer, he's had his share of tough times and tough lessons, but he's still struck by the wonder of it all from time to time.

You'd have a hard time believing it, listening to his music; his haunting licks and gritty vocals are really in a class of their own when it comes to evoking a wistful sense of urban pressure.

It seems to be the truth, however, that the guys who make it as far as Powers has -- he's 55 now, after all -- and still play blues always have that ability to tap their inner sense of quiet calm, and to be genuinely decent folk; Jimmie Vaughan, who has gone through his own fair share of challenges and tragedies, struck me as having the very same sense of self-assuredness in the spotlight.

Who knows, maybe it's just good parenting. But it certainly seems the more experience a blues player is, the better he carries himself. It makes a strong argument for clean living, albeit one most of us will ignore.

Where blues crosses over

Like most who play blues as a passion but make their living in a day job, I've fallen into the trap of being a blues nazi, an adherent to tradition for tradition's sake.

Or so I thought.

My recent conversion away from thinking only a certain sound of blues music was worth my time was prompted by an exploration of religion for  a newspaper series. That got me to thinking about the roots of orthodox belief, and how a set of misconceptions can guide our belief system.

Take the old argument that you can't play blues unless you're an old black guy; anyone who's listened to enough blues has heard a white guy do it convincingly, in a way that anyone could emotionally connect to, to believe that one anymore. But it's one of many conclusions people reach erroneously while trying to figure out the defining magical factor that is common to every good, true blues song.

So allow me this stab at screwing it up.

It has occured to me with increasing frequency that the difference between great blues and reverent blues, between the kind that leads to lemon-sucking facial expressions and the kind that makes 55-year-0ld grandmas at festivals dance, is the urgency of the piece at hand.

Take every blues performance you ever heard that was technically proficient but, for whatever reason, didn't "shake you from one side of your rib cage to the other," as Luther Allison once put it. It didn't make you suck lemons or foot tap uncontrollably. It was just.....nice.

Now go back and listen to that song again if you can find it, and use my insta blues-o-meter comparison technique:

1) Play the song. listen to it carefully. Then remove the cd.

2) Pop in "Black Magic" , by Magic Sam. Play track 7, "You Don't Love Me." Listen for the sense of urgency, the compulsion behind what he's singing. If you're still not quite sure what I'm talking about, play track 3 on the same disc, "Easy Baby." Listen for the sense of urgency, the compelling argument made not only by Magic Sam's plaintiff, hard-edged soul vocals but by the stabbing single string guitar, the leaden-but-lyrical rhythm pounding out behind him.

3) Go back and listen to your tune. Chances are it's missing that bare minimum of at least one dominating, urgent expression, whether it's the vocals or the lead playing.

Now, go back to every argument you've ever heard between a longtime blues player who has branched out to other styles and a "blues nazi" fan. The inability for us to articulate this urgency leads to the player thinking the fan is creatively banrktupt, and the hardcore fan, who gets addicted to that sense of urgency in the music, thinks the player is selling out on the blues.

Folks, there's nothing wrong with stepping away from 'urgent' blues music to stuff that's lyrical, poetic, rhythmic or funny, but lacking that driving sense of brevity and urgency. I may not do it, perhaps, as much as I should. But occasionally, it's fun not to suck lemons while enjoying a night out.

As for the performance end of it? Well, maybe figuring out how urgently you need to express the blues; how commonly the sad songs are in your repertoire because you're genuinely ticked; how commonly the shuffles and uptempo songs are there because the knots in the muscles in the neck mean you need to cut loose. Maybe it is simplistically easy to just say the blues are a  matter of whether you've got 'em or don't. Maybe you can love the blues, and play the blues without having the blues.

But it probably won't feel urgent. And the blues nazis will remain unsatisfied.

It's flooding down the basement...

...and all of my amplifiers are down.

There may be nothing worse you can tell a musician -- even a part-time goof like myself -- than the horrible truth that his basement has flooded. I'd give you 5-1 odds there's a guitar laying down there somewhere; and there's a good chance there will be electronics as well, which could cause all sorts of problems.

My weekend episode wasn't nearly that bad -- groundwater seeping into the basement from a rapidly thawing/flooding in the rain backyard. But being a blues fan it was only appropriate when, during my first break from using a four-gallon portable wetvac to fight back the sogginess, I turned on my itunes shuffle mix and got an apropos greeting from Fenton Robinson, doing the classic Texas Flood. '

His take on the song is an interesting one. It's far softer and more soulful, I think, than Stevie Ray's; it's less grandiose than the boomy, horn-drive Roomful of Blues version . But it got me thinking how a good song is often only as effective as who is delivering it. Recently, pop and rock stars like Christina Aguilera and Aerosmith have done a fine trade moving discs that were in the majority blues cuts. In some respects, it's great advertising in the ongoing question of every hardcore blues fan to get the rest of the world to understand what we already know.

In another, it's a bitter confirmation: that if people hear blues, they like it. These discs got that mainstream exposure and suddenly, Aerosmith fans are cranking out Baby, Please Don't Go like it was a Saturday afternoon in Greenwood, MS. And yet, without the artists in question already having the power of an established commercial fanbase, it never seems to take place. It was just as true when the aforementioned SRV hit the scene; 'blues' promotion was conspicuously absent from his first CD because Jackson Browne warned it would stigmatize the music.

So, the commercial mainstream's lack of knowledge of blues makes it difficult to get the commercial mainstream to play blues, even though we know their listeners like it. Talk about a catch-22.

One thing that I do know is this: The synchronicity thing rarely works when it's a good song. If we're stuck in a traffic jam and "Crosstown Traffic' comes on, we want to beat our heads on the steering wheel. But if 'Good Day, Sunshine' comes on and it happens to be a bright sunny day, we still wanna kill whichever idiot wrote it.

Download texasflood_sh.mp3

The two-faced nature of blues

One of the neat things about my newspaper letting me cover blues and use material both here on the site and in the printed edition is the issue of choice.

For years, newspaper music reviewers have been plonking little stars, or suns, or smiley faces, at the end of columns to signify an overall ‘rating.’ On this site, I don’t have to do that.

Ratings are, of course, pretty foolish, and basically only exist to play to the public’s need to have its decisions made easier.

Within blues reviews, for example, there are often so many differences between stylistic approach and artistic relativity that to say one guy is way better than another is pretty speculative, at best.

That’s not to say that being a critic changes much; you’re still giving your honest opinion, if it’s done right, and sometimes your opinion just won’t jibe with another. To suggest, however, that someone holds the magic key to figuring out relative musical value, is ridiculous. The music either does it for you, or it doesn’t.

There is an intangible within blues, however, that continually fuels the debate over whether it’s ‘good’: the lemon-sucking factor. As with other organic music forms -- right from field hollers and repeating line baptist choruses to Franciscan monks chanting and buddhists reciting mantras -- blues contains an element that lets some people find real solace in it.

It’s called lemon-sucking (I don’t know if BB King coined that term or is just its most famous user) because it draws the player, or listener, into that zone where they lose conscious perspective of why they feel so damn good, and even of how they appear, which is why they tend screw up their faces, like they’re ‘sucking lemons’.

There are all sorts of biological indicators as to why this happens; look up the work of neurotheologist Andy Newberg for some of the scientific explanations as to why. But it sure is familiar to all of us; you’ve seen BB King do it. If you watch this week’s feature artist, the great Lurrie Bell, play guitar you’ll realize he’s doing it most of the time. He’s that into what he’s doing and, as he explains, drifting off as it provides him with great comfort and emotional release.

The great divide in blues comes between those who’ve found a style of the music that generates that sentiment and those who haven’t and just don’t get that sensation, or even understand it.

This debate, when seen through the perspective of someone who merely enjoys listening to blues as they do any other music, is between ‘blues nazis’ who want conformity to traditions and ‘creativity’ in exploring something new.

When seen from the perspective of the adherent to traditions, it’s between "real blues" and "white boy blues/reverent blues/festival blues" and any other number of numbskull descriptions.

The reality, of course, is that both sides are right to notice a difference, but too hasty to judge. As someone who, as a younger guy, was frequently in the blues nazi camp, I speak from experience.

The blues can come from just about anywhere but, depending on the audience, will always leave folks firmly divided as to its purpose: fun music or an emotional release. Some get the latter and consider it essential to the proceedings. Others don’t. Some labels are built around it -- Delmark has always seemed to me to be the ultimate lemon-sucker’s blues label -- others are more eclectic.

The only -- rare -- exception I’ve run into are musicians who are so creatively connected that they tend to get that other-wordly, lemon-sucking connection from many styles and genres. They tend to be the most confused, and annoyed, of all of us. They’ll tell you music is music and you can find that joy from any direction.

Perhaps sadly, many of us don’t. We find it in the release from emotional burden, from a rhythmic intensity that can suck in cheeks, make thigh muscles cramp, makes eyes close while feet tap uncontrollably. That’s what drives the ‘blues nazi’. I’ve talked to older artists who will tell you that, in conspiratorial tones reserved only for issues that are bad for business, they consider the ‘lemon-sucking’ connection to be what real blues is all about.

They may be right about that. But, like I said, reviews are objective. There are orthodox adherents to other genres, other forms of relief. So when it comes down to it, maybe no one gets to dictate terms. Maybe just digging the music will suffice.

The two-faced nature of blues

One of the neat things about my newspaper letting me cover blues and use material both here on the site and in the printed edition is the issue of choice.

For years, newspaper music reviewers have been plonking little stars, or suns, or smiley faces, at the end of columns to signify an overall ‘rating.’ On this site, I don’t have to do that.

Ratings are, of course, pretty foolish, and basically only exist to play to the public’s need to have its decisions made easier.

Within blues reviews, for example, there are often so many differences between stylistic approach and artistic relativity that to say one guy is way better than another is pretty speculative, at best.

That’s not to say that being a critic changes much; you’re still giving your honest opinion, if it’s done right, and sometimes your opinion just won’t jibe with another. To suggest, however, that someone holds the magic key to figuring out relative musical value, is ridiculous. The music either does it for you, or it doesn’t.

There is an intangible within blues, however, that continually fuels the debate over whether it’s ‘good’: the lemon-sucking factor. As with other organic music forms -- right from field hollers and repeating line baptist choruses to Franciscan monks chanting and buddhists reciting mantras -- blues contains an element that lets some people find real solace in it.

It’s called lemon-sucking (I don’t know if BB King coined that term or is just its most famous user) because it draws the player, or listener, into that zone where they lose conscious perspective of why they feel so damn good, and even of how they appear, which is why they tend screw up their faces, like they’re ‘sucking lemons’.

There are all sorts of biological indicators as to why this happens; look up the work of neurotheologist Andy Newberg for some of the scientific explanations as to why. But it sure is familiar to all of us; you’ve seen BB King do it. If you watch this week’s feature artist, the great Lurrie Bell, play guitar you’ll realize he’s doing it most of the time. He’s that into what he’s doing and, as he explains, drifting off as it provides him with great comfort and emotional release.

The great divide in blues comes between those who’ve found a style of the music that generates that sentiment and those who haven’t and just don’t get that sensation, or even understand it.

This debate, when seen through the perspective of someone who merely enjoys listening to blues as they do any other music, is between ‘blues nazis’ who want conformity to traditions and ‘creativity’ in exploring something new.

When seen from the perspective of the adherent to traditions, it’s between "real blues" and "white boy blues/reverent blues/festival blues" and any other number of numbskull descriptions.

The reality, of course, is that both sides are right to notice a difference, but too hasty to judge. As someone who, as a younger guy, was frequently in the blues nazi camp, I speak from experience.

The blues can come from just about anywhere but, depending on the audience, will always leave folks firmly divided as to its purpose: fun music or an emotional release. Some get the latter and consider it essential to the proceedings. Others don’t. Some labels are built around it -- Delmark has always seemed to me to be the ultimate lemon-sucker’s blues label -- others are more eclectic.

The only -- rare -- exception I’ve run into are musicians who are so creatively connected that they tend to get that other-wordly, lemon-sucking connection from many styles and genres. They tend to be the most confused, and annoyed, of all of us. They’ll tell you music is music and you can find that joy from any direction.

Perhaps sadly, many of us don’t. We find it in the release from emotional burden, from a rhythmic intensity that can suck in cheeks, make thigh muscles cramp, makes eyes close while feet tap uncontrollably. That’s what drives the ‘blues nazi’. I’ve talked to older artists who will tell you that, in conspiratorial tones reserved only for issues that are bad for business, they consider the ‘lemon-sucking’ connection to be what real blues is all about.

They may be right about that. But, like I said, reviews are objective. There are orthodox adherents to other genres, other forms of relief. So when it comes down to it, maybe no one gets to dictate terms. Maybe just digging the music will suffice.