With a voice like a wrecking ball made of honey, Patty Loveless tears into the opening lines of Harlan Howard’s 1962 classic “Busted,” the first song on Mountain Soul II, the long-awaited continuation of the critically acclaimed 2001 album that laid bare the Kentucky coal mining roots of the gold-selling, three-time CMA award winner.
“Well the bills are all due and the baby needs shoes, we’re busted,” Loveless sings, accompanied by seamlessly matched acoustic guitar, Dobro and fiddle. “We’ve had a hard time since they closed down the mines, we’re busted.” Singing Howard’s original lyrics, which Howard himself gave to Loveless’ husband and producer Emory Gordy, Jr., Loveless returns the song to the coal mines, away from the cotton fields in the versions sung by Ray Charles and Johnny Cash. But for Loveless, it doesn’t matter where the song takes place—she is seeing its relevance every night she sings it on tour.
“Whether it is about coal mining or cotton or the auto industry, or anything else, more and more jobs are being lost these days and there’s a lot of people facing being busted,” Loveless says. “I certainly have seen those days before. Sometimes you get so low you have to look up to see bottom. And sometimes it takes that to help you pick yourself up and dust yourself off.”
That straightforward spirit of faith and determination runs through all the songs of Mountain Soul II. Featuring an extraordinary collection of musicians—including Del, Robbie and Ronnie McCoury, Carl Jackson, Bryan Sutton, Mike Auldridge, Emmylou Harris, steel guitarist Al Perkins, and 16-year-old vocal powerhouse Sydni Perry—the album was cut quickly in Nashville, and retains the interwoven, swaying spontaneity of incredible musicians singing and playing together. “It was a wonderful four days,” Loveless laughs.
Cut at the behest of fans who wanted more of the bluegrass, Appalachian, country combination of the first Mountain Soul album, Mountain Soul II feels more like an extension than a recreation. Drawing from her childhood experience of singing in the Old River Baptist Church where her grandfather preached, Loveless leads the band with her time-stopping, powerful voice through the melodies of such classic spirituals as “Working On a Building” and the haunting, a capella “Friends in Gloryland,” which leads seamlessly into “(We Are All) Children of Abraham,” penned by Loveless and Gordy
Loveless follows the three-song gospel set with the rollicking good time of “Big Chance,” also penned by her and Gordy. “Oh, mama, daddy, can’t you see? Holler’s closin’ in on me,” Loveless sings. ”Cousins pourin’ down like rain. They’re runnin’ out of given names.”
Humble, raucous, spiritual and plainspoken, Mountain Soul II is a stripped-down tribute to the people and music that shaped Loveless from an early age.
“I find myself able to reconnect to that time and revisit this kind of music,” Loveless says. “It is stories about real people and real lives, and stories of history. I think if there is a song in your heart and your soul, it is a way of getting out of your worries and woes. It can be sorrowful but it can be uplifting to share about your life. And it’s a way for people to get away from their troubles. Early on in the tour, I would say, ‘Thank you for being here. I know times are hard.’ But then I thought, I don’t need to remind them of this. They don’t need to hear that from me. I just need to entertain them, let them escape for a while. What I need to do is give them the music.”
If life was fair, Alejandro Escovedo would probably be dead or in jail—and he’d also be recognized as one of America’s best songwriters. A last man standing of not just bands, but entire scenes and genres, Escovedo has survived nearly thirty years of near misses—with fame and death alike—to emerge, with a gracious sense of understatement and a punk rock grain of salt, as one of the truly great artists of the day.
One of the youngest of 12 siblings in a musically gifted Mexican-American family that includes percussionists Pete and Coke Escovedo and niece Sheila E, Escovedo grew up in San Antonio and later Orange Country, California. In the mid-70s, he drifted up to San Francisco and formed the Nuns. A seminal band of the nascent West Coast punk scene, the Nuns opened the Sex Pistols’ last show, where Escovedo got to see the self-defeating circus aspect of punk rock first hand. Later, in New York, he played guitar for cowpunk pioneers Rank and File, then moved to Austin where he formed the critically acclaimed True Believers with his brother Javier.
More than any other of Escovedo’s bands, the True Believers seemed poised to reach a larger audience. They landed a deal with EMI/Rounder and Los Lobos, early and enthusiastic supporters, offered the band the opening slot on a long tour. But long stretches on the road allowed the band to delve into rock and roll decadence, which took a toll on the relationships inside and outside of the band. In a label merger and shuffling, the True Believers were dropped before the release of their second record.
In 1989, Escovedo—bandless and working as a clerk at Austin’s Waterloo record store–took his first tentative steps as a solo artist. He formed two distinctly different bands—The Alejandro Escovedo Orchestra, a free-form collective of some of Austin’s best musicians; and Buick Mackane, a raucous guitar-heavy combo with a name cribbed from T. Rex. Escovedo played around town constantly over the next couple years, experimenting with different styles, genres and line-ups. It was a period of extraordinary growth in Escovedo’s skills as a songwriter and performer.
In 1992, he released the acclaimed solo debut Gravity that welded the raucous energy of the True Believers (“One More Time”; “Pyramid of Tears”) with the lovely and fragile melodies of songs like “Gravity/Falling Down Again” and “She Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.” He followed it with the intensely personal and lyrical Thirteen Years. A harrowing and heartbreaking look at love, death and loss propelled by mournful cello and violin, and Escovedo’s unaffected, haunting voice. For the world outside of Austin, it was the announcement of a staggering talent.
In 1996 Escovedo released With These Hands, his third great solo record in a row, and then two revealingly titled albums—More Miles than Money and A Man Under the Influence. Out on the road, touring heavily, he lived up to both.
It was not a pace that anybody could sustain, and in April 2003, Escovedo collapsed after a show in Phoenix and was rushed to the hospital. Ever the overachiever, Escovedo was suffering from severely untreated Hepatitis C, cirrhosis and internal hemorrhaging. Recovery was long, slow and expensive—especially for a gifted but broke musician with no health insurance.
Friends, fans and family contributed to offset the costs with a series of concerts and a tribute album, Por Vida: A Tribute to the Songs of Alejandro Escovedo, featuring the likes of Steve Earle, Lucinda Williams, Los Lonely Boys, and Escovedo idols Ian Hunter and Lenny Kaye. It was a gesture of tremendous caring and generosity that revealed not only the greatness of Escovedo’s songs, but also the breadth of respect and admiration he commands as a songwriter.
After a period of reflection and recuperation, Escovedo returned with 2006’s somber The Boxing Mirror, produced by the Velvet Underground’s John Cale, and last year’s amazing Real Animal, produced by the great Tony Visconti.
On Real Animal, perhaps more than any other album, Escovedo seems at peace with himself and comfortable with who he is as an artist. The album looks back—lyrically and musically—at his entire life in music, going back all the way to the Nuns with the sneering “Nuns Song.” The crisp acoustic rocker “Sister Lost Soul” balances the introspection and strings of his solo work and “Always a Friend” is the kind of brilliant, melodic rock song that seems to drop from the Austin air like grackles. It’s the kind of song, and album, that reveals all the promise and potential of Americana to carry on the great traditions of post-Dylan rock and roll, and these days Escovedo does it better than nearly anyone.
It’s no surprise that Escovedo has been nominated for Artist of the Year by the Americana Music Association, with Real Animal up for Album of the Year. What is surprising, though, is that Escovedo is around to receive the recognition he deserves. Through sheer faith, determination and talent, Escovedo has managed to beat the odds. He has lived to tell the tale. What could be more rock and roll than that?
–Ari Surdoval
Alejandro Escovedo jumps onstage in Houston to lead some bar band through his great “Always a Friend.”
In the digitized computerized compressed treble-drenched fluorescent 99-cent disposable downloadable candy-coated cookie cutter MSGed MP3ed airtight televised stifling stalled casino elevator that is generously referred to these days as modern music, it can get a little hard to breathe. Somebody needs to open the window—preferably with a well-thrown brick—and let a little sun and wind in. Luckily, every once in a while, somebody does. More often than not lately, that somebody is T-Bone Burnett.
A truly brilliant producer, and a gifted musician and songwriter, he was born Joseph Henry Burnett in St. Louis in 1948 and raised in Forth Worth, Texas. At just 14, he started wandering out on to the Jacksboro Highway, headed for the dilapidated Skyliner Ballroom to catch performances by the likes of Junior Parker and Bobby “Blue” Bland.
“The way that room sounded is the sound I’ve been going for on every record I’ve ever done,” Burnett told Mix Magazine in 2006. “I’ve just learned more and more about how to do it. It’s been a long time of figuring out how to make it sound as exciting on a record.”
Burnett put together his own recording studio while still in high school and spent his free time recording his friends, and occasionally himself. He stops far short of calling himself a prodigy, though. “I was really bad. That’s what would distinguish me from a prodigy.”
In the early ‘70s, Burnett left Texas for Los Angeles. By 1975, he had landed a spot playing piano and guitar in Bob Dylan’s legendary Rolling Thunder Revue. At the tour’s end, Burnett formed the Alpha Band with fellow Rolling Thunder veterans David Mansfield and Steven Soles and released three critically acclaimed albums before calling it quits.
After a solo career that found Burnett creating albums that generated universal critical praise but modest sales, he dedicated himself to producing. From the crisp roots rock of Los Lobos’ How Will the Wolf Survive? to the gorgeous, fragile acoustic ballads of Elvis Costello’s King of America, Burnett brought a deep breadth and a refreshing sense of space, tone and timing to his production.
Eschewing the heavily synthesized, compressed production process so popular and prevalent in the 1980s and ‘90s, Burnett helped create music that now seems timeless. He did it with young artists inspired by heroes Burnett shared—the Wallflowers, Counting Crows, the BoDeans, Sam Phillips, Gillian Welch—and he also did it with the true heroes themselves. Burnett is responsible for the Roy Orbison concert film masterpiece A Black & White Night and Orbison’s Grammy-winning last album Mystery Girl, and also later albums by legends like Ralph Stanley and Tony Bennett.
It is Burnett’s ability to make music resonate with tradition, without using that tradition as a gimmick or some kind of shtick, that led to two of the most artistic and commercial pleasant surprises of the past 20 years.
In 2000, Burnett composed the score and produced the soundtrack for the Coen Brothers’ O Brother Where Art Thou? Featuring such artists as Emmylou Harris, Alison Krauss, Ralph Stanly and Gillian Welch delivering stunning interpretations of traditional American folk, blues and bluegrass songs, the album was a massive, grassroots-driven smash hit. It sold more than 7 million copies, earning a Grammy and awards from the Country Music Association and the Academy of Country Music, introducing a new generation of music lovers to the rich hidden history of American music.
Just as surprising is the oddball pairing of Alison Krauss with Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant on last year’s terrific Raising Sand. Burnett produced and plays guitar on the album as Krauss and Plant weave incredible harmonies through songs by Townes Van Zandt, Mel Tillis, Tom Waits, Gene Clark, the Everly Brothers and Doc Watson. Even after going platinum, being heralded as one of the best albums of the year and winning the 2009 Grammy for Album of the Year, it still seems like a weird idea. Who would ever think to pair one of rock’s grittiest and most legendary lead singers with one of the most beautiful voices in bluegrass, much less propel them with slapback echo, reverb and swaying vibrato through a set of obscure songs written by some of music’s greatest unsung heroes? You’d have to be a genius to pull that off. Luckily, there was one on hand.
“What I am shooting for is to make music that is as good as music gets,” Burnett told Charlie Rose last year. “Why not?”
–Ari Surdoval
Alison Krauss and Robert Plant doing the Everly Brothers’ “Gone Gone Gone” from the Burnett-produced Grammy winner Raising Sand.
Roy Orbison—rock and roll’s greatest singer, a crooning rockabilly Caruso who brought opera’s high drama to the malt shop jukebox, broke the hearts of bobbysoxers, and redrew the emotional power and possibility of pop—started out in a dust-covered oven called Wink.He was a West Texas sensation by the time he was 17, playing to crowds as big as 10,000 in 100 degree heat, hosting his own radio show, and fighting his friend and rival Buddy Holly for gigs in towns like Odessa, Lubbock, Midland and Amarillo. Pale and wiry, with thick glasses, Orbison had a voice big enough to fill the flat scorched emptiness that stretched out all around him. When he welded it to his mean, skittering electric guitar, he shot sparks. Orbison knew what he had, and he rode it like a rocket all the way to Memphis. He graduated from Wink High in 1954. By ’56 he was in Sun Studios, crying, Hey baby, jump over here, when you do the ooby dooby I just gotta be near, as Sam Phillips, rock and roll’s wild-eyed prophet, watched from the other side of the glass.
There is poetry in history—especially in the strange, explosive symmetry of early rock and roll. Around the same time the great Muddy Waters was introducing a young part-time hairdresser and housepainter named Chuck Berry to Leonard Chess in Chicago, a failed vacuum-cleaner salesman named J.R. Cash appeared on Roy’s radio show in Texas. Dubbed “Johnny” by Phillips himself in order to young him up a little, the novice Cash was touring behind his first single on Sun, “Hey Porter b/w Cry, Cry, Cry.” Cash and Orbison hit it off, and Cash passed along Phillips’ phone number at Sun. When Orbison made the long-distance call to introduce himself, and pass along Cash’s recommendation, Phillips screamed, “Johnny Cash doesn’t run my company!” and slammed down the phone. Soon after, though, Phillips changed his mind, thanks to some demos Orbison had recorded at Norman Petty’s studio in Clovis, New Mexico, where Buddy Holly had cut his chart-topping early singles.
Just like he had with Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Cash, Charlie Feathers and Carl Perkins, Phillips signed Orbison reluctantly, and only after changing the name of his band from the Wink Westerners to the Teen Kings. Phillips’ heart belonged to artists like the 300-pound blues powerhouse Howlin’ Wolf—who Phillips championed as the most significant artist he ever recorded, proclaiming Wolf’s music “where the soul of man never dies.” But with the gale force of Elvis howling all around him—and with Wolf gone to Chicago to join Waters and Berry at Chess—Phillips knew he could make lightning strike twice in his slapback-slathered Memphis echo chamber. And he did—again and again—but not with Roy Orbison.
It was not for lack of talent. Or trying. Orbison unleashed a string of blistering Sun singles that to this day stand as rockabilly Rosetta stones. “Ooby Dooby,” “Go! Go! Go!” “Domino,” “Rockhouse,” “Claudette,” “Devil Doll.” Just saying the titles out loud feels like dancing. But where Elvis and Jerry Lee were perfect matches for Sun—their white shoes stomping mercilessly on the pent-up sexual and racial repression of the 1950s—something feels a little out of place on Orbison’s cuts. His voice sounds trapped inside all that rockabilly clatter, like it’s yearning to fly into the otherworldly edges that Elvis flirted with on “Blue Moon” and Charlie Rich skirted in “Who Will the Next Fool Be?” But that’s not what Sun was about—and plus, he wasn’t charting. “Ooby Dooby” scooted up to No. 59, but that’s about it. His days at Sun were numbered.
Orbison left Memphis in 1958 and moved to Nashville, where he landed a job as a songwriter for Acuff-Rose publishing and a short-lived contract with RCA. When the RCA deal fell through, it seemed like the Texas teen king, who started out at just 13, would be washed up at 23. Nobody seemed to know what to do with Roy Orbison.
Enter Fred Foster. In the spring of 1959, Wesley Rose of Acuff-Rose, Roy’s defacto manager, called Foster and asked him to sign Orbison to his fledgling Monument label as a personal favor—and what’s more, Rose wanted an answer immediately. Foster wasn’t sure; all he knew about Orbison was the two or three Sun singles that had stalled on the charts. But then—in one of rock and roll’s pivotal but lesser-known moments—Foster said one word that would change the sound of popular music forever. He said yes to Roy Orbison.
Foster heard the power and depth in Orbison’s voice, knew nobody had been able to capture it, and decided to frame it with the sweet, string-heavy Nashville sound pioneered by Chet Atkins at RCA. It’s a production style that could smother a singer, but it was time for Orbison to take some chances, and he trusted Foster. After a couple cuts that bridged the sound of Sun and what was to come (“With the Bug,” “Pretty One,” “Uptown”), it became clear that Orbison had about one more chance with radio and the public. Foster told him the next song would be the most important of his career. He was right.
On March 25, 1960, Roy Orbison entered the RCA-Victor studio in Nashville for a session with guitar greats Hank Garland and Grady Martin, pianist Floyd Cramer, the Anita Kerr singers and a full string section. It was a far cry from his stripped-down Sun sessions. But the song they were cutting bore little resemblance to his earlier material.
Over a happy dum-diddy-doo-wah vocal, bouncing guitar and sugary strings, Orbison steps up to the mic and sings like a man coming out of a dream. His voice is thick with honeyed sadness as he sings one of rock and roll’s most famous opening lines.
Only the lonely know the way I feel tonight.
Orbison starts softly, almost sighing along with the production. He rides the dry, cheerful sway of the music, waiting for his moment. Suddenly, it comes. With full force, Orbison hits the high falsetto in the line “That’s the chance you have to take…” and jolts the song to a standstill. The sound of that “you” is stunning. It stops time and transcends everything else in the song, everything else Orbison had ever done. It is equal parts heartbreak and hope, a cry of pure musical freedom, bursting past the strings and the singers and the whole Eisenhower era for one incredible time-stopping moment before floating back down as the song ends humbly, shuffling to the fade with no fanfare or even acknowledgement of what just happened.
On playback, everyone knew what they had captured. Everyone except Orbison, that is. Foster offered to pay him for a million copies upfront if that’s all he’d ever owe on the song, but as a friend, urged him not to take the deal. Within weeks, “Only the Lonely” was a hit all over the world.
It was a magical session, but perhaps the most extraordinary moment happened with no tape rolling. Early in the day, as the musicians were learning their parts, bass player Bob Moore suggested they needed to put the song into meter so kids could dance to it.
Orbison responded: “I don’t want people to dance to my songs.”
What a declaration. It was 1960. Rock and roll—watered down and on the wane after a series of deaths, arrests and scandals—was and had always been dance music. With one sentence, Orbison revealed his artistic vision: This music could be about more than dancing; it could move people emotionally as well as physically. With the string of singles he recorded after “Only the Lonely,” he proved it. “Running Scared,” “I’m Hurtin’,” “In Dreams,” “Crying,” and perhaps the song that most seamlessly combined Orbison’s ability to rock and pine at the same time, “Oh, Pretty Woman.”
These are the seeds that would bloom into popular music as we now know it. While Chuck Berry begat the Rolling Stones and punk, and Howlin’ Wolf begat Led Zeppelin and metal, and Johnny Cash begat Merle Haggard and outlaw country, it was Roy Orbison who inspired the next generation to write rock and roll that reached for the heart’s limits. If you listen, you can hear Roy Orbison everywhere: From the Beatles—whose “Please Please Me” was directly inspired by “Only the Lonely” and who claimed that Roy Orbison was the only artist they never wanted to follow onstage—to Bruce Springsteen, who listened to Orbison every night before recording the epic Born to Runand who pays tribute to him on the album’s very second verse (Roy Orbison singin’ for the lonely, hey that’s me and I want you only.) Orbison’s influence can also be heard in the great writers of the Brill Building—it is not far from “Only the Lonely” to “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?”, performed by the Shirelles but written by Carole King, who would go on to recut it on her groundbreaking album Tapestry. All this incredible pop and rock, sweet and stark and sad, dreamily plunging headfirst into lost love and loneliness: It all started with Roy Orbison.
But don’t go measuring Orbison solely by the weight of his influences. That’s not what makes “Only the Lonely,” “Oh, Pretty Woman” or any of his other songs jump from the speakers nearly fifty years later. His music lives today, just as vibrantly as the day it was cut, because he was an unbelievably powerful singer, writer and performer. Who else could lead a band featuring Springsteen, Elvis Costello, Tom Waits, Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt, James Burton, and k.d. lang—as Orbison did in the incredible Black and White Night concert, filmed when he was in his 50s—and hold both the audience and the band spellbound, not just with his voice, but with his very presence? And who else could form a band with the likes of Bob Dylan, Tom Petty and George Harrison, and provide the vocal hook that rocketed the band’s song to the top of the charts, as Orbison did in the Traveling Wilburys?
That vocal hook that Orbison sings on the Wilbury’s “Handle with Care” is, I’m so tired of being lonely, I still have some love to give. Sadly, Orbison died soon after, in December 1988. But that line he sings, like all his heartfelt music, is utterly devoid of irony. His last album, Mystery Girl and its single “You Got It,” were released after he died. They were both hits.
Today, the classic look of Roy Orbison: skinny, with a slick-backed black pompadour and dark sunglasses, is one of rock and roll’s truly iconic and timeless images. But it is his music, the amazing songs he wrote and performed, and his haunted and haunting, beautiful singing that allow him to live forever as one of the most influential and powerful artists of all time. Once you hear Roy Orbison, his voice never leaves you. Just close your eyes and listen, you’ll hear him now.
–Ari Surdoval
Roy Orbison, “Only the Lonely” from A Black and White Night, 1988
Chooglin’. It’s a verb, baby—as in, to choogle. Just check your Creedence American Dictionary, it’s right there: “to ball and have a good time,” an act to “keep on” or continue. Or better yet, check the Minneapolis octet that bears the name. To them, Chooglin’ means the Soul Train getting robbed by the James Gang, Kiss on 78 speed and the MC5 tearing into Blood, Sweat and Tears. All at once. With a bleating horn section and ferocious guitar playing, the band is a boogie-rock juggernaut that has the guts and the skills to deliver greasy, proto-Stax soul with as much power and conviction as their relentless, riff-driven rockers.
Formed in 2005 by guitarists and singers Brian Vanderwerf and Jesse Tomlinson, from Twin City contenders the Midnight Evils, as a rollicking but conventional two-guitars-bass-and-drums lineup, Chooglin’ made their official debut in November 2005, opening up for Reigning Sound and the Detroit Cobras. Their show garnered some early local praise, but the band hit their sonic stride a month later when they were joined by a three trombone and trumpet horn section that had been assembled for a one-off performance of the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street for a local club’s cover band contest. The full Chooglin’ line-up—Vanderwerf and Tomlinson on guitar and vocals, bassist Jeff Johnson (since replaced by Paul Diorio), drummer Shawn Walker, trombonists Harold Longley, Steve Erickson, and Zach Zins, and trumpet player Bob DeBoer—was soon unleashed on an unsuspecting public in a round of now legendary high-octane live shows.
“Yeah, we can get pretty high energy,” laughs Vanderwerf. “Kinda Mach 10 compared to the record. We all come from punk rock, but you know, when I get asked what we sound like, I just say ‘rock and roll.’”
Considering the blistering opener of Chooglin’s Big Legal Mess debut Sweet Time, “Mach 10 compared to the record” is a little terrifying to consider. Weaving ragged guitar and horn lines together at a breakneck pace, songs like “Take Your Sweet Time,” “Airport Bar,” and “Tonight Alright” careen between soul and early metal. Vanderwerf’s gruff, soul-shouter vocals veer from heartbreak to sleaze and back again, while Tomlinson’s blistering guitar playing stitches all the disparate elements together—making Iron Maiden guitar gallup and Hi Records horns sit together seamlessly, and sound strangely natural together.
“There’s so many guys in the band, we all bring something to it,” Vanderwerf says. “We get a lot of comparisons to 70s rock, but I think we have more of an R&B thing going on. Jesse is an amazing guitarist, and he is writing all the time. Shawn our drummer likes more aggressive stuff, like punk rock and weird two-piece metal. And I’m a huge Stones fan, so I’m sure that comes through. But most good rock and roll is loud and fast”
Very true—but for a band that rocks this hard, it is a testament to Chooglin’s musical ambition that some of the real gems on Sweet Time are when they slow down a little. Gritty ballads like “Another Land,” “Nexium of Interest” and “Royal Vengeance,” showcase the power of the full line-up—the swaying melodicism of the horns, the songs’ dynamic arrangements, and the range and emotion of Vanderwerf’s voice.
“We started out as just straight up, balls-to-the-wall rock, but now we’re trying to write different stuff,” Vanderwerf says. “And since we have the horns, we want to use them for more than just accenting the rock songs. I love the newer slower tunes, cause we’re doing something different, but I think we pull it off. I think we can say to ourselves now we can try different stuff and not suck at it. ”
And then he laughs and says, “But sometimes I listen to the lyrics and think, ‘God what a bunch of big babies.’”
Discovered by Big Legal Mess while playing a show with Fat Possum artists Hezekiah Early and Elmo Williams during the Deep Blues Festival, Chooglin’ recorded Sweet Time at Minneapolis’ legendary Creation Studios—home of everything from the Trashmen’s “Surfin’ Bird” and Dave Dudley’s “Six Days on the Road,” to the Replacements’ Tim and several Husker Du records. Inspired by the close-knit Twin Cities music scene that launched the Replacements and Husker Du, Chooglin’ exhibit a classic Minneapolis band trait—a musical restlessness that keeps them from repeating themselves, and a total refusal to do anything that pigeonholes them.
“I try to be open-minded, and not old man about it,” Vanderwerf says. “But a lot of new stuff just bores me. We go around and we see lots of the same shit. You know, you show up and see the band posters and they have like flames and iron crosses and skulls all over them. And then, watching a lot of these bands live, it’s like God—c’mon, bring it, you know? Get it into it. That’s why I like doing some of these slower songs. It opens us up to try different stuff. I think we raised the bar a little, doing things in a more musical way than just rocking out all the time. But we like to jump around and stuff too. It’s gonna be a real struggle when we go out on the road.”
–Ari Surdoval
Chooglin’, makin’ it after all, and doing “Father Time” at Minneapolis’ 7th Street Entry.
In a soft Southern drawl that seems a stark contrast to the raw howl of his singing, Willem Maker looks out from his home on Turkey Heaven Mountain in East Alabama and says with what sounds like relief, “It’s the middle of nowhere.” The rural beauty of his home tends to find its way into his songs, which weld the molten electric guitars of Neil Young’s Crazy Horse with the melodicism of Nick Drake and the lyricism of Townes Van Zandt. But for Maker, it has been a perilous and painstaking path to Turkey Heaven Mountain—a gut wrenching mental, emotional and spiritual journey that he unflinchingly chronicles on his new album New Moon Hand, released by Big Legal Mess Records in March.
A follow-up to Stars Fell On, the acclaimed debut that he recorded alone at home, New Moon Hand finds Maker joined by such blues and rock and roll luminaries as Alvin Youngblood Hart, Jim Dickinson and Cedric Burnside. But despite the distinctiveness of the contributors, the sound is uniquely his own, and Maker establishes himself as a brilliant emerging artist with a story few can imagine.
The son of a drag racer, Maker grew up on the rural Southern stock car racing circuit, spending an isolated childhood in West Georgia and Tennessee. Encouraged by his older brother, Maker showed an early talent for music and took up the bass, learning by playing along to classic rock radio and his Metallica records. When his father took a job for industrial giant Southwire, a wire manufacturer, the family eventually settled in Carrollton, Georgia, where Maker spent his teenage years.
While living in Carrollton, Maker committed himself to music more seriously and began writing his own songs. He formed the band Ithica Gin with his brother Sloane and quickly developed a local following. An early single was produced by Jay Farrar and the band received an offer to play with Ryan Adams. But Maker’s promising start was cut short by a tragic turn of fate.
While still in his teens, Maker began to experience severe, unexplainable manic episodes. The mania most closely resembled the onset of bipolar disorder with one disturbing difference. Those suffering from bipolar disorder have no memory of their manic episodes, but Maker was hyperconscious—wracked by an intense, dizzying mania that could last for days. Medical specialists were baffled and struggled for a diagnosis. It was not until much later that Maker and his family learned the cause: severe lead and mercury poisoning.
“It’s a real dirty tale of what went down in that town,” Maker says. “Supposedly, Carroll County is one of the top three dioxin hot spots in the world. They would illegally dispose copper slag and the residue from the smelter, dump it into farmer’s fields and use it as back fills. The slag is highly toxic, and it was all around the house we rented. They used it as back fill around the basement, where we rehearsed and where I spent all my time. The air was pure poison.”
Just nineteen, and wracked by the mysterious, disturbing episodes, Maker was hospitalized at Ridgeview Institute, a psychiatric center in Smyrna, Georgia. In a strange twist of fate, Maker’s roommate at Ridgeview was Joe South, the legendary singer-songwriter who wrote Grammy-winning classics like “Games People Play” and “Walk a Mile in My Shoes” before depression and mental illness derailed his own musical career.
“They took me to my room, and there he was. I don’t think I had slept for like two weeks going in there and they put me on Haldol, which I think at the time was the strongest stuff there was. I remember walking into the room and Joe was laying on the bed with his arms behind his head. His presence was really comforting, and I talked to him about music and how I was really optimistic about the future and the band. It was really weird that I was talking to him about that stuff, and me and my brother, because Joe played with his brother and his brother died tragically. He was real quiet. I just remember him being really caring, and really patient. And then I was out in the lobby one day, and there were some people to see him, and then he was gone.”
Maker resisted all attempts to put him on medication, determined to find other answers to what was happening to him. “They wanted to put me on lithium and all that, but I knew something else was at work. I found this holistic doctor and over time, we learned about heavy metal poisoning. He turned me on to this therapist in Atlanta, who was really the lifesaver. If I hadn’t met her, I don’t think I would be alive. I was just lost at sea. All this stuff had flown through my door and I didn’t know how to make sense of it. I couldn’t figure out how to integrate into everyday life.”
Drawing from the electric, hallucinatory creativity of his manic episodes, Maker began writing feverishly, filling notebook after notebook with lyrics. It was a long and slow recovery. Eventually, alone and settled on Turkey Heaven Mountain, Maker began recording his music.
“My grandfather was a bootlegger till the day he died, and I’ve always thought of my home studio as like a moonshine still,” Maker laughs. “I’m trying to make the best brew possible.”
For Maker, the process of writing and recording became a deeply creative exploration of his life and what had been revealed to him during the episodes. “I felt like I had woken up, and there was a lot of stuff that needed to come out of me,” he says. The result was Stars Fell On, recorded alone on Turkey Heaven Mountain, and the songs that formed the basis for New Moon Hand, Maker’s new album on Big Legal Mess.
Recorded on Turkey Heaven Mountain but also in Nashville and Memphis, New Moon Hand continues the rich lyricism and punishing blues-based guitar of Stars Fell On. It also features appearances by close friends of the Fat Possum/Big Legal Mess family—notably Scott Bomar, who played and handled production with Maker, Memphis legend Jim Dickinson on piano and organ, Cedric Burnside on drums, and the powerhouse Alvin Youngblood Hart on guitar. The result is an album of tremendous power and delicacy—from the grinding open-tuned slide guitar of “Black Beach Boogie” to the soulful, Sticky Fingers-era Stones-y “White Ladye” to the sparse piano of the lovely “Saints Weep Wine.” In the latter, in a plaintive rasp, Maker sings, “Leave the fever in the past / Ready the plow and sharpen the axe / Raise the dead, love / Rise to the task / Outlast / Outlast.”
“Saints Weep Wine” offers a hopeful, shimmering reflection of Maker’s recovery, which is countered later by the chilling “Lead & Mercury”: “There’s poison lead and mercury / rainin’ down on our heads / on our babies’ beds / Stole my youth / Took my brightest days.” The two songs offer perspectives not only on what Maker went through, but also on the depth and span of his talent as a writer and musician. It is incredible that Maker could emerge from such pain with so much powerful music—but even more amazing is Maker’s ability to find hope, beauty and even inspiration in it.
“What I had is actually called a spiritual emergency,” Maker says. “That’s the actual term for it. It’s not a chronic mental illness; it’s a moment when someone is going through an intense change. It is a moment of fast evolution. It was like I had a prolonged near-death experience due to the toxic poisoning. That’s the core of my work, learning to understand that and integrate all the stuff that had come in. It was an unstable experience, but it was also like the richest experience of my life, which is something people can’t get their heads around. But you know, we’re all vulnerable in that way. It’s surprising just how fragile everything can be.”
John Paul Keith grew up outside of Knoxville, the son of a truck driver. He learned to sing in church and he learned to play guitar when he was ten and his father gave him an acoustic and a copy of Chuck Berry’s Golden Hits and The Best of B.B. King. It was the first music he ever heard that wasn’t country or spirituals—he didn’t hear the Beatles until he was nearly in high school. By the time he was seventeen, he was drawing big crowds in Knoxville as a member of the Viceroys, and then quit the band when they got signed because he didn’t like the direction the music was headed. By twenty-one, he had moved to Nashville and formed his own band, and got signed to Sire within months. It was a meteoric rise by a kid everyone in the industry had their eyes on—and wanted their hooks in.
John Paul Keith can sum up the rest in just a few lines. He tells you nearly everything you need to know about him in the first thirty seconds of Spills and Thrills, his humble, freewheeling masterpiece of a record, featuring songs so timeless and well crafted you’d swear they were obscure honky-tonk b-sides. Over a swinging drumbeat and a stinging Telecaster, Keith sings, “Well, I’m right on the money, but I’m never on time / One step ahead, two steps behind / And I’ve never been lucky, and I’ve never been hip / Got a whole lotta headaches when I opened my lip.”
Though the loyal following who pack his Memphis shows with his crack band the One Four Fives might beg to differ about never being hip, truer words have never been sung. Blessed and cursed with rare talent and common Southern stubbornness, Keith would have gone a lot further in the music industry if he only had a little less brains and a lot less integrity. A blistering guitarist and singer, and the kind of songwriter who makes great melodies and incredible lyrics sound effortless, he certainly seems like a sure thing—the kind of artist you just need to hit play and record on and let rip.
Instead, Keith spent more than a decade at near constant odds with band mates, managers and executives eager to water down and compromise his music in order to chase the latest trend. With each fight—whether it was a shady manager badgering him to metal up his guitar playing on the major-label debut that never got released, or losing his whole band to an Americana prima donna—the sheer joy of making music was replaced with the drudgery of trying to stay true to himself in an industry full of exploiters and those ecstatic to be exploited. From Knoxville to Nashville, New York to Birmingham, and back again, Keith struggled to stick to his guns and create the kind of music that would hold up to the records that made him want to play music in the first place. By 2005, he’d had about enough. Alone, with no band and no prospects, he moved to Memphis and declared himself washed-up at 29.
Somebody should have told John Paul Keith that Memphis is the wrong place to go if you’re looking to give up music. A veritable island of great musicians and music lovers, with a scene that is dismissively and blissfully oblivious to the obsessive flights of the music industry, the city is an outsider’s paradise. Tapped by an acquaintance to fill in for an absentee guitarist, Keith was introduced to Beale Street. Dead broke, he started busking for tourists’ tips in W.C. Handy park and sitting in at places like the Rum Boogie Café. Not only did it give him enough money to eat—or, more likely, keep him in sweet tea and cigarettes—the spirit of the city and the camaraderie of the musicians on Beale rekindled Keith’s faith in playing music for its own sake. He fell in love with his guitar again, and the next thing he knew, he was writing songs.
Obsessed with his Telecaster, Keith started hanging around the now-closed Taylor’s Music store in midtown Memphis, where he met drummer John Argroves and bassist Mark E. Stuart. They started playing together, and when they were joined by guitarist Kevin Cubbins, piano player Al Gamble and multi-instrumentalist John Wittemore, the One Four Fives were born. Taking their name from the I-IV-V musical progression that forms the foundation of blues and rock and roll, the band gave Keith the one thing he was missing for all those years: A group of sympathetic musicians who could match his talent—and his integrity. They brought power and muscle to Keith’s songs, but stayed true to the spirit of his influences.
The band built a loyal following in Memphis—both from fans, and from the city’s close-knit scene. Supported by such Memphis stalwarts as Jack Oblivion and Harlan T. Bobo, John Paul Keith and the One Four Fives built a reputation as one of Memphis’ most ferocious bar bands—capable of delivering two, three, even four hour sets of blistering, beer-spilling rock and roll. With this spirit of open-minded acceptance, support and encouragement, so special to Memphis, Keith began to write the best songs of his life.
That raucous excitement and inspiration is all over Spills and Thrills, Keith’s debut album for Big Legal Mess Records. Part of the legendary Fat Possum family that championed and gave a home to such incredible artists as R.L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough, Big Legal Mess is proudly preparing Spills and Thrills for an April 09 release. The album, which was recorded mostly live at Young Ave. Sound and the legendary Ardent Records in Memphis, captures the spirit and energy of John Paul Keith and the One Four Fives’ live shows, and showcases Keith’s incredible singing and songwriting. This is the sound of real rock and roll—fast and fun and loud, with songs that fly by so quickly you want to listen to them two or three times in a row. It’s around about the third listen the realization comes: These songs are incredible. From the crafted, bouncing melodicism of “Lookin’ For a Thrill” to the more-poignant-than-you-think tearjerkers “Rock and Roll Will Break Your Heart” and “Otherwise,” this is the work of an amazing songwriter. Spills and Thrills is rock and roll brilliance the way it used to be, back when brilliance could be danceable and catchy, before it became synonymous with self-indulgence and experimentation and arrogance. So if you’re looking for one of the best records of the year, here it is. It took John Paul Keith half his life to get the chance to be himself, but it was worth the wait.
–Ari Surdoval
John Paul Keith and the One Four Fives perform “Lookin’ For a Thrill,” at Ardent Studios in Memphis
It’s the end of winter, 2006, and Joan Jett is finishing up the final touches on her album Sinner in a New York studio, as her new song “Naked” blares over the speakers. It is classic Joan Jett: buzz saw guitars, sing-along melodies, and that amazing voice—rough and soft, sweet and tough at the same time—lashing it all together and taking it to new heights with every chorus. “Every bit of trouble that I cherished / Every bit of truth that I let perish / Every little bit of me is naked,” Jett howls, nearly pleads, and then sneers, “Yeah.”
This is rock and roll as it ought to be—raw and catchy and a little desperate. This is the music that has been Joan Jett’s lifeblood for 30 years, since she started the legendary Runaways when she was 15. Jett’s sound—succinctly described by longtime manager Kenny Laguna as a cross between “Yummy Yummy” and the Germs—is so prevalent these days it is easy to forget that she invented it. You don’t have to dig very deep below the surface of anyone from Green Day, the Donnas, and Bikini Kill to Avril Lavigne, Pink, and a slew of lesser bubblegum pop punk to find her. Every time a producer wants to sprinkle a little edge or credibility onto a manufactured starlet, from Ashlee Simpson to Kelly Osbourne, Joan Jett’s sound is borrowed. The irony is not lost on her.
Joan Jett has fought hard for her success. It was built in the face of hostile audiences, oblivious record executives, and entrenched resistance. She has held her ground in front of the meanest audience—even while being spit on, pelted with bottles and batteries, and insulted. Millions of records and about a dozen hit songs later, she takes it all with a grain of salt. She has earned some of the most loyal fans in the world and she has become a North Star for every girl who picks up a guitar. Besides, nothing is more rock and roll than kicking down doors and doing what everyone says can’t be done. And everybody knows Joan Jett loves rock and roll.
“The first records I remember really inspiring me to play guitar were T. Rex ‘Bang a Gong’ and Black Sabbath ‘Iron Man’ and the first New York Dolls record,” Jett remembers. “I started playing for real at 13. My parents got me a Sears Silvertone for Christmas. I had been bugging them for it. I tried to take some guitar lessons and was very excited and went in and told the guy, ‘Teach me how to play rock and roll!’ He looked at me like I was out of my mind and attempted to teach me how to play ‘On Top of Old Smokey.’ That was the one and only lesson I took. I got one of those ‘How to Play Guitar by Yourself’ books and just taught myself to play.”
It was just a couple years later when Jett formed the Runaways, the groundbreaking all-girl teenage rock ‘n’ roll band, with Lita Ford and Cherie Currie. “I moved to California when I was 13,” she says. “Coinciding with the time I was learning to play guitar. Moving was traumatic, because of the friends and all that, but that was the point when I thought, ‘Now I can make these dreams happen, because now I’m in California.’”
Managed by notorious Sunset Strip Svengali Kim Fowley, the Runaways gave Joan an early education in the sleazy sides of the music business and a preview of the obstacles that she would face in the years ahead. Tough teenage girls playing menacing rock and roll in an age of Captain and Tennille, the Runaways were written off as a novelty act in the U.S. (Predictably, Rolling Stone snubbed them as “Kim Fowley’s quintet of teen teasers.”) They were huge in Japan, though, and they were everything to Joan. She put her heart and soul into the band, walking the tightrope that stretches between the right to rock and the refusal to be exploited. Her look, sound, and integrity prefigured and influenced punk rock and it was punk rock that welcomed her when the Runaways fell apart.
“The whole idea of the Runaways to me is punk rock. And my first inspiration came from early British glitter music, and all the bands that were happening right around us. The Ramones, the Clash. We were lucky enough to tour right in the middle of it. It was really one of those moments you never forget. Especially being a teenager. But the Runaways were five different girls with five different influences. And half the band really wanted to go in a heavy metal direction and I didn’t. I wanted to stay more straight-up rock and roll. That’s really what caused us to split in the end. But it was devastating for me. The Runaways were my baby. They were my band. It was very traumatic. I did not look at it as freeing, or freedom, or anything like that. I felt very lost.”
Joan left Los Angeles and drifted to London, confused, unsure of what to do next. “I was just trying to figure out where to go. I didn’t want people to feel that girls couldn’t rock, that the Runaways failed. Because that is the vibe that people throw at you. Like, ‘Ha ha ha, we told you it wouldn’t work. We told you girls can’t rock.’” While in London, Joan met Paul Cook and Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols, and enlisted them to play on a demo of a song she had been wanting to record for a while. She had tried to get the Runaways to cut it on their last two records, but nobody had been interested.
Alone, far from home, with no band and no record deal—worried that she might have missed her chance, that her dreams were over—Joan Jett walked into the studio and cut “I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll.”
The response? Complete indifference. “Nobody heard ‘I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll,’” Joan says, sounding still stunned. “That was the funny thing. To everybody else it was just another song. And I have 23 rejection letters to prove it, from everybody.”
In New York, the crowds started building. “We were really well received. It seemed like it happened very quickly. The audiences were really intense. I don’t know if it was timing, or if it was the songs. We had great support from radio, though, which is nonexistent for up-and-coming bands now. Radio was very, very helpful.” With the Blackhearts, Joan went back into the studio and rerecorded “I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll,” along with great versions of Tommy James’ “Crimson and Clover” and the Halos’ “Nag,” and classic Jett originals like “Love is Pain” and “(I’m Gonna) Run Away.”
“I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll,” the single and the album of the same name, were released just before Christmas, 1981. It shot up the charts and stayed at No. 1 for two months. For Joan, it was like being on a rocket. She was suddenly an indisputable rock star, just as she always knew she could be. The massive success came with a price though. In addition to an ecstatic army of fans, Joan crashed head on into a wall of prejudice and stereotype. Many people just could not accept a woman on stage playing rock and roll guitar. A tour of Europe opening for the Scorpions got particularly nasty.
Back in Los Angeles, Joan was determined. She shrugged off the rejections and pushed forward. She put together a tough band and, with Laguna, started her own label to release the song herself. “I formed the Blackhearts and we moved to New York. I wanted to get out of L.A. I wanted to start fresh. For a band that has no money, for a struggling bar band, there are a lot more cities that you can play on the East Coast and go home at the end of the night. You can play Jersey, you can play Rhode Island, you can play Connecticut, you can play Pennsylvania, you can play Massachusetts, and you can play a million places in New York and still drive home. So that’s what we did, for all of ’79, ’80, ’81. Lots of touring, sleeping in vans, selling albums that we had printed ourselves from the trunk of our car. That was Blackheart Records right there. In the trunk.”
“They would work up these loogies,” Jett remembers. “And they’d let you know they were working on them, because you could hear it! The most disgusting noises you can make, hocking, working on these hideous loogies. And I would just be showered in spit and phlegm. It was a battle. But it wasn’t even about the music! I mean, I could have been channeling Elvis Presley and it wouldn’t have mattered. It was about trying to humiliate a woman onstage. And so they’d hock on me and I would be literally dripping in these loogies, these disgusting things hanging off me, off my guitars, off my clothes. And when that didn’t work, when that didn’t get me off the stage, besides calling me names, they’d start throwing things. At one place it was a bottle, and at one place it was a battery. I don’t remember which was where. One hit me in the head and gave me stitches and another hit me in the chest and broke a couple ribs.”
At the same time, Jett was up against a different kind of opposition from record executives who didn’t know what to make of her or her success. A stint on MCA inspired a cover of the Sex Pistols’ classic put-down “E.M.I.” with the letters changed to those of her new label. “I’m not sure that a certain level of label gets what kind of artist I am,” she says. “And that’s not a cut—they just don’t get it. They try to change you and change the essence of who you are. That’s why I just do my own thing.”
Her own thing has done well. She followed “I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll” with hits like “Bad Reputation,” “I Hate Myself for Loving You,” “Do You Wanna Touch Me,” and the multi-platinum “Up Your Alley.” She stormed into the ’90s as a mentor and inspiration to the riot grrl movement, working with Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill and Kat Bjelland of Babes in Toyland and Donita Sparks of L7. At the same time, her near-perfect version of “Love is All Around” (the Mary Tyler Moore theme) became the anthem for women’s NCAA basketball. She wrote with Replacements front man Paul Westerberg, and together they recorded a raucous duet of Cole Porter’s “Let’s Do It.” Not the easily defined, lobbed softballs that the major labels beg for, but truly the stuff of a fiercely independent, self-reliant artist who has always followed her own instincts and blazed her own trail forward. And most importantly, it always sounded good.
The next few months are going to be busy for Joan Jett. She is gearing up for a summer on the Warped Tour, playing with bands she influenced heavily, for a young audience who fell in love with her sound secondhand. More than most performers, Joan Jett can connect with a crowd. She feels for her fans deeply. Watching her play live, it is almost as if she sees the reflection of herself staring back at her. An ocean of kids who love and believe in rock and roll, all the same age she was when she picked up a guitar and formed the Runaways. She thinks about this generation a lot, and the question she gets asked most is maybe the one that is closest to her heart, but the hardest to answer.
“I still can’t quite figure out why there aren’t more girls playing rock and roll,” she sighs. “Why they aren’t there. I think it is a combination of a lot of things. I think a lot of women get treated the way that I have been treated. And I think a lot of women aren’t willing to put up with their whole self-esteem being destroyed every day just because they are playing music. So I think sometimes people might say, ‘I don’t need this shit for a career; I’m going to do something else.’
“There are definitely walls up. I couldn’t tell you why and at what level. Is it the A&R people? Is it the presidents? Is it the record companies? Is it the video channels? Is it the press? It’s all of it. But if people want to play music, they should be able to. And if you happen to be a girl, you should be able to play rock and roll. So all I can say is: Girls, go play! If you want to play, go play! Things will change. The world is changing.”
–Ari Surdoval
Nice spurs. From the absolute ass-end of the Eighties, but she does this one great: Joan Jett tears into Chuck Berry’s “Tulane” on Letterman.
John Lee Hooker grew up deep in the Mississippi apartheidof the ’20s, sharecropping, dreaming by the old Victrola, picking up KFFA from Helena on his family’s crackling crystal radio. He stuttered when he talked, but his voice could fill a church when he sang. He got his first guitar from a traveling salesman, but his father called it the devil and only let him play it in the barn behind the house.
Charley Patton was everywhere, whooping and whispering of dark roads and high water, popping and hissing on thick black 78s. Same goes for Son House, his slicing, metallic slide echoing from juke joints throughout the Delta. You can hear Patton and House—and the doomed, haunted cries of Robert Johnson—drifting through Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, but you won’t find them in John Lee. Hooker’s one-chord boogie is only a degree removed from Africa. Its lonesome, stumbling rhythm snaked up through Texas and Louisiana, through the brutal blues of Robert Pete Williams and Blind Lemon Jefferson, clear to the hills of North Mississippi, where Hooker learned it from a guitar-playing stepfather, and where it lives to this day in the children of R.L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough. From Senegal to Senatobia.
Hooker learned his blues and held fast. He never caved, never swayed to a citified 13th chord, a sliding 9th, or even a slide. Hooker knew what he had from the moment he found it out in the barn, on the rusted strings of the salesman’s cheap guitar. He used his blues to flee Mississippi, in the great postwar migration out of the South’s hopelessness, to the grinding, industrial powerhouse of Detroit. “There was nothin’ there,” Hooker said of Mississippi, much later in his life. “And there still ain’t nothin’ there.”
Hooker chose Detroit over Chicago to dodge the competition, and ironically wound up fighting for gigs against T-Bone Walker, who had landed in Detroit as well. Surprisingly, Hooker loved Walker, the consummate, uptown guitar-hero blues showman. “I idolized him like I did God,” Hooker said. “I followed him around like a puppy after a bone, and he got to know me, so sometimes he would let me pick up his guitar and play some.” Even in the shadow of Walker—a superstar of the blues, a profound influence on Chuck Berry and countless others—Hooker stayed true to the sound he carried up from Mississippi.
In Detroit, Hooker was discovered fronting a small combo at the Apex Bar, and got booked for a cheap recording session at Pan American studios. He cut four songs quickly–the last one was “Boogie Chillen.”
“Boogie Chillen” struck like lightning—perfectly capturing the excitement, hope, and trepidation of the millions of black Southerners who found themselves in the strange, cold North, immigrants in their own country. It was the electrified sound of the South, but the story was pure Detroit: When I first come to town people, I was walking down Hastings Street / I heard everybody talking about Henry’s Swing Club / I decided I’d drop in there that night / And when I got there, I said, yes people / They was really having a ball.
“Boogie Chillen” is the sound of a man alone, far from home, holding on to and letting go of everything he knows. Hooker stomps his foot to keep time, and a hollowbody electric is his sole, perfect accompaniment—not as open and spacious as the acoustic Houston blues of Lightnin’ Hopkins, not as clipped and snarling as the grinding solidbodies that would soon power the new Chicago blues. Acoustic and electric, past and future, hill country and Black Bottom, hope and heartbreak, the murderous, futureless Southern countryside and the brutal, ruthless streets of the North. “Boogie Chillen” is all of this, but it is a celebration—a defiant reminder that this music is not about getting into the blues. It is about getting out of them. And I felt so good / I was boogiein’ just the same, oh Lord.
Hooker was working as a janitor when “Boogie Chillen” exploded, selling a million copies in the blink of an eye. Just like Patton in the Delta a generation earlier, John Lee’s voice was everywhere. Well my momma she didn’t allow me just to stay out all night long, oh Lord…. “Everywhere you went, that was all you’d hear coming out of windows and stores and the neighbors’ houses,” Hooker recalled. “I said, ‘I don’t need this broom. I can make it on my own,’ And I never looked back.”
-Ari Surdoval
John Lee Hooker performs “Boom Boom” on some television show in 1966.
On July 22, 2006 one of the most distinctive and powerful voices of the blues fell silent when Jessie Mae Hemphill died from complications to an ulcer after a long and painful struggle. She was 83. Though she never gained the recognition of fellow North Mississippi blues artists like Fred McDowell, R.L. Burnside, and Junior Kimbrough, Hemphill’s driving, hypnotic guitar boogie was some of the toughest and most mesmerizing hill country blues ever cut. With her open-tuned hollow body guitar driving an amp to break up, Hemphill rode the skittish, swaying rhythm of her songs, crying the blues with a voice that rolled between threatening, heartbroken, sensual, and angry. There was deep, lonesome sadness in her music, but when she leaned into that endless Mississippi boogie, Jessie Mae made you move. Hemphill released two critically acclaimed albums, the incredible She-Wolf in 1981 and Feelin’ Good in 1991. In 1993, just as her career began to take off, Hemphill suffered a stroke that paralyzed the left side of her body and prevented her from playing. She spent the rest of her life in Senatobia, Mississippi with her beloved dog Sweet Pea, struggling to make ends meet and singing in the local church.
Hemphill died penniless but not alone, and not forgotten. For two years, the friends and fans who loved her have raised money for a tombstone to honor her life and music. On July 30, a headstone will be dedicated at her grave, at the Senatobia Memorial Cemetery. On Highway 51.
