Tag Archives: blues

686. nobody’s fault but mine

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“As my friend Mark once put it, Presence is the good Led Zeppelin heroin album — the mostly sh** one being In Through The Out Door as Jimmy Page was too f***ed up to care. Either way, the Zeppelin’s days of full-on world dominance and glory were slipping past them by 1976, which didn’t exactly stop them from laying down some of the evilest blues mankind has ever known. Even if Nobody’s Fault But Mine is about taking personal responsibility for the mess you’re in, which, when you think about it, is very mature behavior, not really evil at all.” (Philip Random)

ledzeppelin-1977

766. I’m Tired

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In which Savoy Brown emerge from the depths of their trad-blues commitments to deliver a uniquely laid back but strong 1969 truth – a time when, if you were properly cool, you had very long hair, smoked a lot of dope, and didn’t mince words when it came to your opinion on the f***ed up state of the world, man.

SavoyBrown-1969

769. in a broken dream

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“The band is called Python Lee Jackson, but yes that is Rod Stewart singing lead. Who knows what the story is? I’m guessing it was a session Mr. Stewart did back before he was uber-famous. And it just sat on a shelf until he was suddenly too big to ignore, and cool. That’s the hard part. To realize that Rod Stewart was once genuinely cool, hard drinking, hard rocking, always smiling, incapable of contributing to the cause of bad music.  But then something horrible happened.” (Philip Random)

PythonLeeJackson

830. directly from my heart to you

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By 1970 (and probably all along), the Mothers of Invention were whatever and whoever Frank Zappa said they were. In the case of Directly From My Heart To You, that meant that Sugarcane Harris‘s straight ahead blues and violin take on a Little Richard original belonged on 1970’s Weasels Ripped My Flesh, which was that kind of album anyway – odds and sods and outtakes from various live gigs and studio sessions all jammed together and, strangely (or perhaps not) making for a very much essential Mothers excursion, the only limits being Mr. Zappa’s abilities (staggering) and taste (expansive to say the least). And then there’s that album cover, which Philip Random admits is the reason he bought it in the first place.

sugarcaneharris-1970

847. love in vain

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By 1969, the Rolling Stones were all messed up on heroin, cocaine, super stardom, yet still somehow capable of being true to an original Robert Johnson blues. It’s possible Satan was involved.

rollingstones-1969

851. she’s like heroin to me

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“The Gun Club were punk badasses out of L.A. who did much of the dirty work of rescuing the blues way back when, releasing them back into the swamp where they belong, or as I remember someone shouting in my ear in the late ’70s sometime, ‘Punk killed the blues, and a good thing too.’ But good things never die, do they?  They just mutate, reinvent, re-emerge, with 1981’s Fire Of Love all the evidence required: the full-on rush of punk and the muck of the bayou (that crossroad where the real stuff never dies), maybe put it at the service of some dangerous poetry about a girl so heavy, she’s like heroin – never misses the vein. Hell yeah.” (Philip Random)

gunclub-1981