by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night, as part of one
of PBS’s interminable “pledge” periods (in which the commercial-to-content
ratio on America’s “public” television network approaches 1 to 1 — when Newt
Gingrich, in his attempt to defund PBS altogether, said that these pledge-break
periods were more offensive than the out-and-out commercials on the for-profit
networks he had a point), KPBS showed a couple of music specials that I thought
would be interesting. One was a 2014 concert by blues musician Joe Bonamassa
given at the natural Red Rocks amphitheatre in Colorado (which became famous as
a music venue when U2 did a concert there that was released as a live album and
video called Under a Blood-Red Sky) which was called Muddy Wolf at Red Rocks. The title was supposed to suggest the content of
his show: three sets, the first a tribute to Muddy Waters (t/n McKinley
Morganfield), the second a tribute to Howlin’ Wolf (t/n Chester Alan Arthur
Burnett — so both these archetypal Black blues singers were named after late-19th
century Republican presidents!), and the third a set of Bonamassa’s own
originals. Bonamassa is apparently attempting to fill the “white blues guitar
virtuoso” niche left vacant a quarter-century ago by the death of Stevie Ray
Vaughan, and he’s an incredible musician even though there’s a sense of
dutifulness regarding his whole “Muddy Wolf” act. He’s got a pleasant if rather
thin blues voice — somewhat to my surprise, while he doesn’t come close to
Wolf’s magisterial intensity (the adjective I first thought of was “demonic”
but I decided the last thing I
wanted to do here is contribute to the ridiculous myth that blues musicians
like Wolf and Robert Johnson literally sold their souls to the devil at the
crossroads to attain their extraordinary talents) he seemed more comfortable
being able to let his voice out more in the Wolf’s material rather than trying
to emulate Waters’ gritty smoothness (not an oxymoron, as anyone who’s heard
the records of the real Waters will know).
One thing that makes these PBS
specials hard to evaluate critically is that what we see on TV is simply a loss
leader for the bonus CD’s, DVD’s and tchotchkes that are advertised as premia for hefty
contributions to the stations. In the 15-minute commercial breaks for PBS in
between the 20 minutes of program, the announcers tell us endlessly that what
we’re seeing is merely a portion of the full show, which you can only get if
you contribute X amount monthly or 12X in one go — the hucksterism here is
galling but what’s significant here is that you don’t know whether any
deficiencies in the performance, particularly in terms of what songs by Muddy and the Wolf to represent them by,
are Bonamassa’s fault or those of the editors who picked and chose from what he
performed to assemble the version that got on TV. His song choices for Muddy,
at least based on what actually aired, were considerably better than those for
the Wolf: he started the Waters set with “Tiger in Your Tank” (at least partly
because he had a film clip of the real Waters performing it which segued into
his own version — he did the same thing latger with Wolf’s “How Many More
Years”), then did “I Can’t Be Satisfied,” “You Shook Me” and the train blues
“All Aboard” (which Bonamassa credited to the 1970 album Fathers and Sons even though Waters first recorded it in 1954 and he ripped off the opening
verse from Arthur Crudup’s 1942 record “Mean Old Frisco Blues”). While there
are plenty of Waters songs I would have rather heard than those (like “Rolling
Stone,” from which a certain British rock group you may have heard of took
their name, and trademarks like “Hoochie Koochie Man” and “I Just Want to Make
Love to You”), at least the four songs on the TV version were solid hits and
representative of Waters’ style. (“I Can’t Be Satisfied” was Waters’ first
commercially released record — though he’d previously recorded an acoustic
session on a plantation for Alan Lomax in 1940 and three sides for Columbia in
Chicago in 1946 that the company didn’t release until the early 1980’s! — and
he cut it in 1948 for Leonard and Phil Chess’s Aristocrat label before they
changed the name to Chess in 1951, and it was such a hit Waters had a hard time
persuading the Chess brothers to let him record his full band instead of just
Waters’ vocal and acoustic guitar and Big Crawford’s bass, the combination on
“I Can’t Be Satisfied.”)
The Wolf set was less successful; Bonamassa began it
with “How Many More Years” (the flip side of Wolf’s first record, “Moanin’ at
Midnight,” and originally recorded in 1951 in Memphis, Tennessee with Sam
Phillips, later famous as the founder of Sun Records and discoverer of Elvis
Presley et al., producing and Ike Turner
playing piano!) and then did “Shake for Me,” “Evil (Is Going On)” and another
early side, “All Night Boogie.” For a musician who learned the blues via Eric
Clapton and Cream (Bonamassa said in an interview that Cream’s Goodbye LP was the first blues, or at least blues-ish, record he ever owned and it was passed to him by
his father) I’m surprised that he didn’t do either of the Wolf songs Cream
covered, “Spoonful” and “Sitting on Top of the World” (and he didn’t do Cream’s
one Muddy Waters cover, “Rollin’ and Tumblin’,” either!), nor did he do Wolf’s
biggest hit, “Smokestack Lightnin’,” nor the awesome “Little Red Rooster” (covered,
less effectively, by the Rolling Stones) or “Back Door Man” (covered, again
less effectively, by the Doors). But then again, maybe the full version of this
show available if you make a substantial contribution to KPBS contains some of
the songs I’m complaining I didn’t hear last night. Bonamassa is a magnificent
guitar player — and fortunately the show’s director got close enough to him to
demonstrate the string-bending technique that gives blues guitar playing much
of its power (I couldn’t help but think of how frustrating it is to watch the
surviving films of Jimi Hendrix and see the director cut away from what we most
want to see: Hendrix’ fingers on the guitar, showing us how he got those
amazing sounds!), but there’s a sense of duty about his performance. In his
“The State of Dixieland” article in the late-1950’s/early-1960’s magazine Jazz
Review, Richard Hadlock noted that
in attempts to recreate a previous style “the tune and the arrangement, as symbols of other men in other times, are
all-important and the performance an almost mechanical means of preserving
them. … Like a professor who escapes the perplexities of today’s world by
living in history, the musician who emulates past performances is on relatively
save and predictable ground. His musical goals are laid out before him,
requiring only hard work and enthusiasm to reach them. The large burden of
individual creative responsibility … is gone, for music that may have been
difficult when it was conceived can be reconstructed with comparative ease
years later. And the results can be lots of fun” — as well as allowing great music to live on in live
performance even after its creators have died.
The results certainly are fun in
Bonamassa’s performances, even though the third set containing two Bonamassa
originals wasn’t especially more creative than the cover sets that preceded it:
I’m guessing at the titles of the two songs he played (the first was “Oh,
Beautiful” and the second could have been called “Happiness,” “Crown of Thorns”
or “Larky Love Song”) but they were in the style less of 1950’s blues pioneers
like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf and more like the 1960’s “psychedelic”
musicians that drew from the blues but added volume, distortion and above all,
length. “Oh, Beautiful” opens with a Hendrix-style fretboard rub (I’m still amazed that Stanley Jordan was hailed as a guitar
innovator in the 1980’s for being able to make sounds by just rubbing the
strings on the fretboard without actually plucking them, when Hendrix had been
doing that during his short-lived prime; but then Hendrix had done so many guitar innovations that one apparently just got
lost in the shuffle, just as Glenn Miller in 1939 was able to claim credit for
a “new” big-band voicing in which a clarinet doubled the sax line an octave
higher, when Duke Ellington had been using that device as early as the 1933
record “Rude Interlude”) but for the most part Bonamassa’s “originals” sound
like someone whose model when he was starting out was Eric Clapton. His
improvisations were actually tighter-knit than Clapton’s sometimes disorganized
rambles (Clapton was — and is — the sort of musician who can deliver a great
solo in a confined space but can get dull if given enough musical time to hang
himself) but it was still an antique style, just one from the 1960’s instead of
the 1950’s. Still, Bonamassa’s playing is a lot of fun, and the people who give enough to KPBS to get tickets for
his concert in December at the Balboa Theatre downtown will almost certainly
enjoy themselves.
