Blues

Grade: D+ Ah, the original Linkin Park, except even more spavined. MC5 came outta Detroit in the mid 1960s and their shrieking blues metal ur-punk was afforded unnecessary respect because of their agitprop politics. Sucking up to the Black Panthers and running a bit foul of the law can do wonders for a slightly below-average blues band whose songs had energy and attitude – but nothing else. Here they are, back with their first studio album in 53 years: thanks for the merciful interregnum, if nothing else. When I say ‘they’, I mean the half-decent guitarist Wayne Kramer and, on one or two tracks, their original drummer, Dennis Thompson.

During a surprise musical performance on Wednesday night, secretary of state Antony Blinken tried to convince the State Department he’s got the soul of a blues singer. The stiff-armed, frog-throated diplomat jammed out to a less than rousing rendition of Muddy Waters’s “Hoochie Coochie Man” that left the room full of his subordinates cheering. “I couldn’t pass up tonight’s opportunity to combine music and diplomacy. Was a pleasure to launch the State Department’s new Global Music Diplomacy Initiative,” Blinken tweeted on Wednesday.  https://twitter.com/secblinken/status/1707230831528620109?s=46&t=KTzG0soGgiCKUdkuiUQOwA Blinken’s set followed performances from Dave Grohl of Nirvana and Foo Fighters and pop star Gayle.

Bob Dylan has always toyed with audiences. He plays what he wants, how he wants, letting his mood dictate tempo and often key (sometimes switching songs to the minor). On Dylan’s return to London for the first time in five years, he summed it up early. ‘I ain’t no false prophet/ I just know what I know,’ he gruffly sang. Dylan spent the night at the Palladium doing what he knows best, singing songs of love, loss and immortality. Covid temporarily ended his ‘Never-Ending Tour’, which had seen Dylan play more than 3,000 shows since 1988. Now it’s billed as ‘The Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour’, with the strapline: ‘Things aren’t what they were’.

I was never into the blues that much. I listened to a bit of Roy Buchanan and Rory Gallagher but only as accidental overspill from rock. I knew the Rolling Stones’s sound came out of their love of the blues but what they added was more important (to me) than what they took. And then there was Eric Clapton. In common with a discerning portion of the British population, I loathed Clapton after his drunken endorsement of Enoch Powell’s rivers-of-blood speech. Even if I’d somehow let that slide, I could never forgive him for ‘Tears in Heaven’ which was like having a bucket of oversweetened bilge water poured over one’s head.

February 15, 1981, the day after Valentine’s Day. At 11 on a Sunday morning, a man’s body was found slumped in the passenger seat of a beige 1971 Mercury on a residential street in the Forest Hills section of San Francisco. All four doors were locked. A Valium bottle was in the pocket of a coat on the back seat. There was no ID: the body went to the morgue as John Doe #15. The dead man was 37-year-old Michael Bloomfield, a pioneering guitarist who brought blues to the mainstream and set Bob Dylan’s music alight. The cause of death was registered as cocaine and methamphetamine poisoning. Questions remain unanswered about how he died; why methamphetamine, which he avoided, was in his system; and why he was in a part of town where he knew no one.

Dr John called James Booker ‘the best black, gay, one-eyed pianist New Orleans has ever produced’. Booker died in 1983, aged 43, ruined by drugs, drink and madness, and attended by legends of delinquency lurid even for a New Orleans piano ‘professor’. Though he had appeared on plenty of other people’s records and stages, Booker had recorded only three studio albums in his lifetime. Classified, recorded in October 1982 and now re-released on vinyl, was the last of them. It might not be the best of them, but it shows why Booker was one of the greats. The studio was booked for three days, but Booker had a breakdown the week before and couldn’t get a good take down in the first two days.

When the finalists for the 2019 Grammy Awards are announced this week, it’ll be official: the blues is no longer an African American music. I’m an African American Blues guitarist. I came of age in my father’s ramshackle juke joint, Tabby’s Blues Box and Heritage Hall in Louisiana. I was the last 20th-century ‘folk-blues’ artist to be discovered by a folklorist from the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC. I played a blues guitarist in O Brother, Where Art Thou? and won a Grammy for its soundtrack. But when I submitted my latest album, Hotel Voodoo, for consideration under ‘Best Contemporary Blues Album 2019’, I learned that I no longer fit the Grammys’ criteria for blues. https://audioboom.