So Many Roads ...

When people ask me what kind of music I play, I usually say something along the lines of "a bit of everything", because that's more or less true. In my gigging and jamming life, I've played all different kinds of rock and roll, jazz, blues, folk, r &B. I've even played in an authentic African band (with one obviously non-authentic member). But really, I play blues. For better or worse (often the latter), when I pick up my guitar, that's what I'm most likely to play for myself.

I got to the blues somewhat circuitously. When I was growing up, my father was an avid audiophile, with a pretty eclectic record collection for someone of his generation. This was the source for pretty much all the music I experienced up to about age 15. Tucked in with the classical, Beatles, and Kingston Trio records, there was some Muddy Waters, some Josh White, Jr., and an odd mix of progressive rock, stuff like Vanilla Fudge, Gentle Giant, and Cream.

As a little kid, I listened mostly to the Beatles and folk records, but when I started playing guitar, I stumbled onto the Cream. The songwriting credits on these records turned me into a bit of a junior Allen Lomax, and got me back to Muddy and co. But the playing of a white dude named Eric is what really got me hooked on playing blues guitar.

That led me to the infamous John Mayall's Bluesbreakers with Eric Clapton (the "Beano" album), which is the basis for the epithet "Clapton is God". Alas, "Wonderful Tonight" "Forever Man" and so much other dreck followed, but that's another story. The lead cut on this album is a song called "All your love (I miss lovin')". It's a minor blues that offers the Platonic form of the Les Paul-Marshall tone.

I'm never satisfied with a cover version though, so I had to chase down the original. "All your love" is credited to a guy named Otis Rush, who I think is the greatest of the second-generation Chicago Blues artists. This is the crowd (names like Buddy Guy, Magic Sam, and James Cotton) that got their starts backing the people who pretty much invented electric blues -- Muddy, Wolf, John Lee, et. al., and then emerged as solo artists in the early 60's. All of these guys are great, but to me Otis Rush has something extra going on.

Apart from the obvious talents -- a great singing voice, guitar tone, phrasing, and time -- there's something I find particularly fascinating about Otis Rush. One of the standard bits of wisdom about blues is that it's not just sad, dark, music. There's all kinds of humor, playing the dozens, ribaldry, love, hopefulness, and so forth. Not with Otis. With him you get all the darkness, sadness, and bitterness you can handle, and more. Death, depression unrequited love, you know, the blues. Some of this stems from the fact that he does a lot of tunes in minor keys, and as we know from music appreciation class, major keys are happy, and minor keys are sad. But the guy also puts out a vibe, and sings an awful lot of songs about being dying, or being mistreated by his woman, including at least one wherein the first person narrator is both dead and mistreated:

You've done me wrong
For a long, long time
And all you've done
Will never change my mind
So please try to love me
Please baby try
My love for you will never die

And these flowers grow
Where I lay and rest
And these colored blossoms
Darling hold to your breast
And darling know
It's my mind
Breaking out
From inside
My love for you will never die.

The other curious thing about Otis is the way he plays. He's left handed, but he plays a right-handed guitar, without restringing it. This makes all the fingerings, chord shapes and techniques not just mirror imaged (a la a typical lefty), but upside down, so you can't figure out what he's doing by watching; you have to use your ears. The only other player I know to do this is the late Albert King, and it has a similar effect in both of their sounds. Stevie Ray Vaughan comes closest of any "conventional" player to capturing it, but not quite.

Finally, for all you late night TV fans, come on, admit it, you've watched the Robin Byrd show. You know, the weird naked public access cable TV show with porn star interviews and stripper showcases? Anyway, ever notice how there's this really cool blues guitar tune over the opening credits? No, not "Baby you can bang my box" at the end. I'm 99.99% sure that's Otis Rush doing "Will my woman be home tonight" from a live in Japan album he did in the late 70's. That's the first Otis record I ever got, and the Robin Byrd thing is the same, note for note, inflection for inflection. Check it out, and if you can't find it on your dial, check this out from his prime:





And this when there were a few more miles on the odometer: