Bare Wires - John Mayall's Bluesbreakers

While we're on the subject of my early immersion in the blues, Bare Wires is the first album I bought with my own money.

I'm not sure where I heard about John Mayall. I don't think it was from listening to the Subterranean Circus on WCFL out of Chicago on my AM radio. It may have been something I read in Hit Parader magazine. Whatever prompted me to do it, I bought the album in 1968 when I was twelve and immediately loved it, especially "Killing Time" and a lot of the "Bare Wires Suite".

The guitar work of Mick Taylor was a lot of what drew me in. I hadn't gotten to hear his predecessors Peter Green or Eric Clapton in the Mayall band, so I had no comparisons I could draw. Mick just sounded so sweet, and his tone was gorgeous, very complementary to the original tunes Mayall wrote.

I was an inveterate listener and contest-entrant at WTOB, Winston-Salem's Good Guy radio station. Once, I won my choice of a free album there, so I trotted up to the studio at Thruway Shopping Center and went rifling through the box, past the fuzzy Odessa album by the Bee Gees and sundry other treasures. I took home Blues From Laurel Canyon, Mayall's last album with Taylor on lead guitar. By then the Bluesbreakers had lost drummer Jon Hiseman, bassist Tony Reeves and sax player Dick Heckstall-Smith to the nascent Colosseum, and the band was a rocking little four-piece. Taylor had more solos and sounded stellar.

It was thrilling for me to see Mick Taylor gravitate to the Rolling Stones for what I feel is their best recorded period. Even though his contribution to that band has been unfairly overlooked, it stands as some of the best playing in their sizeable canon of works.

Mayall's singing voice reminds me now somewhat of Grover from Sesame Street, but at the time, I didn't think of it, probably because Sesame Street was a year away from its debut.

And who could not love Dick Heckstall-Smith, if only for his quintessentially British name alone? What a huge link in the history of blues and jazz in England... (I still kick myself for missing an opportunity years later in London to see Dick perform jazz in a small pub, damn it. He died in 2004.)

Bare Wires hasn't held up as well as some of the albums that were contemporaneous, but it helped me find out more about the blues. At twelve, I needed all the help I could get.

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On that note, I think about how people like the Rolling Stones, the Beatles and even the Dave Clark Five were able to transmit the knowledge they had about American blues and r 'n' b back out via their repetoires, so that young whelks like me could then look for the source and find people like Howlin' Wolf, Don Covay, Larry Williams and Chris Kenner. That transmission was so important, and I hope that today's performers find young listeners who thirst to find the roots of the music they relate to.

Projections - The Blues Project

My late brother Curtis gave me this record in 1967 when I was eleven. Maybe he didn't like it very much, but he fobbed it off on his impressionable baby brother who absorbed it completely in his post-Beatle awareness of all things hip in music. He'd given me the head's up on the Beatles appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964 and had fed me a Left Banke album he thought I'd appreciate, which I did.

The Blues Project record, though, was different from the pop stuff. I didn't know from blues at that point, so this was my first foray (unless you count hearing Tom Rush sing "Who Do You Love" on AM radio about the same time).

First thing that drew me in was the spidery, shiny screech of Danny Kalb's lead guitar, especially on "I Can't Keep From Crying" which sounded as much like Blues Magoos as the blues to me. Al Kooper's ondioline was making an early appearance in that song too, as it would later on "Her Holy Modal Majesty" on Super Session, a weird proto-synthesizer that weedled itself into the middle of the pre-solo cacaphony.

"Wake Me, Shake Me" also captured me with its grooving rhythm section (Roy Blumenfeld and Andy Kulberg). "Two Trains Running". My first exposure to a Chuck Berry deeper cut with "You Can't Catch Me", a song I'd later cover with The H-Bombs and in solo shows.

I sought out the originals, of course, like any good neophyte blues afficionado would do. I bought Al Kooper solo records after he got the boot from Blood, Sweat and Tears. I bought Seatrain records because Kulberg was in the band, and there I learned about Peter Rowan and Richard Greene.

I make a big deal about how much Michael Bloomfield and the Electric Flag got me into the electric blues, but honestly, this was the first shot fired over the bow. The tracks I have from Projections still sound snaky and evil to this day, and I'd highly recommend getting ahold of this potent record (although you might want to grab the band's anthology which features all the tracks from Projections at a cost somewhat less than the inflated price of the actual disc itself).

Holiday gift giving suggestion

Know some kids who need nice shirts? Especially the little ones that you don't want to dress in faux football uniforms or princess dresses?

Be sure and check out Smart Wife's website Nice Shirt, Kid and order some of her sweet onesies and shirts. They make great presents. The children look like they have excellent taste in musical instruments. That's the fifteen-month-old, lunging toward the popular acoustic guitar long-sleeve onesie. Banjos, electric basses, Plush Amplifiers, they're all there.

(And it beats one more talking toy, doesn't it? I mean, if you step on a shirt in the kids' room in the middle of the dark night, it doesn't shout "TO INFINITY...AND BEYOND!" I was closing up the living room the other night and, so help me God, every one of the five-year-old's Madagascar 2 Happy Meals toys went off in a howling chorus of celebrity voices that just about sent me through the ceiling. I have a brother-in-law who has been known to dismantle the audio in toys he sends, for the sake of the parents. Bless his heart.)