Having a Little Faith

There are times that A Little More Faith almost feels like a middle child, not catching quite the esteem of its older sibling nor the notice of the younger. Davis' 1961 sophomore release for Prestige/Bluesville, following the seminal and well-received Harlem Street Singer by less than a year, was the fledgling label's hopes that lightning would strike twice. It did--and would again, just months later when Davis' third Bluesville LP, Say No To the Devil was released. Bruce Eders, surveying Davis' work in his AllMusic reviews has by turns called A Little More Faith "magnificent," "priceless," and "triumphant." High praise indeed for an album that was all about praise.

As with its predecessor, A Little More Faith offers an even dozen spirituals. In modest contrast to Harlem Street Singer, this album's material strikes one as being more "traditional" in its readings, if only just so. As before, Rev. Gary blends mostly original songs with more standard church tunes, such as I'll Fly Away. He takes one aback almost immediately with his take on You Got to Move. For one more familiar with the near-foreboding tones of Mississippi Fred McDowell's version, this strikes one as purely upbeat and fun--for certainly Rev. Gary was having a ball (listen to him through the last minute of this song and he's doing more than getting into it, he's grinning ear to ear.) We find this running throughout this album, Gary enjoying himself and giving full praise to his Lord. We also find in another oft-covered spiritual blues, Motherless Children, some of Davis' more deeply emotive and affecting performances, reeling in his fluid playing and pushing his vocals forward, achieving something singularly bone-deep and heartfelt.

There is almost a more positive spirit at work here overall, exemplified through his readings of There's a Bright Side, I'm Glad I'm in that Number, and When I Die I'll Live Again. Like so much of Rev. Gary's work, it's infectious music that draws us in, draws in our smiles, and gets our toes to tapping. His guitar work is consistently a thing of beauty, perhaps more understated than his performances on Harlem Street Singer, but deceptively intricate and inventive.

The Reverend Gary Davis would record four albums for the Prestige label and they would release five, three on its Bluesville imprint and two more on Prestige-Folklore before they folded, late in '64. Of the two on the Folklore imprint, the first was a re-release of Harlem Street Singer, retitled Pure Religion!, the second a wholly-instrumental and delightful affair titled The Guitar and Banjo of Reverend Gary Davis. His three albums on the Bluesville imprint were composed entirely of spirituals. For this, arguably the most pivotal period of his career, Davis was enthusiastically received by a secular world on the strength of dazzling musicianship, raw, genuine emotion and infectious joy.

Peace, Mudcatz


Rev. Gary Davis
A Little More Faith
Prestige/Bluesville 1999

1. You Got To Move
2. Crucifixion
3. I'm Glad I'm In That Number
4. There's a Table Sitting in Heaven
5. Motherless Children
6. There's a Bright Side Somewhere
7. I'll Be Alright Someday
8. You Better Mind
9. A Little More Faith
10. I'll Fly Away
11. God's Gonna Separate
12. When I Die I'll Live Again

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Ragged-Edged Joy

Infectious.

There have been a multitude of adjectives thrown at Theodore Roosevelt "Hound Dog" Taylor and his Houserockers through the decades since Alligator Records founder Bruce Iglauer staked his inheritance on their future. "Raw" and "gritty"are among those most often assigned, adjectives with negative connotations that end up cast in a positive and appreciative light once we get to talking about this trio. They were an unassuming, unvarnished unit that played loud and loose, avoiding rehearsals whenever humanly possible. For all practical purposes, they were a garage band with street cred, the house band for a tavern that didn't feature live music. Playing every Sunday afternoon for more than a decade at Florence's Lounge, a working-class bar, had made them a fixture on Chicago's South Side. And nowhere else.

Pretty much everyone with a passing knowledge of the blues, or at least Hound Dog Taylor knows the story: Bruce Iglauer, a shipping clerk at Delmark, frustrated that that label was patently disinterested in the Houserockers, invested his $2500 inheritance to found Alligator Records, with the specific purpose of recording this trio. That record, Hound Dog Taylor & the Houserockers, would become a bit of a phenomena, selling 9,000 copies in its first year alone, an unheard of volume for an unknown blues artist on an independent label, with its very first release, no less. The album has gone on to sell more than 100,000 copies.

"It was very much the album I wanted to make," Iglauer recalled. "It sounded as close as I could make it to what they sounded like on the bandstand. Hound Dog was incredibly proud. He was thrilled...to make an album, to see his picture on it, to have people come up to him and ask him to autograph it. He was sitting on top of the world. He was flabbergasted when I paid him royalties..."

"I assumed," Iglauer would also say, "that if I hadn't come along he would have just as soon played taverns for $15-20 bucks a night for the rest of his life. He probably didn't think about it beyond that. He was amazed not only that I wanted him to make a record with me, but that I'd pay him. It never crossed his mind that he'd get paid to make a record..."

"It was a band you couldn't help but love, and I loved them enough to start a label, leave my day job...and become their booking agent, road manager, driver and friend..."

Perhaps more than his own advocacy and aggressive marketing, Iglauer credits unique and advantageous timing for that first album's--and the Houserockers' later--success. Specifically, FM radio was only just then asserting itself and the formats were much looser. DJ's programmed their own music. This lack of structured programming and playlists, in the years before the corporatization and homogenization of FM radio, left the field wide open for the likes of Hound Dog Taylor. "People played what they thought was good," Iglauer recalled, "I knew I could get something going with that kind of radio. I picked the perfect window of opportunity--it was totally dumb luck."

Through the next four years, Taylor, Brewer Phillips and Ted Harvey would be elevated to a level of musical success that, throughout their entire careers until that point, would have been no more than a fanciful abstraction. They would tour the U.S., packed into a second-hand car with Bruce Iglauer at the wheel. "I'd usually drive," he'd say, "because I was the sober one." They would appear at no less than four Ann Arbor Blues Festivals, being featured artists for three of them, and tour Australia and New Zealand, with the likes of Freddie King and Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee. They opened for Muddy Waters and Big Mama Thornton in New York and Mitch Ryder in Ryder's own Detroit home turf. They were a constantly-bickering trio, given to frequent fisticuffs and knife-pulling. Taylor would famously shoot Phillips in the arm and leg (& be charged with attempted murder) after Phillips insulted Taylor's wife, Fredda. Hound Dog wouldn't live to see a trial. Six months later, Phillips granted his old friend's dying wish and forgave Taylor on his deathbed. Hound Dog died from lung cancer the next morning, December 17, 1975.

The Houserockers' music wasn't pretty and it wasn't polished. It was never intended to be. Phillips, Harvey and Taylor were more interested in their small audiences having a raucous good time than they were with niceties like tuning. Fast blues or slow, they threw themselves into each tune with gleeful abandon, never able to conceal the genuine joy they took in playing. Theirs was feel-good music for hard-working folks. Houserockin' music meant for butts to be moving. "He'd just be having a wonderful time," Iglauer recalled. "He wanted to see people laughing and grinning and dancing..." This spirit is in constant evidence throughout their various live recordings. Alligator, of course, released Beware of the Dog shortly after Taylor's death. Recorded over a trio of nights in November, '74, the album managed to capture the raw, frolicking energy that the previous two albums only approached. It may well be the best of the Houserockers' Alligator releases. For years (and excepting JSP's 1997 release of Live at Florence's), the only real competition for live Taylor would be the scatter of recordings to come out of Joe's Place, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In late November, 1972 the Houserockers played a two-week stand of shows at Joe's, the (originally bootleg) recordings from these shows would surface time and again, right up until the current day. Live at Joe's Place, Have Some Fun, Freddie's Blues, and Live in Boston would all be taken from these tapes.

The best of these, the much-traveled and multiply-released Live at Joe's Place, has become a standard for me through these recent years, threatening to usurp even the nicer-sounding (& every bit as frenetic) Beware of the Dog. It's a raw and ragged disc, full of Taylor's gleeful asides, stinging slide, and the Houserockers' balls-out playing. As Cub Koda pointed out in his review (and little else) "They're drunk, they're out of tune, but the crowd goes nuts and the overall vibe cancels out any musical inconsistencies..."

Yup. That'd be about the size of it.

One should, however, also make mention of their searing takes on Elmore James' Wild About You, Baby, The Sky Is Crying and It Hurts Me Too, which the Hound can't help but introduce with a chuckle. Their spin on the time-honored Kansas City almost qualifies as a guilty pleasure, a gritty romp with Phillips just managing to hold it together. Add on their well-octaned readings of the stomping Kitchen Sink Boogie, Give Me Back My Wig and Take Five and we've got ourselves a 52-minute blast of houserockin' blues that, like the Hound himself, just leaves us smiling. I would argue that none of the Joe's Place recordings, including Live in Boston (which includes 6 of these 11 tracks and ends up sounding like a "Best of Joe's Place" compilation, rather than a straight live album release) quite capture the dizzying, uninhibited raunch of Live at Joe's Place. In this regard, it makes a decided case for "less being more." Like many a bluesman, and certainly Hound Dog himself, it is what it is: a rough and tumble recording of a rough and tumble outfit, treating a packed house to a night they would never forget.

Peace, Mudcatz


Hound Dog Taylor & the Houserockers
Live at Joe's Place
New Rose, 1992


1. Kitchen Sink Boogie
2. Phillips' Crawl
3. Wild About You Baby
4. Kansas City
5. Mama, Talk To Your Daughter
6. The Sky is Crying
7. It Hurts Me Too
8. Dust My Broom
9. Freddy's Blues
10. Give Me Back My Wig
11. Take Five

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Blue Monday: Albert & the Hound @ Joe's Place, '72 & '73

I think we'll spend just a bit more time in Boston--or at least across the Charles River, in Cambridge. The sheer concentration of universities in that area, or more specifically their thirsty, music-loving student bodies, served to make Boston a curious hotbed for blues music, but a hotbed it became indeed. Forty and fifty years later, we're still finding ourselves loving on music that came out of that scene. Boston had legendary nightspots like the Unicorn Coffee House, Paul's Mall, and the Tea Party. Cambridge had Club 47 and the humbly-named Joe's Place.

It seems if you were a bluesman in the early '70's and managed to get anywhere near New England, you played Joe's Place. The sheer volume of unofficial recordings--and quality blues-- to come out of that club has guaranteed that we're still talking about the joint four decades on.

When Albert Collins showed up in January, '73 he was into the long, lean years between moving on from Imperial and finding his way to Alligator. In Cambridge, he's in front of a potent, stripped-down quartet that gives us, at times, a funkier feel than we would see in later Ice Breakers years (see the Thaw Out opening and "by request" Frosty for examples...) Through an hour-long set, the Iceman gives us vintage, ripping readings of Gonna Walk With You Baby, Conversation with Collins, and Back Stroke. This is lean and mean Albert, grinning all the way...


Albert Collins
Joe's Place
Cambridge MA
January 17, 1973

FM

1. Thaw Out
2. Can't You See What You're Doin' To Me
3. Gonna Walk With You Baby
4. Get Down
5. Frosty
6. Conversation With Collins
7. Stormy Monday
8. Back Stroke
9. Instrumental

Albert Collins: Guitar, Vocals
B.C. Hill: Bass
Dave Maxwell: Piano
Mark David: Drums


Link


Less than two months before, Hound Dog Taylor, Brewer Phillips, and Ted Harvey played a spate of shows through late November...and provided we blueshounds with hours of enjoyment and fits of confusion. Bootlegs of Hound Dog's November, 1972 run at Joe's Place first began being traded, then started popping up, years later on labels like Wolf and New Rose Blues. New Rose issued the most famous of these, Live at Joe's Place, in 1992, the same year that Wolf gave us Have Some Fun. They would follow this latter album up two years later with Freddie's Blues. This trio of albums provide the backbone of Taylor's non-Alligator discography.

And they were all cut at Joe's Place, in November of '72.

In 2006, British re-issue label Charly released Hound Dog Taylor and the Houserockers: Live in Boston. Though (as usual) light on citing their source material, Charly essentially released a "best of" compilation from these three Joe's Place albums. The best of these, New Rose's Live at Joe's Place, contributes 6 of of the 15 cuts and some of its strongest moments, though the Roll Your Moneymaker and Take Five offerings from Freddy's Blues are right tasty as well. Taylor, Phillips, and Harvey were, all three, liquored up and having a ball throughout these sets, giving it to Joe's like they were used to giving it to Florence's every Sunday: loose and raw, primal and raucous, blues that makes a man feel good 'bout being alive.

Peace, Mudcatz




Hound Dog Taylor & the Houserockers
Live in Boston
Charly, 2006

1. Wild About You Baby
2. The Sky is Crying
3. Dust My Broom
4. Give Me back My Wig
5. Mama, Talk To Your Daughter
6. Gonna Send You Back To Georgia
7. Rock Me Baby
8. Jumping With Symphony Sid
9. Just Can't Take It
10. It Hurts Me Too
11. Roll Your Moneymaker
12. Freddie's Blues
13. Let's Get Funky
14. Take Five
15. Goodnight Boogie

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Blue Monday: Muddy @ Jazz Workshop, '72

Those of you who suffered through my Paul's Mall post a few weeks back (or you folks who just happen to know Boston...) might recall that both Paul's Mall and the Jazz Workshop were under one roof, both downstairs and separated by a wall. Through their 15 year run (1963-78), these very small clubs would see the undisputed musical giants of their era. A great many of these shows were broadcast by Boston's WBCN radio...which almost always means that somebody bootlegged it...

In August of '72, it was Muddy's turn to take the stage at the Jazz Workshop, leaving us a woefully short set that is amply pleasing nonetheless. Muddy brought a fierce little line-up with him to Boyleston Street that night; behind him were Pinetop Perkins working the keys, PeeWee Madison and the legendary Louis Myers on guitar, Mojo Buford on harp and the fierce little rhythm section of Fuzz Jones and Willie "Big Eyes" Smith.


One of the joys of this set is Madison warming the room for the first 2 (actually 3 tunes) tracks, bringing some of that West Side goodness into mix with a Big Legged Woman>You Done Lost Your Good Thing Now and I Need Your Lovin'. Following Buford's standard circus barker intro, Muddy steps forward...and gives us his standard band intro banter. Listen to a stack of Muddy's band intros through this period and you'll see how little he seemed to wander from his script.

Muddy's leading the way through just 4 songs here, a by rote Stormy Monday, backed by a version of Jimmy Reed's You Don't Have to Go that gets to cooking. Long Distance Call was a fixture of Muddy's sets through the '70's, a ready-made moment for Muddy to break out his nasty slide and join the fun. After a romping, if predictable Mojo, Muddy's down the road and the band wraps things up with a spirited outro.

Short-dose Muddy it may be, but a tasty little nug it remains. And a fine way to kick off Blue Monday...

Peace, Mudcatz


Muddy Waters
Jazz Workshop
Boston MA
August 22, 1972

(FM) WBCN, Boston

1 Big Legged Woman>You Done Lost Your Good Thing Now
2 I Need Your Lovin'
3 Muddy intro
4 Band intros>Stormy Monday
5 You Don't Have to Go
6 Long Distance Call
7 Got My Mojo Workin'
8 Instrumental Outro


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Rev. Gary's New Beginning

When Jazz label Prestige began its Bluesville subsidiary in 1960, what would become the folk and blues boom was only then getting ramped up. Through the four short years of its existence, Bluesville released a near-staggering amount of quality blues, helping the fuel the revival as well as providing us, from the distant hilltop of these later years, with many of the idiom's essential recordings. In its first year alone, the Bluesville imprint would turn loose albums by Willie Dixon, Roosevelt Sykes, Lonnie Johnson, and a pair from Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee. At the end of their first year, they introduced the Rev. Gary Davis to much of the world.

Davis had, of course, recorded for ARC in the '30's and the Smithsonian in the '50's. By the end of that decade, he was already a fixture in New York City, playing on its streets and, entering the 1960's, its coffee houses.

When Prestige/Bluesville released Harlem Street Singer, it would almost seem a gutsy move in hindsight, pitching an album of spirituals at a secular and an as-yet-still-unproven folk market. One would think that, were it just about anyone other than the Rev. Gary Davis, and especially this album, things might have worked out differently. As it went, it turned out very well indeed. Davis would stick around Bluesville, releasing two more critical albums, and his career moved, finally, into its most successful stage.

In late August, 1960, at a recording studio in New Jersey, Davis cut 20 songs in just 3 hours. Twelve of these would become Harlem Street Singer. Davis would open his repertoire back up a bit fairly quickly, incorporating secular material into his live sets, and then his albums. For this, his debut, Davis recorded exclusively spirituals. Spirituals that were designed to shake a man deep, music--and a man--that blended sanctified music, the blues, and trend-setting ragtime guitar into something seamless and singular. Davis' music still defies convenient labeling because he was able to bring them all to the fore simultaneously.

One could scarcely hope for a stronger opening than Davis' well-traveled Samson and Delilah, giving us what could easily qualify as its best rendition. What follows is a showcase dose of what made the man such a seminal figure. Whether riffing on ragtime or playfully playing call and response with his guitar, Davis' fingerwork throughout this album is just gorgeous. Frenetic one moment, introspective the next, this is the sort of disc, and Rev. Gary the sort of player, that requires repeated spins to catch the nuances.

Often as not, with Davis' rough-hewn, life-worn voice and blues holler inflections, most of his spirituals ended up sounding like blues. Davis wasn't on any sales pitch, he was just singing it like he felt it. Like he believed. When his voice got to booming, as it does through I Belong to the Band, Hallelujah, Great Change Since I Been Born and Twelve Gates to the City, Gary's giving it his all, straining for, wringing out that last note.

Harlem Street Singer would be the Rev. Gary's introduction to a broader audience that was finally primed to hear him. They found in his music, and the man, something decidedly genuine. Even joyous.

Peace, Mudcatz




Rev. Gary Davis
Harlem Street Singer
Prestige/Bluesville 1993

1. Samson and Delilah
2. Let Us Get Together
3. I Belong to the Band, Hallelujah!
4. Pure Religion
5. Great Change Since I Been Born
6. Death Don't Have No Mercy
7. Twelve Gates to the City
8. Goin' to Sit Down by the Banks of the River
9. Tryin' To Get Home
10. Lo, I Be With You Always
11. I Am the Light of the World
12. I Feel Just like Goin' On

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Happy New Year!

John Lee at the Go-Go and In the Pen

"So I'm going to stay in Soulville for a little while..."

I once turned a career convict onto John Lee Hooker, and thence onto the blues, with this album. By the time I knew him, Henry was an old-school badass and had already been in and out of state lock-up's, starting in California before ending up in New England. Reflecting on his West Coast time, he told me, "Vacaville could be nasty. Soledad was a fucking sewer."

I mentioned that I had a John Lee Hooker concert that was partly recorded at Soledad--and that's all it took to see his eyebrow cock. A couple days later, handing back the CD I'd loaned him, all he said was, "More. You got anything more by this guy?" I loaned him a couple more Hooker albums and threw in a Buddy & Junior for good measure.

I've refined my shtick through recent years and have taken to burning and handing out discs by the short-stack whenever folks tell me, as they still oddly do, "I'm really getting into the blues. Any suggestions?" If I'm trying to turn folks onto the blues, I have perhaps a half dozen titles/artists they get on the first pass.

This would be one of them.

John Lee Hooker's Live at the Cafe Au Go Go (and Soledad Prison) is the ungainly title for a stitched-together live album that smolders, burns, throws down and boogies. On paper it seems almost ridiculous: melding a pair of previously-released LP's of shows spaced six years apart, with John Lee backed by very different bands. And expect it to work. Live Hooker could be a gamble as it is, with some releases exponentially better than others. Hooker could be a tough cat to back and, as the old saw goes, if you were on his stage, you played by his rules. Gamble though it may have seemed, this one ends up "blackjack" all the way through.

The Cafe au Go Go segment of this album (tracks 1-8) was originally released on the Bluesway label in 1967. The 5 Soledad tracks make up the bulk of 1972's Live at Soledad Prison, when it was released on ABC, Bluesway's parent label. In 1996, when MCA reissued these performances, they trimmed the opening two cuts from the Soledad show (the John Lee Hooker Jr.-led Super Lover and I'm Your Crosscut Saw) and folded the remaining 5 cuts in with the Go-Go's 8.

Hooker could hardly have gone wrong with his backing bands here, most especially in New York. At the Cafe au Go-Go, he's backed by the Muddy Waters Band, a formidable outfit indeed which, at this gig featured Muddy, Otis Spann, Sammy Lawhorn, Luther Johnson, Francis Clay on the drums and George "Harmonica" Smith blowing harp. Like Hooker, Muddy had his own idiosyncratic sense of timing and his boys knew precisely how to back such a man and how to play tight without getting in each others way. Witness if you will, Spann's subtle phrasings in I'm Bad Like Jesse James or the Johnson & Lawhorn licks in Heartaches and Misery.

If any of those assembled behind John Lee that night deserve singling out, it is probably Spann. His playing throughout the Cafe au Go-Go tunes are trademark Otis, lushly understated and rich. The man could set a mood or a pace like nobody's business. Here, Hooker's performance of When My First Wife Left Me is haunting, deeply soulful and all the way into the pocket. He's in great voice, a fully emotive voice...and Spann's fills with the band's textured playing are a significant reason why this track packs such a punch. Music like this is why blues bands were formed.

Fact is, there isn't a weak cut on this album. Right out of the gate and into the growling strut of I'm Bad Like Jesse James, John Lee gives us gives us probably its most chilling version. Right behind that he's romping through She's Long, She's Tall, revisiting a standard blues theme that rarely gets cited: singing praises for his lady (rather than lamenting her wayward ways). Whether we're talk
ing about this tune, Sonny Boy's Eyesight To the Blind, or the scores of songs cut for as long as the blues have been around, these guys are loving life and they ain't lamenting shit.

Cafe au Go-Go or Soledad Prison, this album's slow blues are its true selling points. Taking us through Hooker standards like When My First Wife Left Me, I'll Never Get Out of These Blues Alive or Serves Me Right To Suffer, John Lee's sly baritone brings it up from all the way down. This is blues with the hair still on its nuts.

I will always believe the blues to be at their best when they're played raw. So much of this album is a great example of why I hold this belief. Playing to a raucous and appreciative convict audience, the Soledad performances are looser and grittier, feeling like they just blew in on a cold Detroit wind. The free-form Boogie Everywhere I Go and the closing Bang Bang Bang Bang are front-end loaded to get some feet moving and blood pumping.

At Soledad, here famously in the company of his son, the standout performer behind Hooker isn't John Jr., it's guitarist Charlie Grimes. Rarely mentioned when one sees discussions of this album, the obscure Grimes lays it down sharp and nasty from when end of that prison stage to the other, straight through the disc's last 5 tracks. His playing with Luther Tucker on It Serves Me Right to Suffer is so tasty it hurts.

The strengths of the Soledad outings go beyond mere performance. As a disc, the assembled albums build to a boogieing crescendo, completing the trajectory begun with the earlier tracks. As a whole, the album becomes more fully realized and rightfully asserts itself as classic.

This one's for you, Henry. May the new year bring you closer to the horizon beyond that wall.

Peace, Mudcatz


John Lee Hooker
Live at Cafe Au Go-Go (and Soledad Prison)
MCA 1996

1. Bad Like Jesse James
2. She's Long, She's Tall
3. When My First Wife Left Me
4. Heartaches and Misery
5. One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer
6. I Don't Want No Trouble
7. I'll Never Get Out of These Blues Alive
8. Seven Days
9. What's the Matter Baby
10. Lucille
11. Boogie Everywhere I Go
12. It Serves Me Right To Suffer
13. Bang Bang Bang Bang

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