The Blues

This is Soub's fault!

He offered Sonny Boy Williamson the other day and I have been listening to the Blues ever since!  I am so lucky that this was the music that influenced my generation so much.  The Beatles, based in Liverpool, had family and friends who worked as stewards and the like on liners taking the rich back and forth across the Atlantic.  These brought back Jazz, Blues, and Rock & Roll records which influenced the youth learning to play their music.  Picked up from Radio Luxembourg, once upon a time the only way to hear decent pop music, similar types in the rest of the country wanted more!  Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker and others influenced so many people in Britain while being almost unknown to the major Radio & Tv stations in the US.  Their sin was to be black and play music not acceptable to the genteel white folks who controlled America.  

Young Americans however were listening also.  Up in Duluth Bob Dylan, then known as Zimmerman, was annoying folks with music influenced by what he had heard, a great many others were like him.  The arrival of the Beatles allowed them to develop their music as an audience was ready and waiting for them.  

Today black Americans (now called Afro-Americans) prefer to ignore Blues music and for reasons no sane person sould possibly understand they find life through Rap!  A type of music that misses out the appropriately placed letter 'C.'  Shame on them!

How I wish I could play guitar like these guys could.  Max found one man who could play like they!

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Blue Sky Thinking

I took this picture of the town hall clock tower not because it was special but because the sky was blue. Read that again - BLUE! Yes indeed for much of the day the sun shone and made us smile, well not the lass in Tesco's obviously. Last time she smiled she was off sick for a week. The sun has made the tower a bit brighter than it was in real life, the clock handles ought to be 'golder' in colour, but my laptop does not enable that to show sadly. However the blue is what I want to see, and lots of it. The golden creature on the top, just what is that supposed to be, and what is it doing? In a week or two I am going on a private tour, with a hundred others, of this 1926 town hall and may be able to catch a couple of pictures. It is very noble inside, with interesting murals and doors, staircases and such like. A reflection of town pride and the pride of the man who paid for it so generously. Of course paying a shilling a week more to his workers might have created a better society but he didn't think of that.

The town hall stands where the town market once stood.  Jokes about cattle and Councillor's can be inserted here.  To the modern mind, who often complain about lack of car park spaces, the idea that cattle, sheep, pigs and the like could be driven through the streets a mere ninety odd years is outlandish.  Yet the market square would buzz with the farmers selling their wares and drinking their health in 'The Bull' and other watering houses.  People on strike for that extra shilling that built the town hall also gathered around here because they felt they were treated in similar fashion to the beasts.  They had a point!  before the Great War strikes were common.  In the year 1912 the railways, the builders, many major industries were all on strike.  Conditions were awful in many places, train drivers and their firemen often driving for the whole day and then forced to do another journey after that.  Long hours, short pay, easy sackings, no compensation.  Life was tough for many in those days.  Then came the war!  Well that's a relief, that helped sort the industrial troubles, apart from the strikes obviously.  Did you know women munitions workers could make a pound a week working a twelve hour shift?  No wonder they took to lipstick, cigarettes and local pubs!  Soldiers got one shilling and twopence a day basic, that's eight shillings a week at twenty shillings to the pound!

We still treat soldiers badly.  The pay is better, some after care has improved, but the failure of the private company to recruit and train sufficient security staff for the Olympics has meant a further several thousand troops must be brought in for security duties.  Three million unemployed, many in the London region, yet they have several thousand staff short?  This organisation lacks a wee bit of organisation I think.  There again after having received £280 million to provide a service and offer the minimum wage for hard conditions I suspect I can see where their problem may lie.

Digitaldreamdoor.com

It is fifty years ago today that the Rolling Stones made their debut at the Marque Club in Soho.  While the line up was to change somewhat in the days following before the 'famous five' pictured above became famous, that's how it is with musicians, nevertheless that was the first time this band performed. Fifty years ago? Some of these boys now touch 70, who would have thunk it? One of the great rock and roll Rhythm and Blues bands of our time. This is one of the tracks all aspiring Rhythm and Blues bands played in those days:-

'Scuse me while I reminisce....

'Pine Top' Perkins

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'Pine Top' Perkins the Blues magician has died aged 97. You may be surprised at this as you had never heard of him until now, well neither had I, however this is my type of music so he needs to be listened to! The States must have been awash with black musicians for many years before the young British bands like the Beatles and Rolling Stones gave them the publicity they so richly deserved. I think it was when questioned on the Johnny Carson show about their musical influences that the racist attitudes of America really showed up. John and Paul mentioned the likes of Howling Wolf, John Lee Hooker and so on yet Johnny had no idea who they were. Black music was not considered acceptable then. However white guys like Bob Zimmerman up in Duluth was using the magic of radio to bring about a radical transformation in both the United States and the western world in general. Taking the name Dylan, after Dylan Thomas the famous Welsh drunk, his music joined with others in transforming society for the better. How interesting that a music ignored by so many, indeed considered dangerous in many ways because of who performed it, was to influence so much change in the USA. Certainly they had been warned in the fifties of this music. Rock and Roll also grew from black influence and gave Elvis his fame, and at first abuse from those who knew best. But it was the men of the sixties who really brought such music to the worlds attention. How glad I am about that. Men like 'Pinetop' supported many famous names over the years, most much more famous than their backing bands, and even today there are men like him still playing their music in their nineties. Good luck to them!






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Rhythm and Blues

Earlier tonight I came across a programme on a video concerning the early years of the great sixties groups. This hour long programme specialised in those Rhythm and Blues influenced folk from that time, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Rolling Stones, Manfred Mann and so on, all great stuff to me. This was my music, the music of my youth. Not that I ever heard enough of this of course, it was not given nearly enough air time on the bubblegum dominated Radio 1, the BBC radio station that began in 1967 and was 'pop' orientated.

As an adolescent, and all through the following years, the screaming guitars and the steady rhythm of the blues was indeed the music that got to the heart! The main groups that made music to listen to, and rarely made money on sales generated by Radio 1, were blues and R & B based. At school, yes I did go to one but would rather have missed that experience thank you, we had a 'hop' at the end of the year.Always a local Rhythm & Blues band was brought in, although when the ginger lass pulled the singer of the stage we nearly lost that little pleasure! This music does speak in a way no other does today, it captures all sorts of moods yet the generation around us prefers bland inconsequential ballads, usually from all girls bands who look the same, on black lassies with high pitch voices who all sound the same! What does our music taste say about the generations?

Our music was more basic certainly, although the bands usually had a middle class background. As the decades since the sixties have passed the music tastes reflect the growing prosperity and becomes more sophisticated. (I discount Lieutenant Pigeon's 1971 offering here by the way) Are we just to wrapped up in ourselves to want to listen to anything other than bland pop? Girlies always did this, and it was mostly the male of the species who wanted Jimi Hendrix and the like, and this led radio stations to give them what they wanted as that was the core listener. Only John Peel in the sixties gave us what we wanted, progressive music to go with our Hippy ideals! 'Make love not war!' It usually became 'Make tea not war,' but we won't go into that. Oh those Hippy ideals, so good and caring, making a better world, and we would have done so if human nature had not got into the way! If it wasn't for sin we would have done OK!

Funny how so much was spoken about the caring, loving life, while the groups that gave us the music that we 'loved' to were arguing with one another while high on drink, drugs and conceit! How many preached the 'love' gospel while ripping others off? However the music was, and still is, good! A proper Rhythm and Blues band can really liven my little brain up. Possibly because we hear it so rarely these days. Even in Chicago and such places the 'Blues' is a dying art, the young find 'rap' more to their taste, though I use the word 'taste' lightly here.

Oh Eric Clapton why could I not play the guitar like you? How come you had the talent and I had the need? I saw him in Westbourne Grove on night. I had just bought a cassette, remember those, of one of his albums, and as I walked along playing air guitar to 'Pretending' in my head, I saw him! He stared at me, knowing I was dreaming I was he, and he realised I was staring at him, our eyes met, and in one sublimely fast movement he was off into the '7/11 shop. I wonder if he often thinks of me? That area, part of the Notting Hill of fame, contains many famous and now rich superstars. The house prices do not allow folk like me to live there. One bedroom flat for half a million? Not me! In fact I recall seeing the 'Third Ear Band' live in a church hall on Lancaster Road there around 1971/2 time. Fantastic evening! Light show and drugged up poetry readings also! wonder if they remember me?

I have always liked music that was a bit innovative. Nowadays I like classics, jazz and the old stuff. Anything that is not meaningless, bland 'pop' usually can be listened to for a while, unless there is a screeching soprano spoiling it of course. There are limits! Oh if only I had Hendrix talents, or Clapton's, or Jeff Becks or Keith Richards or Jimmy Page or .....