1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 69. John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers – With Eric Clapton (1966)

Another one from my mother’s old record collection (the rest so far being lots of Bob Dylan and a really chunky bit of vinyl for The Beach Boys). Alas, this one was scratched too much to be listenable; better was the 1969 compilation album Looking Back. Mayall was (is) one of those musicians that is perhaps more well known for all of the nascent talent that he worked with. Clapton, here, and also on this album John McVie later of Fleetwood Mac. Other Mac members Peter Green and Mick Fleetwood will also work with Mayall, but not on this album. I was wondering if this mid-later Sixties period is a particularly fertile time for cross-pollination of artists compared to other periods, but I guess I’ll find out more as I go on. Perhaps these days the area of hip-hop and R&B has a lot of interplay with the likes of performer/producers like Dr Dre; maybe I’m talking nonsense, we will see. 

I have stated before that the blues by its very nature is a somewhat limited musical form, but Mayall does do a lot of pushing within those boundaries, not least the move towards more guitar distortion and on occasion a very loose timing structure (often shifting time signatures during a song, but also the soloing has more of a ragtime feel sometimes). One could perhaps worry about whether, in the words of the Bonzo Dog Band, “Can Blue Men Sing the Whites?” and how the life experiences of a bunch of lads from St Martin’s College (actually Mayall went to Manchester College of Art and is the son of a pub landlord) compare to those of a black man in 1950s Mississippi, but do we really want gatekeeping in music? Some tracks are original, many are covers of the likes of Ray Charles and Robert Johnson. Charles’ “What’d I Say” has some funky Hammond going on and a jazz-like drum break; it also blends on the riff from the Beatles Daytripper (or did the Beatles nick that riff from Ray Charles?). It highlights the new blues sound, though. 

Beyond all that, if you like blues, and want to hear the early years of the British Blues scene, this is it. Dare I say it, hand-wringing about cultural appropriation aside, I prefer the blues tracks on off here to the BB King album. Eviscerate me now. I’d like to hope that the US bluesmen heard this, liked it, took the ball back and put their own improvements to it, much like the folk/rock back-and-forth we’re seeing with Dylan/Byrds/Beatles. 

 

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