And just like that, we’ve reached 1977. This is the first year, I think, that I will specifically remember music being released in real time, and it looks like there a few albums here that I used to own (buying them in retrospect some time in the late Eighties), so it’ll be an interesting change of perception.
The year saw Queen Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee, and I remember street parties and entering a decorated bike parade on my knackered old bike that I nicknamed Old Squeamish. It was the year that saw the launch of Concorde, and test flights of the space shuttle Enterprise, from piggy-backed launches from the back of a 747. And relevant to music, both Elvis and Marc Bolan died. Oh, and of course, Star Wars was released but right at the end of the year, I don’t think I saw it until some time the following year (just me and my then 11-year old cousin taking ourselves to the cinema, couldn’t do that these days).
I’m a little surprised how few pure blues albums there are on the list, and I would have thought that some good old Chicago blues might have featured in the Fifties. But here we have Muddy Waters at the young age of 64 showing us how it should be done. The first track on here, Mannish Boy, was first recorded by him in 1955, and the version on here, although a studio track, sounds raw and live, stripped back to Waters, Willie “Big Eyes” Smith on drums and producer Johnny Winter on “Miscellaneous Screams”.
And, Great Scott, is Waters on fire with this arrangement. I’ve discussed before how the blues has quite a tight set of rules – to turn a scale into a blues scale involves trimming out quite a few intervals, and chord progressions tend to be within certain parameters too. This makes it super easy to jam with, but in the wrong hands can also make it easy to fall into lazy cliché. In the hands of a master, however, like any art form with strict rules, the rules can be stretched and bent or used as a framework for genius.
A lot of credit goes to the recording quality – Smith’s drums have real kick and power to them, and the whole thing sounds live even though it's a studio recording. Some of these tracks must have been single-takers, surely? There’s an infectious enthusiasm where all the musicians, notably James Cotton on harmonica and “Pinetop” Perkins on piano, really bounce off the presence of Waters. The lengthy jam of Bus Driver is a great example of this, a song about a bus driver stealing the singer’s wife (“He used to give her rides in the daytime, now she gives him rides at night”). Crosseyed Cat, about a jealous, violent, cat “too big to be a housecat, too small to be a lion” that proves a barrier to amorous intent, is likewise an absolute tour-de-force of a jam where everyone gets a burning solo.
In the same way that Tom Waits managed to recreate the atmosphere of a smokey jazz club, patrons sat quietly at their tables, this album manages to recreate a jumping blues club, patrons crammed in beyond the numbers that fire regulations allow. And I loved it.
Side note: There's 17 years between this and Waters' previous album on the list. A record so far, let's see if anyone beats it.
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