Critical Mass

PHILIP MARTIN: Stones show they've still got blues

The Rolling Stones — Ron Wood (from left), Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Charlie Watts — returned to their musical inspiration on an album of classic blues, Blue & Lonesome.
The Rolling Stones — Ron Wood (from left), Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Charlie Watts — returned to their musical inspiration on an album of classic blues, Blue & Lonesome.

The new Rolling Stones' album Blue & Lonesome is pretty cool.

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Album cover for The Rolling Stones' "Blue & Lonesome"

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Democrat-Gazette file photo

Muddy Waters was a primary inspiration for the Rolling Stones, who took their name from one of his songs.

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Democrat-Gazette file photo

Eric Clapton plays on two songs on the new blues album by the Rolling Stones.

It's not some essential document that everyone who cares about the popular music that started to emerge in the second half of the 20th century and is now fading out needs to own, but it's a nice record, quickly conceived and recorded. You could criticize the production -- by Don Was, one of the band's longtime collaborators along with quasi-members Chuck Leavell and Darryl Jones -- as being a bit too tidy, but then this is the World's Greatest Rock 'n' Roll Band™, a bunch of septuagenarians bearing down on the music that inspired them in their youth, not the Replacements doing Monkees covers under the influence.

All in all, it's an impressive show of strength, made more so by being so offhand. Yes, the band can still swing, and yes, they are obviously schooled in the conventions of electric blues. What's probably most moving about the album is the obvious affection it betrays as it signals the band's return to youthful ambitions.

Recorded in three days, the cover story is that Blue & Lonesome is a lark -- they just ran through Little Walter's "Blue and Lonesome" as a palate cleanser, a way to reset before getting back to their serious work of recording a new album. Someone had the presence of mind to push "Record." They liked the playback, so they did another blues classic. And another. And another. And then they had a record full of covers of Chicago blues and their first studio album since 2005, their first album ever without a Jagger-Richards original. And maybe their first real blues album.

It's different in other ways too. Mick Jagger doesn't play any guitar and Keith Richards doesn't take a vocal turn. Eric Clapton, who was recording in an adjacent studio at the time, shows up on two tracks. On Willie Dixon's "I Can't Quit You Baby," a touchstone that's been recorded by hundreds of artists including Led Zeppelin and Otis Rush, Jagger introduces Clapton's solo by yelling "Yeah, go, Eric!" at the 1:48 mark; Clapton applies a little slide guitar to Little Johnny Taylor's "Everybody Knows About My Good Thing."

Jagger's singing is strong throughout -- compare his seasoned and relatively restrained approach here to his effective yet callow reading of Willie Dixon's "Little Red Rooster" that topped the British charts in 1965. Jagger's harp playing is outstanding (Brian Jones played the harmonica on the 1965 recording of "Little Red Rooster," though Jagger routinely mimicked the part in lip-synced television performances).

The young Jagger tried so hard to channel the blues shouters and soul crooners he admired that he eventually willed himself into becoming a great singer. It wasn't so much that he made virtues of his limitations as he overrode all objections with his sneering, snarling style. Jagger didn't hold notes, he backhanded them away. His singing was conversational in the style of the old blues guys and the sex that darkened his voice wasn't of the incense-and-peppermints "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" variety.

The Stones started out as more than a grittier alternative to Merseybeat cutesiness. They dragged Jimmy Reed and Howlin' Wolf into the pop mix; they named themselves after a Muddy Waters song. They seemed to court something other than hit singles and fugitive pop star glory. They were -- in aspiration if not quite in fact -- a blues band.

All they ever wanted to be, Richards has written, was a blues band.

...

Let's stipulate that the blues is a magpie genre, a folk music that accreted more than being written, born from the handed-down and the overheard. W.C. Handy got off a train in Tutwiler, Miss., in 1903, took the words and weird music of a street musician who no doubt picked them up from somewhere else and codified it as "Yellow Dog Blues."

So the father of the blues was a transcriptionist who snatched something from the air and put it down on paper and maybe made himself a little profit. The blues was born from appropriation and not just from the communal reservoir of shared verses and guitar riffs. An ex-con named Aleck "Rice" Miller met a harp player who called himself Sonny Boy Williamson sometime in the 1930s and 20 years later there were two Sonny Boys -- the second one played with Elmore James on "Dust My Broom" and went to England in the early '60s where he played with the Yardbirds and nearly burned down his hotel by trying to cook a rabbit in a coffee percolator.

It was this Sonny Boy who allegedly told Levon Helm "Those English boys want to play the blues real bad, and they do."

So what is blues?

That's a reasonable, even essential, question. If we answer it one way -- if we say that the blues is a musical genre bounded by certain conventions and agreed-upon rules -- it is obvious that the blues is available to anyone who would play them. After all, a guitar string doesn't know the color of the finger that plucks it and vibrating columns of air are indifferent to the social and historical forces that have conspired to set them vibrating.

But there are problems with defining the blues as an arrangement of sound. If we set certain parameters to conceptually constrain the ideal, we lose the emotive context most blues fans find essential. On the other hand, if we define the blues as a profound musical expression of the anguish of American black people, a form forged in the brutal segregation of the late 19th-century Mississippi Delta, if we say that genuine blues must arise from some reservoir of injury, then aren't we raising the specter of cultural separatism? Under the circumstances, wasn't it presumptuous for middle-class British white boys to affect the inflections of ancient black men from Mississippi? Aren't the Blues Brothers a sick joke? Not to mention the early Rolling Stones?

It can be argued that the blues is a uniquely black American form and that all others who try to play the blues are at best imitators and hobbyists and at the worst plagiarists and grave robbers. I've likened the blues to the Hopi Ghost Dance -- if it ain't real Indians dancing, it's counterfeit.

But maybe that's only if you believe in ghosts. For some of us, the blues is haunted. We cannot listen to Robert Johnson without hearing a kind of resigned yet naked pain. (Though there are those who will tell us we've never really heard Johnson, that on his recordings his vocals and picking were sped up, that part of his eeriness derives from what was either a technical mistake or an engineered contrivance. I don't buy this and have argued against its likelihood, but the theory is gaining credence in some circles.) No one sounds like Johnson, although there are those who do him honor.

Peter Green, the Englishman who years and years ago played in another British "blues band" called Fleetwood Mac, does some very nice, very respectful, very worthy versions of Johnson's songs -- but for me Green's music isn't the same thing as that of Robert Johnson or even Keb' Mo'. Neither for that matter is Clapton's -- although Clapton's a tasteful and almost too respectful student. What these guys do is artful and appreciated, but it's not what I call the blues.

Maybe the argument seems academic and specious, but it matters to some blues fans -- just as the question of whether a new folk song can be written or whether the songs must be handed down matters to some.

It is one thing to cherish a music, to tap into its source materials and explore its conventions and to ultimately use it to express your personal joy and sorrow in a way that other people can relate to it. It is quite another to experience being born black in America, to know that your great-grandparents were born into slavery, to experience the subtle (and less subtle) forms of racial prejudice that still permeate this culture. Music is more than an arrangement of sounds. Acknowledging cultural differences is not racism per se -- the blues properly belongs to the culture of black Americans and can only be borrowed by others. It's all right to play those sounds on your guitar, as long as you don't convince yourself you've earned them.

But maybe the Stones have.

Still, 50-something years later, isn't it a little weird for famous old millionaires to affect the cadences and vernacular of a damaged and afflicted underclass of a foreign country?

...

It's clear that the right to sing the blues is not one of those inalienable ones, endowed by the Creator to each and every one of us at birth. It's more like something handed down through blood like a curse. Or maybe you can earn it, through living your hard-knock life.

Can white people play the blues? The best answer comes from the late great critic-and-provocateur Randall Lyon, one of the giants who once roamed about these parts. "Sure they can," he once told me. "But you and I don't have to listen."

But sometimes, only sometimes, maybe you want to.

Email:

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

blooddirtangels.com

Style on 01/08/2017

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