Devil at My Heels

Here we go - another white guy making a confession about the Blues. It is sincere, yet another suburban spud telling you how the Blues saved his life. Well, maybe not that extreme; I wasn't on the edge ready to jump off when I first heard Blind Lemon Pie. But the Blues definitely changed my outlook on life. And I am here to tell you about it - sorry.

I didn't grow up with the Blues; my first experience might have been something as both mundane and sublime as 'Porgy & Bess', then 'House of the Rising Sun' by the Animals. It was groups like the Rolling Stones and individuals like Eric Clapton who introduced me to the Blues, white guys teaching a white guy. But it wasn't that simple. There was also this jazz thing, creeping along the fringes, where you could hear an obvious overlap between the styles. Blues doesn't have to be served straight up; it can be a spice added to some other genre and have just as much of an effect.

Some people think that the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, and all the other white people who appropriated the Blues harmed the genre. I think that they saved it, pure and simple. The African-American community had largely moved on to Soul and R & B, and it was the younger generation of kids outside the entire Black experience who, for whatever reason, embraced it and made it their own. And the good ones did two things; first, they always acknowledged where the songs came from (I'm looking at you, Led Zeppelin, the group most notorious from ripping off others, black or white, of musical ideas), and they realized the the Blues is really about singing the song, not playing the guitar.

Clapton learned this lesson in a particularly painful way. As early as 1966 the audiences were declaring him 'God', yet no matter how esteemed a guitarist that he was, he always seemed hollow. During the 70's and 80's he learned to sing like a Bluesman, and it showed in his music. He developed a set of lungs and could really deliver beyond the reedy squeak that he managed in 'Crossroads' decades earlier in Cream. His music, IMHO, on albums like 'From the Cradle' was much more convincing and better for it.

So perversely, I am going to feature three Blues instrumentals in this blog posting. There is a simple reason for that; I am reluctant to create or post any music videos of songs written by other people. I am sensitive to copy-write infringement, although I have posted one Blues cover earlier, 'Mother Earth'. It took me a while to write lyrics to Blues songs. Instead, I did strange instrumentals pushing the definition of the Blues. Those are featured here.

When I finished my first solo recording project back in 2006, the thing that struck me the most was how jazzy the whole thing sounded. Not necessarily jazz, but in the genre blending and sampling that I did, largely improvisational and loose, traits that I associate with the jazz idiom.  When I took over the drum duties as well, making my music completely self-sufficient, I immediately started doing more Blues-based material, as much to steady my beat and for the discipline. Trust me, the Blues are definitely a discipline, more so the looser you get. It is the dichotomy that makes it art.

I almost did a Blues album in 2009, 'Sloppy Seconds', a strange hybrid album carrying over some earlier songs with nine new pieces that were mostly up-tempo. In 2011, by which time I was singing a great deal more, the first of five Blues albums came out, 'Blues Askew'. My vocals were another reason to head to that genre, as it was a good place to learn how to have the right attitude when singing. I am a reluctant vocalist, and I will write about that later, but the human voice is and always will be the greatest instrument, simply because of the emotional response it triggers at a deeply psychological level, similar to hearing a baby cry.

Blues albums are different in another way, as they are likely to be full of cover songs. There are thousands of great songs to choose from, and I have made more than one playlist of potential candidates. Originals don't show up as often, although two of my songs, both with lyrics, have been featured on this blog; 'MIA in Miami' and 'Kelly Devine'. While both could be considered rock, they show how my Blues album constantly stretch the boundaries of that genre.

"Backdoor' was from that first blues album, and it is an unusual sleazy instrumental with lots of sliding chords and choppy riffs. Obviously, this is the jazzy side of things, but keep in mind how Miles Davis' best selling album was 'Kind of Blue', which mined similar territory. I had just purchased a semi-acoustic f-hole Godin guitar with a beautiful black satin finish. It had a funky plunky sound, and this piece came out of fooling around with it. The organ works as a support instrument, and unusually I am playing acoustic drums here. Using brushes even, not my normal style but for whatever reason I am more comfortable as a jazz drummer - more instinctual - than as a rock drummer banging away a 4/4 beat.

For whatever reason, I found myself gravitating towards f-hole style guitars in the last decade. I only buy guitars that I want to use, not being a collector, and I always wanted something that could get a decent acoustic sound yet had a pickup, while also being able to be plugged in and get a nasty primitive overdrive sound. That instrument was perfect, and the song was built around it, as have a handful of other pieces since. I will also tune the guitar to open 'E" and use it for slide, since the sound goes well with that style.

The next example of a Blues instrumental is very different. This was a hard number done in 7/4 time, hence the title 'Raging Sevens'. It was an exercise for my drumming and bass playing as much as the wailing guitar solo that I build to various climaxes. By now my drumming was getting flexible enough to not sound stilted even in a challenging time signature, so there is a decent groove going on here. It is obviously my Stratocaster that I am ripping away on, and much fun is had playing with the effects pedal board.

While most of the videos that accompany these songs are quite secondary to the actual music, this particular one is different, having an interesting back story. We were on a vacation on the Riviera Maya as the guests of another couple. The first morning, while everyone else slept late from the travel, I got up first and went outside to look around. There was a triathlon happening on the grounds, which were very nice and included three rivers coming out of the ground and meeting at a spot in the Caribbean.

 I tried rousing the others but they could not be bothered. So I grabbed my little video camera and ran out, following the crowds and contestants, getting some good footage. In particular, there was a stone jetty, and the athletes were swimming along side to get up the river and begin the next stage of the race. This formed the basis for the video that accompanied the song, which was a good thing, since a hard drive melt down a couple of years later made that footage go away. I also created another couple of videos from that vacation and named a song in honor of the beautiful resort that we stayed at, 'Tres Rios', but not being a Blues, I'll leave that for another day.

The last video that I will feature is from my latest Blues album, 'Down in the Bottom' from 2017. After three straight years with an album in that genre, I stopped in 2013, waiting four years to go back. It was simply getting too easy, and I always want to think of fresh ways to approach the genre. Surprisingly, the year that I did sixty songs, while there was a fair amount of rock, only one song could be considered a Blues, and that was rather Avant Garde jazz as well. Maybe I should do a video of that; it would be weird.

'Down in the Bottom' from 2017 was mostly cover songs done in a British Blues Invasion style (a year before Joe Bonamassa's new album, mind you). There were a couple of originals, one of which, 'MIA in Miami', I have talked about and posted on this blog previously. There was one instrumental, just to shake things up, and it was a particularly good one, called 'Devil at My Heels.' Like much of the album, it was uptempo, almost frantic, and a bit non-stop. By coincidence it was also done of the Godin, which my wife named 'Blackie'.

The concept was simple; how about doing a Blues in dropped 'D' tuning. Guitarists will know that just slightly changing the tuning of one string can significantly alter the way to approach chords, and I wanted something that was going to hit the low strings hard. Another goal was to give enough space for both the drums and bass to get a little attention, and that worked. I borrowed some patterns from slide and translated into the tuning, added some riffs, and a monster song emerged, one of my best surprises of the 2017 project.

The video uses a couple of old train promos from the Prelinger Archives because, well, trains just seem to go with both the Blues as well as the constant feeling of motion in this song. I just piled up the visuals until I got a nice sense of overload. The music on this one is powerful enough, and unique enough, to carry the piece to the finish. That's why I love the Blues; it is a seemingly simple form that can be manipulated to express the individual's personality. That one has a big hunk of me in it.