Wed Sep 24 2014

Steady rain all night. A relaxing sound. By midmorning it had slowed to a drizzle. The kind of rain that could last for days, or weeks, or until spring. This one is likely to be days, but you never know. Turned in early last night (in my world, anything before midnight is “early”). I don’t usually read in bed because I tend to fall asleep, but the weather made cozying up under a pile of blankets with a book and a cat seem like the way to go. The only downside of going to bed early is that I then wake up early. The first time it turned out to be 3:30am. No problem rolling over and going back to sleep until I actually needed to get up, which on Wednesdays is about 6:30. It is only as I type this that I realize that the Tracy Nelson earworm did not figure into my morning for the first time in what seems like forever. Perhaps the focus on new songs yesterday filled some of that space.

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So, the Wang Dang Doodle arrangement that I’m working on is more or less derived from the Koko Taylor version, which she recorded at Chess with Willie Dixon singing backup vocals. It came out a couple of years after the Howlin’ Wolf version, and was actually a hit for her. This was in the early 1960’s, but I wasn’t aware of any of it at the time. All of my early-life blues exposure came through rock bands who covered blues material. Only later did I get serious about following those influences back to their source, and the life-long love of this music went to a much deeper level. The first time I heard the song was probably on a Savoy Brown record, or possibly the “London Howlin’ Wolf Sessions” (Wolf with Clapton, Winwood, Watts, and other British rock/blues luminaries). The two albums came out almost simultaneously in 1971, shortly after I graduated high school and as I was embarking on my path to fame and fortune in a Norfolk, Virginia-based blues/rock band.

Koko’s version took the rough edges off of Wolf’s original, particularly his notoriously idiosyncratic relationship with time. This is more or less the history of blues moving into the world – it goes from something unique to a particular artist and undergoes a kind of standardization which makes it a lot more easily accessible to a lot more people. Pretty much every cover I’ve ever heard since then has been based on Koko’s version. Even Wolf’s London Sessions version is a cover of Koko, more or less. So when Bill and Igor and I first got together in The Undercover Blues Band, we elected to go back to Howlin’ Wolf as our jumping off point. What evolved was a completely unique approach. Not a cover of Wolf’s arrangement, by any means, but not Koko either. Much of what we do in UBB is pretty straightforward interpretations of songs anyone with an interest in the blues would know. But there are several arrangements so specific to this combination of players that I would be very careful about trying to recreate them with anyone else. This is one of them.

Still, I have a perverse love of these tongue twisting lyrics, so as I began looking at putting together a repertoire that travels, I decided to go back to the beginning. After working with Wolf’s original for a while I found myself heading back to Savoy Brown. I liked the groove and got some energy from playing with it, so it felt I was going down a good path. The weird thing about their version is that it is looooong, and basically what happens is they play the whole song through, and then inexplicably switch to a boogie rhythm and play the whole thing over again. For me, and this is strictly a personal thing, if a song is longer than 3-4 minutes, there had better be a really good reason. My days of 10 minute guitar solos are behind me; 2-3 choruses max, only stretching it out further when we are really clearly on a roll. So back to Koko; clean and succinct and pretty much exactly what I was looking for. One interesting discovery, after 40+ years, was that Savoy Brown turned the rhythmic placement of the repeated figure completely around. I wonder if that was intentional. Kim Simmons has a Savoy Brown Facebook page. Would it be rude to ask? “Hey Kim! In 1971 did you really mean to move that figure 2 beats to the left, or was that an accident?”

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So… “natural” talent or acquired ability?

Last Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, I was following this train of thought, concluding more or less that 1) I don’t actually know if such a thing as natural talent exists, and anyway 2) if I ever had any, it was exhausted early. I kind of took a break from writing over the weekend. It had started to become more of an autobiography than I had really intended. TMI and too much work, and I wasn’t sure that was really what I was after.

So rather than spell out the details of a lifelong pursuit of the musical craft I’ll propose this as the process that encapsulates it all for me:

1. Play guitar.
2. Develop a sense of competence and achievement. Feel good about my guitar playing.
3. Put myself out there.
4. Find myself in a situation where I realize how completely delusional my assessment of my own talent is. This generally involves coming face to face with people who really are good guitar players, and not just guitar-playing wannabe’s like me*.
5. Hang around these people/this school/this band/this job, and learn everything I can from them.
6. Practice what I am learning.
7. Return to Step #1. Which is to say, put into practice what I have learned.

And so it goes. Repeat that for about 50 years, and here I am, still repeating it. How specifically this has manifested at any particular moment in my life, I’ll bend your ear over a drink sometime. Tall tales and war stories.

* Note: this is not actually how I judge myself or my abilities. It is, however, a pretty fair representation of the way it feels in that moment of recognition of how far I still have to go.

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So… “natural” talent or acquired ability?

The protracted Wang Dang Doodle-related yammering was really a kind of associative tangent to this question. I’m not quite as obsessed with this particular piece as its current prominence in this blog might suggest. The outcome of my work on this song will be that I’ll be standing on a stage somewhere, I’ll be playing this tight little guitar figure/groove, and over top of that I’ll be singing these clever twisted lyrics, and it will look like it is the easiest and most “natural” thing in the world for anyone to be doing. But the way I need to address the piece very precisely illustrates the reality of the process I need to go through every time I have to make the journey from complete incompetence to being able to do something that appears effortless.