Sun Oct 19 2014

Beautiful sunny day, and remarkably warm for mid-October. Upper 70s, which is kind of weird, but not complaining. Went for a long walk, and worked up a good sweat, which felt good. I've been a little sedentary of late, I'm afraid. The whole time I was out, I had this nagging feeling that it was getting late, even though I knew it was just early and middle afternoon, and I had no particular place I needed to be. After stopping at the library to drop off the Wolf bio and pick up the Muddy bio, I headed to a café in Ballard and sat outside facing south, enjoying the sun and the first chapter of the book. Only then did I recognize that at this time of the year the sun never gets very high over the southern horizon (and in 6 weeks it will barely make it). So the light has a perpetual “late afternoon” angle to it, and hence the feel.

This morning I jumped on the Howlin’ Wolf tune, Commit A Crime, based on the sweet version from the London Sessions. I hadn’t really thought of it seriously before this, in part because Stevie Ray Vaughn did a massively smoking live version of it. I try to stay away from pieces that are too closely associated with guitar gods. Especially Stratocaster slinging guitar gods. Too much distraction, and it tends to take away from the material. So now I’m listening to Wolf and Hubert to see if there is a way to make it my own, rather than a Stevie cover. Fun to play with no matter what. Even more than Killing Floor, I think this lick is Hubert Sumlin at his absolute best.

Moving on to the Muddy Waters biography, written by the same author as the Wolf bio. As I was walking I put early Muddy on my iPod, both the Lomax stuff from down in Mississippi in 1941 and the early Chess stuff. Whenever I listen to Muddy, especially very early and very late Muddy, I recognize where my primary blues aesthetic comes from. Somewhere in the middle he kind of loses me for a while. Not that he was ever under any obligation to me. I was listening to the recording from the 1960 Newport Festival, and this is the quintessential “Chicago Blues” band, the one that Butterfield and everybody else latched onto and ran with. But for me it loses a little of the emotional content. Then, of course, in his later years when Johnny Winter got hold of him, I think he may have surpassed even his younger self. I’ll take the version of Mannish Boy from “Hard Again” or “The Last Waltz” over pretty much anything he did in his entire lifetime.

We’ll see how this assessment holds up as I read and listen in the next couple of weeks.