Sun Oct 26 2014

Big wind storm last night. I actually had 2 social occasions to attend. For the early one it was mostly just a rainy Seattle evening. By the time I got to the second, which was not so far from home, the wind was picking up. As the party progressed we began to notice a bit of a relentless roar outside. We were watching our host's travelogue, when suddenly the electricity went out. I was disappointed not to see the rest of the images and hear the rest of the stories, but hanging out and talking by candlelight was a lot of fun. The drive home was a minor adventure, as I had to detour my way around a number of downed trees along my route.

Mostly nice out today. Walked down to Fremont for a bit of exercise, as well as diversion. Walking more or less the route I tried to drive on my way home last night, I got to observe the aftermath of the storm. A lot of broken and downed trees.

Hung out at the café to read more of the Muddy Waters bio.

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July 11, 1951. Maybe not quite “national holiday” material, but definitely a date worth taking note of. In Chicago on that day Muddy Waters and his band went into the studio to record a number of sides. Muddy’s biographer refers to this day as Independence Day for the harmonica.

Previously, he [Little Walter] played his harp into a microphone that, like a vocal, went directly to the tape recorder. On this session, he plugged into an amplifier and had the engineer mike that instead. He could manipulate the amp and have that mediating sound recorded instead of his harp directly. The difference is night and day, akin to the change Muddy achieved on electric guitar. The harmonica was about to move from the country to the city. It was a revolution.

This is the place where you can say, utterly without irony, “and the rest is history.”

The result is She Moves Me, and you can hear the difference right away. The harmonica sound that we associate with Chicago for the first time. No impudent Little Walter? No Charlie Musselwhite, no Paul Butterfield, no blues harmonica as we no it.

This also meant that Jimmy Rogers had to sit out the session, because the studio amp only had 2 inputs, and Muddy and Walter had them locked up. Rogers was not particularly fond or Walter, and I don’t imagine this helped. Neither did the fact that after the recording of She Moves Me, Walter grabbed Jimmy’s guitar, plugged it in, and they recorded Still A Fool with Walter playing guitar.

These two pieces, for me, mark a turning point. A sound that had never quite been heard before. Until then electric had pretty much just been acoustic country blues but louder. Now it was something entirely different. And the last funny thing about this session is who the drummer was. They were cutting She Moves Me. Muddy is quoted:

My drummer wasn’t doing nuthin’, just dum-chik-dum, but he couldn’t hold it there to save his damn life, and Leonard Chess knew where it was, so Leonard told him, “Get the fuck out of the way. I’ll do that.”

The result is, by almost any measure, some of the strangest drumming ever. I have always noticed it and thought, “what possessed them?” Now I know. The record company owner and record producer jumped in and played in place of the drummer. And yet I can’t really imagine any other way to play it. We never talked about historical precedents or any such thing, but when Undercover Blues Band first began rehearsing our version of Two Trains Runnin’ (basically, Still A Fool), Bill’s instant response was to go to the bass drum and built everything from that. It is simply the only right way to play that groove.