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For me this is a very indulgent thing to do, to write about something you love and grew up with, hopefully sharing it with others who might feel the same.
Like most teenagers, I picked up an acoustic guitar and tried to play it without much success. To begin with I had a Bob Dylan song book with most of his early songs written in three chords. With rutted and sore fingers I managed to learn those songs; the only route to playing any kind of music was at a folk music club, where men with beards and woolly jumpers droned through songs about loosing their girlfriend, employing their take on those same three chords.
The next step in the journey toward the blues is harder to place chronologically, but I think it was the purchase of Led Zeppelin 2, mainly because all the serious music fans regarded it as a thing to be
The pivotal moment came I think in 1969 when I went to my first (and last) pop festival at a place called Weely, somewhere near Clacton. Just about surviving the height of Hippy madness, grass fires and sleeping in a field, I saw some great acts, but one will stay with me forever. At about midnight the man himself, Rory Gallagher, skipped onto stage, announced that he had just broken up with Taste and played about an hour of powerhouse blues that changed me forever. I have a vivid memory of him in a checked shirt skipping across the stage, guitar slung low. People have tried to describe the energy he brought onto the stage, his politeness and humility
Picking a song is difficult since the performance and energy are the key, Messin’ with the Kid, Sinnerboy, Laundromat, Going to my Hometown, it’s impossible to keep it in single figures. One day I might do one of His songs. The mid seventies were my college years, and I found a range of diverse people and musical influences there, reggae, world, progressive, roots, oh and Country. To be right, this was the time of the Eagles and Fleetwood Mac. It’s not easy to listen to that stuff any more, but the quality of songs, the harmony and the guitar playing triggered a whole genre of great bands producing music from the comfort zone. The blues thing didn’t go; it just dozed away. It showed itself amongst the West Coast style now and again. My next two influences came from this time, combinations of American folk, Country and different blues.
I first heard Bonnie Raitt on a vinyl album Taking my Time, from a blues direction. I was taken first by her slide playing, beautiful and sparse, played late and tasteful. Then the voice, then quite young sounding, really put her in the big league of blues singers and players. I’ve got lots of her records and have seen her a couple of times, what a lady, what a voice and her guitar playing is in a class of its own. So many beautiful ballads too. From Loves Me Like a Man, Love Sneakin Up on You, through Kokomo Blues to Shadow of Doubt.
I think the appeal of both Bonnie and Ry is that their music picks up from the less obvious blues roots, and although I have tried, I can’t get near either of their very special slide playing. So after college and through the eighties not much happened on the guitar front for me, it took until the early nineties for the next guitar moment to
Through my nineties rediscovery period a couple of other things happened. Firstly I could afford better guitars and better gear came on line. I treated myself to a red 1988 Strat which I still have. I also discovered ways of sounding great without a wall of Marshalls and without being deafened, through Amp modellers like Pandora and Line 6. Although live it has to be a Marshall valve amp. I also met Rob Bendelow of Saracen who introduced me to sequencers, computer studios and most importantly he taught me a lot about heavy rock and metal guitar playing. I think some of my blues stuff rubbed off on him too, after all blues and rock are brothers: feeding and stretching each other. In the ‘Ratzkabin’ Rob taught me classic heavy metal stuff while I passed on tapping techniques which Rob developed and took forward onto his Red Sky Album. I learned so much from Rob, being able to share your knowledge is a great virtue, he understands music as opposed to a guitar player who picks things up: even so he is still a great guitar player. Visit him at www.templarmusic.co.uk. So in my recent years I began to listen to blues and play more than I ever did, revisiting and soaking up the blues, T Bone, the three Kings (especially Freddie), Albert Collins, John Lee Hooker, Stevie Ray and Robert Cray. Running alongside them are people like Gary Moore, Johnny Winter and Eric Clapton, white guys whose takes on early blues signpost and introduce people like me to the diverse players who influenced them. I hope it never ends. If you’re still reading this, thanks, you must be into music as much as I am, I hope it means as much to you as it does me. See you at an EKB Gig soon John Johns Top 10 Guitar and Blues Moments
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It’s been hard to work out where I began with the blues. I think that everyone carries the music that was with them during their teen years for the rest of their lives. For me that was the very late sixties and the seventies. Some say that this was a golden time for music, then there was a musical route which included writing and performing songs: this produced some unique songs that have prevailed to this day. There are young performers around today who are just as gifted and talented as back then, although the medium and method of delivery has changed, a great song is a great song, performed by someone with a guitar and a little inspiration, in a room somewhere.
Then it happened. Listening to Radio One on a Saturday afternoon, the volume was turned up high in an empty house. I think one of Herman’s Hermits ‘great’ pop hits was being played, or maybe something by Cliff Richard that even sounded crap really loud. Then bang! The house was throbbing to weird discordant chords: then a guitar figure (the word riff hadn’t been invented) that soared and swooped. The lyrics made no sense. I listened and after just over two minutes I stared into space, and would never perceive music in the same way again. You might have worked out that I had heard Purple Haze by Jimi Hendrix for the very first time. Just imagine the life changing dimension that had on an adolescent guitar playing boy; it scared and inspired me. I spent about a week in a daze, even trying to play it on my trusty crusty guitar, not realising that the man was on a different and parallel guitar planet of volume, distortion and down tuning. I hadn’t a clue. I bought the record the next week. I can still picture the black labelled Track single which was played constantly and probably into extinction. We got Jimi’s smash hits album and it was played on our radiogram (a piece of furniture the size of a sideboard with a mono record player hiding within). It’s still as fresh and scary today as it was all those years ago.
worshipped. It looked good to walk around with the album cover under your arm, defining yourself as a serious muso, rejecting the values of pop music. You are probably aware of all the great guitar moments on that record which introduced me to my next guitar hero, Jimmy Page. Again playing a guitar like Jimmy was something I couldn’t even comprehend, but after a couple of months I had mastered the two big riffs; total playing time, just 10 seconds. On the strength of this I brought Led Zeppelin One, which I loved even more, but I didn’t realise I was actually listening to a really great blues album, blues which spurned and shaped the original pomp and power of a Heavy Rock and Metal. Then the introduction to Since I’ve Been Lovin You on the third album came along, which even today remains one of the great blues moments.
between songs and love of his audience, they can’t capture it, I won’t even try. Over the next few years I probably saw Rory about fifty times, he was touring constantly and whenever he passed the near Midlands we would go and see him. He played with a fire and energy, ringing sounds out of his Strat that powered and energised his performance, some acoustic songs in the middle, then ending with incendiary slide playing, never less than three encores, never less than two hours. Between songs he was sweet and modest, just one of the boys playing guitar and enjoying himself. The real blues man. Pulling out performances and songs is difficult. Maybe that winter’s night in Birmingham when the band was stuck in snow drifts on the M1, Rory was there without them, so he played on his own to about fifty people in the Town Hall for his usual two hours; electric and acoustic, apologising then showing his great talent with unique solo versions of his set list. It was a true privilege to be there that night; he returned in the New Year, honouring the original tickets and, as always, tore the place down.
I had heard of Ry Cooder, but it wasn’t until I saw him playing Vigilante Man on the Old Grey Whistle Test that I was hooked. Sitting alone on a stool wearing a bandana, playing slide with a piece of bottleneck, deliberate, clean slow control over slide guitar of which he is the absolute master. Even now when I pick up an E tuned guitar, the plaintive opening notes of Vigilante Man are usually the first thing that comes out. From there I bought most of his albums, his techniques that took him in many directions, soul, blues, gospel, RnB, folk, Mexican, even his jazz album I enjoyed.
come along. Around that time there was a MTV clip on TV featuring a metal guitarist playing a beautiful ballad in the desert, a bit like Carlos Santana, but then he unleashed a tapping thing the like I had never seen before. I found out the player was Joe Satriani and the tune was Always with Me Always with You. I got a couple of his albums and was hooked again. No one was doing guitar only albums then, Joes albums were not only cutting edge technique and speed wise but were melodic and musical, as opposed to self indulgent widdling. Now I could hear the updated Hendrix approach mixed with the heavy metal roots from Sabbath and Zeppelin. Once again I studied the techniques. By then there were magazines that helped you do that, thus more dimensions opened up. After a small amount of success I realised that the despite the flash, speed and techno of his playing, the seeds that it all grew from were the blues. Or rather the delivery and context of the blues.
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