It’s all tone and feel, with attention to every note and lick, implemented with the perfect intention. He’s not exactly holding back but he’s not showing off either.
This is Billy Gibbons putting on a blues guitar clinic, of restraint and intensity. And it’s nothing but absolutely unadulterated slow blues, with serious feeling, even if rock and roll radio listeners weren’t fully aware that’s what they were getting. This was, and remains, a genuine hit for that Little Ol’ Band From Texas. Yet I want to talk here about still another pants-related blues song that came along a few years later, that being ZZ Top’s spellbindingly desolate 1975 smash, ‘Blue Jean Blues,’ off their killer “ Fandango!” album, which based on my completely unscientific study and self-appointed powers as local music aficionado, I’m going to declare as the most prevalent, most classic rock radio popular, straight-ahead blues tune ever.
#ZZ TOP BLUE JEAN BLUES SERIES#
Certainly, there were many other examples of similar vintage: the Rolling Stones brilliant ‘Love In Vain,’ a plaintive re-arrangement of Robert Johnson Bonnie Raitt’s sensual and surly ‘Love Me Like A Man’ and ‘Bell Bottom Blues’ a jangly/bluesy Eric Clapton composition for Derek and the Dominos, one of a series of tunes on “ Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs” broadcasting his unrequited love for Patti Boyd, who happened to be the wife of his best friend George Harrison (snake move, Slowhand!). They wore their blues influences proudly whilst fusing it with super-charged hard rock to create a mystical sonic barrage that not only proved to be monstrously successful commercially (though not right away), it basically changed the face of FM-radio, eventually leading unmistakably to the concept of “classic rock.” ‘You Shook Me’ and ‘I Can’t Quit You Baby’ were unassailable blues interpretations on that Led Zeppelin debut record (both also Willie Dixon covers), and perhaps no early Zeppelin tune was straight blues-ier than the one appearing 20 months later on “ Led Zeppelin III,” this time a Page/Plant/Jones original, the sensational 7-minute scorcher ‘Since I’ve Been Loving You’. Another band first appearing in 1969, arriving with an interbred sound jocularly predicted to go over with music audiences like a proverbial “lead balloon” – or worse, a Le(a)d Zeppelin. Bone Walker’s “Stormy Monday” and Blind Willie McTell’s “Statesboro Blues,” in all cases injecting their blues with elements of jazz, soul and southern boogie which became part of their signature. The Allman Brothers Band’s eponymous 1969 debut album included the seething slow blues original, ‘It’s Not My Cross To Bear,’ which they then soon followed up in 1970 with a cover of Willie Dixon’s “Hoochie Coochie Man,” and in 1971 on the legendary “ At Fillmore East” record, doing live renditions of T. Muddy, of course, created the famous song, ‘The Blues Had A Baby And They Named It Rock And Roll,’ and in the tail end of the ‘60’s and early ‘70’s a few prominent bands did most certainly bring the blues into the mainstream, masqueraded only vaguely as rock and roll. Maybe, if you were lucky, you might get just a sprinkling of Muddy Waters (but far more likely in the later ‘70’s with his “comeback” era facilitated by collaborator and lifelong fan Johnny Winter). No Howlin’ Wolf, Bobby “Blue” Bland, Little Milton, or Buddy Guy. You weren’t going to catch Elmore James on regular radio. That hadn’t been the case for a while for most of the early progenitors of the blues.
Sure, it quickly became, and of course deservedly so, a blues standard, but you could actually hear it on the radio. King, released ‘The Thrill Is Gone’ in December of 1969, and in 1970 it was a big hit for him.
0 kommentar(er)
