THE BLUES MAGAZINE
17
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blues issue 17
ZZ TOP ✪ THE PRETTY THINGS ✪ THE BEST OF 2014 ✪ COSIMO MATASSA ✪ DEVON ALLMAN ✪ KAZ HAWKINS ✪ CANDI STATON
s e r b m o H s e ZZ Top, Tr explosion and the blues. of Texas chilada! n e e l o h w e Th
November 2014 • Issue 17
features
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ZZ Top
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The Pretty Things
The little ol’ band from Texas on the making of their breakthrough ’73 album Tres Hombres. Plus: from Blind ‘Lemon’ Jefferson to Gary Clark Jr, we tell the story of Texas blues.
On the 50th anniversary of the iconic band’s debut album, founding members Phil May and Dick Taylor reveal the speedfuelled R&B mayhem of 1960s London.
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Cosimo Matassa
We pay tribute to the N’Awlins studio boss and producer who cut sides with Little Richard, Guitar Slim and more.
The Best Of 2014
We round up the 50 best albums and recall the highs and lows of a landmark year in blues.
Kaz Hawkins
34 ZZ Top
Dusty, Frank and the Rev. Willy G reveal the weird birth of their ’73 Texas blues classic Tres Hombres.
kevin nixon, alamy, getty
54
cosimo matassa
The Belfast shouter on the tough life that led to debut album Get Ready.
Devon Allman
On his new album, the future of the Brotherhood… and uncle Duane.
Harry Dean Stanton
The Hollywood veteran finally gets round to cutting his debut album at the age of 88.
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Candi Staton
The R&B diva finds ‘Fame’ and her fortune in late-60s Muscle Shoals.
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kaz hawkins
88
devon allman
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November 2014 • Issue 17
Regulars
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Testify
All the latest news from our thriving world of blues including the sad passing of Cream bassist and vocalist Jack Bruce, and the upcoming, now timely, release of the Cream: 1966 – 1972 sixplatter vinyl boxset, plus the launch of the Memphis-fuelled documentary Take Me To The River. You’ll also find opinion pieces from Mike Zito and Stephen Dale Petit, Tony Russell’s Blues Collector column, plus interviews with new faces such as Lee Bains III & The Glory Fires, Irish R&B revivalists The Whereabouts, Handsome Jack and Darren Eedens, alongside established favourites including Jimmy Barnes, King King and Ruby Turner.
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Call & Response
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Cuttin’ Heads
Grady Champion
To mark the release of his excellent new album Bootleg Whiskey, Mississippi bluesman Grady Champion reveals how he saw the light thanks to Sonny Boy Williamson, turned his back on rap music and picked up the harmonica to keep the blues alive in the delta.
One classic song. Two great versions. Which one is best? This time around, veteran journalist, author and blues nut Charles Shaar Murray holds the coats as Chuck Berry’s original Johnny B Goode slugs it out with Jimi Hendrix’s incendiary live version of the well-trodden bar room perennial.
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First Time I Met The Blues
She once thought of blues as “old people music” but San Diegan soul singer Missy Andersen tells us about the artists and songs that finally got her hooked.
Reviews All the CDs and DVDs you need to feed your blues obsession, reviewed by our team of aficionados.
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reissues
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lives
john bull, getty
albums
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Over the last 12 months, the old guard reminded us why they’re legends, while the next generation thrilled us with their modern take on the blues. It left us with a damn hard job: picking the best of 2014‌
the best of 2014
selwyn birchwood Don’t Call No Ambulance alligator records
When Alligator’s veteran label boss Bruce Iglauer declares a 29-year-old nonentity “one of the next stars in the blues world”, and hard-bitten Blues scribe Charles Shaar Murray deems his debut “the grandest entry into the arena since Gary Clark Jr”, you sense that something special this way comes. And so it proved with Don’t Call No Ambulance: a supremely confident debut that established the Afrototing, megawatt-grinning 29-year-old Floridian as an artist you couldn’t take your eyes or ears off. Last issue, Birchwood cited the rule breakers, from Jimi Hendrix to Buddy Guy, and irreverence for the form was writ large on these 12 songs. Darting from the hot-buttered funky Addicted to the small-hours sweatbox strut of Walking In The Lion’s Den, but always glued together by that Marlboro bark, this is a record where anything could happen. “Instead of going with the theme of ‘I woke up this morning and my baby’s gone,’” he told us, “I wanted to make songs a little more thought-provoking.” Consider our thoughts provoked, Selwyn. Sexy, saxy and dripping with signs of future greatness, this is a truly heart-stopping album. Better call that ambulance after all… henry yates
Naomi Shelton And The Gospel Queens
paul rodgers
the robert cray band
429 records
provogue
Daptone
Although Shelton moved from Alabama to Brooklyn in 1963 to sing in churches and nightclubs, she didn’t release an album until 2009. This sanctified soul followup is another fine showcase for her powerful, affecting voice. Standouts include the call and response gospel funk of It’s A Cold, Cold World, the confessional testifying of Sinner and a swaying cover of O.V. Wright’s Everybody Knows (River Song). Shelton moves your body while saving your soul.
Before forming Free with Paul Kossoff in ’68, Paul Rodgers was schooled in R&B and soul. He’s put his reputation on the line by recording this soul album with some of the original Memphis masters. The search for authenticity means a predictable set list, but there’s no disputing his durable phrasing and ability to make a song his own. He dominates the horn-led Down Don’t Bother Me, gets funky on I Can’t Stand The Rain, soars on I’ve Been Loving You Too Long, and revels in the string arrangement of Walk On By. A true soul man!
“I don’t have any commercial ambitions,” insisted Mr Smooth of this love-letter to the Stax and Chess platters of his youth. “We’re just trying to keep this incredible music alive.” Mission accomplished. In glorious denial of changing times and marching technology, Cray and his new line-up cranked out In My Soul live at Santa Barbara Sound (“At Stax, they’d cut it right away before the flavour went”), and from Hip Tight Onions to a rebooted Nobody’s Fault But Mine, this was a record to play loud.
Jon Harrington
PETE FEENSTRA
henry yates
istock, paul natkin
Cold World
The Royal Sessions
In My Soul
The Get-Go
Typically English Southside
This south-east London power trio dress for the Crawdaddy Club, but skip the R&B years and go straight for the heavier, Blue Horizon end of the decade. Their second album is a fine example of soul-inflected British blues, with Stuart Farnham’s Marriott-esque vocals over the natural-born boogie of the title track. The mournful So Sad The Morning is cut from the same cloth as Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac. Guests include Roger Cotton from Peter Green’s Splinter Group and Steve Dixon of the Gary Moore Band. Quality blueswailers.
A Year In Blues
Punch-ups, passings and some great new bands seal our cracking 2014.
Anyone banking on a quiet year for the blues scene was soon jolted back to reality. With hits, misses, splits, mud-slinging and emergency surgery, the last 12 months had everything, plus a bit more. Rewind to January, then, as Gary Clark Jr rubberstamped his arrival in the A-list with a Grammys performance alongside Keith Urban, ruffling a few feathers in the process. In February, production of Gregg Allman biopic Midnight Rider was halted after a train tore through a scene filmed on railway tracks in Georgia, killing camera assistant Sarah Jones. “I am asking you to do the right thing,” wrote the Southern rocker in an open letter to director Randall Miller, “and to set aside your attempts to resume the production out of respect for Sarah…” Come April, a former friend of Kurt Cobain told NME that the late Nirvana man was planning an album of old blues covers in 1994 – but “two weeks later he was gone”. Meanwhile, very much still here was Wilko Johnson, who survived the removal of a football-sized tumour and his pancreas and spleen. That same month, our editor Ed Mitchell headed to the unlikely blues epicentre of Riga, Latvia, to watch Barcelona’s A Contra Blues win the fourth annual
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Studio magic: Cosimo Matassa at the controls in J&M, New Orleans.
courtesy of Cosimo Matassa Archive
cosimo matassa
Words: Paul Trynka
We pay tribute to legendary recording engineer Cosimo Matassa, who created the blueprint for rock’n’roll in his New Orleans studio, cutting records for Ray Charles, Dr John, Little Richard and more. ust a regular day in New Orleans: a crazed guitarist in a bright red suit brandishing a brand-new gold Les Paul, singing a song that the Devil gifted him in a dream. The studio is so tiny, it feels like a space capsule packed with musicians who can’t move from their tiny allotted spot. The fiendishly talented Oscar Moore drives the beat from behind his tiny drum kit; the horn section is massed just by his side, while Ray Charles calmly issues instructions and adjustments from the grand piano. Cosimo Matassa, a meticulous, likeable man, sits behind a primitive mixing desk, four inputs, one output, calmly monitoring levels, on what will be yet another smash hit out of New Orleans: one of the hottest blues-rock-soul gumbos of all time, the first record to feature a purposely distorted lead guitar, a sound that would be a huge influence on the young James Marshall Hendrix. Cosimo reckons he’s finally got a handle on the sound, watching through the tiny control room window as Eddie Jones, aka Guitar Slim, grimaces, coaxing fiery notes out of his cranked-up Fender amp. There have been quite a few dodgy attempts, as the massed horn section struggles to follow Slim, who regularly skips beats or entire sections of the song as the mood takes him, but a few takes in and he’s in his stride, reflects Cosimo, who’s seen the crazed guitarist destroy less extrovert musicians in the South’s infamous Cutting Concerts, bills that pit one guitar hero against the other. The tubes on Slim’s overloaded little combo glow white with the strain as he picks out an especially jagged, impassioned guitar solo. Cos smiles inwardly in with pleasure, then sighs as the music clatters to a halt. He can hear Slim addressing the musicians through the chunky Telefunken microphone. “Gentlemen,” Slim calls out, with a slight lisp. “Did you hear that?” t took another couple of dozen takes for a definitive version of The Things That I Used To Do to make it onto the mono Ampex. A few weeks later it became just another smash hit recorded at Cosimo Matassa’s J&M Studios on Dumaine and Rampart, in the heart of New Orleans. Cometh the hour, cometh the man. And when the hour came in New Orleans, as an unbelievable stream of blues, proto-rock’n’roll and jazz turned into an irresistible wave of teenage rebellion, “Cosmo”, or “Cos”, as everyone in New Orleans called one of the greatest recording engineers of his time, was ready to catch it. classicrockmagazine.com 55
With Tres Hombres, ZZ Top transformed from a Little Ol’ Band From Texas into a phenomenon, putting the Lone Star State back on the musical map as they defined the sound of Texan blues. Words: Ed Mitchell Interviews: Redbeard & Henry Yates n 1973, ZZ Top cut a John Lee Hookerflavoured boogie for their groundbreaking third album Tres Hombres. Driven by a rhythm that could piledrive through concrete walls, La Grange has since been described by the band’s guitarist and leader Billy Gibbons as “a defining moment”. It scarcely could have landed at a better time. The blues in Texas was just ticking over. The old guard were dragging themselves around the same old venues while the Lone Star State’s brightest hope, Johnny Winter, had moved north to find his audience. So, a pre-beards and pro-Nudie suit ZZ Top – Billy G, bassist Dusty Hill and drummer Frank Beard – were left to mind the store. As Gibbons hollered those Hooker-esque ‘how, how, how, hows’ on La Grange, there was no doubt that the Little Ol’ Band From Texas were open for business. Tres Hombres put Texas blues on the map – and defined its sound to the rest of the world in the process. Everything they’d done so far had been leading up to its release. “Dusty and I played with the American Blues in Dallas; Billy played with The Moving Sidewalks 34 classicrockmagazine.com
outta Houston,” says Beard of the Top’s origins. “Course, we knew of each other and came the time that I needed a job. I went to Houston in a Volkswagen with a set of drums and said, ‘Hey, hire me!’ So, that’s how I met Billy…” Hill takes up the story: “I moved to Houston not knowing Frank was down there. I was playing in some club and Frank just accidentally walked in. He said, ‘You gotta come play with this guy [Billy Gibbons]’ and I said OK.” Frank Beard laughs: “I later apologised for that!” Things started to happen when Texan music impresario Bill Ham happened upon the band and offered his services as manager. He would go on to produce ZZ Top’s albums, as well as discovering Nashville star Clint Black and founding country music publishing companies. Gibbons says: “He wandered by the rehearsal hall and there was quite a clatter going on. He kinda liked what he heard and handed us each a cigar and said, ‘Boys, I’m gonna make you stars!’” Hill: “‘…Come with me boys…’” Beard: “It didn’t hurt that he had John
getty
zz top
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