The Juice On Johnson

Robert Johnson... He had to get in here sooner or later... If Sleepy John Estes was scary (see previous post), then Robert Johnson was downright terrifying. He became known to me through the composer's credits on Rambling On My Mind (which Eric Clapton slipped onto the Blues Breakers album) and Four Until Late (which Eric Clapton slipped onto the first Cream album, Fresh Cream).

From there it was a short step to hearing pretty much everything that Johnson had ever recorded in his brief but almost unbelievably brilliant blues career.

There's not much to add to all the thousands of words written about Johnson. It's enough to point out that without him, it's difficult to imagine any of the subsequent evolution of blues/rock. Oh, and can we please remember that it was Johnson, not Zeppelin, who coined the immortal line: "You can squeeze my lemon till the juice runs down my leg."

Wrong Is Right

Thoughts of Sleepy John Estes and making a change led on to We're Going Wrong. It has to be a contender for the most perfect song. Okay, there's Like A Rolling Stone and A Day In The Life and Layla... and everyone can add their own contenders.

But We're Going Wrong, which first appeared on Cream's Disraeli Gears album in 1967, is perfect for its simplicity, for its emotion and, of course, for the musicianship.

Ginger Baker's wonderful tom-tom patterns on a 6/8 rhythm could probably hold the song together on their own. Jack Bruce's bass is largely restrained, but his pure voice is increasingly unrestrained as the song unfolds. And then we get Eric Clapton, at the height of his fuzzy-haired, woman-tone period, with sublime notes played in just the right places.

On stage in the Sixties, the song became a tour de force, and still possessed its power when Cream revived it — and themselves — in 2005.

Many listeners, particularly in 1967, took We're Going Wrong to be a political/philosophical/protest kind of a song. Look at the lyrics and you'll see why. But it is documented that Jack Bruce wrote it after a row with his wife, and that it is simply about a fractured relationship.

Whether it's about the failed relationship between two particular people or about all the failed relationships that make up the world we live in, the song works. And if the microcosm and the macrocosm are all one, then it's not even worth differentiating.

Either way Jack Bruce wrote a masterpiece. For him, it might have been personal. For us, it's a perfect and universal call for change.

First Time I Met The Blues

The first real blues record I ever heard was an album by Sleepy John Estes and it was actually quite terrifying. I had never heard anything remotely like it in my little schoolboy life.

Not only did it sound scarily grown up, but it opened a window into another, darker, more real world.

And it wasn't just that voice and that guitar. There was also the blues harmonica playing of Hammie Nixon. Altogether, this new (to me) sound was almost too much to take.

"Everybody ought to make a change some time," sang Sleepy John. And that's about all any of us needs to remember...