JIMMY REED
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1953–1976 |
Electric blues |
Bright Lights, Big City
(1961) |
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Album
released: August 1958 |
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Tracks: 1) Honest
I Do; 2) Go On To School; 3) My First Plea; 4) Boogie In The Dark; 5)
You Got Me Crying; 6) Ain’t That Lovin’ You Baby; 7) You Got Me Dizzy; 8)
Little Rain; 9) Can’t Stand To See You Go; 10) Roll & Rhumba; 11) You’re
Something Else; 12) You Don’t Have To Go. |
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REVIEW
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The answer is
simple: do not compete with Muddy Waters — compete with Jimmy Reed. I am
almost sorry to have to reproduce the truism about Jimmy Reed being the
epitome of mediocrity in the American electric blues-rock life of the 1950s;
presumably, he was a nice guy (at least when he wasn’t stone cold drunk,
which was most of the time), and some of his charisma manages to creep in
onto his records, otherwise he wouldn’t have had 18 Top 20 hits on the US
R&B charts from 1955 to 1961. But there is pretty much nothing specific,
no particularly memorable or outstanding feature in Jimmy’s «classic» output.
He was a competent, but not an outstanding singer; a tolerable, but not a
technically skilled or a musically inventive guitar or harmonica player; an
okay songwriter who did everything within the same 12-bar blues scale and
rewrote each of his songs (with new lyrics) at least three or four times; a
pleasant stage presence who did not have any tricks up his sleeve to make his
shows stand out from the rest. In short, Jimmy
Reed was as average as can be — which is probably why, despite eventually
settling in Chicago, he was never able to secure a contract with Chess
Records, and had to satisfy himself with the much lesser label of Vee-Jay,
which, I believe, is mostly known for two things: being the first ever
distributor of Beatles material in the US, and producing all of Jimmy Reed’s
classic records. (They also had John Lee Hooker and Memphis Slim for a while,
but they weren’t nearly as fully associated with the label as Jimmy). Even
Vee-Jay did not agree to letting him put out a full-fledged LP until 1958, by
which time he’d been cutting singles for five years; and even then, the LP in
question was just a hodge-podge of A- and B-sides, covering all of that
five-year period. You can listen to the album on its own, or you can
embellish it with bonus songs that did not make the grade, or you can just
cut the bullshit and get yourself a compilation — it doesn’t really matter.
Once you’ve heard two or three Jimmy Reed songs, you pretty much heard them
all. Listening right
now to the last track on the LP, which was his first big hit in 1955 — ‘You
Don’t Have To Go’ — I just keep thinking and thinking about what it was that
made this kind of record so popular. It is as utterly generic as can be, not
to mention lazy and relaxed, as compared to, say, Sonny Boy Williamson: Jimmy
and his backing band slowly and very nonchalantly drift through the aether,
beat after beat after beat, then Jimmy takes a short, equally lazy, harmonica
break, then another verse and off to sleep we go. How could anybody like this enough to buy, let
alone cover, this limp clone of ‘Sweet Home Chicago’? Yet bought, and
covered, it was, although even its instrumental B-side, ‘Boogie In The Dark’,
is marginally more interesting (at least he tries to go in several different
directions on the harmonica there). ‘Ain’t That
Lovin’ You Baby’ was an even bigger hit next year, hitting #3... and then he
simply re-recorded it with new lyrics as ‘You Got Me Dizzy’ and it also hit #3. I suppose that Jimmy’s
colleagues over at Chess must have been astounded — here they all were,
practicing, working at establishing their own styles and identities, spending
time to come up with new songwriting ideas, and here was this odd
booze-drenched guy next door with his totally trivial output and he somehow
managed to outsell them all, from time to time at least. What the heck was
this guy’s secret weapon? "Simplicity
and honesty", perhaps, as explained by producer Scott Billington in his
notes on the recent 3-CD compilation of Jimmy’s Complete Vee-Jay Singles. Even some of Jimmy’s fellow
African-Americans may have been spooked away by the intensity of the great
Chess artists — whereas on none of Jimmy’s singles is there anything even
remotely fearsome. Even though, like most of Chicago’s bluesmen, Reed, too,
came from the South (Dunleith, Mississippi), his music is 100% urbanized —
without any traces of the Delta’s toil and trouble, or of centuries-old pagan
African practices taking roots in American soil. It can be a little sad, a
little angry, or a tad romantic, just enough for the average listener to
sympathize and never once going deeper than the most simple, common,
universal emotions. What, oh I dunno, what a band like Bad Company does for
the universe of classic rock, Jimmy Reed did for the universe of electric
blues. I do not love or hate Bad Company (at least, not until they started
sucking really hard in the
Eighties), and I do not love or hate Jimmy Reed — I just feel mighty
indifferent to all these songs, and I suppose it’s a fairly normal reaction. Every once in a
while (very rarely, though), a tiny
non-trivial idea wiggles its way into one of Jimmy’s tunes, making it stand
out from the rest. ‘Honest I Do’, another big hit for the man which Vee-Jay
put up as the opening track on this album, is a little bit more poppy than
his standard 12-bar formula, and is graced by an elegantly woven descending
riff, played by Jimmy’s faithful sidekick Eddie Taylor. The Rolling Stones
later picked up the song and recorded it in a highly inventive manner
(loyally preserving that riff but also embellishing the song with creative
uses of the stop-and-start mechanics, echoes, and «drum explosions» from
Charlie), but even here it is hard to deny that the tune is a stand-out.
Lyrics-wise, ‘Little Rain’ is a relative highlight, somewhat unusual in its
depiction of a simple romantic situation set to a 12-bar blues melody which
typically implies negative rather than positive emotions. (Most of Reed’s
lyrics were written by or co-written with his wife, Mary, which might explain
all that extra romanticism). And ‘Roll And Rhumba’, an instrumental that was
originally released as the B-side to his very first single, is at least an
honest attempt at genre-mixing, though I cannot define it as a highly
successful one. And that’s pretty much all I can say about this stuff. Having said all
that, though, I return to my original point: God bless Jimmy Reed for
providing those British boys with so much raw material which they could cut
their teeth on. ‘Honest I Do’, ‘Ain’t That Lovin’ You Baby’, ‘You Don’t Have
To Go’, ‘I Ain’t Got You’ — all those songs from 1954-58 and more were
exploited by the Stones, the Animals, the Yardbirds, and dozens of other,
lesser acts until they could be sure that they got that kind of mechanics
down and could build their own houses upon that firm foundation. I have no
idea if anybody could really enjoy a full CD of Jimmy Reed tracks all the way
through in this day and age — he just seems to be the quintessential «you had
to be there» type of guy — but I think that neither today nor back in his own
time were you really supposed to enjoy more than one or two Jimmy Reed tracks
in one sitting anyway. And for the Stones and the Animals, one Jimmy Reed
track a day gave them something to play. |
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Album
released: September 1959 |
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Tracks: 1) Going To New York; 2) A String
To Your Heart; 3) Ends & Odds; 4) Caress
Me Baby; 5) Take Out Some Insurance; 6) The Moon Is Rising; 7) Down In
Virginia; 8) I Know It’s A Sin; 9) Wanna Be Loved; 10) Baby, What’s On Your
Mind; 11) My Bitter Seed; 12) Rockin’ With Reed. |
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Vee-Jay’s second LP of Jimmy Reed
material predictably follows the rigid formula of the first — a chaotic
selection of A- and B-sides, some of which came out in the year-long interim
between I’m Jimmy Reed and this
album, others were culled from even earlier singles. For some strange reason,
the one song they did not include
was his highest charting record from 1958 — ‘I’m Gonna Get My Baby’, only
available on various later compilations. Precisely why it was his highest charting record of the year sort of
escapes me, since it sounds exactly like every other mid-tempo piece of
generic 12-bar blues he ever cut. Perhaps it’s the lyrics: phonetically
entangled sequences such as "well she’s my mama loochy-hoochy goo-dee
hoochy-goochy" can have their own odd voodoo magic, particularly when
delivered through Jimmy’s fabulous Slur Filter. On a related weird note, most
lyric sites transcribe the words in Jimmy’s first verse as "Gonna find
my baby boomer / Built to start a-rockin’", which, if true, means that
this is officially the very first appearance of baby boomer in art, about four years prior to the term appearing
in printed form in its common meaning. I have absolutely no idea what it
means here, though — and for all I know, Jimmy might be singing "baby
bomber" or "baby boner", because who can really tell, coming
from a man who absolutely refuses to use his teeth while enunciating? |
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What is actually
here sounds more or less the same as the stuff on I’m Jimmy Reed (no big surprise about that), but with even fewer
standout tracks and without the excitement of discovery, if you happened (or
happen) to follow Reed’s career in an approximately chronological order. The
oldest track is the one which lent its title to the entire album — an
instrumental B-side to ‘Can’t Stand To Let You Go’, a fast and energetic
boogie romp on which Reed’s harmonica vivaciously duets with (probably) Eddie
Taylor’s slide guitar. When they match in unison, the resulting sound
promises excitement; when they solo on their own, the level of excitement
drastically drops down. I’d certainly prefer to rock with Chuck Berry or Bo
Diddley, but if you need a rigorous bass line for pure, unencumbered
headbanging, ‘Rockin’ With Reed’ is like your proto-Ramones kick in the
Chicago area circa ’56. From 1958, the
biggest of the included singles (which didn’t really get anywhere serious on
the charts) is ‘Down In Virginia’, another utterly stereotypical 12-bar thing
which, if I am not mistaken, tells the short story of Jimmy trying to drag
his girlfriend out of the country, "where the green grass grows",
and failing. This theme of escaping the country for the big city actually
runs through Reed’s entire career — unlike Muddy Waters, whose deep love for
the Delta and them old cotton fields had stayed with him through all of his
urban life, Reed (in his songs, at least) always comes across as an extremely
lucky guy to have been able to escape the boring dreariness of rural
provincial life (carefully avoiding any racial topics, though). Just a little
later, we get ‘Going To New York’, set to the exact same melody as always and
promising us that he’s "not gonna rest ’til I get to New York / I’m goin’
to New York / I’m goin’ if I have to walk". Sharp and nasty tongues
would have added that only in the overpopulated urban sprawls of the North a
guy like Jimmy Reed could find a suitable audience for his kind of playing —
but we don’t really want to stir up social trouble. Instead, let us
just go on and mention that the first single from 1959 to be included on the
album is ‘Take Out Some Insurance (On Me Baby)’, a song that failed to chart
but still has its own Wikipedia page because a couple of years later it was
recorded (with entirely new lyrics) by Tony Sheridan and the Beatles, to be
released as its own single in 1964, upon the arrival of Beatlemania when
Polydor Records, like everybody else with an opportunity, decided to
capitalize on the hype. The Sheridan track is just a historical curio; the
Jimmy Reed original is at least notable for being one of Jimmy’s totally most
minimalistic recordings ever — he doesn’t even blow his harmonica on this
one, it’s just steady drums and bass, with laconic, barely heard guitar licks
from either Reed himself or Taylor peeping from behind the rhythm section. In
this way, it might be the quintessential, if far from the most musically
inventive, Jimmy Reed track. The honor of
the most inventive track, then, should probably go to ‘Ends & Odds’, an
instrumental that was also recorded as ‘Odds & Ends’ (!) and, I believe,
released twice as a B-side: predictably, some sources and digital versions on
the Web confuse the two, but the important thing is that one version is just
a 12-bar blues with harmonica, and the other one is a 12-bar blues with
harmonica and violin, presumably played by the jazz musician Remo Biondi.
Obviously, it is not every day that a professional jazz player decides to
guest on a Jimmy Reed track, of all places (think Stephane Grappelli adding a
violin solo to a Ramones track), which makes things interesting by
definition; besides, Biondi takes the opportunity to «adapt» to his odd
companion’s style, preferring to play in an equally minimalistic style, with
pizzicatos all over the place, then making his instrument explode in a series
of beehive-influenced stings to bring the tune down in style. There are, I
think, maybe one or two LP-only songs here, culled by Vee-Jay from outtakes —
at least I cannot verify that they were ever released as singles. One is ‘My
Bitter Seed’, a song with a dirty-sounding title and really odd lyrics; the
other is ‘Moon Is Rising’, an unashamed note-for-note, if not word-for-word,
rewrite of ‘Honest I Do’ that was probably not even seen fit for single
release because it so blatantly repeated the original’s musical hook. Neither
of the two is really worth serious attention — and both simply confirm the
overall judgement on Rockin’ With Reed:
listenable, but brain-numbing filler city from a guy who never claimed to
write anything other than filler city and still found a grateful audience. |
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Album
released: 1960 |
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Tracks: 1) Baby What You Want Me To Do; 2)
Found Love; 3) Meet Me; 4) I Was So Wrong; 5) Going By The River (Part 2); 6)
Big Boss Man; 7) Hush-Hush; 8) Where Can You
Be; 9) I’m Nervous; 10) Going By The River (Part 1); 11) I Ain’t Got You; 12) Come Love. |
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"There isn’t a bad track on Found
Love", so starts out the short assessment of this album by Al
Campbell on the All-Music Guide — presumably, to help all of us lowly plebs
who have just finished putting together the impression that this album sucks
quickly and efficiently shatter our auditory illusions. Perhaps the most
appropriate answer to this loud and proud statement of the century, however,
would be "Why sure, because
there’s only one track on it anyway!" More specifically, a track
originally called ‘That One Jimmy Reed Song’ and then re-recorded under a
miriad of names to make the universe seem so much more diverse than it really
is when it’s really the same old types of protons, neutrons, and electrons
all over again. From that point of view, Found
Love is downright immaculate. |
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It does contain
three tracks that will be fairly familiar to any serious fan of Sixties’ rock
who may not ever have heard even one Jimmy Reed original: the singles ‘Baby
What You Want Me To Do’ and ‘Big Boss Man’ have been covered by just about
everybody, and so was the non-single ‘I Ain’t Got You’, extracted here from a
much earlier session in 1955 to fill up empty space on the LP and somehow
catching the eye of both The Animals and The Yardbirds (and then, later,
Aerosmith). The song, by the way, was not written by Jimmy, but rather by
Vee-Jay’s producer Calvin Carter, which might explain why it is the only song
here that does not quite sound the
same way as ‘That One Jimmy Reed Song’ — amusingly, the first commercial
release of the song by Billy Boy
Arnold actually sounds more like generic Jimmy Reed than Jimmy’s own
recording, which unexplainably remained in the vaults for five long years.
You can easily see the UK kids falling under its spell — the weird time
signature, the threatening stops-and-starts, the ominous harmonica howls
after each repetition of the title (usually converted to guitar howls in
those UK versions), and, of course, the delectable mystery of this whole
situation. "I got women to the
right of me, I got women to the left of me, I got womens all around me... but
I ain’t got you!" What is it, exactly, that makes the «you» in
question so damn special? It’s a cool, swaggery celebration of life’s
luxuries, each line of which is undercut by the double bang-bang! of realization that there’s actually more to life than
"Eldorado Cadillacs" and "charge accounts at Goldblatt",
though the protagonist cannot quite figure out what and why. It’s a cool
song, but one might also add that it is not very much in line with Jimmy
Reed’s essence. Jimmy Reed might have been reasonably well off with all of
his sales in the Fifties (although I guess he must have squandered all his
earnings on booze anyway), but his artistic persona is not fairly well
associable with life’s luxuries — his is the role of the little man, the
simple man quietly nibbling away at life’s simple pleasures and swatting away
life’s minor troubles. The quiet worker ’round the clock whose "big boss
man" certainly can’t hear him when he calls, because he’s too afraid to
call him in any voice louder than a toothless whisper. For the sake of
accuracy, ‘Big Boss Man’ was not written by Jimmy either (it is credited to another
of his producers and Luther Dixon, the professional songwriter responsible
for the breakthrough of The Shirelles), but unlike ‘I Ain’t Got You’, this is a song tailor-made for him,
and it’s refreshing to hear him borrow the rhythm of Chuck Berry’s ‘Memphis,
Tennessee’ for it, rather than reuse the same mid-tempo ka-CHUNK-ka-CHUNK 12-bar blues beat that crops up pretty much
everywhere else. The funny thing
about ‘Big Boss Man’ is that almost everybody who covered it actually treated
the song as a rebellious anthem — Elvis, in particular, sounded and looked
like he was really going to tear
his own "big boss man" a new one; here, though, it is crystal clear
that Mr. Reed is just grumbling "you
ain’t so big, you’re just tall, that’s all" under his breath, scared
to death to throw it in the man’s face, which, alas, is usually a much more
gritty reality for us than the opposite. If you listen real hard, you can
hear Mary "Mama" Reed faintly echo Jimmy’s lyrics in the background
— she was, perhaps, just cueing him in, but she ends up putting a sort of
«family touch» on this intimate protest song, the loyal partner supporting
her struggling proletarian working man from afar but just as helpless to
remedy the situation. In this particular case, I might dare to suggest that
nobody ever truly improved on the original ‘Big Boss Man’ (although I’m
becoming pervertedly partial to the ridiculous 1985 cover by B. B. King
which pretty much sets the original lyrics to the melody of ‘Billie Jean’!! —
really, no other decade excelled as much at trying to turn Dumb and Absurd
into Cool and Stylish for subsequent generations to hypothesize about
potential alien infiltrations or undetected viruses... but we’re getting off
topic). At least when it comes to brutal cowardly honesty, Jimmy here is our
fellow man. As for the
mid-tempo ka-chunk, ka-chunk, it, of course, opens the record
with what has arguably become the most widely covered Jimmy Reed song of all
time — ‘Baby What You Want Me To Do’. Here’s a funny bit of trivia: everybody always sings "you got me doin’ what you want me, baby
what you want me to do", while in fact the original lines make a
little more sense as Jimmy goes "you
got me doin’ what you want me, baby why you want to let go?",
indicating a little more agency on the part of Jimmy’s dissatisfied
sweetheart. But, of course, there’s no getting away from the fact that the title of the song has never been ‘Baby
Why You Want To Let Go’, so the source of the confusion is clear, as is the
natural attraction of the interrogative phrase to its affirmative
counterpart. And the
phrasing does matter here. There
are literally dozens of Jimmy Reed songs that all sound exactly like ‘Baby
What You Want Me To Do’ – at least three or four of them on this very album —
but instead of getting randomly and evenly covered by subsequent generations
of admirers, they are all forgotten while ‘Baby What You Want Me To Do’
trudges on and on and on. Even The Everly Brothers, who by 1960 must probably
have realized that blues-rock would never become their forte, rushed out to
produce their own version of the song as soon as they heard it. Apparently,
all it takes is a little fiddling with the generic structure of the AAB
pattern to get a specifically «nagging» feeling — got me running, got me hiding, got me run, hide, hide, run, anyway
you want to... — and somehow the song grows itself an extra claw and
turns from instantly forgettable to permanently memorable. For Jimmy, it was
really a lucky fluke; for the world, it was the arisal of a new standard,
which, unfortunately, then went on to sprout like a weed. Maybe ‘Stairway To
Heaven’ is the most overplayed song
in the world — who knows — but I know for sure that I have never had to suffer
through as many totally unnecessary and superfluous covers of ‘Stairway To
Heaven’ than I did of ‘Baby What You Want Me To Do’. Ironically, not a single
of these covers ever managed to improve on the original, either. That said, the
bulk of Found Love is more akin to
the title track of Found Love —
which has the exact same melody as ‘Baby What You Want Me To Do’, only a tad
sped up and, this time, following the conventional AAB pattern to a tee. It
is true that a bit of effort, if you decide to delve deeper into the lyrics,
may be rewarding here. The already quoted Al Campbell from the AMG states
that "the title track is
particularly notable, as it contains a one-note harp wail that proves to be
vibrant, heartfelt, and timeless" — indeed, it is very vibrant,
though I’m not so sure about ‘timeless’ (well, since I am still listening to
it today, maybe it is timeless);
but as for ‘heartfelt’, I would guess this word should decode as «imbued with
sincere positive emotion», which would agree rather well with the first line
of the song ("I found true love,
one worth waitin’ for") but only if you prefer to totally ignore the
second — "I’m gonna sign it to a
contract, you won’t find one little flaw". That’s right, Jimmy Reed did have a cynical sort of humor, well
confirmed in the second and last verse of the song: "It’s hard to believe the condition the
world is in / You can’t trust nobody and girl you know it’s a sin". Indeed, the
entire album sort of implies that even if Jimmy Reed did find love, he sure
as hell ain’t got no idea what to do with it, or even how to keep it — all of
those songs are about family quarrels, adultery, eloping, begging for
forgiveness, and other things typical of the dysfunctional mind. Ten of them
— everything, that is, except for ‘Big Boss Man’ and ‘I Ain’t Got You’ — also
have the exact same ka-chunk ka-chunk melody, the subtle differences provided
by speedier or sluggier tempos and by whether the bass player wants to get a
little more creative or just get paid by the minute. I won’t deny that there
may be a certain therapeutic effect here — some people who feel like shit and
need to get their rocks off without being tainted by pathos or pretense might
find this particular way to waste thirty minutes to be their personal path to
healing. But generally, all you need from Found Love are three songs — well, four if you throw on the title
track as a representative of Reed’s ironic attitude to life. |
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Album
released: February 1961 |
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Tracks: 1) Close Together; 2) Got Me
Chasing You; 3) Wanta Be With You; 4) Jimmy’s Rock; 5) Tell The World I Do;
6) You Know You’re Looking Good; 7) I’ve Got The Blues; 8) Laughing At The
Blues; 9) Down The Road; 10) Ain’t Gonna Cry No More; 11) You’re My Baby. |
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REVIEW I seriously pity the poor
engineers and market department workers at Vee-Jay Records who had to put up
with their superiors’ unexplainable desire to keep on allowing Jimmy Reed to
bake new LPs — without the slightest desire to come up with at least one new melody. Now Appearing, released in early 1961, bears the dubious
distinction of being the first Reed album where almost every song sounds the same (I’ll get to the exceptions in
a jiffy) — and that «same» is something we’d been hearing from him since the
mid-Fifties. Ominously, even the liner notes to the album, commissionned from
French blues experts Marcel Chauvard and Jacques Demêtre (who were
conducting a quasi-ethnographic scientific study of Chicago blues at the
time), begin with the following statement: "A lot has been written about the Blues; so it may seem preposterous,
trying to add anything new and original". Well — for Jimmy, it
probably seemed preposterous to add anything new and original to the kind of
blues he had whittled out for himself ten years ago. Admittedly, for those
French gentlemen who came to visit the Chicago club scene in 1959 this formula
probably sounded fresh and vital, just as it would feel for Martians, had
they decided to land their ship on the roof of a Chicago recording studio
right at the very moment when Jimmy Reed started up his three hundred and
fifty-second variation on the exact same chords. |
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The only single
taken off the album — and, consequently, the only song off it that is
occasionally found on basic Jimmy Reed compilations — is ‘Close Together’,
whose melody is exactly the same as ‘Going To New York’ and a dozen other
songs. This time around, though, its relaxing mid-tempo stride is accompanied
with a bit of creative sloganeering: "We gotta stay close together / If we don’t somebody could get ahead
of us". These words of unparalleled wisdom and incomparable depth
were repeated sufficiently enough to soak deep into the minds of the American
public and make the single rise all the way to #12 on the R&B charts (and
even #68 on the general pop charts!), proving that Jimmy’s
magical-minimalistical hold on the people was far from over. Of the remaning
ten songs on the LP, eight differ only
in terms of tempos (‘Tell The World I Do’ is taken at a torturously slow one,
bringing the song’s lenth up to four minutes just because Jimmy was probably
suffering from a hangover or something) and lyrics (which I have not
analyzed, but strongly suspect that there’s not much to analyze). Nothing by
way of interesting guitar or harmonica solos, either, just the usual slog to
go along with. In addition, Jimmy’s diction problems are getting worse than
ever, so much so that it is fairly hard to find a decent transcription
(available web versions are full of question marks — perhaps a well-trained
AI could help, but apparently training AI on samples of Jimmy Reed’s singing
is not a priority task next to Freddie Mercury and Kurt Cobain). In the end, the
only thing of minor interest on the record are its two instrumental tracks.
Not only do they alleviate the boredom a little bit, but they are actually
the only spots where Jimmy’s backing band is allowed to at least try
something interesting. On ‘Jimmy’s Rock’, Eddie Taylor (I’m assuming it’s
him) shows us the wonders of syncopated guitar boogie, sometimes sounding a
bit like John Lee Hooker and sometimes like a parsimonious Chuck Berry
(Jimmy’s own harmonica solo is quite bland in comparison). ‘Laughing At The
Blues’, probably named that way because of an accidental bit of ad-libbed
laughter at the beginning, is not as quirky, but still I’d rather listen to
that kind of playful-if-unassuming guitar sloing all day long than sit
through yet another of Jimmy’s mid-tempo bores. |
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Album
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Tracks: 1) Bright
Lights Big City; 2) I’m Mr. Luck; 3) Baby What’s Wrong; 4) Found
Joy; 5) Kind Of Lonesome; 6) Aw Shucks, Hush Your Mouth; 7) Tell Me You Love
Me; 8) Blue Carnegie; 9) I’m A Love You; 10) Hold Me Close; 11) Blue, Blue
Water; 12) Baby What You Want Me To Do; 13) You Don’t Have To Go; 14)
Hush-Hush; 15) Found Love; 16) Honest I Do; 17) You Got Me Dizzy; 18) Big
Boss Man; 19) Take Out Some Insurance; 20) Boogie In The Dark; 21) Going To
New York; 22) Ain't That Lovin’ You, Baby; 23) The Sun Is Shining. |
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REVIEW «How does Jimmy Reed get to Carnegie Hall?» – «Riding the coattails of Muddy Waters».
I, too, was a little puzzled (surely the limited commercial success of Jimmy Reed
alone would not be sufficient reason for him to play at such a prestigious
venue) before finding out (by almost accidentally discovering the scan of an old
flyer for the event, sold at an online auction!) that Jimmy Reed did, in fact,
play Carnegie Hall, but only as part of a larger «Blues at Carnegie» program
that also included Big Maybelle, Muddy Waters, Jimmy Witherspoon, and Oscar Brown
Jr., all playing on the same evening of May 13, 1961. Arguably, this was the
single biggest chunk of recognition he ever got, and Vee-Jay Records quickly
decided to capitalize on that — albeit in a rather strange manner, somewhat
telling of the crazy record industry practices at the time. |
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According to
the liner notes, "a combination of contractual and technical
difficulties unfortunately prevented recording of the actual event", but
the ingenious people at Vee-Jay never gave in to despair: instead, they
claimed to «recreate» the performances in the studio, putting out a setlist
consisting of 11 brand new Jimmy Reed numbers that allegedly reproduced the
set he’d actually played at Carnegie Hall. Verifying this in any way is
probably impossible, unless we locate some old boomer with a perfect memory
who was present at the event and,
after all these years, can still tell one Jimmy Reed number from another (yeah,
right); the fact that the «setlist» includes an instrumental number called ‘Blue
Carnegie’ might, perhaps, indirectly corroborate this statement, but then
again, he could have just as easily «written» this after the show (I mean,
the fact that Joni Mitchell has a song called ‘Woodstock’ is hardly proof of
her actually having played it at the real Woodstock, isn’t it?). Far more
suspicious is the fact that all of these eleven numbers are brand new: I
seriously doubt that Jimmy Reed, playing at Carnegie Hall, would perform a
completely fresh program without playing even one of his popular singles. That’s
something more typical of a Bob Dylan, not an old-school Chicago blues
veteran. In fact, it is
far more likely that the Carnegie Hall setlist would look something like the second disc of this double album, astutely
subtitled The Best Of Jimmy Reed but
you can only see that upon cracking open the gatefold sleeve; the customer
who’d walked into the record store and decided to inspect the sealed and cellophane-packed
front and back sides of the LP would have formed the obvious impression that this
was a brand new 23-track live performance from their blues hero, only
discovering the truth upon already having paid for the record. The second LP does,
in fact, consist of well-known Jimmy Reed classics, but they are not live and
they are not even re-recorded; only ‘The Sun Is Shining’ had not previously
been released on one of the LPs that I have already reviewed (but it was an
actual single from back in 1957). Consequently, to
give things their proper names, Jimmy Reed
At Carnegie Hall is the biggest scam in Jimmy Reed history and a solid
gold inclusion into the Big Encyclopaedia Of Record Industry Scams — and,
like most of such scams, it probably did not even really make Vee-Jay any extra
money, given that the album failed to chart like any other Jimmy Reed LP: sure,
people might be dumb as a species and everything, but when it comes to
counting money in their pockets, they are at least smart enough to realize
that there is no point in buying twelve clones of one single, let alone
twenty-three. So they went
out and thoughtfully bought the single instead. The single was ‘Bright Lights,
Big City’, and indeed it became Jimmy’s last impressive hit and a classic
number much coveted by Jimmy’s overseas admirers such as the Rolling Stones
and the Animals; Eric Burdon would go on to make the song more interesting,
with a suspenseful theatrical mid-section detailing the protagonist’s lover’s
head-spinning thrills in the «big city», but Jimmy does lay down the proper foundation
by taking the melody of ‘Hush Hush’ and setting it to more interesting lyrics
with a little bit of social philosophy behind them (even if he was far from
the first blues guy to explore the urban vs. rural contrast on the Chicago
blues scene). Honestly, it doesn’t go too far beyond the opening "bright lights, big city gone to my baby’s
head" statement, but there was something so powerful about it that
the song did go straight to everybody’s head upon release. Music-wise,
though, probably the best recording here is ‘Baby What’s Wrong’, taken at a
faster pace than usual and pinned to a classy groove of deep distorted bass,
two rhythm guitars, and a minimalistic lead guitar part that have a sort of
crunchy, primal magic to them. Once again, it makes me feel sad that Jimmy
took so few opportunities to explore faster tempos and different combinations of instrumental tones; this is a rare
example when a Jimmy Reed original can actually hold its original ground
against a later Animals
cover, even if we probably have Willie Dixon to thank for that, holding
down that bass like a seasoned machine-gunner in his nest, rather than Jimmy
himself. Alas, besides these
two classics, the alleged «Carnegie Hall performance recreation» has fairly
little of interest going for it. The aforementioned ‘Blue Carnegie’ is
basically just an instrumental re-run of the same ‘Hush Hush / Bright Lights Big
City’ pattern, good for those who can’t get enough of Jimmy blowing his
harmonica (I am more interested in the brief electric guitar solo at the end,
with a few quirky jazz bends and trills, though I have no idea who’s playing:
the credits list a whole bunch of guitarists without any specifications). ‘I’m
A Love You’, in a rare twist, introduces a bunch of backing vocalists singing
"whoah-oh, yeah-yeah"
during Jimmy’s harmonica solos — a little reminiscent of Chuck Berry’s style
on ‘Back In The USA’, but not really enough to suspect Jimmy Reed of «going
pop». And maybe ‘Blue, Blue Water’ is worth admiring from a rigorously
minimalistic perspective: "Blue,
blue water / Silver moon / Tell me darling, tell me soon / You’re my darling,
you’re my sweetheart / My heart desire" does a good job of cutting
out all those unnecessary verbs to deliver the relevant message in a
telegraphic style. Some other, allegedly more «literate» slob, would probably
go all «silver moon shining down, blue
water flowing by» on us, but not Jimmy, who simply tells it as it is,
going all the way back to the origins of language when verbs were a rarity
and abstract notions mostly took on concrete forms... oh, never mind. Anyway, the lesson to take home here is that yes, Jimmy Reed did play Carnegie Hall, and no, the existence of this album by itself does not prove that he
ever did. Do not bother paying an insane amount of money on Ebay for an old
copy unless you have a gatefold fetish, and do not bother downloading the
second half of it even if you are a completionist — and if you are not, ‘Bright
Lights Big City’ and ‘Baby What’s Wrong’ are the only two tracks here worth
any serious bother; if you don’t believe me, just ask Eric Burdon. |
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