Only Solitaire Reviews: Long John Baldry

	LONG JOHN’S BLUES
	Album released: 1964	V	A	L	U	E	More info:
		2	3	3	2	3
Tracks: 1) Got My Mojo Working; 2) Gee Baby, Ain’t I Good To You; 3) Roll ’Em Pete; 4) You’re Breaking My Heart; 5) Hoochie Coochie; 6) Everyday I Have The Blues; 7) Dimples; 8) Five Long Years; 9) My Babe; 10) Times Are Getting Tougher Than Tough; 11) Goin’ Down Slow; 12) Rock The Joint.
REVIEW Merely a footnote in the history of rock’n’roll today, John William Baldry is most likely to be encountered in the biographical section — as the man who helped launch the careers of both Rod Stewart and Elton John, both by hiring them and helping them gain self-confidence (it was Long John Baldry whom Elton would later make into the "someone" of ‘Someone Saved My Life Tonight’). But while nobody would probably argue that Long John was a truly great artist, such an assessment seriously downplays his role in the history of British rock music. For a very brief while out there, Long John Baldry was a major, one-of-a-kind presence on the UK stage — essentially, the first more or less credible, authentic-sounding blues and R&B belter for miles around, setting the scene for many followers with more interesting vocal styles and more creative (rather than imitative) approaches to music, but also flaunting his own personality, boldly (baldry-ly?) going where no British singer had gone before, and usually voting for integrity over commercialism.
You can hear some of Long John’s earliest vocal takes, already quite impressive but not yet quite flamboyant, on Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated’s first album, R&B From The Marquee — and you can see him in all of his two-meter-high youthful prime, already quite flamboyant, singing ‘Got My Mojo Working’ on the TV show Around The Beatles, with the Fab Four themselves merrily clapping from the balcony. Unfortunately, I am not sure if you can hear any records from 1963 that would have both Long John and a very young Nicky Hopkins on piano, when they were both members of the short-lived Cyril Davies R&B All Stars revue, before Nicky left it for health reasons and Cyril himself died from leukemia. Even more unfortunately, after Long John took over Cyril’s band, renamed it to Long John Baldry and the Hoochie Coochie Men, and hired Rod Stewart as supporting vocalist, certain contractual reasons prevented Rod from recording together with Long John, so — one more disappointment. (There is, seemingly, only one recording on which the two are caught in a vocal battle: a June ’64 B-side featuring a cover of Sister Rosetta Thorpe’s ‘Up Above My Head’, where Rod was supposed to sing backing vocals but ended up outsinging the lead singer). Ultimately, Baldry’s legacy from those classic early days remains in the form of a couple of singles and this one LP, recorded in London and released some time in 1964 on the United Artists label. The "Hoochie Coochie Men" at the time were Cliff Barton (no, not Cliff Burton!) on bass guitar, Bill Law on drums, Ian Armit on piano, and Geoff Bradford on guitar — all of them veterans of the early British skiffle / R&B scene, having previously played with Korner and Cyril Davies as well. The setlist, consequently, is not too unpredictable, mainly consisting of classic blues and R&B covers — Big Joe Turner, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, that kind of thing. The atmosphere, however, is notably different from the way it used to be with Blues Incorporated — and this is where Long John actually makes his mark. Although he certainly sounds less intimidating on record than he would look if most of us stood next to the guy, Long John’s appeal is not about being able to match the deep dark mystery of Muddy Waters or Howlin’ Wolf, but in being able to simply let loose next to a microphone. Before the guy came along, blues and R&B influence in British music manifested itself in two principal ways — the «Alexis Korner style» of doing it, i.e. a professional, reverential, somewhat stiff and sterile take on the blues which seemed to demand to take it more seriously than it deserved; and the «Eric Burdon style» of doing it, i.e. rough, rowdy, rambunctious, but converted to the shape of three-minute pop singles that could be placed on the same shelf with your Merseybeat records. It was only a matter of time before something in between would be worked out, with a loose-cutting white singer guy treating his black blues mentors with respect, but not like sacred cows, and remembering that the prime purpose of this music, after all, was entertainment rather than education. And you don’t need to go much further than the opening verses of ‘Got My Mojo Working’ on Blues Incorporated’s R&B From The Marquee and on Long John’s debut album to get that difference. Unlike Cyril Davies with his formalistic approach to the performance, Baldry knows that the song only works if it puts the audience in a trance, and in order to put the audience in a trance, you need first and foremost to put yourself in a trance, and this is what he does on the very first line, already delivered in a wobbly, «possessed» state, with muttering and murmuring ad-libs at the end. If this trance feels a little «phoney» next to Muddy’s classic original, this is perfectly excusable, because Baldry is still a long way from showing enough individuality to fully detach himself from his idols; but there is some individuality in this performance — you could say it’s really all in his phrasing mistakes, but then you could also argue, for instance, that Keith Richards’ unique style of playing Chuck Berry riffs and solos all came out of his mistakes in playing Chuck Berry riffs and solos just as well. The most important thing is that the guy puts the fun back where it belongs. Nobody could imagine Alexis Korner’s band appearing with this kind of sound on a Beatles-hosted TV show — Alexis himself would probably scoff at such a desecration — but Long John did it, and did it well. From there, it does not exactly get «better», but the record is quite consistent, with Baldry demonstrating his mastery of the fast-paced rollickin’-fun boogie-blues style (‘Roll ’Em Pete’, ‘Everyday I Have The Blues’), the slow and menacing Chicago style (the inescapable ‘Hoochie Coochie Man’), the slow and depressed Chicago style (‘Five Long Years’, ‘Goin’ Down Slow’), and even a bit of the midnight / lounge jazz style (‘Gee Baby Ain’t I Good To You’). All through the record, he wails, howls, screams, mumbles, stutters, and uses almost as much ad-libbing as Robert Plant in his prime — not as shrill and in-yer-face but also nowhere near as obnoxious as Robert at his baby-baby-baby-worst — and sooner or later, you shall find yourself drawn into the fun, unless you prefer to stubbornly fight it all the way. The single worst thing about Long John’s performance, and most likely the single main reason why he never broke through as a big star, is that his natural singing voice is just not very interesting. You can clearly hear this in his above-mentioned duet with Rod Stewart — both singers try their best, but God is clearly on Rod’s side, because he has this naturally-coming barking bad boy rasp in his voice that stimulates every hormone in your body, whereas Baldry’s voice is naturally pure and indistinctive, making him really work for his supper. On the album, he does everything in his power to make the songs come alive, but «coming alive» is not the same as «making every fiber in your body vibrate with tension and passion», which is something that requires a special inborn talent and which is why singers such as Rod, or Steve Marriott, or Steve Winwood, or Joe Cocker would soon come along and push Long John to the bottom rungs of the pedestal. That said, nothing prevents us from enjoying and admiring the artistry all the same. It’s fun, for instance, to witness Long John unpredictably metamorphose into Ella Fitzgerald at times, scat-singing or throwing in "a-tisket a-tasket, she took my yellow basket"; or paying a hilarious tribute to his benefactors by inserting a bit of ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ right in the middle of ‘Everyday I Have The Blues’ (again, something unimaginable from the likes of Alexis Korner). But it is also undeniable that he has a deep understanding of all the serious music he sings — the phrasing on slow blues such as ‘You’re Breaking My Heart’ perfectly places all the right accents on all the right spots, with the highest bit of tension reserved for the closing a cappella line. There is nothing here to make Long John’s interpretations of these songs in any way «superior» to the originals, but there is enough here to make them worth listening, every once in a while, next to the originals. A couple of nice words should also be said about the musical backing. Geoff Bradford is a pretty damn good guitar player: in fact, his soloing on slow blues tunes like ‘You’re Breaking My Heart’, while still quite imitative of Chicago masters, might be the best blues lead guitar in the UK prior to Clapton redefining the sound and function of the instrument on John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers the next year (actually, I think that an album with Clapton as lead guitarist and Long John Baldry as singer could have been an even more definitive landmark of the early British blues movement). And the little-known jazz pianist Ian Armit, who would stay at Long John’s side until the early 1970s, plays his instrument on ‘Roll ’Em Pete’ with precisely the same smooth technique and self-assurance as Pete Johnson himself did on the original — with much better recording quality, too. All in all, Long John’s Blues, in addition to its historical importance, remains a solid piece of entertainment. Many blues and R&B recordings from that period now sound like boring fossils, popular at the time for purely technical reasons but totally devoid of individuality (Georgie Fame, for instance); this one somehow manages to live and breathe, just because the artist behind it was smart enough to understand that this kind of music needs to live and breathe in order to remain viable and meaningful.

Recording years	Main genre	Music sample
1964–2004	Classic rhythm’n’blues	Everyday I Have The Blues (1964)