Looking at the posters that litter the side streets of central and suburban
London, one might be forgiven for assuming that the
Blues was created by a post-
Aldermaston generation of art students rather than by the afflicted
negro population of the
American Deep South. The posters advertise
authentic Rhythm ’n’ blues by groups which play a variety of music—some
Pop-
oriented, some
Folk-
oriented, some
Jazz-
oriented but largely derived from the music of the more sensational
coloured entertainers of the
USA, like
Chuck Berry,
Bo Diddley,
James Brown and
T-Bone Walker. Of the 2,000 or more groups working the multitude of large and small
clubs, no more than two dozen are in any way original, even in pop-
music terms, and even these are rootless shadows of the singers on whose material they draw. The difference between the blues of modern America and the “blues” of modern
Britain is the difference between music which is an authentic racial expression and music which is an expression of no more than a liking for the authentic form.
The origins of British “blues” are far from clear. Their seminal genius may have been Muddy Waters who toured Britain in 1958 but it was not until March, 1962, when the harmonica player Cyril Davies and the guitarist Alexis Korner opened the first of the clubs—next door to the ABC Teashop off Ealing Broadway—that the “boom” really had its beginnings. Korner and Davies played mainly pre-war blues of the negro night clubs of urban America. Once they had their own stage the “boom” gathered in Central London, attracting a young audience in reaction against a particularly enfeebled pop music—this was the hey-day of Cliff Richard. The Band—known as Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated—had the now familiar line-up of harmonica, guitars and drums and if it was unexiting compared with its Chicago parent it had, at least, a rhythmic earthiness and an emotional directness which had been completely absent from pop music since the demise of rock ’n’ roll in the late ’50s.
By the end of 1962 the
Beatles had had their first small hit,
Love Me Do, featuring the magical combination of harmonica, guitars and drums, and the
Rolling Stones were making their early public appearances at Ealing and elsewhere. In January, 1963 the Stones appeared for the first time at the
Marquee. The
bill was topped by
130
Brian Knight’s Blues-
by-
six and the Stones earned £2 each as the fill-
in group. By March the Stones had moved on—to the fringe of pop success—and their place was taken by another group from Ealing, the Mann-Hugg Blues Brothers, later to be re-
named
Manfred Mann. By the time the Stones had their first small hit,
Come On, in the summer of 1963 (only enough to earn them 83rd position in the 1963
New Musical Express Points Table, equal with
Sammy Davis,
Frank Sinatra,
Ken Dodd and Chuck Berry) r ’n’ b was freely tipped as the next pop craze.
It seems to have happened for much the same reason as rock ’n’ roll ten years earlier: a teenage reaction to the sickly gutlessness of orthodox pop. Its success has led to extraordinary results. The Cliff Richard pop image of tidy, boy-
next-
door
Christianity, has been replaced by a stylised image of rough-
living—beards, long hair, defiant nonchalance and an incoherent, unarticulated curse against conformity. The new image may be as unreal as the old but it is a great deal more tolerable. It is a cliché to observe that pop music is a major field for the exploitation and manipulation of young people, generating respect for false values and poor standards, exploiting dissatisfaction to turn young people in on themselves rather than out on society, serving the function ascribed by
Marx to religion, that of an “opiate of the people”. It would be unrealistic to claim that r ’n’ b has altered this deeply engrained pop-
cultural pattern but it may have dented it. Since the success of the Beatles—recorded not because they might be made into stars but because they
already were local stars—teenagers have shown a gradually increasing independence of the will of record companies.
Merseybeat and r ’n’ b—or at any rate the
local variant on the American theme—were created by teenagers for themselves and although the companies have exploited this music, they have had their urual role, that of
creating stars, stolen from them by teenagers. This has been a tendency rather than a decisive trend but it may represent the first steps of teenagers to free themselves of the parasites who live off them and their enthusiasms. It is not just that the quality of the music is better, although I believe it is (compare the Beatles’
I’m a Loser or Manfred Mann’s
I’m Your Kingpin with
Adam Faith’s
What Do You Want? or Cliff Richard’s
The Young Ones) but that the relationships between stars and audiences have changed. The new stars are
of their public, neither patronising nor stupid. They are irreverent, they smoke, they drink, they behave with a naturalness which would have earned them nothing but abuse ten years ago and they are articulate spokesmen for the teenage thing as well as for their music. The new stars are not held in awe except by the very young. The club-
goer knows that records are poor imitations of club performances, that record success leads to nothing so much as the dilution of a group’s “sound” in an endeavour to court general popularity. It is, in short, doubtful whether the companies have ever held so little sway over the
avant garde “popnik”. Most young people listen to nothing but pop music and within this context the infusion of some blues-
form into pop music is extremely welcome. Even in the hands of white singers it has introduced into a sadly ailing pop culture some elements of an infinitely richer
folk culture
131
and some elements of a less corrupted
pop culture—the music of Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry and James Brown still expresses something of the agony of negro life as well as the enormous surging vitality and new optimism of the
Northern ghettoes. British blues is primarily a
dance music and if it is impure it has, at least, an enthusiasm which is positively damning to inhibition. In the clubs there is a new vigour.
Kenneth Rexroth once argued that jazz is a revolutionary music only insofar as it is conducive to eroticism in dancing. The same might apply to British r ’n’ b. Today’s audiences are active and the groups, who still play for the critical club audiences rather than the easily pleased pop “concert” audiences, must make people want to dance. The modern dances are not set pattern dances. The Shake, the Dog, the Jerk are dances for crowded rooms, improvised round a basic pattern, and the groups must be able to improvise to provide variety. In the clubs, for example, Manfred Mann have played numbers like Cannonball Adderley’s Sack O’ Woe and their original—naturally enough never recorded—Packet of Three, which involved violent climaxes and sudden cliff-hanging breaks in the rhythm. Graham Bond and Brian Auger, recruits from modern jazz, and Georgie Fame, a recruit from rock ’n’ roll, play in much the same manner and now that instrumentation is veering away from harmonicas and guitars, to saxes, flutes, organs and pianos it is these latter groups who may really come into their own.
If the new music is different, so are the new stars. Many of them are strange pop idols. Keith Relf, leader of the Yardbirds, was a Beat before he made a living by singing and so was Rod the Mod Stewart, possibly the best vocalist to emerge from the “boom”. (Rod Stewart was also an International Amateur footballer.) Many groups look Beat; tired, worn and weary with the bum’s slouching walk. Indeed the mythology of the r ’n’ b clubs is the mythology of the angry, dishevelled reject of orthodoxy, the protesting bum. The Pretty Things, the most beat-looking of all, sing: “I’m on my own, just wanna roam/I’ll tell you man, don’t wanna home/I wander roun’ feet off the groun’/Digging sounds from town to town/I say I think this life is grand/I say, I dig it man, don’t bring me down, man/Don’t bring me down I met this chick the other day/Then to me she said she’ll stay/I got this pad just like a cave/And then we have a little rave/And now I’m lying on ground/My head is spinning round, don’t bring me down man/don’t bring me down”.
Other singers too have strange pasts.
John Mayall, leader of one of the most vigorous groups, the
Bluesbreakers, lived in a
tree top house.
Manfred Mann (singular) was
classically trained at
Juilliard in the USA and is, even now, more than a little odd by pop standards. The whole Mann group took one man’s name but insist that they have no leader, that leadership is redundant and responsibility shared and equal. It may have something to do with the fact that their vocalist
Paul Jones was once a member of the
Oxford Committee of 100 and is, apparently, still a
Tribune contributor. The
Animals, probably the best pop-
r ’n’ b group, emerged from the strange
North East phenomenon of “animals”, young people who spent the weekends away from their
132
bourgeois homes, on cheap transport, living “rough”. (In the
South they might have earned the derisive epithet “weekend ravers”.)
Most of the r ’n’ b groups who have had hits have done so with numbers which were not r ’n’ b numbers. The Stones made a brave attempt with the slow blues, Little Red Rooster, but most of their hits were white pop in origin—Not Fade Away, a Buddy Holly number, It’s All Over Now, originally recorded by the C & C Boys in America, a country-and-western type number, I Wanna Be Your Man was by Lennon and McCartney and The Last Time was written by themselves although it is reminiscent of the Staple Singers’ This May Be My Last Time. Manfred Mann recorded pop numbers, nonsense songs and a ballad. Georgie Fame had a big hit with Yeh, Yeh, a sophisticated Lambert-Hendricks-Bavan “cool” jazz vocal with little blues content. (Significantly his follow up In the Meantime, in the same vein, did not do so well, dashing the hopes of those who thought Fame represented some sort of commercial breakthrough for soul-jazz.) The Animals’ big hit, House of the Rising Sun, was a folk song. Other groups have either recorded and wrecked blues classics or concentrated on monotonously contrived and unvaryingly dismal versions of Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley numbers, the staple diet of the uninventive. With their own material they are rarely convincing; authentic material they wreck by an apparent incomprehension of what they sing. In the clubs they are usually better and to hear British r ’n’ b, with all its undeniable excitement and all its undeniable, overall mediocrity, it is necessary to visit the clubs.
There are clubs all over the country. In London there is the
Flamingo, once
the modern jazz centre, with its large, lively and critical audience, many of whom are
West Indian;
Klook’s Kleek in
West Hampstead (the name a give-
away of its modern jazz
origins); the
Crawdaddys at
Richmond and
Croydon;
Bluesville Harringay at
Manor House;
Club Noreik at
Tottenham and many, many more. In
Southampton there is
Club Concord, in
Manchester the
Twisted Wheel, in
Guildford and
Windsor the
Ricky Ticks. The outlandishness of their names is only equalled by the names of the groups who play in them. Some take their names from song titles—the
Rolling Stones, the
Hoochie Coochie Men, the
Pretty Things, the
Thunderbirds, the
Dissatisfieds. Others borrow other singers’ names—the
T-Bones, the
Bo Street Runners. Some use names which seem to sound good—the
Authentics, the
Soul Agents, the
Delta Five,
Hogsnort Rupert, the
Loose-ends, the
Downliners’ Sect. The British blues has its acknowledged “originals”, as does negro blues. The more hip fans talk as reverently of Alexis Korner, Cy Davies and even
George Melly, as blues enthusiasts of
Son House,
Charlie Patton or
Robert Johnson. The leading star of this old elite is
Long John Baldry who was a vocalist-
tambourinist with Cyril Davies’
All-Stars (formed, from
Screaming Lord Sutch’s former backing group, the
Savages, after Davies’ break with Korner) and took over the band, changing its name to the Hoochie Coochie Men when Davies died, late in 1963. Baldry has an enviable reputation, earned partly because he is convinced of his own value and
133
partly because most groups are very poor, which has enabled him to break attendance records set by more apparently successful groups like the Rolling Stones. He is a passable singer, clever but unmoving. The sort of boredom he induces has often been thought a sign of authenticity.
Over the last eighteen months there has been a steady stream of real bluesmen to this country, among them Big Joe Williams, Sleepy John Estes, Lightning Hopkins, John Lee Hooker and the unquestioned genius of instrumental blues, the harmonicist Little Walter Jacobs. While it remains sadly true that local white singers are preferred to the “originals”, it is almost entirely due to the propaganda efforts of the white musicians that we have been able to see the genuine article at all. People like Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones have been admirably unselfish in their fulsome praise of singers like Muddy Waters, James Brown and Howling Wolf, an unselfishness which clearly places them apart from most English revivalist jazz band leaders.
It is tempting to end this account by arguing strongly that white singers and musicians should leave negro “folk” music alone. The British singers argue, correctly I think, that no music is sacrosanct, that if they wish to play what they like and publicly champion, that is their affair. So it is. It is also the critic’s right to assess their music, rather than their social significance, in terms of the negro tradition and find it wanting. When Rod Stewart made the memorable statement that it is as easy to have the blues in the Archway Road as on a Deep South railroad he was, in a way, right. You can have the blues in the Archway Road—the blues is, in one sense, the immemorial music of sadness. But it is more than a sadness in the heart, more than the ache of hunger, more than the misery of the hobo. It is the vocal expression of a people, just as all real folk music is. Rod Stewart is only half right. It may be as easy to have the blues in the Archway Road. It just is not as easy to sing them.
