Who here knows from Johnny "Guitar" Watson?
I bet that right now some tiny renegade soul station in Baltimore, Detroit, D.C. or one of the other Chocolate Cites in this great land is taking a spin of "Ain't That a Bitch" or "Superman Lover," two of the biggest hits from the original Original Gangster, but let's be honest... that really isn't much of a legacy. It's much more probable that 95% of you reading this are thinking, "who the hell is Johnny "Guitar" Watson?," 3% remember him from back in the day, and the other 2% are rushing to their Zappa shelf to make sure that this is the same Johnny "Guitar" Watson who guested on One Size Fits All. Relax, fellow geeks. It is.
And this obscurity is a crying shame. The splanking-new two-disc Johnny "Guitar" Watson: The Funk Anthology (released Sep. 6 on Shout Factory) goes a long way toward placing Watson in his rightful place in funk history. If he doesn't rank right up there in front along Parliament, Sly, the Ohio Players, and James Brown, he definitely makes the elite second cut with heavy hitters like Zapp, Maceo Parker, and the Bar-Kays.
Johnny Watson, a native Texan, hit the scene in the early 1950s playing keyboard in blues bands around Houston, and he managed to get time on cuts by Albert Collins among others. A taste of his future direction would come in 1954 when Watson strapped on the axe and entered the studio to record "Space Guitar," a tour de force of hot playing and speaker-melting sound effects that was at least fifteen years ahead of its time.
Throughout the 1950s and '60s, Watson would bounce from style to style, playing blues, rock, jazz, and spaced-out super blues as his own innate sense of "what's happenin' now" demanded. From time to time, he would lob a song into the lower reaches of the charts, and he eventually built up a formidable reputation as one of the finest blues players on the West Coast.
More importantly, Watson became known as an iconoclastic, phenomenally talented trailblazer with a flair for explosive stage shows. So much, in fact, that his act became part of the musical DNA of the time and influenced the next generation of far-out acts. According to soul-blues king Bobby Womack, "Music-wise, he was the most dangerous gunslinger out there. Even when others made a lot of noise in the charts - I'm thinking of Sly Stone or George Clinton - you know they'd studied Johnny's stage style and listened very carefully to Johnny's grooves." Watson himself would claim that Jimi Hendrix was always careful to give him due credit.
Article comments
1 - godoggo
Clapton said Watson was his favorite guitarist, according to a customer reviewer on Amazon; the album was something like The Very Best of Johnny "Guitar" Watson.
2 - crooked spine
"Space Guitar" was indeed years ahead of its time. The first time I heard it, I thought it was Jeff Beck circa 1966. Hard to believe it was recorded in 1954. Johnny Watson definitely is an underrated guitarist.