I love pondering the competing, contradictory, complementary, and random elements found when the musical atom splits and all its elements laid before you. To borrow from Jagger and Richards, "It's the singer, not the song." Or is it? That's where the role of the performer and performance come into play. Music, drama, and comedy were by necessity live action activities. That changed with the ability to capture sound and video but it hasn't disappeared and continues to be part of the equation, particularly in music. How important is "performer" in the anatomy of a singer/songwriter/musician?
It's a fun discussion and I've traveled many miles considering different angles on the way home from different concerts throughout my life. There are so many schools of thought and so many different kinds of performers that, when paired with different kinds of music, can create a vast array of experiences. You've got your carnival barkers, your televangelist or tent revival preacher, class clown, exhibitionist, beat poet, anti-performer and countless combinations and variations of all of the above. Magic happens when performance, performer, and song intersect at just the right place. I started thinking about it again while listening to Junior Wells' Live in Boston 1966, just released this fall by Chicago's Delmark label. This is as close to experiencing Junior Wells in concert as I'm ever going to get and that's a tragedy because after listening to this and Live at Theresa's 1975, I am convinced he is one of the blues' best intersections.
Junior Wells is more than a badass with a harmonica. He was most certainly that (hit yourself if you don't own Hoodoo Man Blues and then correct that) and these performances are good, the audio quality is solid, and Wells is backed ably by one of Chicago's most prolific rhythm sections. The Meyers boys, Dave and Louis, and Fred Below have so many credits on guitar, bass, and drums you have to wonder if Chess Records didn't have a Dred Pirate Roberts thing going.
Article comments
1 - Jim Byrnes
Hey Josh, Yes, what a record and what a night. September 16, 1966 at the Club 47 (just off Harvard Square, actually in Cambridge Mass). I was there and I remember it so well. I was a student at Boston University at the time. I was with Ralph Kaufman from White Plains New York, his girlfriend, Erika and I was with a girl named Barbara Baum. Me of course being the blues expert as I was from St. Louis, an exotic import in Ivy League country. Fred Below was the baddest and the Myers brothers were joined beyond the hip, all of them laying it down so it stayed there while Junior worked that joint like a jack-leg preacher. They owned us that night and God bless those folks at Delmark for bringing back those memories and giving this fabulous gift to everybody that couldn't be there that night. Did you know that was Fred Below's 40th birthday?
PS: Thanks, Josh, for the wonderful review you gave to my latest work. It is truly appreciated.