The fatalistic beauty seems more urgent. Dax’s vocals and guitar (both often distorted) and Tessie Brunet’s feral drumming and lovely harmony vocals are here.
You don’t have to be a fanatic or a geek to appreciate the raw beauty of Mayer’s Fortune recordings, and you don’t have to be one to love this album, either.
Half-assed blues from one-third of JSBX. Judah Bauer plays the kind of music that makes you think, “Hey, that Jon Spencer is a pretty good guitarist, isn’t he?”
Country blues, acoustic guitar, sedate mutterings & rarely a standard 12-bar blues in sight. No SRV/Skynard/white boy bar band massacre of a pentatonic scale.
He’s got an attitude the size of a Mac truck, and a personality with the power to knock you down. This is the raw element, where it all began, the fountainhead.
Recorded in a house in a couple of hours in 1965 by Mississippi Fred McDowell and Johnny Woods. These two old friends hadn’t played together in eight years.
Bad Man is raw like a wound scrubbed with steel wool, jagged like the neck snapped from a bottle of Thunderbird ESQ, and chock full of soul and attitude.
A contemporary of legends like Wilson Pickett and Otis Redding, Solomon Burke made a series of incredible recordings in the ’60s and ’70s. And then he vanished.
Some is the straight-forward blues Payton played at home, bars, and bait shops around Washington County, Mississippi. Some of it’s goosed-up with studio beats.
Not the usual head-cuttin’ stompin’ blues curiosity the label specializes in. James “Super Chikan” Johnson’s soulful elaborations on old themes will win fans.
Blues purists may dismiss this slab o’ anarchic slide guitar’n’bass drum voodoo as mere hipster shuck’n’jive gimmickry. It’s sure not the “same old blues crap.”