"...the human word is like an outworn, battered timbal upon which we beat melodies fit for making bears dance when we are trying to move the stars to pity." -Flaubert
Which is my big ol' ham-fisted way of saying when it comes to Real Blues or what The Straight People call blues I ain't so sure I got my homework done enough to know what i'm talkin' about. But Chris Cotton does. However, in the spirit of MY Real Blues (and Mr.Cotton's) to hell with the damned stars and bring on the dancing bears! I just finished listening to Chris Cotton's new CD titled I Watched The Devil Die. I'm awful sorry to say that the best language I could come up with at the final note (without my usual swearing) was WOW! You'll be adding your own abundant and imaginative expletives after you hear it for yourself. I'm at least honest enough to admit I know about enough about Piedmont style and other finger pickin' styles to keep my mouth half shut about Mr.Cotton's technical skill. On the other hand, a fellow I work with is versed in that world. His word as nail hit upon head listening to this set was, "Exceptional!" Most finger-pickin' sorts have sounded high-brow, tight and pretty clean to my mud and woods tuned ears. Mr. Cotton despite his dangerous knowledge makes it roll out and around the ol' dirt road just as natural and rockin' as can be, not forced faux and special. Mr. Cotton covers some of the masters works here. Mr. Willie McTell's Dyin' Crap Shooters Blues, The Mississippi Sheiks' That's it, and of course Mr's Hurt and James with Louis Collins and I'm So Glad. But this man's a fine songwriter too. Six of the twelve here are his and fit quite comfortably up against the old timers. Each song sounds like it was played (not performed) at a late night pickin' party among good friends. The song Black Night sticks out for the help and heft of Mr. Big Jack Johnson's after-hours slide and as well for Mr. Cotton's xtra fine band's joyful playing on such a dark and menacing song. Mr. Jimbo Mathus' production here as usual brings you in to the room and sets you nicely in the hot seat front and center of the action goin' down live and naked and hot in the Mississippi midnite hour. I just gotta hope Yellow Dog Records P.R. Machine is fired up to overheatin' overdrive on this disc 'cuz if work this good isn't hailed in all the so called blues mags and beyond then sombody someplace ain't payin' attention. Of course most folks don't listen cuz they're too busy bein' dazzeled by the stars and wouldn't Hear great music if it was a dancing bear bitin' their ass.
Yr pal Chris Cotton has a fine new video out for the song Blues and Sadness off his excellent new album The Big Sea. You can read my review of The Big SeaHERE.
Me playin' drums with Cotton at Deep Blues Festival '08. Video shot but Ol' Cuzn Wildweed. BTW Tix for DBF '09 are available HERE
photo courtesy of tiina liimu CHRiS COTTON plays THE DEEP BLUES FESTiVAL First of all let's get this straight: You can call Chris Cotton a lot of names. Call him Cotton, Slappy, Wingnut McSpazz-O-Tron, yr daddy, or Mr. Cotton, Sir. But don't call him a bluesman. And don't call his music blues, either. Gatemouth Brown suffered the same curse and carried a similar cross. What Mr. Brown played wasn't really blues either but to a lot of ears it might have sounded like it. I won't bother to go into that whole "black man playing guitar it must be blues" thing. You are smart enough to figure that out. Chris Cotton doesn't hardly sound a thing like Mr.Gatemouth Brown but both do (or in the case of Mr. Brown "did") excel at spreading their sound across a rich loamy rock-free field of music while still sounding completely themselves. Both have done all they can to dig themselves out of that shiny Tommy Bahama shirt laden blues ghetto. Here's the thing about Cotton's music. The more you hear it and the more intently you listen to it, the more you find is revealed. Cotton plays with a deceptive ease. Not a laid back hippie ease but rather that of one comfortable with himself and his instrument, his fellow players, and his skills. Skills which you'll find are utterly formidable. The comfort and ease with which Cotton's singing and playing come across makes his music feel like you're wearing all your favorite clothes at the same time. Maybe your worn old punk rock boots with your coolest dark blue country cowboy shirt with bright Pearline buttons and cigarette burns, soft old jeans you stole from your dad with the patches and holes that mark and reveal where they've been and that dirty old slouch hat with the sweat stained band you picked up in Memphis. But when you start to peel off all the layers it's still the original thing underneath. Cotton's music is organic. It's who he is. It's what he does. Without creepy wispy adaptation or precious faux affectation or special outfits or any other extemporaneous B.S.
Chris Cotton is a songster. I don't think he'll mind me calling him that. What the hell is a songster? Leadbelly was a songster. He knew all the hits of the day. Mississippi John Hurt and Furry Lewis too. They made those songs theirs. They knew blues, too, but it wasnt' all they knew. Same with Cotton's special rider man Blind Willie McTell. And just like them, Cotton plays pop music. You just don't recognize it that way. The difference is history. Cotton's musical forefathers were usually one man operations that played what was happening then and not often for a socially mixed audience, if you know what I mean. Cotton, too, is playing what's happening then. The difference is a couple hundred years of musical history. It's as if Cotton has somehow absorbed the ink from a two-hundred year long songbook and he uses that songbook for watercolor paper covering it with his own original washes and colors mixed with the original ancient ink to paint textures both coarse and fine. Textures like the sitar in the third track of the three track suite that holds the belly of the album, and the deft vocal exchanges with friend and neighbor John Henry on I'm Going Home (one of two Cotton co-writes on this ten piece album) as well as the duets with fellow west coaster(and fine artist in her own right)Paige. It's the HERE and NOW that Cotton filters the music of THEN through. The unfortunate thing for Chris Cotton is that people rarely LiSTEN to music anymore. When was the last time you put on an album and sat down on the couch and actually listened to it without some sort of multi-tasking? And LISTENiNG is what has to happen for Cotton to escape that blues ghetto and the clutch of The Dudes who care more about what gauge of strings their god Robert Johnson used on Terraplane than they do about being moved. Taken at face value Cotton will be accepted or dismissed based on blues taste makers. Just as Gatemouth Brown was. Unfortunately for Chris Cotton most of the taste the bald headed pony tailed panama hatted bluesers (or the spelling they would probably prefer "Bluezers") have is in their mouth. Blanket indictment? Damn Straight. Chris Cotton and I would be more than happy for you to prove us wrong. Cotton has assembled a dynamite album that is akin to his previous releases but a couple years stronger and deeper. An album that rewards the listener who pays attention with each subsequent play. An album that, once you hear it will cause your jaw to drop and your eyes to bug out when you find out it was recorded completely live with no overdubs. Do any of your wankin' souless bluezerstars do that? Cotton would, should, could be king. His coronation is up to you.
FUN FACTS! Actually The Big Sea contains eleven pieces including the Cotton style hill-country hidden track Farm Jam which drops at three minutes in. This track features Cotton on guitar as well as John Henry on bass and Dirty Simonson on drums. This combo does not appear elsewhere on the CD. Cotton briefly went to college where I grew up but we never met. Countless years later I got to back him up on drums at Deep Blues Festival number one.
"...and what makes it so good is that everybody is original, everybody has their own taste of the blues. Their own feeling of the blues. Their own form of the blues. Told in that way, that's what makes it historical - it will never die."
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Watch This Space!
The Cure for The Purist.
WATCH iT!
Bad Luck & Trouble as Travelogue Webcast! W/ yr hosts Jeff Konkel & Roger Stolle, and an array of Who's Who in hard blues!
Truth.
"...authenticity without evolution isn't authenticity, but mimicry. And not terribly authentic or interesting at all." -Ted Drozdowski
Via Folio Weekly Magazine
My 15 Minutes..14...13...
And, of course, that is what all of this is -- all of this: the one song, ever changing, ever reincarnated, that speaks somehow from and to and for that which is ineffable within us and without us, that is both prayer and deliverance, folly and wisdom, that inspires us to dance or smile or simply to go on, senselessly, incomprehensibly, beatifically, in the face of mortality and the truth that our lives are more ill-writ, ill-rhymed and fleeting than any song, except perhaps those songs -- that song, endlesly reincarnated -- born of that truth, be it the moon and June of that truth, or the wordless blue moan, or the rotgut or the elegant poetry of it. That nameless black-hulled ship of Ulysses, that long black train, that Terraplane, that mystery train, that Rocket '88', that Buick 6 -- same journey, same miracle, same end and endlessness." -- Nick Tosches, Where Dead Voices Gather
"My songs, they have just the one chord, there's none of that fancy stuff you hear now, with lots of chords in one song. If I find another chord I leave it for another song." -Junior Kimbrough
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Broke & Hungry Records 5 year Retrospective! Must Own.
