Meeting The Devil At The Crossroads

I was reading an interview with Jarvis Cocker, and he thinks, as do I once I sit & capitulate, that it's odd how blues has become the middle class middle-aged guy's music of choice. Especially since it's the sound of black slaves dealing with their "situation".

White guys, like me, with an adequate job & some sort of normalcy in their lives - wife, kids, mortgage, multiple TVs & cars - digging - playing - de blooze. They remember with fondness their youth: Cream, Fleetwood Mac (UK version, not Cali cokehead version), Savoy Brown - wait, aren't these all from the UK, where the working class is truly lowdown & the caste system is still in full effect today? Wait, I'm not done: Canned Heat, Paul Butterfield, Johnny Winter (talk about white). All those guys got their data from those first- and second-generation American negroes. Today's blooze fan doesn't know Son House from Dr. Gregory House.

(OK - this is not really another one of my posts showing how people are root-ignorant; that's not what this post started out to be. People certainly don't have to be down on their luck to dig the blues. As always, it's nice when the originators get credit.)

Later this summer if all goes well with a foot surgery scheduled for July I'm supposed to go to an outdoor blues concert featuring blues giant B.B. King and Robert Cray - neither of whom I like. But here's something interesting: B. B. goes back 60 years. He's a contemporary of most of the blues cats I listen to, and normally that would be good enough for me, but B. B.'s so ... Jerry Lewis Telethon. He's up there singin' & playin' the blues (however not at the same time) in a sparkly tux that would make Marc Bolan envious. Shit, he's loaded, and I don't expect him to wear one-strapped overalls, but he's just too damn slick for my liking. His blues has morphed into the Vegas Blues. Not so strange then that I don't get any soul from him. The reality is he transcended all his down home funk & he's not gonna front. Normally I would consider that great. But his Quincy Jones-type shit just doesn't happen for me. And Robert Cray is truly an exceptional artist, but that experience for me is like listening to your college suitemate play a gig on the diag. As some bald-domed cat once said, it is puzzlement. Personally I don't wanna live a destitute life, bad luck & trouble followin' me wherever I go, but psychologically that's what I expect from my blues artists (if they're British, of course, then all I expect is delta influences & bad teeth). Different strokes, is all I'm sayin'. And as usual, my favorite strokers are dead.

If my demographic is blues's ideal audience, then so be it. My peers could have chosen young country over blues. Most black folk don't dig the blues because it reminds them of bad times. Me and my peeps can't relate, we just wanna look over yonder wall and dust our broom, bottles in hand: one cheap whisky, one Purell.