I'm not much of a blues fan, so I can't appreciate a lot of what else he did, but this album and his slide playing are from another planet.
That was the cool thing about JW....he played blues, but he played the blues unlike your typical shoe-gazer players just standing there and drooling away...
....and he played more than blues. Some of the best R&R, Boogie and there are even mellower Pop-ish cuts scattered on his albums that are well done, plus his work with brother Edgar was yet another dimension.
Yeah, he played blues, but I can tell you that at his concerts, no one was ever bored to death by the blues.
Every time I saw him, about 30 seconds into the first song, no one was sitting anymore, and they stayed on their feet to the end.
He would bang out some up tempo R&R....then switch guitars and ask the crowd, "You'll don't mind if I play some blues"...and the place would go wild. His blues playing style was very raw and energetic...not just twiddling.
Man, it's kinda funny that you posted this because I felt the same way the first time I heard SRV (Austin city limits). I'm like " what's all the fuss about? Johnny winter was doing this back in 1969...
Yeah....one thread here and another in the Cave.
But honestly, I think SRV was gifted, but those were my exact thoughts when I first encountered the SRV craze back in the mid-80s. The first thing I could think of was JW, and how he was playing that same kind of stuff long before.
SRV's finger playing style was slightly different, but yet when you hear a lot of the runs/licks that JW does, you hear a lot of similarity from SRV.
Anyway....I gained a great appreciation for SRV over the years, so not meaning to minimize his playing in any way.....just saying that JW in his prime could smoke a lot of the guys who are considered great players, or at the least, hang with any of them and not miss a beat.
A lot of folks see YT vids of him from later years, when JW was getting old and could hardly stand anymore....but man, back in the 70's, he was very entertaining on stage and really rocked.
I'm still so bummed about his passing....
...but I knew he was close, he just looked so frail the last few years.