Blues guitar

[travelin travis]

Don't want the pure stuff? Like the watered down shit, huh? Where do you think they got it from?

To each his own. I happen to like both, for different reasons.

I never was much of a Gary Moore fan either. The first time I heard Robert Johnson I thought it was at least two guitar players doing all that. I still don't know how in the hell he played that stuff. His music had alot of depth that you don't really hear any where else.

 

[Druw]

well, i havent heard much blues stuff, i like dave gilmours stuff (bluesy) and clapton. but clapton does repeat stuff alot. i guess its like a voice, always similar.

 

[alambler]

I'm 27 and have spent most of my guitar playing years (since I was 12) playing the blues. I started off in hair rock and metal, side stepped a little into grunge, and then fell straight back into the blues. I have listened from Robert Johnson to Muddy Waters and Albert King (the guy that SRV and Clapton stole most of their licks from), to Buddy Guy and more recent players like SRV, Tommy Castro, and the like. The blues has been rehashed for so long, all the new players have to fight to put a new take on it. Robert Cray's blues is more in his voice than in his fingers, likewise with Bonnie Rait. Although, they both have very distinctive guitar sounds. I can hear any random song of theirs on the radio and pick out either player.

At this point, I have played on stage: staight ahead rock, big band jazz, more modern jazz, old school funk, new school funk, reggae, punk, honky tonk and country, bluegrass, ska, latin, fusion, acoustic, electric, Texas, Chicago, and all types of blues. The blues is almost everywhere and in every piece of music since it's inception.

There's still nothing better than hearing Muddy Water's slide solo on "She's 19 Years Old" and Buddy Guy's replication of it 30 years later. The new stuff is still blues like the old stuff, just different.

I would be nothing without the blues and I'd like to think I'm a rather accomplished guitarist.

 

[travelin travis]

Albert King is awesome and SRV definately stole every one his licks! I dig Muddy Waters and Buddy Guy too.

 

[daav]

Love blues, that is gritty, raw stuff like R.L Burnside, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, much of the early Aligator stuff, etc. THere is aton of stuff out there as well that people who are not all about the blues have never heard.
I used to be really into the electric blues ala (Albert) King and Collins and all those types, but i get fatigued with the redundancy these days pretty quickly.

I absolutely can't stand the 35+ year old white guy blues bands that seem pervasive in many venues, playing covers of mustang sally and old blues numbers that sound horribly stale and lifeless.

Daav

 

[sweetpeee]

I never was much of a Gary Moore fan either. The first time I heard Robert Johnson I thought it was at least two guitar players doing all that. I still don't know how in the hell he played that stuff. His music had alot of depth that you don't really hear any where else.

Johnson....my fave is "preachin' blues..(up jumped the devil)" There's one point in the song where he's singing about what the blues are/is, and he says " And the blues is a low down achin' chill...yes....I'm hittin' them now"...leaves the next verse as if he were overcome by emotion and just hums "MmmmmMmmm.....is a low down achin' chill" and I believe he actually was hitting them at that moment. Had me convinced.

I thought for that time, this particular song had a lot of advanced elements in it. The technique is phenomenal. Oh yeah....if you want to hear someone playing from around that same time that sounds like more than one guitarist playing, give Blind Blake a listen to. In my search for the first guitar virtuoso, he's the earliest I've ever found.Talk about blues folklore...no one knows what happened to Blind Blake...he just disappeared.


J.P.

 

[sweetpeee]

Albert King is awesome and SRV definately stole every one his licks! I dig Muddy Waters and Buddy Guy too.

Two things stick out in mind about SRV. First, I read an interview (Guitar Player?) where he states this and laughs! I dug that about him...he's not ashamed to tell you where he got his stuff. The other is the concert at Montreux (?) blues festival, he was boo'ed after a handful of songs and left the stage stunned. He met Bowie and Jackson Brown back stage and they couldn't figure out what the booing was all about either. Best guess is that the crowd was in the mood for acoustic blues....anyway, he was headlining the same gig three years later.

Speaking of Buddy Guy. I remember seeing him on some blues oriented show, it may have been the SRV tribute featuring Jimmy Vaughn and the Tbirds. Anyway, if memory serves me, Bonnie Raite was there as was Buddy Guy, John Lee Hooker,Cray and some other well know blues players. At the end of the gig, they were all taking turns soloing. It seemed that the first few that soloed, where playing a bit flashy...not over playing, just kicking it out.When it came to Buddy Guy's turn to solo, he bent ONE NOTE and gave it some vibrato and just let it hang there for a while. He looked at some of the other players on stage with a smile on his face that pretty much said "Gotcha!" and I actually felt that without him saying a word. The he went into a short solo. Watching everyone else play this that and the other thing and seeing Buddy Guy start with one sustained bent note and smiling about it was an eye opener. Sometimes one note played at the right time is all you need to make a statement.

J.P.

 

[sweetpeee]

I absolutely can't stand the 35+ year old white guy blues bands that seem pervasive in many venues, playing covers of mustang sally and old blues numbers that sound horribly stale and lifeless.

Daav

I don't mind that so long as I'm just out to have a couple of beers and listen to a band without trying to analyize what they're doing.

 

[cephus]

I absolutely can't stand the 35+ year old white guy blues bands that seem pervasive in many venues, playing covers of mustang sally and old blues numbers that sound horribly stale and lifeless.

Daav

Me, too.

Blues is SO tired. I loved blues but SRV kinda ruined it for everyone by turning it into a macdonald's franchise. Plus the only ones that like listening to blues is guitar players.

 

[alambler]

Not true about the only ones that like blues being guitar players. A lady here I work with in her 60's is a much more critical blues listener than I am and that's all she listens to. I am sure she's listening for the same things a lot of us are: emotion, originality, and authenticity.

SRV didn't make the blues a francise, Sony Music did.

I have seen Buddy do that one note thing many times and it works very well on stage. Some horn players have been doing that for years with the circular breathing technique.

When the 35+ year old white guys you are talking about kill music, it's not just blues they murder; but classic rock, southern rock, and any kind of current cover.

 

[cephus]

Not true about the only ones that like blues being guitar players. A lady here I work with in her 60's is a much more critical blues listener than I am and that's all she listens to.

OK. I'll recant. no one likes listening to blues excpet guitar players and one 60 year old lady in orlando.

The problem is that guitar players never have any fucking money and little old ladies don;t drink enough to make it pay to play blues out anymore.

I love blues, but I won't listen to all that crap white guy blues. Yech.

 

[espskully]

I toured the US and Canada with a pretty smokin' blues band. I played very aggressively as did the band - and it rocked.

Blues is just like anything else - there's great and there's terrible, and stuff in between. I have digital cable with the Blues station - and man, is there a lot of utter shite. Just really bad. Makes me think "Fuck, the Blues really suck". Then someone who does it right comes on - and holy shit. Awesome.

 

[alambler]

OK. I'll recant. no one likes listening to blues excpet guitar players and one 60 year old lady in orlando.

The problem is that guitar players never have any fucking money and little old ladies don;t drink enough to make it pay to play blues out anymore.

I love blues, but I won't listen to all that crap white guy blues. Yech.

BB King is selling a heck of a lot of tickets for his 80th birthday tour that range from $40-100. That sounds like a few guitar players out there have money or have girlfriends with money that buy them tickets.

 

[Joepie]

Two things stick out in mind about SRV. First, I read an interview (Guitar Player?) where he states this and laughs! I dug that about him...he's not ashamed to tell you where he got his stuff. The other is the concert at Montreux (?) blues festival, he was boo'ed after a handful of songs and left the stage stunned. He met Bowie and Jackson Brown back stage and they couldn't figure out what the booing was all about either. Best guess is that the crowd was in the mood for acoustic blues....anyway, he was headlining the same gig three years later.

Yeah, I've got the Montreux recordings somewhere, bootleg recording. I was stunned to hear my greatest guitar hero beeing booed off stage by a bunch of Swiss idiots. I was told that Montreux was, at least in the 80's, a jazz festival in the pure sense of the word. The crowd didn't know how to appreciate a song with only 3 chords, none of which diminished. If only they had a clue...

 

[MadTiger3000]

Albert King is awesome and SRV definately stole every one his licks! I dig Muddy Waters and Buddy Guy too.

I have listened to about 15 Albert King songs in the last week, and SRV played with him on one live cut. Very nice.

Of course, as was said, SRV's distinctive styling and tone made it fresh.

 

[cephus]

BB King is selling a heck of a lot of tickets for his 80th birthday tour that range from $40-100. That sounds like a few guitar players out there have money or have girlfriends with money that buy them tickets.

Your definition of success (or suckiness) is just different than mine. Sure, BB king can do something with the blues, but I guarantee that his audience isn't 100% blues lovers. He has crossover appeal on alot of different levels. that's why he does the same commercials as Patti LaBelle. His success is not representative of most blues guys. Local middle aged white blues bands are the pits and you know it and there are a hell of alot more of them than there are up and coming BB Kings in the world.

I am saying from a working musician's standpoint, blues is a dead end street if you don't turn off and take it in some other direction. Middle aged white guy guitar players are the overwhelming majority of blues consumers. Lemme guess, you fit that description and that's why you keep arguing that... what are you arguing? that blues is cool? Or that I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about?

We can end it right now. Blues is cool (although not viable) and I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about. I just know that in 4 hours, we can maybe play one or 2 blues songs. More than that and the crowd changes to a bunch of lamo's that don't put enough money through the till for me to get my nightly bonus. Fact of life.

 

[sweetpeee]

Okay two things that this thread had me thinking about. First I live near Philly and they have a radio show on WXPN, which is the University of Penn radio station that's also picked up in Wharton Baltimore and somewhere in Delaware as well.If I am not mistaken, you can listen to in over the internet. Anyway every Saturday night, and this has bean going on for Yeeeeaaars, they have the blues show. It's FIVE HOURS long! Nothing but blues followed by "Blues and Beyond". Johnny Meister hosts it and hes a bit of a blues scholar. So this college radio station with sister stations on the east coast is playing blues for five hours every Saturday night...blue is alive and well thank you!

Second, some older gent that use to work here had the door to his office five feet away from where I sat at my desk, which had no door. He use to play Matavani records!! I am dead serious! For those of you who don't know, Matavani, is elevator music. It's the Beatles lyrics played by an orchestra with no vocals. WTF buys elevator music CD's ?!?!?!?! This guy apparently. Okay so he's an older guy...maybe in his early sixties, but jeeees. Anyway, after about a month and a half of this abuse, I put a Charley Patton CD on and played "Mississippi Boawevil Blues" and cranked it all over the office. I don't have any idea what Charley Patton is saying at all....it was the music that I thought would annoy this older white elevator music guy so I went with it. He shut his door... He never cranked the elevator music again and he quit shortly there after. Not because of me, he had a long drive to get there. I've since bought a 60G ipod to drown out what I don't want to hear.


J.P.

 

[sweetpeee]

The problem is that guitar players never have any fucking money and little old ladies don;t drink enough to make it pay to play blues out anymore.

I love blues, but I won't listen to all that crap white guy blues. Yech.

That's a valid point, blues doesn't have as big a following as it use to, unless of course you are playing blues clubs exclusively. If I am not mistaken most major cities have blues clubs (the circuit).

What white guy crap blues are we talking about? Johnny Winter is the whitest man to ever play the blues and he rocks. Or do you mean the weekend warrior that's playing the local club?

J.P.

 

[cephus]

do you mean the weekend warrior that's playing the local club?

J.P.

Johnny Winter=God

I am talking about the well-equipped hobbyist in the the docksides and SRV hat.

There are real blues acts that come through town, but I am talking about the vast majority of working "bluesmen" in the heartland.

Blues is weird because the better you get, the shittier your blues sounds. You know? Like My clarence gatemouth brown comment in the Strengthening your pinky thread. He played with one finger and was all phrasing and he was awesome. Some dork with a PRS playing myxolidian over blues changes is the worst.

 

[DogFood]

"When the 35+ year old white guys you are talking about kill music, it's not just blues they murder; but classic rock, southern rock, and any kind of current cover."

AMEN, we turn the best, most heart felt music into MUZAK! we should be punished.