VA - Slide Guitar Blues

Size: 249,0 MB
Time: 106:21
File: MP3 @ 320K/s
Released: 2018
Styles: Electric Blues, Blues Rock
Art: Front

01 Chuck E. Weiss - Devil With Blue Suede Shoes (5:00)
02 Kelly Joe Phelps - House Carpenter (6:43)
03 John Hammond - Shake Your Money Maker (1:58)
04 Delaney & Bonnie & Friends - Come On In My Kitchen - Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean Going Down The Road Feeling Bad (4:15)
05 Bjoern Berge - Look On Yonder Wall (3:16)
06 Faces - Around The Plynth (5:48)
07 Mississippi Fred McDowell - Keep Your Lamps Trimmed And Burning (2:44)
08 Blind Willie McTell - Motherless Children Have A Hard Time (2:54)
09 60,000,000 Buffalo - American Money Blues (5:36)
10 Little Feat - A Apolitical Blues (3:25)
11 Honey B. & T-Bones - Hawaiian Groupie (2:25)
12 Slaptones - Little Red Rooster (3:36)
13 John Fahey - Steamboat Gwine 'Round De Bend (4:14)
14 Danny O'Keefe - Steel Guitar (4:04)
15 Tom Rush - If Your Man Gets Busted (3:30)
16 Doug Sahm - Blues Stay Away From Me (4:47)
17 Foghat - Terraplane Blues (5:45)
18 Low Budget Blues Band - Tennessee Plates (3:10)
19 Robert Randolph & The Family Band - Run For Your Life (4:53)
20 Bjoern Berge - Who Do You Think You Are (4:51)
21 Delta Cross Band - Key To Highway (7:50)
22 Alvin Youngblood Hart - Mama Don't Allow (5:34)
23 Mississippi Fred McDowell - When You Get Home, Write Me A Few Little Lines (3:24)
24 Faces - Jerusalem (1:41)
25 Kelly Joe Phelps - Roll Away The Stone (4:49)

Slide Guitar Blues

---

Various - Strange Angels: In Flight With Elmore James

Bitrate: MP3@320K/s
Time: 49:59
Size: 114.4 MB
Styles: Blues, Soul, Country, Pop, Americana
Year: 2018
Art: Front

[2:15] 1. Elayna Boynton - Can't Stop Loving You
[3:17] 2. Bettye Lavette - Person To Person
[2:34] 3. Rodney Crowell - Shake Your Money Maker
[3:18] 4. Tom Jones - Done Somebody Wrong
[5:56] 5. Warren Haynes - Mean Mistreatin' Mama
[2:57] 6. Deborah Bonham - Dust My Broom
[9:10] 7. Jamey Johnson - It Hurts Me Too
[4:00] 8. Shelby Lynne - Strange Angels
[3:42] 9. Keb' Mo' - Look On Yonder Wall
[4:08] 10. Mollie Marriott - My Bleeding Heart
[2:21] 11. Chuck E. Weiss - Hawaiian Boogie
[3:53] 12. Addi McDaniel - Dark And Dreary
[2:20] 13. Elmore's Latest Broomdusters - Bobby's Rock

Passionate music followers have been known to trade thoughts on times, places, and musical line-ups they can only fantasize being there to catch. An easy nominee might for one of those would be Sylvio’s bar on Chicago’s West Lake Street in the 1950s and early ‘60s, where Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf traded off as headliners, occasionally shared bills. In those cases, the management definitely wanted an act strong enough to sandwich between those fierce competitors and their enormously skilled and exciting bands to keep both the musical heat and customers in place, and for that, the choice would often be house regulars Elmore James and His Broomdusters. Elmore’s slashing slide guitar and explosive vocal attack were famous in themselves, and had produced the hit “Dust My Broom,” that gave his band its name.

That celebrated song, and its lasting riff, had been taught to Elmore by legend-to-be Robert Johnson, but Johnson’s own record was long out of circulation when James’ electrified version became a hit in 1952, and remained so until 1970; the hundreds of blues revival and rock versions heard since were picked up directly from Elmore, though he didn’t live to know it, having died from a heart attack at age 45, in 1963

The style of guitar and vocal attack stuck because Elmore’s turns on older blues, and songs he came up with himself, were flat out electrifying in all senses of the term. As rock ‘n roll gave way to harder rock, his vocal and instrumental example became all the more a model, for all the more performers. He’d played with a full band (horns sometimes, electric always) as early as 1939, when that was an utterly novel way to present intense, personal Delta blues numbers; his songs and arrangements were built to work in hot band situations. When you hear country traditionalist Jamey Johnson’s take on the now standard blues “It Hurts Me Too,” you can be sure it’s Elmore James’ sturdy and adaptable song being saluted—though history shows that Elmore had adapted it from Tampa Red’s “When Things Go Wrong With You.’ Elmore’s music sticks, instructs, and sets a pace.

That’s evident throughout this salute album— which puts such often-revisited James numbers as “Shake Your Moneymaker,” “Look on Yonder Wall,” and “Person to Person” alongside songs known mainly by James aficionados, gets them into the hands of masterful interpreters from out of the blues, soul, country, pop and Americana arenas, as far-ranging as Tom Jones, Rodney Crowell, Keb Mo, Deborah Bonham of the rocking Bonham family, and sisters Shelby Lynne & Allison Moorer. The set reveals something fresh in the process: Elmore James contributed more than riffs and intensity to American music, he left a body of memorable, adaptable songs that can be renewed again and again in surprising ways. They’re that sturdy—and no less electrifying for it. ~Barry Mazor

Strange Angels: In Flight With Elmore James mc
Strange Angels: In Flight With Elmore James zippy

---

Chuck E. Weiss - 2 albums: The Other Side Of Town / Extremely Cool

Album: The Other Side Of Town
Bitrate: MP3@320K/s
Time: 25:20
Size: 58.0 MB
Styles: R&B, Electric blues
Year: 1981/2008
Art: Front

[1:26] 1. Luigi's Starlite Lounge
[2:43] 2. Saturday Night Fish Fry
[3:20] 3. Sidekick
[1:54] 4. Gina
[2:56] 5. Tropicana
[2:54] 6. Sparky
[2:25] 7. Juvenile Delinquent
[4:32] 8. The Other Side Of Town
[3:06] 9. Down The Road A Piece

Originally issued in 1981, The Other Side of Town is terminal L.A. hipster Chuck E. Weiss' debut album on the Select imprint. He's claimed on at least a couple of occasions in print that it was a demo and issued without his permission. OK. Weiss' biography reads a little like Neal Cassady's, whose fictional incarnation was the hero of Jack Kerouac's On the Road. Weiss, who hails from Denver, was the son of parents who owned a record store. He was originally a drummer who played with Lightnin' Hopkins and gigged with Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, Howlin' Wolf, and Roger Miller, to mention a few. He has been immortalized in song by his old running mates Tom Waits and Rickie Lee Jones -- right, that Chuck E. -- and had characters loosely based on him show up in Sam Shepard's plays; what these three all have in common with Weiss is that they all lived in the Tropicana Motor Hotel in Los Angeles at the same time. While the rest have all gone on to various forms of legend, Weiss is still hanging out in Los Angeles, talking to anyone who will listen about the old days and banging about on countertops in coffee shops and the like. He's a rascal and proud of it, and he's recorded three more albums between 1999 and 2007. There isn't anything particularly special about The Other Side of Town other than the fact that it goes back to an earlier time in much the same way the Red Devils and the Blasters did with the blues and rockabilly. Some guy named Mac Rebennack (aka Dr. John) plays piano like a firehouse burning down, and Jones in her beat angel voice sings a duet on the track "Sidekick." Larry Taylor plays bass, Alvin "Shine" Robinson wails a pretty mean guitar, and Freddie Stahle plays drums -- Weiss sings and plays percussion. It sounds like a demo, but it's full of great wit, charm, and an utter carelessness that makes it feel dangerous in a time when music is anything but. It is reminiscent of old rock & roll, blues, and raggedy R&B because to Weiss it's not remotely revival music. He's actually playing that stuff because that's who he is -- he was a relic even then.

A mere 25 minutes in length, these aren't so much songs as musical vignettes, all of them streetwise, hip, and uncompromising in their guttersnipe intensity. If Weiss had recorded these tunes with a lesser group of musicians, they'd come out around the same -- perhaps more dangerous because then the listener would realize he wasn't trying for a record deal, but to be heard, to speak, to get it out there in the open. Yeah, that is a good thing. It may seem quaint to those kids getting their kicks on piercings, tribal tattoos, and personal scarification in order to showcase their individuality; it may seem distasteful to those from an earlier generation who'd like to forget they once lived precariously through the lenses of Kerouac, the younger Tom Waits, William S. Burroughs, and Iceberg Slim as they dig into their latest bland "sophisticated pop." To those who come from privilege and spend their time listening to generic-sounding bluesmen from Chicago who play 20-minute guitar solos and wear big ugly hats, loud designer Hawaiian shorts, and smoke expensive cigars while trying to "get down," this raucous swill will sound like noise. It is noise, thank God. Whether it's "Saturday Night Fish Fry," the title track, the brief rambling spoken word story set to music that is called "Luigi's Starlite Lounge," or the cranky wildman barely keeping his lines inside the verses of the bonus cut "Down the Road a Piece" (it could have been a lower-rent outtake from Waits' Heartattack and Vine), it's all racket and impolite and a downright nasty doesn't-give-a-rat's-ass-what-you-think kind of rock & roll; it doesn't fit now and never did, and if you heard people playing it from some garage on your street you'd call the cops. Select claims that Weiss persuaded them to re-release this, so apparently he's given it his blessing. Maybe he needed to hear it again, too. ~Thom Jurek

The Other Side Of Town mc
The Other Side Of Town zippy

---

Album: Extremely Cool
Bitrate: MP3@320K/s
Time: 46:39
Size: 106.8 MB
Styles: Roots rock, Electric blues
Year: 2000
Art: Front

[5:00] 1. Devil With Blue Suede Shoes
[5:14] 2. Deeply Sorry
[2:52] 3. Oh Marcy
[3:07] 4. Pygmy Fund
[2:32] 5. It Rains On Me
[3:31] 6. Sonny Could Lick All Them Cats
[2:35] 7. Jimmy Would
[4:42] 8. Extremely Cool
[2:35] 9. Just Don't Care
[2:13] 10. Roll On Jordan
[5:33] 11. Do You Know What I Idi Amin
[3:05] 12. Horseface
[3:36] 13. Rocking In The Kibbitz Room

After an 18-year hiatus from recording, Chuck E. Weiss returned to the studio with Extremely Cool, his first album since 1981's The Other Side of Town on Select. Extremely Cool made one wish that Weiss hadn't stayed away from the studio for so long, for it's an enjoyable and unpretentious collection of roots music and Americana. A variety of earthy material finds its way to this release, which ranges from the bluesy rock of "Pigmy Fund" and "Devil with Blue Suede Shoes" and the roots-rock of "Jimmy Would" and "It Rains on Me" to the zydeco-influenced "Oh, Marcy" and the jazz-minded "Sonny Could Lick All Them Cats." The thing that ties all of these songs together is Weiss' earthy, down-home nature -- instead of trying to seduce listeners with slickness or technique, Weiss wins you over with his honesty and lack of pretense. This CD employs such noteworthy guests as Tom Waits (one of the executive producers) and guitarist Tony Gilkyson (brother of folk-pop singer Eliza Gilkyson and a former member of Lone Justice and X) -- and it made a person hope that Weiss wouldn't wait another 18 years to record his next album. ~Alex Henderson

Extremely Cool mc
Extremely Cool zippy

---

Various - The Greatest Swamp Blues

Bitrate: 320K/s
Time: 57:07
Size: 130.8 MB
Styles: Swamp blues
Year: 2013
Art: Front

[3:56] 1. Sonny Landreth - Taylor's Rock
[3:28] 2. Corey Harris - Fish Ain't Bitin'
[3:48] 3. Katie Webster - Black Satin
[5:01] 4. Anders Osborne - Love Is Taking Its Toll
[2:46] 5. Lazy Lester - Alligator Shuffle
[3:45] 6. Guitar Shorty - Right Tool For The Job
[4:10] 7. Clarence Gatemouth Brown - Alligator Eating Dog
[2:36] 8. Janiva Magness - Whoop And Holler
[4:22] 9. Chuck E. Weiss - Fake Dance
[3:57] 10. Gov't Mule - Gonna Send You Back To Georgia
[3:31] 11. Marcia Ball - Somebody To Love
[2:52] 12. Ramsay Midwood - Alligator's Lament
[4:39] 13. Tab Benoit - Down In The Swamp
[3:44] 14. C. J. Chenier - Road Dog
[4:25] 15. Buckwheat Zydeco - The Wrong Side

Swamp Blues, the looser, more rhythmic variation of the standard Louisiana sound, also brings more contemporary elements of New Orleans, zydeco, soul music, and Cajun to bear on its style. The guitar work is simple but effective, and is heavily influenced by the boogie patterns used on Jimmy Reed records, with liberal doses of Lightnin' Hopkins and Muddy Waters. Unlike the heavy backbeat of the more popular urban styles, its rhythm can be best described as laid-back, making even its most uptempo offerings share the same mood and ambience of the most desultory of slow blues.

The Greatest Swamp Blues mc
The Greatest Swamp Blues zippy

---

Chuck E. Weiss - 2 albums: Red Beans & Weiss / Old Souls & Wolf Tickets

Album: Old Souls & Wolf Tickets
Bitrate: 320K/s
Time: 51:51
Size: 118.7 MB
Styles: Roots rock, Contemporary blues
Year: 2002
Art: Front

[4:27] 1. Congo Square At Midnight
[3:15] 2. Tony Did The Boogie Woogie
[3:17] 3. It Don't Happen Overnight
[3:15] 4. Sweetie-O
[1:44] 5. Piggly-Wiggly
[4:03] 6. Two-Tone Car (An Auto-Body Experience)
[4:16] 7. Anthem For Old Souls
[3:42] 8. Sneaky Jesus
[3:24] 9. Down The Road A Piece
[3:54] 10. No Hep Cats
[4:39] 11. Jolie's Nightmare (Mr. House Dick)
[4:41] 12. Blood Alley
[3:20] 13. G-D Damn Liars
[3:49] 14. Dixieland Funeral

Weiss, a crony of Tom Waits since the early '70s, has probably heard more than enough comparisons between his and Waits' music. It's nonetheless hard to avoid when describing Old Souls & Wolf Tickets, which has much in common with Waits' own fusions of hipster growl, blues, smoky after-hours jazz, and weird Americana. Just because it sound at times like a poor man's Waits, however, doesn't mean it isn't likable enough on its own terms. Weiss is considerably more steeped in Louisiana-styled R&B, backwoods blues, and Cajun music than Waits is, so what you get here sometimes sounds like an unholy cross between Waits and Dr. John. The New Orleans influence is no secret from the mere title of the opening track, "Congo Square at Midnight." Weiss' wizened, sly vocals are a good match for the off-kilter material, which stews together goofy, onomatopoeic wordplay with the kind of bemused boho world-weariness you would expect from his persona. Sometimes the goofiness crosses over to silliness, as in his deliberately high, squeaky minstrel vocals on "Piggly Wiggly." When he gets close to straight blues, the results get more pedestrian. A duet that he recorded with Willie Dixon in 1970, "Down the Road Apiece," might excite extreme completist blues collectors, but sounds out of place on a CD where everything else was recorded 30 years later. But if you're looking for more modern equivalents to the kinds of idiosyncratic music Dr. John made in his voodoo rock days, this isn't a bad disc to check out. ~Richie Unterberger

Old Souls & Wolf Tickets

---

Album: Red Beans & Weiss
Bitrate: 320K/s
Time: 48:22
Size: 110.7 MB
Styles: Roots rock, Blues rock
Year: 2014
Art: Front

[3:13] 1. Tupelo Joe
[3:33] 2. Shushie
[3:49] 3. Boston Blackie
[3:22] 4. That Knucklehead Stuff
[4:22] 5. Bomb The Tracks
[4:53] 6. Exile On Main Street Blues
[3:25] 7. Kokamo (Boy Bruce)
[2:45] 8. Hey Pendejo
[4:13] 9. Dead Man's Shoes
[3:51] 10. Old New Song
[4:50] 11. The Hink-A-Dink
[2:42] 12. Oo Poo Pa Do In The Rebop
[3:17] 13. Willy's In The Pee Pee House

It's been seven years since Chuck E. Weiss released 23rd & Stout, a set that drunk-walked between roots rock, vintage R&B, jump blues, zany experimentation, and post-Beat humor. Red Beans and Weiss marks the songwriter's first album for Anti. It was self-produced, though it lists Tom Waits and Johnny Depp as executive producers. Guitarist Tony Gilkyson, drummer Don Heffington, and pianist Michael Murphy all return. The personnel is fleshed out with bassist Will MacGregor and saxophonists Jimmy Roberts and CeCe Worrall-Rubin. For anyone who's heard Weiss' Rykodisc albums Extremely Cool and Old Souls & Wolf Tickets, there will be much to enjoy here. Opener "Tupelo Joe" may have throwaway lyrics, but the scorching modern rockabilly slashed and burned through by Gilkyson's guitar playing makes it more than worthwhile. The moderately funky hipster rap that is "That Knucklehead Stuff," with its alternating honking sax and zinging guitar lines, is catchy as hell, as is its strutting counterpart, "Kokamo (Boy Bruce)." "Exile on Main Street Blues" is done in swaggering 1950s Chicago style. "Hey Pendejo" walks the line between bumping polka, East L.A. backyard mariachi, and a Catskills comedy routine. What works best here are the cuts where electric blues-boogie is the M.O. This band is tight and nasty, no matter how spaced out and loopy Weiss' groove is. Check the strutting boogie in "Boston Blackie," "Bomb the Tracks," and "Dead Man's Shoes"; they are electrified and worth the price of admission alone. The syncopated blues-jazz in "Oo Poo Pa Do in the Rebop" is complete with lyrics seemingly drawn from the world of an Iceberg Slim novel and a rhythm section that can't be shaken. "The Hink-a-Dink" is a sinister moaning blues with Gypsy violin, Judy Brown's wailing wordless soul backing vocal, and a moody male chorus moan all tossed in, but it works! Not everything does, however. "Shushie" is a noir-ish hepcat jazz number whose lyrics make a feral cat Weiss rescued into a terminal hipster. (The smoky saxophone solo is nice, though.) Closer "Willy's in the Pee Pee House" is so dumb it could have just been left off altogether. That said, none of this is contrived -- it's all Chuck E. Weiss. Zany, unrepentantly retro, and drenched in an era that revivalists can't touch, Red Beans and Weiss is a greasy, gritty report from one of L.A.'s last original rock & roll street denizens. It has a grimy charm all its own. ~Thom Jurek

Red Beans & Weiss

---