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| Track list: 1. She Was in Chicago 2. Goin' On Highway 51 3. I Love You Honey 4. Boogie Woogie 5. Boogie Chillen No. 2 6. Drifting from Door to Door 7. Every Night 8. Must I Wait Till Your Man Is Gone 9.Whistlin' and Moanin' Blues 10. I Can See You When You're Weak 11. Late Last Night 12. I Wanna Walk 13. The Numbers 14. Slim's Stomp 15. Sunny Land 16. Never Satisfied 17. I Can't Believe 18. If You Need My Lovin' Baby 19. Little Boy Blues 20. You've Taken My Woman 21. Tease Me Baby 22. Crawlin' Back Spider 23. No Friend Around Running time: 66 minutes Released: 2013 |
This one starts a little different, if only a bit muted in tone and grubbier in sound from the guitar. We are immediately in to the same style of hook that has annoyed me on the previous three discs of this set - and there are two more hours of Hooker still to come after this which compounds my feelings of discontent. Hopefully it is not representative, but I think I have heard enough by now to think it probably is.
It has been a week since I made time for the last listen. I had wanted to fit this in during the working week, as I didn't have many social evenings lined up last week. In the event though, work took over and robbed me of the energy or will to concentrate for a solid stretch to deliver a post on a disc that runs over an hour.
Goin' On Highway 51 is a little more interesting as a starting point, a tinnier guitar used more sparingly means that although there are patterns similar to that one form of riff that has annoyed me so, they aren't so constant and the structure of the piece gives you more of a rest from it. I still don't like it enough to keep but its not painful in the way the repetition was becoming elsewhere. When I Love You Honey turns out to be a piano-driven melody in addition to the foundation provided by the guitar, I feel a bit more positive again.
As I said before, long week. Working into the evenings, and 100 miles an hour during the time spent in the office. Then yesterday I nipped over to Bristol to see a couple of old friends for the day and it too turned into a long one as I didn't get home until 2am. Better than a longer drive in worse conditions this morning though!
Boogie Woogie has none of the brightness or constant gentle roll that I would expect from the title. Not because it isn't there, but because I feel that the guitar cannot provide it, much as Hooker tries. Or rather, it can but if it does then there is nothing else going on, and that just seems to me to be no way to build a track. I have said on prior discs that the tunes are better when there is more of a band in play and that is really the nub of the issue here. As good as John Lee Hooker might be at playing blues guitar, limiting the pieces to just the guitar and some rudimentary tapping percussion really shows up the over-reliance on a couple of specific patterns and forms.
Thinking about this more, it is the rhythms specifically that repeat and that is what I find myself objecting to. The fact that is effected by hammering the same note several times in a pattern that shifts little between tracks is an annoyance but if the rhythms were more different piece to piece it would not hammer into my skull like a red hot nail each time. Having said that, it does definitely make me appreciate the tracks that don't use the same trick more. Every Night being a good example.
As I say that though track 8 starts. This has both a backing band and a less annoying rhythm but it fails to enthrall on any level. In part this is because the recording is awful, the crackle here doesn't add warmth or a sense of place, it simply obliterates the keyboard part and distorts the rest too. I then get a shock as track 9 puts John Lee Hooker up with Andrew Bird as a user of whistling - albeit only briefly. I saw that the song was titled Whistlin' and Moaning Blues but I did not expect whistles to actually be employed. Unfortunately the track is a bit dull, underwhelming.
That is less true of the song that follows. Whilst it is slow, it hangs together well, and does not fall into the traps that I have come to be wary of around Hooker's songs. I Can See You When You're Weak is a nice inclusion here, warming my view towards the current task, and I like it enough that it puts a positive spin on what comes next. Late Last Night does rely on a very similar rhythm as a lot of those tracks I have bemoaned thus far but crucially it manages to put more into the guitar part so that rather than rote repetition there is a bit more craft and guile about it and I come away happy with it. Shockingly I then find myself keeping three in a row as the next track is a decent, if short, ditty too.
Numbers takes us back into don't want to be here territory though, and highlights another point about the repetition that speaks to why it bugs me so much - it's not just with the rhythm and the playing. These songs often have a very very similar vocal pattern too and overlaying two components with so little variance makes it feel much more like the same tune with different words each time, and after 70 plus tracks of JLH that is simply getting a bit too much for me now. Part of me is hoping to get a second listen in today, but if that is going to happen then it will definitely be playing with the order of things because I can't take 2 solid hours of blues from the same man in 24 hours!
The current track is called "Never Satisfied" and I feel like that applies to me listening to this late, great legend's work. Even when it is interesting I feel like it is tainted by the limitations of when it is not. I suppose, really, that I am not really evaluating this in the best way. I am complaining about similarities in the music and "same song, different words" in a context where I cannot really concentrate and take in the quality or otherwise of those words. Having said that, I do not consider it likely that I would listen in depth to the words of these songs in future even were I to keep them and it bears mentioning that if one aspect of what you are listening to is not very enjoyable (to put it mildly) then it is likely to detract from the overall experience. Thus whilst I am definitely not being fair to Hooker's songwriting ability, I feel happy with the decisions that I am making on the basis of his composition.
It is always a pleasant surprise when these listens where most of the disc douses my interest throw up little gems of surprise. You've Taken My Woman snaps me out of the self justification with a really fun little number, again full band to add the uplift it seems Hooker needs to go from interminable to enjoyable. There are still tracks to go at this point, but this really is the highlight, and probably the best point to consider this post closed. For all my cynicism there really is some genius here.
It has been a week since I made time for the last listen. I had wanted to fit this in during the working week, as I didn't have many social evenings lined up last week. In the event though, work took over and robbed me of the energy or will to concentrate for a solid stretch to deliver a post on a disc that runs over an hour.
Goin' On Highway 51 is a little more interesting as a starting point, a tinnier guitar used more sparingly means that although there are patterns similar to that one form of riff that has annoyed me so, they aren't so constant and the structure of the piece gives you more of a rest from it. I still don't like it enough to keep but its not painful in the way the repetition was becoming elsewhere. When I Love You Honey turns out to be a piano-driven melody in addition to the foundation provided by the guitar, I feel a bit more positive again.
As I said before, long week. Working into the evenings, and 100 miles an hour during the time spent in the office. Then yesterday I nipped over to Bristol to see a couple of old friends for the day and it too turned into a long one as I didn't get home until 2am. Better than a longer drive in worse conditions this morning though!
Boogie Woogie has none of the brightness or constant gentle roll that I would expect from the title. Not because it isn't there, but because I feel that the guitar cannot provide it, much as Hooker tries. Or rather, it can but if it does then there is nothing else going on, and that just seems to me to be no way to build a track. I have said on prior discs that the tunes are better when there is more of a band in play and that is really the nub of the issue here. As good as John Lee Hooker might be at playing blues guitar, limiting the pieces to just the guitar and some rudimentary tapping percussion really shows up the over-reliance on a couple of specific patterns and forms.
Thinking about this more, it is the rhythms specifically that repeat and that is what I find myself objecting to. The fact that is effected by hammering the same note several times in a pattern that shifts little between tracks is an annoyance but if the rhythms were more different piece to piece it would not hammer into my skull like a red hot nail each time. Having said that, it does definitely make me appreciate the tracks that don't use the same trick more. Every Night being a good example.
As I say that though track 8 starts. This has both a backing band and a less annoying rhythm but it fails to enthrall on any level. In part this is because the recording is awful, the crackle here doesn't add warmth or a sense of place, it simply obliterates the keyboard part and distorts the rest too. I then get a shock as track 9 puts John Lee Hooker up with Andrew Bird as a user of whistling - albeit only briefly. I saw that the song was titled Whistlin' and Moaning Blues but I did not expect whistles to actually be employed. Unfortunately the track is a bit dull, underwhelming.
That is less true of the song that follows. Whilst it is slow, it hangs together well, and does not fall into the traps that I have come to be wary of around Hooker's songs. I Can See You When You're Weak is a nice inclusion here, warming my view towards the current task, and I like it enough that it puts a positive spin on what comes next. Late Last Night does rely on a very similar rhythm as a lot of those tracks I have bemoaned thus far but crucially it manages to put more into the guitar part so that rather than rote repetition there is a bit more craft and guile about it and I come away happy with it. Shockingly I then find myself keeping three in a row as the next track is a decent, if short, ditty too.
Numbers takes us back into don't want to be here territory though, and highlights another point about the repetition that speaks to why it bugs me so much - it's not just with the rhythm and the playing. These songs often have a very very similar vocal pattern too and overlaying two components with so little variance makes it feel much more like the same tune with different words each time, and after 70 plus tracks of JLH that is simply getting a bit too much for me now. Part of me is hoping to get a second listen in today, but if that is going to happen then it will definitely be playing with the order of things because I can't take 2 solid hours of blues from the same man in 24 hours!
The current track is called "Never Satisfied" and I feel like that applies to me listening to this late, great legend's work. Even when it is interesting I feel like it is tainted by the limitations of when it is not. I suppose, really, that I am not really evaluating this in the best way. I am complaining about similarities in the music and "same song, different words" in a context where I cannot really concentrate and take in the quality or otherwise of those words. Having said that, I do not consider it likely that I would listen in depth to the words of these songs in future even were I to keep them and it bears mentioning that if one aspect of what you are listening to is not very enjoyable (to put it mildly) then it is likely to detract from the overall experience. Thus whilst I am definitely not being fair to Hooker's songwriting ability, I feel happy with the decisions that I am making on the basis of his composition.
It is always a pleasant surprise when these listens where most of the disc douses my interest throw up little gems of surprise. You've Taken My Woman snaps me out of the self justification with a really fun little number, again full band to add the uplift it seems Hooker needs to go from interminable to enjoyable. There are still tracks to go at this point, but this really is the highlight, and probably the best point to consider this post closed. For all my cynicism there really is some genius here.
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