But this time it is THE man who done gone. John Mayall. He once wrote, in an eponymous title track for one of his many albums "You know I've been born to trouble/and it's a Hard Road 'til I die." Well: he is about to find out if it gets any easier afterwards. I've been to California where he eventually settled. Parts of it are idyllic. I imagine that's how it would look, if he makes it to heaven.
I first saw and heard John Mayall's Bluesbreakers at The Lanchester Polytechnic in 1967. "The Lanch" (Now Coventry University), was ( thanks to a potent Students Union Entertainments Committee) one of the best rock venues in Coventry at that time. I was still in Sixth Form. I went along with Ron Cook, little knowing that he would later become a world famous actor. Ron and I both attended Caludon Castle Comprehensive School, known to ex pupils as "Cally." Little did I know either that night, that half a century on, I would still be occasionally fronting Blues bands and singing songs by Muddy Waters or Howling Wolf. Or that I would meet John Lee Hooker about 18 months after that epic Lanch gig.
Through my love of The Animals and The Stones I was already well aware that night of the fact that white British Blues players were taking the indigenous music of the USA back home and rocking stadiums with it. So The Wolf and Muddy and Sonny Boy Williamson, I was familiar with. I loved the Pretty Things The Artwoods and The Yardbirds too, so I knew who Jimmy Page Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton were. But I'd never really heard of Peter Green until someone played me the Hard Road album. Wow!
The line up that night included Peter Green and John McVie too, I seem to recall. Despite getting to The Lanch early, there were queues everywhere. Queues to get in. Queues to get served at the bar. The SU bar at that time was on top of a long multistorey building opposite the new cathedral. As I joined the queue, nodding to all the Cally lads waiting to get served, I began anxiously checking my watch. Suddenly the glasses behind the bar began to shake, as three floors below, the unmistakeably and thunderous opening riff to " Dust My Blues" rattled the building. Many heads in the queue lifted. They had recognised it too. I left the bar and my beer behind and joined by dozens of others, legged it athletically down three flights of stairs to catch that opening number.
It's basically a play on the original Elmore James song "Dust My Broom." Which in turn, being electric blues is probably a riff copied by James and imitated by someone else. Since that epic night at the Lanch I've collected enough versions to compile an iPod playlist of similar interpretations. That list includes variations on a theme by Gary Moore, The Spencer Davis Group,Rising Sons, Joe Bonamassa,The Allmans Brothers and many more.. Its inclusion in the set list and on the album tells you much about John Mayall's other life as a music researcher. Like Cyril Tawney, A.L. Lloyd or Alan C. Lomax, Mayall had been travelling documenting and collecting material whilst I was still at Primary School.
So as well as being enjoyable, listening to any album curated by Mayall was both educative and entertaining. Though he was respectful to the background and legacy of the blues, he was not afraid to experiment and to interpret differently. What struck me that night (and ever since) was his instrumentation. Though notorious for developing and then losing guitar players like Clapton, Green and Mick Taylor, he could play guitar, decent harmonica and piano himself. That taught me that besides guitar geniuses like Buddy Guy and BB King there were also Bluesmen who specialised in other instruments. Like Otis Spann on piano. Much (much) later I found that a good harmonica player could really enhance the performance of an ordinary blues song.
To some extent, the experimentation made his albums infuriating. Each one was very different. The personnel seemed to change regularly. As did the material. I revisited the original Bluesbreakers album (the one with Clapton reading the Beano on the cover) and adored it. I bought Hard Road and I love it still. Later I really liked Blues from Laurel Canyon recorded after Mayall had fallen in love with and moved to, California. Those three remain my favourites. I still have them on CD and the original vinyl. One thing I often struggled with was his vocal range. It was remarkable. He could hit high notes with window-shattering ease. But he could also growl or moan the blues. He was not averse to singing Blues unaccompanied. Something I can assure you, is very difficult.
Mayall was a trailblazer an innovator and an evangelist. He seemed to be always seeking something or someone new. He took a very obscure genre and highlighted its virtues to a wider audience by demonstrating just where the blues could go. And they did not always have to be miserable. "Leaping Christine," for example is a high tempo jolly rompalong song. "Walking on Sunset" is a joyous celebration of the new lifestyle he had adopted in the USA.
John Mayall took grief and loss very personally. He outlived many Blues legends and had as they say, "a good innings".. One of the most unusual tracks I ever heard him sing was " The Death of J.B. Lenoir." A haunting mournful song about the loss of a friend with a typical almost falsetto vocal, a protesting saxophone solo and unmistakeable sadness in the phrasing. Now it's time for those who loved his work to write a blues for John Mayall. "It's Over," he sang on Hard Road. Well it is now,
