Dazzling Stranger: Bert Jansch And The British Folk And Blues Revival (Colin Harper, 2000); www.bertjansch.com
Download: HMV Digital
‘People saw him as a rival to Bob Dylan,’ says Martin Carthy. ‘When his first album came out it really was a big day.’ Along with Carthy, Bert was one of the kings of the folk music castle in 1965. The ‘folk boom’ looked like exploding on a national level and offbeat singer-songwriters were converging on London for its all-nighter folk scene. With an astonishingly original sound, blending Broonzy’s blues with Mingus’s jazz, Scottish trad and a flavour of English guitar exoticist Davy Graham, Bert had drifted down from Edinburgh.
‘[Singer] Anne Briggs took me firmly by the throat and said, “Look, for God’s sake you must do this record,”’ says freelance engineer Bill Leader. Bill had recorded Anne for trad label Topic, but there were no obvious outlets for the wayward Jansch. Not even owning a guitar, Bert recorded the album at Leader’s flat on spec using a Revox and borrowed instruments. Anne was meanwhile lobbying Nat Joseph of Transatlantic, who finally agreed to a purchase of £100 and no royalties. It was the only option. ‘Perhaps if I’d sat on it for another six months,’ says Bill, ‘we might have done a better deal. But there comes a time when a record has to be released for an artist and if you miss that you bugger up his career.’
Davy Graham’s Angie, mischievously adopting Cannonball Adderley’s Worksong as middle-eight, was the only cover – although Smokey River was essentially Jimmy Giuffre’s Train And The River while Casbah had started life as Mingus’s Better Git It In Your Soul. Mostly, though, these were intense, personal songs reflecting the lifestyle of its author, from his earliest composition Courting Blues through the swaggering imagery of Strolling Down The Highway – written in 1962 while hitch-hiking through France – to the more poignant reflections of Needle Of Death (the first anti-drugs song?) and Running From Home. Songs from the album were covered on record by Julie Felix, Marianne Faithful and Donovan while the moody cover shot of Bert with guitar in a bare flat completed the message that here was not only music to absorb but a way of life to acquire. ‘His work will touch youth with a force unknown to our present British artists,’ concluded Folk Scene. Another journal, Folk Music, nailed it: ‘It might be objected that this is not folk music, and of course it’s not. But until our categories expand Bert must be included within folk in its broadest sense.’ Rightly or wrongly, he still is.
Jerry Lee Lewis
Live At The Star Club, Hamburg
The Killer invents garage punk with a little help from the Nashville Teens.
Record label: Phillips
Produced: Siggi Loch
Recorded: The Star Club, Reeperbahn, Hamburg, West Germany; April 5, 1964
Released: April 1965
Chart peaks: None (UK) None (US)
Personnel: Jerry Lee Lewis (v, p); The Nashville Teens: Pete Shannon (g); John Allen (g); Ray Phillips (b); John Hanken (d)
Track listing: Mean Woman Blues; High School Confidential; Money (That’s What I Want); Matchbox; What’d I Say (Part 1); What’d I Say (Part 2); Great Balls Of Fire; Good Golly, Miss Molly; Lewis’ Boogie; Your Cheatin’ Heart; Hound Dog; Long Tall Sally; Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On
Running time: 37.12
Current CD: Bear Family BCD15467PMI adds: Down The Line
Further listening: The Golden Hits Of Jerry Lee Lewis (1964); listen to Jerry Lee’s proper touring band speed through the hits on The Greatest Live Show On Earth (1964); check out his country resurrection on Another Time, Another Place (1968)
Further reading: Killer (Jerry Lee Lewis and Charles White, 1995); Hellfire (Nick Tosches, 1982); www.jerryleelewis.com
Download: Some tracks available on iTunes
When Jerry Lee Lewis crashed into Hamburg in April of 1964 he was a pill-fuelled anachronism, a brilliant ’50s rocker staring out at an audience of bowl-haired boy-girl Beatles kids. At just 28 years old he looked like an old man out of time. The past six years had not been kind. On May 22, 1958, a 21-year-old Lewis had arrived in England for his first tour outside the US, with his 13-year-old wife née cousin Myra Gale in tow. Lewis told the press she was 15. ‘Back home,’ Myra explained, ‘you can marry at 10.’ It put an effective halt on his career for the next 10 years.
From 1958 to 1968 Jerry Lee toured constantly on a strict diet – Biphetamin to take him up, placidyls to bring him down, whiskey to bridge the gap. His regular $10,000 per night fee was knocked down to $250. ‘I couldn’t care less,’ said Lewis. ‘Life is too short to worry your brains over making a buck.’ Then, on Easter Sunday 1962 – while Jerry was coming down from another amphetamine-wild gig in Minneapolis – his three-year-old child, Stevie Allen, wandered out into the garden of his Memphis home and drowned in the mud-filled family swimming pool. God had found him out and punished him and the Jerry Lee who toured Britain and Europe for the next four years, the one you hear on this record, played like a man with the Holy Ghost in his soul and the devil on his tail.
This date had no rehearsals. The Star Club’s house band, The Nashville Teens – a mythic whippet-thin Scouse wrecking crew and no-argument best live band in Britain – spent the gig either struggling to keep up with Lewis or storming ahead – locked into a teeth-grindingly tense race to the end of each song. From the cavernous howl of Mean Woman Blues through to a final ragged Whole Lotta Shakin’ the rhythm section sound like they’ve been remixed by Tom and Ed Chemical while Pete Shannon and John Allen’s screwed-up jags of guitar and Jerry Lee’s demonic growls, wails, yelps and piano stabs are sweat-soaked punk pre-history. He carried on playing like this for the next three years – The Greatest Live Show On Earth. No contest, true, but it nearly killed him. Then, in 1968, recording Another Time, Another Place for Mercury, Jerry Lee Lewis found country, dispensed with the pills and the booze, and a whole other kind of star was born.
Them
Them
Future superstar Van Morrison arrives with an influential slice of garage blues.
Record label: Deram
Produced: Tommy Scott, Bert Berns and Dick Rowe
Recorded: Decca Studios, West End Lane and Regent Studios, Denmark Street; July, September–October 1964 and January 1965
Released: June 1965
Chart peaks: None (UK) 54 (US)
Personnel: Van Morrison (v, hm, s); Billy Harrison (g); Eric Wrixon, Jackie McAuley, Peter Bardens (k); Ronnie Millings (d); Pat McAuley (d, k); Alan Henderson (b)
Track listing: Mystic Eyes (S); If You And I Could Be As Two; Little Girl; Just A Little Bit; I Gave My Love A Diamond; Gloria (S/US); You Just Can’t Win; Go On Home Baby; Don’t Look Back; I Like It Like That; I’m Gonna Dress In Black (S/US); Bright Lights Big City; My Little Baby; (Get Your Kicks On) Route 66
Running time: 39.13
Current CD: POR8101652PMI
Further listening: Them Again (1966), the band’s second album
Further reading: Van Morrison: Inarticulate Speech Of The Heart (John Collis, 1996); Van Morrison: No Surrender (Johnny Rogan, 2006); www.makingtime.co.uk/them.html
Download: Not currently legally available
Any listener only familiar with the