Sonny Boy Williamson said of his ’60s collaboration with the Yardbirds, “These white boys want to play the blues in the worst way—and they do.” But Williamson indulged the worshipful English blues fans, trading them the honor of his musical presence for access to a new public. Ever since the ’60s “rediscovery” of dozens of Southern musicians, older bluesmen have found themselves in cross-generational and cross-cultural collaborations that often create for them a role as much sociological as musical. They are regarded as soulful, “authentic,” steeped in history and grassroots culture.
R.L. Burnside, legendary “trance blues” master of Holly Springs, Miss., has as much claim to this mantle as anyone. Following the steps of many earnest forebears, the members of Jon Spencer’s Blues Explosion journeyed south to play on his new album, A Ass Pocket of Whiskey (Matador Records). It’s a fun record—loose, playful, and raucous—but at times it makes you wonder what role Burnside is taking in his own show, and by whose intention.
To begin with, it’s an odd match. Jon Spencer, Judah Bauer, and Russell Simins of the Explosion make a splintery, gloriously fucked-up, and exciting music that incorporates fragments of blues style but disdains any concern for authenticity—they ain’t Eric Clapton. But blues is supposed to be an honest music: Even when the musician is singing words that were written half a century before, his listeners understand those words as descriptive of the singer’s, and their own, human condition. I’ve never heard Jon Spencer sing a line that sounded like it meant much to him—he acts out weird, cranky personae and plays carny barker for his own band. This is also the man, remember, who with Pussy Galore wrote songs like “You Look Like a Jew,” mostly to be annoying. The Blues Explosion are a great band, but they’re all surface thrills and confrontational uneasiness. You can’t avoid the dreaded word “postmodern” if you want to compare them to the Yardbirds or Mike Bloomfield or other earlier white rockers who staked a claim on the blues.
Burnside, on the other hand, was described by critic Robert Palmer as the “blues walking like a man” that Robert Johnson sang about. He’s got authenticity to spare. He used to run some very scary juke joints in the northern Mississippi hill country; Palmer says a microphone once captured him muttering, “The devil: that’s who I’ve been serving.” It sounds like something Spencer might put on record, but Burnside didn’t think anyone was listening when he said it. The day he recorded Bad Luck City, his first album for Fat Possum Records, his house burned down. Burnside, however, is not an especially introspective artist in the manner of a Robert Pete Williams. His power is largely sonic: His guitar cooks. And in this he and the Explosion do find some common ground.
Recorded in an afternoon, Ass Pocket is less summit meeting or guru consultation than it is drunken pool game. Burnside, the Explosion, and local guitarist Kenny Brown jam on some standards (including Burnside’s own classic “Snake Drive”) and screw around on some studio concoctions. On my vinyl copy of the album, the first side contains the familiar titles, and it’s definitely the best. This is the kind of blues guitar that you feel as much as hear; it’s thick and sounds slightly composted, and its repetitive, hypnotic riffs explain the label “trance blues.”
The music does have that certain imprecision that plagues such offhand encounters; Burnside’s talents and the Explosion’s collapse into a sort of lowest common denominator of churning groove. But it’s the kind of churn some of us can’t live without. Play it loud; see if your brain doesn’t melt into it for a while.
The second side (tracks 7 through 10 for you moderns) is stranger. While Burnside and Spencer whoop back and forth now and then over the first side, they absolutely hold forth on the second side, which seems to be have been entirely thrown together in the studio. And here I start to wonder why this album happened.
In “The Criminal Inside Me,” over a lengthy groove, Burnside tells a lurid tale of mayhem and then starts to trade whoops with Spencer. Then Spencer asks Burnside for 40 nickels for a bag of potato chips, and Burnside tells him, “If you don’t get out of my face fast, I’m gonna kick your ass, you son of a bitch.” Spencer shouts “Ohhhh!” and soon has the temerity to ask again, which really riles Burnside up. Etc., etc.
This is all pretty funny—well, I think so—but it makes Burnside a character in what sounds like one of the Blues Explosion’s absurdist mini-dramas. Did Spencer travel down to Holly Springs to run Burnside through a pomo blender and make him just another element in his ongoing blues parody? As Sonny Boy Williamson held a mythic significance he probably never anticipated for the Yardbirds, is Burnside similarly becoming something both more and less than human for Spencer?
It’s an interesting question, but ultimately inessential, because Burnside holds his own. I don’t think there are any jokes he’s not in on, and if he’s playing a part in Spencer’s mind, he doesn’t disappear into it and become the caricature that graces the album cover. In the squealing train wreck of a closer, “Have You Ever Been Lonely,” Spencer asks, “R.L. Burnside! Have you ever been LONELY in HOLLY SPRINGS, MISSISSIPPI!” Of course, it’s a vacant invocation. At first Burnside plays along, giving as good as he gets, but after a while he actually starts to say something: “When you really got the blues, you start comin’ home late at night, and you meet your cat comin’ out of the driveway...and the first thing he say to you, ‘She ain’t heah, she ain’t heah, she ain’t heah....’ Get in the house, you don’t know what it’s all about, look in the closet, she got all her clothes out.” It’s nothing special, not even a song, but it breaks through the joke. It doesn’t feel like it’s stage-managed by Spencer, as the potato chip exchange does.
Whatever Spencer’s intentions are, I think Burnside is having fun and doing exactly what he wants to, whether it’s rocking on his guitar or telling an incomprehensible story about Tojo making a telephone call to Hitler. And, not incidentally, he’s finding what could be a whole new audience.
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