Planet of Sound

By Rev. Keith A. Gordon

Planet of Sound is a collection of essays, retrospectives, artist interviews and album reviews penned by award-winning rock critic and music historian Rev. Keith A. Gordon. Originally published by the Rock and Roll Globe website, the Reverend covers a wide range of rock and blues music with these essays. From well-known artists like Steve Miller, Walter Trout, Frank Zappa, Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, and the Blues Brothers to lesser-known talents like avant-garde guitarist Eugene Chadbourne, singer/songwriter Buzzy Linhart, British oddball Screamin’ Lord Sutch, and cult rockers the Flamin’ Groovies, the Reverend explores the history of these artists and places their legacies into proper context.

Within these pages are 33 aggressively looong essays, etc on rock and blues music – popular and otherwise – that you can read for free online but, in keeping with my obsessive quest to publish nearly every word I’ve ever written in some misguided and utterly futile attempt at immortality, I’m trying to sell you in printed and eBook form. I can only hope that you have as much fun reading this stuff as I did in writing it. Rock on!

The “Reverend of Rock ‘n’ Roll,” Rev. Keith A. Gordon has been writing about music for nearly 50 years. A former contributor to the All Music Guide books and website, and the former ‘Blues Expert’ for About.com, Rev. Gordon has written or edited 24 previous music-related books, including Blues Deluxe: The Joe Bonamassa Buying Guide, The Other Side of Nashville, Scorched Earth: A Jason & the Scorchers Scrapbook, Fossils (volumes one and two), and the five-volume Rock ‘n’ Roll Archives series of vintage artist interviews.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rev. Keith A. Gordon
• Release date: Sep 22, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005981402

Rev. Keith A. Gordon

The "Reverend of Rock 'n' Roll," Rev. Keith A. Gordon has almost 50 years in the pop culture trenches. Gordon's work has appeared in over 100 publications worldwide, as well as in several All Music Guide books and on the AMG website, as well as Blurt magazine and the Rock and Roll Globe. Rev. Gordon is the author of nearly two-dozen music-related books including The Other Side of Nashville, a history of the city's rock 'n' roll underground; Blues Deluxe: A Joe Bonamassa Buying Guide; and The Rock 'n' Roll Archives series.

Book preview

The Steve Miller Band’s Children of the Future at 50

Rock & Roll Hall of Fame member Steve Miller is remembered for two things – the cranky, contentious acceptance speech given at his 2016 induction into the Rock Hall, and his mid-to-late ‘70s string of rock radio hits. Beginning with the chart-topping 1973 single The Joker, the Steve Miller Band (of which singer, songwriter, and guitarist Miller is the only enduring member) chalked up half a dozen Top 20 hits by 1977, classic rock staples like Jet Airliner, Take the Money And Run, Fly Like An Eagle, and Rock’n Me. Miller’s last big single was 1982’s Abracadabra, after which he began his long, slow slide into rock ‘n’ roll history.

Miller took a seventeen-year hiatus from recording after 1993’s mediocre Wide River, returning with 2010’s collection of blues covers, Bingo! It wasn’t an entirely unexpected turn towards the blues for Miller, who made his bones playing gigs in Chicago with giants like Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, and Buddy Guy during the early ‘60s (when he should have been attending classes at The University of Wisconsin). Miller even hooked up with keyboardist Barry Goldberg, a future member of Electric Flag, in the short-lived Goldberg-Miller Blues Band, the pair releasing a single in 1965 on the Epic Records label. After a short stint working as a janitor back home in Texas, Miller relocated to San Francisco in 1966 and put together the Steve Miller Blues Band.

After a few changes in the band’s roster, Miller landed on a line-up that included his childhood friend, singer and guitarist Boz Scaggs, bassist Lonnie Turner, keyboardist Jim Peterman, and drummer Tim Davis, a college pal and former bandmate. Gigging around the Bay area, they eventually dropped the Blues from the band name and signed a sweet deal with Capitol Records, which would remain Miller’s label for the next 20 years. The Steve Miller Band’s debut album, Children of the Future, was recorded at Olympic Studio in London with first-time producer Glyn Johns (who would subsequently shepherd albums by the Rolling Stones, Humble Pie, Joe Cocker, and many other rock legends into being). Released 50 years ago, in June 1968, to a fair amount of critical acclaim, it’s worth taking another look at Children of the Future to see how it holds up after a half-century.

As Johns’ remembered in his 2014 biography Sound Man, Miller envisioned the first side of the album as an extended Children of the Future suite complete with psychedelic sound effects and tape manipulations inspired by avant-garde composers Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage, while the other side would draw upon the band members’ shared blues roots. Provided this perspective, the title track does, indeed, kick off the LP with a miasma of swirling, chaotic instruments clashing in the mix, fading to a dull roar before Miller’s psych-drenched guitar leads the listener towards the bright, gorgeous harmony vocals that pre-date Crosby, Stills & Nash’s initial effort by a couple of years.

All five band members pitch in, their voices meshing nicely until Miller takes over the microphone as the song runs into Pushed Me To It, a poppy reprise that lasts less than a full minute. You’ve Got the Power makes use of Jim Peterman’s Hammond organ, which tastefully dominates the minute-long song’s rambling, unfocused duration. The first three tracks of Children of the Future are spaced closely together as a suite, running less than five minutes combined, and really serve as a hallucinogenic introduction to the song that is the heart of side one (and the album). With a runtime of seven-minutes-plus, In My First Mind is a hauntingly beautiful pop-psych construct, with co-writer Peterman’s keyboards serving as a foundation for the unlikely musical head trip to follow.

Miller’s vocals here are somber and strident, with Goth-tinged neo-classical instrumentation layered beneath his voice, sounding not unlike an early Procol Harum recording. The song winds out as a sort of instrumental tone poem, with sparse drum fills complimenting Peterman’s keyboard licks. Miller’s The Beauty of Time Is That It’s Snowing (Psychedelic B.B.) closes out the first side. Picking up where In My First Mind left off, the song slowly unfolds with various eerie sound effects and rumbling instrumentation, Miller’s guitar laying down a faint Chicago blues chorus, the guitar slung low in the mix as thunder rumbles and the wind howls and gulls screech their otherworldly paean to the sea. When the band’s voices rise to the surface, they’re approximating a harmonic sound that falls somewhere between a Beach Boys melody and chanting Benedictine monks.

Boz Scaggs would leave the band at the end of 1968 to pursue his own dreams of solo success, which he achieved parallel to Miller with a series of mid-’70s blue-eyed soul hits. Scaggs contributed two songs to Children of the Future, which kick off side two of the album. Baby’s Callin’ Me Home is an ethereal pop-psych tune that features Scaggs’s slight vocals sparring with guest musician (and future SMB member) Ben Sidran’s ringing harpsichord notes. The song is so laid back that one can’t tell if Boz is coming or going…much better is the following Stepping Stone. A funky, bluesy romp with a well-defined groove that puts drummer Tim Davis through his paces, Scaggs’ soulful voice and wiry leads soar above some scorching Miller guitar in a rather muddy sonic mix. With better production, and some separation of the instruments and vocals, the song could have been an early radio hit for the band.

Ditto for the up-tempo rocker Roll With It, which skews closer to the sound that Miller would achieve on his ‘70s-era radio hits. With magnetic vocal harmonies and flamethrower guitar, the song is punctuated by Peterman’s riffing keyboards. FM rock radio had yet to be invented in 1968, but Roll With It was ready and willing to take to the airwaves. The early Steve Miller Band was much more of a democracy than later versions (it was the late 1960s, after all…), so just like Scaggs and Peterman had their moment in the sun, so too does Tim Davis, the band’s only African-American member, who takes on lead vocals for Junior Saw It Happen. Another unabashed rocker, Davis’s vox remind a lot of Buddy Miles, adding a depth to the performance that stands in pleasant contrast to Miller and Scaggs’ different vocal styles.

Davis takes the lead again on the rollicking Fannie Mae, the 1959 R&B chart hit by blues singer Buster Brown. Davis’s vocals aren’t as prominent here, his hardy voice overwhelmed by Miller’s jaunty harmonica play and Lonnie Turner’s rolling bass rhythms on what devolves into a raucous, albeit rapid-fire three-minute jam. Children of the Future closes with a cover of blues legend Big Bill Broonzy’s classic Key To the Highway. A traditional blues tune modernized by Broonzy with his 1940 recording, and revamped again by Chicago bluesman Little Walter with a 1958 hit single, the song has been recorded by artists as diverse as Count Basie, B.B. King, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, and Captain Beefheart, among many others.

Miller plays it pretty straight here, delivering Key To the Highway as a slow, ambling blues dirge that depends heavily on Davis’s rhythmic timekeeping, Peterman’s background keyboards, and Miller’s own mournful harmonica playing. The song harkens back to Miller’s early days in Chicago, his musical education informed by the city’s thriving ‘60s-era blues scene. Broonzy is an obvious artistic touchstone, the country bluesman becoming one of the Windy City’s first big stars after arriving in 1920 from Mississippi. In his later years, Broonzy would help newcomers like Muddy Waters find jobs and housing, and his unique style influenced a generation of young rock guitarists like Clapton, Keith Richards, Jerry Garcia, and Rory Gallagher. Closing the album on a slow note would be unheard of these days, but in 1968, Key To the Highway merely anchored a complex and multi-textured collection of songs.

Children of the Future would provide an auspicious creative beginning for the Steve Miller Band, if not a particularly commercially successful one. The album rose to only #134 on the Billboard magazine albums chart, and flew entirely beneath the radar in ancillary markets like Canada and Europe. Capitol Records curiously released a non-album track, the Miller-Goldberg written Sittin’ In Circles, as the band’s first single, with Roll With It included as the B-side. This order should have been reversed and, of course, the single refused to chart. Undaunted, Miller and the same band line-up would return to the studio, again working with producer Johns (this time in L.A.), to record their follow-up album, Sailor, which was released in October 1968.

Using much the same musical template as Children of the Future, i.e. blues-infused psychedelic-rock, Sailor would nevertheless include the band’s first minor radio hit in the Beatles-inspired Living In the U.S.A. Along with the sublime Quicksilver Girl, which sounds like early Big Star and was featured in the 1984 movie The Big Chill, and what would become one of Miller’s signature tunes, a cover of Johnny Guitar Watson’s Gangster of Love, this would be enough to push Sailor to #24 on the chart and open the door to later albums both classic (1969’s Brave New World) and enormously successful (The Joker). Fifty years down the road with the Steve Miller Band, over a career littered with creative and commercial triumphs, it all began with the somewhat tentative and experimental first step that was Children of the Future. (August 10th, 2018)

Buddy Guy: A Half Century of A Man & the Blues

The title of Chicago blues legend Buddy Guy’s Vanguard Records label debut, A Man & the Blues (released, oddly, under the title The Blues To-Day in France), couldn’t have been a more apt description of the first recording to truly capture the guitarist’s chaotic energy and genre-busting talent. Guy had previously recorded sides for Cobra Records in the late ‘50s, and was signed to Chess Records from 1960 to 1968, with that label releasing his debut LP, I Left My Blues In San Francisco, in 1967. However, Guy was constantly frustrated by the conservatism of the Chess Records approach, and the label’s founder, Leonard Chess, notoriously (and unfairly) criticized Guy’s playing as noise.

Guy had moved from Louisiana to the Windy City in 1957 at the tender age of 21 years old, following in the footsteps of many Southern musicians. Much as the great Chicago bluesman Tampa Red helped a young plantation worker by the name of McKinley Morganfield (a/k/a Muddy Waters) after he immigrated to the city, so too did Waters help those who came behind him with finding housing and gigs. Guy landed with Chess Records as a session guitarist backing artists like Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Little Walter, Koko Taylor, and others. To get around the straitjacket placed on his playing by Chess, Guy covertly recorded with his friend and fellow legend Junior Wells under the pseudonym ‘Friendly Chap’, sessions that subsequently resulted in Wells’ classic 1965 album Hoodoo Man Blues.

For I Left My Blues In San Francisco, Guy was saddled with a slate of blues and R&B covers and a wealth of studio musicians that included talents like Matt Guitar Murphy, Phil Upchurch (Rotary Connection), and Lafayette Leake. But the label tried to force Guy into the role of a contemporary soul artist by smoothing out the guitarist’s rough edges. It was an unsatisfied Guy that left the safe harbor of Chess Records and was quickly signed to Vanguard Records by music historian and producer Sam Charters. Charters had been responsible for bringing the blues to the primarily folk-oriented label by signing artists as diverse as harmonica wizards James Cotton and Charlie Musselwhite, and country bluesman ‘Mississippi’ John Hurt to the Vanguard roster.

With Guy, Charters had found an explosive blues guitarist in the vein of Magic Sam and Otis Rush who would appeal to rock ‘n’ roll (i.e. white) record buyers. To his credit, Charters eschewed a large studio contingent when producing A Man & the Blues and allowed the guitarist to record with familiar musicians like pianist Otis Spann and fellow Chess session guitarist Wayne Bennett. Charters also let Guy perform a number of his own original songs for the album. With A Man & the Blues recently reissued on vinyl by Craft Recordings in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the album’s release, it’s worth taking another look at why Guy’s sophomore effort has endured to this day.

A Man & the Blues kicks off with the Guy-penned title track, a slow-burning Chicago blues number that sizzles with Guy’s guitar intro and Spann’s background piano. It’s as close as Buddy comes to mimicking one of his idols, B.B. King, and his smooth-as-silk vocal delivery offers a fine counterpoint to the imaginative interplay of single-note guitar solos and rollicking piano play. It’s a performance that threatens to explode but for Guy venting the kinetic energy through his guitar. The mostly-instrumental I Can’t Quit the Blues is another Guy original, its up-tempo, Southern soul revue-styled performance and raucous instrumentation putting it in another league altogether from the opening track. With Spann pounding the keys honky-tonk style and a trio of saxophones blaring in the background, Guy embroiders the song with his lively fretwork.

It was de rigueur during the late ‘60s for labels to try and shoehorn traditional blues artists into the bourgeoning soul genre by having them cover a popular R&B song. Vanguard rolled the dice with Guy and his cover of Barrett Strong’s early Motown (1959) hit Money (That’s What I Want), which probably didn’t end up like they thought it would. Guy’s rowdy vocals on the song are more Koko than B.B. if you catch my meaning, while his fiery guitar solos are accompanied by Jack Myers’ spry bass lines and Spann’s rhythmic piano licks. Although the song has been covered by everybody from the Beatles and the Rolling Stones to Jerry Lee Lewis and the Searchers, nobody did it quite like Buddy.

Slowing the pace, Guy’s reading of Mercy Dee Walton’s 1953 R&B chart hit One Room Country Shack displays a darker mood befitting the song’s socially-conscious lyrics, with Bennett’s shuffling rhythm guitar and Spann’s piano fills providing an instrumental backdrop for Guy’s tortured vocals and cacophonic guitarplay. Guy’s unique take on the English nursery rhyme Mary Had A Little Lamb was released as the only single from A Man & the Blues. Although it underperformed on the R&B chart, the song would become a longtime fan favorite, Guy’s energetic fretwork and shouted vocals accompanied by a wall of saxophones, helping push the blues into the future with its soul-drenched instrumentation.

Guy’s Just Playing My Axe is mostly that, a semi-instrumental track akin to Bo Diddley records like 1959’s Say Man, the song featuring random stream-of-consciousness lyrics shouted above the din. Guy leads his talented band through the jaunty performance with his stinging guitar licks and the swinging horns paving the way, the band conjuring almost three minutes of pure R&B bliss. A cover of B.B. King’s classic Sweet Little Angel offers a devastatingly bluesy rendition, Guy providing the song with possibly his best performance on the album, his heartbreak vocals punctuated by Spann’s piano, which is loud in the mix, with flurries of emotional guitar notes.

Trombone player, songwriter, and bandleader Pluma Davis had songs recorded by B.B. King and Bobby Blue Bland, and his wonderful Worry Worry is a blistering blues dirge done right by Guy and the band. A near-perfect example of 1950s-style blues with a slight jazz flavor, Guy’s guitar playing sounds more like King here than he did on Sweet Little Angel. Spann’s trilling piano-play builds the song’s foundation, and the rest of the band provides slight musical accents, but otherwise it’s just Guy’s soulful vocals and slashing guitar that drive the performance. A Man & the Blues closes out with another mostly-instrumental tune that showcases Guy’s six-string abilities and the immense talents of his studio band. Jam On A Monday Morning is a R&B rave-up guaranteed to bring an audience to its feet, Spann rocking the ivories, Myers plucking the fat strings and, of course, Guy’s flamethrower guitar.

A Man & the Blues has proven itself an influential classic of blues music, inspiring more than one generation of musicians to pick up a guitar and play. Fellow blues legend Walter Trout considers it one of the greatest blues albums ever made. Trout says when I first heard it as a teenager, I was completely floored. The interplay between Buddy and Otis Spann is almost supernatural. They have a conversation with their instruments and they are both tuned into each other in such a profound and deep way and the music is incredibly powerful while being understated and subtle. I think it is Buddy’s greatest work and a landmark in the history of this genre. Citing Guy’s influence, Walter adds, "on my album Blues for the Modern Daze, I recorded a song called ‘Blues For My Baby’ and I did it specifically as a tribute to this amazing album by Buddy Guy."

Nashville blues guitarist Mark Robinson was also influenced by Guy, stating Buddy Guy is one of the last direct connections to the Delta blues, to the music and the artists. He played with all of the great Chess artists in the ‘50s and ‘60s; he played with and inspired many of the icons of the ‘60s, and he continues to play with current blues and rock artists…his early guitar playing was innovative and exciting, inspired by the older bluesmen, but faster, crazier, and with a harder edge. Buddy has probably had a bigger impact on current blues and rock guitarists than any other blues guitarist.

Guy’s A Man & the Blues remains a blueprint of traditional guitar-based blues, a bona fide classic that has survived the test of time, finding a new audience in every generation of young blues fans. At 82 years old, Buddy Guy is one of blues music’s revered elder statesmen. The guitarist continues to tour and record, winning a Grammy™ Award for 2015’s Born To Play Guitar and releasing The Blues Is Alive and Well earlier this year. It was with A Man & the Blues that Guy first found his voice, however, and a half-century after its initial release, this timeless recording continues to inspire. (September 18th, 2018)

Soul Men: The Blues Brothers Briefcase of Blues at 40

It was 40 years ago, in November 1978, when the Blues Brothers’ live debut