NPR Music is a great source for new tunes as well as music news and reviews. I love their “First Listen” section where you can stream new albums, and their “Tiny Desk Concerts” are fun too. But until recently, the way you had to listen to the music — their proprietary music player — was a source of endless frustration. It’d crash constantly, and if you were halfway through listening to an album you’d have to start all over at the beginning. (Yes, I realize I’m complaining about free music.)
But now NPR updated their music player. It works much better than the old one, and you can even stream live radio, with some of my favorite stations like KEXP in Seattle, The Current in Minneapolis and WNKU in Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky.
Lonnie Mack passed away on April 21st. Never heard of him? You’re certainly not alone. But you’ve most assuredly heard him, or at least his echoes, in the hundreds of rock and roll guitarists who were influenced by him. [Note: all indented paragraphs below are from the other sources that are linked in this post.]
“Lonnie Mack was one of the first white guys to really make a mark playing blues-infused guitar,” said record producer and blues historian Dick Shurman. “I think of him as a prototype of what later could be called Southern rock. His music was a blend — it wasn’t a conscious blend — he brought black and white styles together seamlessly.”
“I think there’s a pretty strong argument to be made that Lonnie is the first true blues-rock guitarist, and perhaps the first rock guitar hero,” says Alligator Records founder Bruce Iglauer, a Cincinnati native who first discovered Mack’s music as a teenager in the Queen City. “He’s the first guitarist that I know of to take elements of blues, country, and earlier rock, and bring them to what you could call a ‘rock and roll’ energy level. As a frontman, he was perhaps rock’s first virtuoso guitarist. Plus, I think it’s safe to say that he brought more elements of blues into rock guitar than anyone before him. He was both a groundbreaker and a brilliant musician.”
Lonnie was born near Cincinnati and his first studio gigs were as a session man (for the likes of James Brown) at King Records and the sister label Fraternity in Cincinnati. It was a Fraternity session that gave him his accidental big break…
And it was on a Fraternity session, recorded at King’s studios in 1962, that Mack stepped into history: His band was backing a female vocal group called the Charmaines when—according to one of several varying accounts—the session finished about 20 minutes ahead of schedule. Mack used the balance of the time to cut two sides, among them a single-take, two-and-a-half-minute instrumental version of Chuck Berry’s “Memphis, Tennessee” (shortened by Mack to “Memphis”).
“Memphis” hit the charts the following year, and its follow-up single, another rocking instrumental called “Wham” also had a profound influence on the future of blues rock:
Down in Texas, “Wham!” had captured the imagination of a nine-year-old boy, as noted in this passage from “Stevie Ray Vaughan: Caught in the Crossfire,” by Joe Nick Patoski and Bill Crawford:
“Whether it was the maniacal, out-of-control attack, the raunchy, fuzzed-out distortion, or the lightning speed with which it was played, Mack’s 1963 instrumental did a number on Steve. He played “Wham!” over and over and over until the grooves began to wear off the 45. He slowed it down to 33 1/3 RPM to decipher the notes that blurred past at the speed of sound and the tricky turnarounds…
His single-minded determination not only annoyed his elder brother, it drove his father nuts. After hearing the song for what must have been the 726th time, Big Jim Vaughan burst into Steve’s room, yanked the record off the turntable, and smashed it to bits. Undeterred, Steve simply went out and bought another copy.”
My love for SRV was how I found out about Lonnie. Every time Stevie would play a concert in Cincinnati, I would attend, and SRV would always bring up Lonnie Mack to play a song or three. In the late 80s, I saw Lonnie Mack play a concert at a tiny Cincinnati bar, in an upstairs room that was usually home to a DJ playing dance tunes. Lonnie and his band absolutely tore it up, and I was thrilled to get a chance to talk to him after the gig and get his autograph.
But he wasn’t just an incendiary guitarist, he also had a very soulful voice.
Greil Marcus selected this track by Lonnie Mack as one of the great vocals in rock n roll and he detailed why in his 2009 lecture “The Songs Left Out of “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency”. Greil described ‘Why?’ thus: “a soul ballad so torturous, so classically structured, that it can uncover wounds of your own. Mack’s scream at the end has never been matched, God help us if anyone ever tops it”.
I highly recommend that you read this great article about the life and times of Mr. Mack.
In the meantime, there’s the issue of his legacy. Mack was criminally overlooked when Rolling Stone published its “100 Greatest Guitarist of All Time” cover story in the summer of 2003. He also remains excluded from induction to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. And like so many artists the world over, he isn’t fond of the business machinations of the music industry.
“I ain’t got no regrets, but at the same time, it ain’t something that I would recommend to a young kid right now like I used to,” Mack says. “Because you have no control of anything anymore. The only way you can make any money is to do what everybody’s tellin’ me I need to go do: Go back out and tour and get the money at the door. That’s the only sure money there is.”
He pauses. And a second later, it seems he’s come full circle.
“I mean, you’d better love it,” he continues. “I mean, daggone! Why I got into it in the first place wasn’t about the money. I got into it because I loved it.”
In loving memory of a true original, Merle Haggard:
Porter Wagoner is a bit off grammatically, but he speaks the truth at the end of the video:
“Of all the singers there is, I just think he’s the greatest man to listen to and puts a story across better than anybody, anywhere.”
Merle and “Kern River” both have a special place in my heart because I lived in Bakersfield, California for a couple of years. That’s where Merle was born (in a converted railroad boxcar!) and raised, and where the Kern River is. Here’s an excerpt from his NY Times obit:
Defying the conventions of the Nashville musical establishment, Mr. Haggard was an architect of the twangy Bakersfield sound, a guitar-driven blend of blues, jazz, pop and honky-tonk that traced its roots to Bakersfield, Calif. In Mr. Haggard’s case the sound defined a body of work as indelibly as that of any country singer since Hank Williams.
I read a Q&A with comedian/author Greg Behrendt in CityBeat(a local alternative weekly) yesterday. I’m not familiar with Mr. Behrendt’s work, but the article mentioned that last year he was diagnosed with cancer and went through three rounds of chemo. And that battle gave him an interesting perspective on social media:
CB:You don’t seem to be as engaged in social media. Why is that?
GB: Recently I just stopped going on any of it. I have them for promotional purposes, but I find they don’t even work well for that anymore. There’s just so much, and it’s an echo chamber of your own taste sometimes. I just got off and wondered what kind of art I would create if I were less plugged in and more aware of my natural environment. It’s been so far so good.
CB:So are you feeling more connected with the real world?
GB: After being sick last year, I realized I wasn’t thinking about my Facebook page. I was worried about spending time with people that I love and being in the world more. I just wanted to be part of the human experience a little bit more. I think there’s a kind of connection with the Internet, but there’s kind of a danger in it as well. The news cycle is so fast and people are missing important facts — it gets to be unhealthy. We become less thoughtful and we’re on to the next thing.
This may sound strange coming in a blog post, but I do agree with GB. Unplug from the interwebs and get out in the world more.
This morning while driving my youngest son to school, I heard this great song on the same subject from St. Vincent.
Favorite lyric:
If I can’t show it, if you can’t see me What’s the point of doing anything?
And St. Vincent (a.k.a. Annie Clark) has some fantastic hair too.
Here’s an interesting video article from NPR Music, about the lead singer of the band Beach Slang:
Beach Slang’s new album The Things We Do To Find People Who Feel Like Us is quite tasty too.
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