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The Sensational Alex Harvey Band: Live Agora Ballroom, Cleveland, Ohio, 1974

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Success was a long time a-coming for Alex Harvey. He started out on a high in the mid-1950s when he won the title of the next “Teenage Idol” in “a Tommy Steele rock-alike” contest. Giddy heights, perhaps, but the reality of being the next big thing was gigging across nowheresville Scotland playing working men’s clubs, where his group Alex Harvey and his Soul Band were generally hated by the audience who preferred the more traditional entertainment of pie-eating contests—as Harvey once told B. A. Robertson. His band played skiffle, rock ‘n’ roll, and the blues. He released a couple of albums in the early sixties which were more popular with his family and friends than the record-buying public.

In 1967, Harvey got a five-year stint playing guitar in the London West End musical Hair. It gave him some much-needed stability away from gigging, a regular income, and some good theatrical experience which furthered his ambition to kick-start his own rock ‘n’ roll career with a new band.

The band he eventually teamed up with was Tear Gas. He’d heard about them from a pal. Tear Gas was a prog rock group, who like Harvey were also from Glasgow. According to Harvey, they were loud, raucous, and undisciplined, but hugely talented. Onstage they were shy. Off-stage they were stars. They need some guidance—they found it in thirty-something “Daddy” Harvey.

The Sensational Alex Harvey Band was born. With Harvey on lead vocal, Zal Cleminson on guitar, Chris Glen on bass, and cousins Hugh and Ted McKenna on keyboards and drums respectively. Together they formed the greatest band that came out of Scotland in the 1970s. And the most influential band that came out of Scotland in the seventies. If you lived in Glasgow back then, the Sensational Alex Harvey Band (or SAHB) was bigger than Jesus and a central part of the city’s holy trinity alongside soccer and alcohol.

SAHB mixed rock, hard rock, prog rock, blues, with theater and cabaret. There was literally nothing to compare with them. As rock critic Charles Shaar Murray described it:

The Sensational Alex Harvey Band were one of the craziest, most honest, most creative and most courageous bands of their time…

Though they gained a cult-following and influenced acts as different as Nick Cave (who honed part of his act on Harvey’s performative skills and later covered SAHB’s “Hammer Song” on Kicking Against the Pricks), John Lydon, Ian Dury, and Kurt Cobain. To get an idea what SAHB could do, take a gander at Harvey’s definitive performance of the Jacques Brel’s song “Next” from The Old Grey Whistle Test in 1973.
 

 
Hear SAHB in concert, after the jump…
 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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03.27.2019
11:29 am
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Hail the King: Muddy Waters rules the Copenhagen Jazz Festival, 1968
03.22.2016
10:36 am
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In his later years, when Muddy Waters started making the money he was long overdue, he’d call up his friend John Lee Hooker and the pair would jokingly brag about the cars they owned. If Waters said he had a new Mercedes then Hooker would call back a few weeks later and tell Waters he had just bought a Mercedes with a phone in the back. It was a small perk in a long career of endless nights gigging, playing or recording for little return.

For playing blues didn’t make money unless you were somebody, as Waters told the N.M.E.‘s Charles Shaar Murray in 1977:

The kind of blues I play, there’s no money in it. You makes a good livin’ when you gets established like I am, but you don’t reach that kind of overnight million dollar thing, man…no way.

If you play nuthin’ but blues, it’s hard to get big off of it. It takes years and years and still the kids come in and go, ‘Who he?’

That night in 1977, Waters was playing a gig with Johnny Winter at some small deathtrap venue in the village of Willimantic—which according to folklore means the “Place of the Swift Running Waters.” As journalist Murray discovered, Waters was right the audience knew more about Johnny Winter—ironically the whitest blues musician of all time, as the Texas guitarist, was of course an albino—than the legendary king Muddy Waters—even after forty years of hard work.

Forget Elvis—Muddy Waters is the true King of modern rock, r’n'b and all the rest. Without Muddy Waters things would have been a whole lot different and sure as hell not nearly as good.

McKinley Morganfield was born on April 4, 1913 or 1915—depending on who you believe—in Rolling Fork, Mississippi.  He was the second son of farmer Ollie Morganfield. When his mother died in 1918, McKinley was sent off to live with his grandmother in Clarksdale, who first christened the boy “Muddy”:

‘I was raised in the country, and out there they didn’t have no concrete, ya know… just muddy country roads and people used to clean their feet off on our front porch. I’d be playing around crawlin’ in the mud, probably eatin’ it…and my granmother started callin’ me her little muddy baby.

‘I started to play harp [harmonica] when I was seven. At nine I was really tryin’ to play. At thirteen I thought I was good. The kids I used to sing to would call out “Hey Muddy Waters play us a piece.”

‘I didn’t like that “Muddy Water” thing, ya know…I didn’t mind my grandmother calling me Muddy, but that whole Muddy Waters thing, I didn’t like it. It just growed on me.’

As a teenager, Waters picked up his first influence, bluesman Charley Patton. Then Son House—from whom he learnt the finer points of bottleneck guitar—and Robert Johnson—whose style Waters copied before finding his very own distinct voice. He traded in his harmonica and took up the guitar.  Waters had known for some time he was going to be a musician—he was going to be someone. Ever since he could remember music was what he wanted to do. If he couldn’t make it music, he figured, then he’d be a preacher, a ball player—“something outstanding.”

‘I didn’t want to grow up with no one knowin’ me but the neighbourhood people. I wanted the world to know a lot about me. I thank my God I got it through…’

By day, Waters worked on the cotton plantations. But he was soon earning more in a night playing blues than he made in a week working for someone else. His early recordings were for the Library of Congress in 1941—an organization which Charles Shaar Murray points out “treats folk musicians as wildlife specimens rather than artists.” Waters never made money on these recordings until about a quarter of a century later when they were released as Down on Stovall’s Plantation.

In 1943, Waters moved to Chicago to become a full-time musician. He earned his money playing bars and clubs. In 1944, he made a major change to his sound by purchasing his first electric guitar. With the release of his single “I Can’t Be Satisfied” in 1948, Waters changed the course of modern music—its beat and loud powerful electric sound announced the imminent arrival of rock ‘n’ roll.

As Murray writes in Shots from the Hip:

[Waters] consolidated his success with a series of harder, heavier, more passionate and more electric hits, and began to assemble, member by member, the toughest and most exciting band in town. Muddy Waters’ Blues Band was to become, not only the best and most influential band in Chicago, but what was for all practical purposes, the first electric rock band.

More Muddy Waters, after the jump…

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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03.22.2016
10:36 am
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Happy Birthday Muddy Waters: Watch his legendary performance at the Blues Summit in Chicago 1974

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McKinley Morganfield, aka Muddy Waters born ninety-nine years ago today, at Jug’s Corner, Issaquena County, Mississippi. The legendary Father of Chicago Blues and influence on artists from Jimi Hendrix to The Rolling Stones, Angus Young to Led Zeppelin

Muddy Waters had always wanted to be a great musician, as he once told writer Charles Shaar Murray for the N.M.E. in 1977:

“....ever since I can remember, this is what I wanted to be. Something outstanding. If I couldn’t make it in music, I’d be a big preacher, a great ball player.

“I didn’t want to grow up with no one knowin’ me but the neighborhood people. I wanted the world to know a lot about me. I thank God I got it through…”

Nearly thirty years after his death, Waters is still as relevant, and as important, as Murray summed up back in 1977:

“The reason that Muddy Waters is still a great and not just an honored ancestor, a museum grandaddy, is that no one can do it like Muddy Waters.

And somehow I don’t think anyone will.”

And here’s the proof, Muddy Waters at the Blues Summit in Chicago from 1974, with Dr. John, Michael Bloomfield, Koko Taylor, Junior Wells and many more.
 

 
Bonus clip from ‘Beat Club’ 1970, after the jump…
 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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04.04.2012
06:01 pm
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Dusty Springfield: Excellent documentary on the White Queen of Soul

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It was summer, I was a young child sitting in the living room drawing pictures when I first heard her voice on the radio. It made me stop and listen to try and understand what it was I was hearing. Her voice was full of a power and emotion that I could feel but didn’t yet fully understand. It gave a hint to some secret, adult world I was still to discover. It was sensual and seductive. The voice was Dusty Springfield. The song, “The Look of Love.”

Dusty was described by Elton John “as the greatest white singer there has ever been.” Never one for understatement, Sir Elton is almost right - though he is a tad forgetful of quite a few others from Maria Callas to Elvis and beyond. Dusty was one of the greats, and certainly the greatest white soul singer there has ever been. No one comes close.

Shown as part of Melvyn Bragg’s always fascinating arts series The South Bank Show, this excellent documentary on Dusty Springfield was first aired in 2006, and contains interviews with Burt Bacharach, Billie Jean King, Lee Everett, Charles Shaar Murray, Neil Tennant, Chris Lowe, Camille Paglia, and Carole Pope.
 

 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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03.20.2012
08:36 pm
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The Sensational Alex Harvey Band

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Musical tastes are important when it comes to relationships, something I realized the night Alex Harvey died, in 1982. The radio was playing a loop of tracks in memory of the great man, when my then girlfriend asked why I liked The Sensational Alex Harvey Band? I explained, and she replied, ‘But he looked so dirty, like a bad workman that would come to your house and drink Dad’s booze and fuck Mom.’ She had a point, and some imagination, but that was the moment I knew we wouldn’t last.

If you lived in Glasgow in the 1970s, The Sensational Alex Harvey Band were bigger than Jesus. Well, Alex was at least, for he was one of the city’s three religions - the other two being soccer and alcohol. While soccer could disappoint, and drink left you hungover, SAHB never let you down.

As Charles Shaar Murray wrote, after Alex Harvey’s death in the NME:

The Sensational Alex Harvey Band were one of the craziest, most honest, most creative and most courageous bands of their time, and also the most public and best-known phase of the career of Alex Harvey, the man who won a Tommy Steele rock-alike contest in Glasgow in the mid-fifties and thereafter dubbed himself The Last Of The Teenage Idols.

Alex Harvey was a genuine working-class hero, born in Plantation, the harbor district of Glasgow in 1935, he grew up with a love of Billie Holliday, Big Bill Broozny, Charlie Parker, Elvis Presley and Little Richard. In 1959, he formed his first band, Alex Harvey’s Soul Band, which established his great, cigarette and alcohol voice that didn’t mimic American inflection, but delivered songs in his native Glaswegian. The band toured the U.K. and Europe, and for one gig had the embryonic Beatles as support.

But Harvey was more than just a Blues singer and he moved on to performing in the musical Hair, which inspired the theatrical style he used with his most successful group, The Sensational Alex Harvey Band.

SAHB were unique as they mixed genres and styles - Weimar cabaret, film, Blues, rock and torch song, with which, as Murray writes, “they achieved their impact simply because Alex Harvey had the insight to locate the central core of the song and the passion to get him to that core.”

What showed most about Alex Harvey the performer was his very real devotion to his audiences. He would go to any length to enlighten and to entertain, and - as his notion of theatrical presentation developed from a few simple costume changes and bits of business to complex arrangements of props and gadgets - his work was never bombastic and never attempted to substitute extravagance for genuine communication. Time after time, he would exhort his audiences to avoid both private and institutionalized violence - “don’t make any bullets, don’t buy any bullets and don’t shoot any fucken bullets” - and to behave responsibly towards each other and their environment - “don’t pish in the water supply.”

During the period of Alex’s greatest popularity, he did not just provide an escape from everyday existence through dem ol’ rock and roll fantasies, but he depicted and celebrated that existence and the process of that escape, and the relationship of one to the other.

Vambo still rules.
 

 
Bonus clips of SAHB plus an interview with Alex Harvey after the jump…
 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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10.29.2010
06:16 pm
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