I've Got Those Chicken Shack Fleetwood Mac John Mayall Can't Fail Blues...
as recorded by the Liverpool Scene, all those years ago.
I know I said that this would be mostly fiction and (alleged) humor, but I have this piece which comes from a couple of weeks back and was written just after John Mayall passed away. It seemed the right time to gather together some thoughts I’ve had (which aren’t that original, to be honest) since I first heard him over forty years ago. It’s a bit long, but think of it like a 60’s blues guitar solo. Endless…
John Mayall’s Legacy – More Than The Blues…
John Mayall played the blues right up to the end of his life. That’s a span of seventy-four years when you consider that his first performance was in Manchester in 1950, when he was only sixteen. Self-taught, painstakingly, on the piano, Mayall was a devotee of the blues from his father’s record collection who had a yearning to express himself through this medium. In terms of the British Blues Boom that made his name and in which he was a pivotal figure, he was a good decade and a half ahead of the game. A game in which he was a pivotal player.
A man generous to his fans, supportive of musicians he played with, and for whom he had an unerring nose for talent, he was also parsimonious with those same musicians (Eric Clapton was only ever paid a session fee for the Bluesbreakers album that made his – and Mayall’s - name) and had little qualms in hiring and firing at will. He was canny enough to carry around his revox tape recorder and make sure shows were down on tape at the peak of his sixties’ fame, which gave us Diary Of A Band Vol. 1&2. Albums which are rough around the edges to modern ears (in the same way that the scratchy 78 recordings of American blues artists were to ears of the sixties and seventies listener) but still pack a powerful punch, as well as having snatches of conversation that are an insight into band dynamics – I’m thinking here of sax player Chris Mercer moaning at drummer Keef Hartley’s extended solo and being told by Hartley to go home, but perhaps not so politely; and later, Mayall’s firing of Hartley over the phone, a conversation also recreated by Hartley and included on his own Keef Hartley Band’s Halfbreed album the following year.
Mayall was larger than life and presented himself as such, willingly: his tanned, bare chest on stage was achieved by having the band strap him to the roof of the van on sunny days as they travelled to a gig (a habit recalled by drummer John Hiseman in Bob Brunning’s Blues: The British Connection book, and not without some bemusement). And it was that life which fed into his own songwriting and allowed him to take his music beyond a slavish copy of the original and into new areas. He was not alone in this: the best of the British musicians inspired by the blues knew that they could never emulate the Americans they idolised, but could use that musical base to find an identity of their own. Perhaps the most idiosyncratic example was Tony McPhee of the Groundhogs, who took his love of John Lee Hooker and added his own lyrical concerns on ecology and animal welfare alongside his interest in sonic exploration to create a blues that is very British and quite unique.
John Mayall was not, perhaps, as gifted in that way. His own music was always searching for new sonic templates – dropping the Bluesbreakers appellation at the end of the sixties and forming an acoustic trio with jazz musicians before emigrating to the USA and working with jazz and funk players before returning to his electric blues roots, he was still finding new young players and exploring sonically into his eighties. However, from the early days of recording his own songs, he displayed an ability to take a blues base and instil pop hooks taken from the music that was around him. This was on show early on: I’m Your Witchdoctor, a single on Immediate that came between John Mayall Plays John Mayall, his first unsuccessful album which saw him dropped by Decca, and the Bluesbreakers album that made his name, has an incredibly catchy hook that is echoed and bounced between Mayall’s vocal and new recruit Eric Clapton’s guitar. It prompted freelance Decca producer and unsung hero of British blues Mike Vernon to badger Decca into re-signing Mayall.
And this is where the legacy becomes more than just the music…
Mayall’s reputation in the seventies was that of a forgotten man whose importance lay in the three lead guitarists he unearthed in succession: Eric Clapton, Peter Green, and Mick Taylor. There is truth in this, but it’s not the whole story. Mayall was still making a changing music, just in another country and at a time when the blues was in a furrow as far as the public’s attention was concerned. And the guitarists were not just important as individual musicians, but rather in the connections they made that changed the face of rock music; the musicians they and Mayall had worked with, and the new combinations of personnel and sounds they inspired.
Eric Clapton was the first guitar hero as we think of them now: Dick Dale, Les Paul and Duane Eddy had made the guitar player a focal point in the USA, and Hank Marvin of the Shadows was responsible for most of the hotshot guitarists of the late sixties and seventies who came to prominence as guitar heroes in Claton’s wake. But it was EC who stamped the template of the brooding, intense guitarist whose solos pour heart and soul into notes wrenched from a fretboard. The nineteenth century ideal of the Romantic artist, previously poets or painters, whose souls are etched in their creativity, found its new home in rock and blues guitar. He took the virtuosity of the three Kings – BB, Freddie, and Albert, each a unique solo stylist – and gave them a western European veneer.
In so doing, he changed the course of rock music. And it was all down to John Mayall spotting how disenchanted he was after leaving the ‘pop’ Yardbirds, and giving him a musical space in which to express himself. Clapton needed no more encouragement that this: the Bluesbreakers cover shows a four-piece band, with Mayall looking intensely at the camera while Clapton read a copy of the Beano, a British comic (and which act gave the album its nickname amongst devotees). Bassist John McVie looks slightly worried, as befits a man who stayed stolid – like his playing – through numerous line-up changes. Drummer Hughie Flint has the resigned look of a man going out the door and back to Manfred Mann’s band, which indeed he soon was. The album itself has been discussed so often, but it’s worth noting that reissues which have both the stereo and mono versions are interesting in that the more compressed mono version seems to pack more power in its compression. In the sixties, many record buyers of an age for such music would have dansette mono players until such time as they could afford a stereo set-up, and radio was still pre-FM and mono in the UK.
Hideaway and Steppin’ Out are the tracks which showcase the skills that made Clapton’s name and led to ‘Clapton is God’ graffiti, but Mayall and Clapton co-wrote Double Crossing Time which, along with Mayall’s own Little Girl and Key To Love show that this was a band that could more than hold their own in the songwriting stakes. The whole album burns with a fiery intensity, and the rhythm section are supportive and supple, perhaps under-rated as Mayall and Clapton wail across the top lines.
It's no wonder that Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker, temporarily burying their own hatchet, enticed Clapton away to form Cream, creating the template for hard rock and metal inadvertently in their desire to (in Bruce’s words) make a living playing free jazz while fooling Eric into believing he was in a blues band. The guitar overkill of Cream, the over-amped bass ostinatos that filled the frequency between lead and rhythm section when there was no extra guitar or keyboard, the extemporisation: metal and prog rock starts here. Meanwhile, Flint and fellow ex-Manfred Mann bassist/guitarist Tom McGuiness carried the blues beyond the seventies and eighties, keeping the music alive and live in the UK between the occasional folk-blues-pop hit with McGuiness Flint and then the prosaically named The Blues Band.
Which left Mayall and the perpetually worried McVie to regroup. Mayall had already found his new guitar star in East Londoner Peter Green, who had called out stand-in guitarists at Mayall gigs during Clapton’s increasingly frequent absences. Mayall had offered him a chance to dep, then dropped him when Clapton returned. As it became clear that Eric was gone for good, Green got the call.
He answered with an emphatic performance both on guitar and as a writer which stamped him as an equal to – and a contrast to – the man called ‘God’.
A Hard Road is a typical Blues title, yet sums up Mayall’s approach: never do it the easy way, do it your own way, regardless of the consequences. The cover painting – by Mayall, a gifted artist who had trained and worked as a graphic designer – sees Mayall staring into the distance, always looking ahead. Green, on the other hand, is staring directly at the listener with a clear, intense gaze. New drummer Aynsley Dunbar, late of Liverpool beat group Rory Storm And The Hurricanes (a drum seat once occupied by Ringo Starr), has hooded eyes, while John McVie still looks worried. Not that this is reflected in his playing, which is supple and solid throughout. Never a flashy player, McVie has always been a master of when NOT to play as much as when to take a run. The title track, Living Alone, Top Of The Hill and Leaping Christine show that Mayall absorbs and reflects the skills of his new guitarist, for which The Stumble is the expected blues guitar showcase. It is Green’s The Supernatural, however, which is the key to the future for both Green and McVie… An instrumental piece with only a sideways relation to the blues, it has a supple, sinuous melody that weaves with long sustained notes from Green’s guitar, and is a gorgeous piece in its own right, as well as pointing the way to Black Magic Woman and the first phase of Fleetwood Mac.
It was inevitable that Green would think he had grown out of the confines of Mayall’s leadership, and so he jumped ship to form Fleetwood Mac, with a modesty prefiguring some of his later mental health issues, using his putative rhythm section to name his band and so avoid the ‘Clapton trap’. Mick Fleetwood had played with Mayall, though had not appeared on record. His style did not suit Mayall’s music, but Green was perceptive in spotting a chemistry between McVie and Fleetwood that powered his own explorations through blues and beyond as Man Of The World, Albatross, and The Green Manalishi created whole new worlds in the space of a few records. For the first few gigs, Fleetwood Mac was really Fleetwood Brunning, as bassist and author Bob Brunning filled in while McVie fulfilled his contractual obligations to Mayall.
Fleetwood Mac lost Green, continued with Danny Kirwan, Green’s guitar partner, recruited Christine Perfect from Chicken Shack, and then married her (well, one of them did), and stumbled through the early seventies with some good records but diminishing returns until happening on an equally stumbling duo called Buckingham-Nicks. The rest is history, but may not have happened without the melting pot of the Bluesbreakers to bring Green, McVie, and Fleetwood together. How different would the seventies and eighties rock landscape have seemed?
John McVie, by the way, still looks worried.
Meanwhile, back in 1967, Mayall has lost his second star guitarist and his rhythm section, as Dunbar has gone off to form his own blues band, Retaliation, who made some decent records (one of which included Warning, which is probably better known as ‘that long, long track’ on Black Sabbath’s first album) before moving to the USA and being drummer for hire for – amongst others – Journey and Jefferson Starship. Undeterred, Mayall dusted himself off and found a new rhythm section, a horn section for the first time, and another rising star guitarist. 1968 would be a productive and more stable year, even if along the way there was still a change in rhythm section…
Mayall was busy in 1967: A Hard Road came out in February, and by the end of the year he had issued Crusade with the Bluesbreakers, and The Blues Alone – a solo album in every sense – on Decca’s Ace Of Clubs budget label. The latter is what it suggests, while the former was a transitional album, with Mayall using a horn section on the road for the first time, as well as on album. He recruited Chris Mercer and Dick Heckstall-Smith on saxes, with new drummer Keef Hartley (another alumnus of Rory Storme And The Hurricanes) and bass player Keith Tillman. On guitar, with one eye on his reputation now as a starmaker, he unearthed a teenager named Mick Taylor.
Taylor was not a complete novice: he had served time in a beat group named The Gods, who had transformed into a psych-rock outfit, and would go on after he had departed to record a concept album and several singles before morphing into Toe Fat, a backing group for ex-beat and soul singer Cliff Bennett, a tremendous vocal talent who fashions passed by somehow. Through their revolving door went Greg Lake on his way to King Crimson and ELP, John Glascock whose career with Jethro Tull was sadly cut short by his heart condition, and most notably one Ken Hensley. Notable because he was the driving force on guitar, organ and vocals, the principal writer, and had an ear for a commercial rock song that found its home in the seventies glory years of Uriah Heep, where he dominated songwriting and production. No doubt working with such a driven man, in terms of both talent and ego, was a good proving ground before joining Mayall.
The two Diary Of A Band albums came out in January ’68, and were a better document of that band than Crusade, albeit rougher in sound (but possibly all the better for that in terms of atmosphere). As can be heard, though, the writing was on the wall for Hartley, and he was soon out the door, followed by Tillman. So, by the time Mayall came to record Bare Wires, released in June of ’68, he had a new rhythm section bedded in, as well as recruiting an additional horn player in trumpeter Henry Lowther, a respected jazzer who could also double on violin (as he shows to good effect on the album).
The new rhythm section comprised drummer Jon Hiseman and bassist Tony Reeves. Hiseman had played with a number of groups and the National Youth Jazz Orchestra. He had last sat behind the stool for the Graham Bond Organisation, a ground breaking jazz/blues/rock band led by the mercurial Bond, and a group from which Heckstall-Smith had made his escape, having served time with Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker, whose own voluble relationship was now bothering Eric Clapton. Mayall was so impressed by Hiseman after watching him that he drove from the gig to Hiseman’s home and waited three hours for him to arrive before persuading him to leave Bond and join the Bluesbreakers. Needing a bass player, Hiseman recommended school friend Tony Reeves, who had been in a beat group and the NYJO with him. Mayall was impressed by Reeves, and so the Bare Wires band was born, taking Mayall to new territory and beyond while sowing the seeds for a future powerhouse of a band.
Bare Wires is an under-estimated album. The first side is taken up the title suite in which Mayall takes the blues as a starting point, bounces off the jazzers he has around him, and reaches perhaps a little too far at times. Some of the melodies are almost beyond his vocal range, and some of the lyrics tilt at profundity and teeter on confusion. These were criticisms levelled at him at the time, and which have coloured the way in which the album is viewed. There is some truth in them, yet Mayall succeeds more than he fails, the band play arrangements that are tight yet still allow moments of freewheeling that are reined in at the right moment, and the soundscape and breadth of imagination far outstrips what any other ‘blues’ musician was attempting in Britain at that time, and indeed beyond many avowedly ‘psychedelic’ bands that verged on the birth of prog. Taylor plays with a grace and imagination that was unexpected in one so young, and even contributes to the writing with his Hartley Quits on side two. A series of unconnected songs, side two also has the breathtakingly sparse and atmospheric arrangement of No Reply, perhaps one of the best recordings Mayall ever made. Non-album singles Picture On The Wall and Knockers Step Forward (possibly about those who dismissed the album) only served to reinforce what a great band this line-up was.
Of course, being the Bluebreakers it couldn’t last…
Hiseman, Reeves and Heckstall-Smith, wanting more control over the music and – frankly – getting a bit narked about the pay, hatched plans for their own band and left, forming Colosseum with keyboard player Dave Greenslade and guitarist/vocalist James Litherland. Two albums in – For Those About To Die Salute You and the incredible Valentyne Suite (a UK release – the US version The Grass Is Greener confusingly has part of this album and some newer recordings under another title altogether) – Litherland was replaced by Dave Clempson on guitar (later to bolster a number of hard rock bands with his presence, and become a session legend) and the roaring voice of Chris Farlowe. Breaking up in 1972, they reformed in the 90’s and kept going until the middle of the 2010’s, with Hiseman’s wife Barbara Thompson, a respected composer and jazz sax player, taking Heckstall-Smith’s place when his declining health forced him off the road. In between, Hiseman had fostered the careers of Alan Holdsworth and Ollie Hallsall in Tempest, and with Colosseum II had given Gary Moore the kind of musical platform on which his talent and profile thrived.
Where did this leave Mayall? At that point, a short-lived final Bluesbreakers line up of Mayall and Taylor, minus Mercer and with bassist Steve Thompson and Colin Allen played some gigs before Mayall turned to America, with the aptly named Turning Point where, accompanied by Thompson and jazzers Jon Mark and Johnny Almond – whose later Mark-Almond band made jazz rock a commercial possibility in the USA – he turned to a quieter, acoustic and wider ranging direction. The days of guitar heroes and launching the careers of those who would change the direction of British rock were gone: while Thompson eventually rejoined Allen in Stone The Crows, whose blues rock led by the fiery Maggie Bell was cut short when band co-leader, co-songwriter, and husband Les Harvey was electrocuted in front of her on stage, Taylor was bound for bigger things.
Headhunted by The Rolling Stones to replace the sacked and soon deceased Brian Jones, Taylor lacked the charisma needed for such a band, but nonetheless contributed great guitar to some of the best rock’n’roll albums of the early seventies before being spat out. Strung-out, washed-out, and craving the anonymity that he has never shaken off, he was as much a casualty of rock as Green and Clapton in their own ways.
Changing the face of rock was a demanding business for them, and for Mayall. Perhaps that was behind the move to the USA, in part. Certainly, Mayall continued to play challenging and forward-looking blues-based music for the rest of his long life. But for a moment there, back in the mid-sixties and over three albums that still crackle and spit with energy and invention, Mayall was at the eye of the storm that changed rock music forever. His own talents, and his ability to spot a great musician at a hundred yards, made him a starmaker and a catalyst for incredible sonic change.
If you’ve never heard Bluesbreakers, A Hard Road, and Bare Wires, then maybe it’s time to change that. You’re in for a treat.