Acquiring The Blues, by Mike Gold – Brainiac On Banjo #194

November 1, 2010 Mike Gold 0 Comments

James Cotton released a new album last month. It’s his, oh, about ten thousandth record.

Let me take you on a trip. Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered on April 4, 1968. Rioting broke out in a great many cities, including mine. Only a complete fool would go out those nights: in addition to the rioting, the police were extremely antsy. Back in 1968 a great many public officials conflated blacks, Latinos, hippies, teenagers, Communists, mass murderers, and alien invaders.

So, Einstein that I am, all of my lean and hairy 17½ year-oldness fearlessly sauntered forth to our local psychedelic dungeon. A perfectly adequate west coast folk-rock group called Love headlined the bill, with bluesman James Cotton as the opener. I didn’t go to see Love, and I didn’t go to see James Cotton. I went to have a good time.

I managed to convince one of my friends – and only one – that this was a good idea. We took the “L” to the Uptown neighborhood; a lower income area filled with half-way houses, flop-houses, and treatment centers. You can almost hear the “danger’s a-comin’” theme music following us west on Lawrence Avenue towards Clark, not far from where I grew up.

We entered Aaron Russo’s Electric Theater – if you saw the movie Medium Cool, you’ve seen the interior of the place. Dark though it was and filled with two epilepsy-inducing hippie light shows, I noticed that the decision I made was not a popular one. There were less than a dozen attendees, a record for me at the time. This record held for less than a year, when I joined a mere five people at a very early Alice Cooper concert at an abandoned Masonic Hall… but I digress.

We had plenty of room to stretch out and get comfortable, which is exactly what we did. Before too long the opening act, the James Cotton Blues Band, took the stage. I was thrilled: Cotton was a legend and I had just started taking the blues very, very seriously.

If you were a kid looking for the nexus point of the blues, you couldn’t do better than James Cotton. After learning his craft from Sonny Boy Williamson, he followed Little Walter as Muddy Waters’ harmonica wizard in 1954. By then he had already cut a couple records for Sam Phillips’ immortal Sun Records. He left Muddy’s band a dozen years later, recruiting guitarist Luther Tucker drummer Sam Lay, whose credits included working with Willie Dixon, Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, the Siegel-Schwall Band, and a guy named Bob Dylan. Later on, Blues Brother-in-training Matt “Guitar” Murphy brought his lightning to the Cotton Band.

James Cotton walked up to the microphone and announced (he could have addressed us each by name) that Love cancelled out due to the rioting. He talked about the importance of music as a healing force in troubled times, and his words had an overwhelming impact on me. Cotton and his pals then played for over three hours, covering both his time and Love’s. In fact, if the police hadn’t imposed a curfew I think they’d still be playing. I walked out of the Electric Theater a changed man. Music became more than a life force, it became my way of life. Music became my personal smack. It still is.

We walked back towards the L. That took the better part of an hour because the local gendarmes stopped us three times to gave us the third-degree. Amusingly, we were threatened with arrest twice, even though the curfew had yet to start. Live and learn. At a large – and perfectly legal – anti-Vietnam War march later that very month, the police beat me for the first of two times that year. Live and learn.

So it is with great pride and enthusiasm that I note Mr. Cotton released that new record last month. He’s now 75 and while his voice has deteriorated to the point where he now has a singer in tow, he still blows a harp that inspires changes in the weather pattern.

James Cotton’s new album is called Giant. He sure is.

Fellow-traveler, anarcho-syndicalist and www.ComicMix.com editor-in-Chief Mike Gold performs the weekly two-hour Weird Sounds Inside The Gold Mind ass-kicking bizarro music and blather radio show on The Point, www.getthepointradio.com, every Sunday at 7:00 PM Eastern, replayed three times during the week (check the website above for times). Likewise, his Weird Scenes Inside The Gold Mind political and cultural rants pop up each and every day at the same venue.