Let's Make A Racket - III

Delta Blues …

Quite apart from all my other nonsense, Old Dive has for decades been one half of an extremely occasional duo.
About once every ice age, we'll turn up at a small pub in Norwich and play for what must be the smallest but most fanatical following of any band anywhere.
I've played in front of anything from twenty-five to twenty-five thousand people (more if you count festivals, but they're not all there to see you specifically, so I won't) but I am never happier than I am when the two of us are sitting in a pub, laughing and playing with a few dozen like-minded folk singing and clapping and cheering and hollering along with us.

This is us: Dive and Michael.

And this is our crappy poster. We are The Blind Willies.

As the poster correctly states: we are "cooler than an ice-cream enema", " hotter than a chili condom" and "more than twelve feet tall" … at least we would be if we were to stand one atop the other.

The Blind Willies are named in honour of those saints of the blues, Blind Willie Johnson and Blind Willie Mc.Tell, which gives you a clue as to the direction our music takes.
We started off as a reaction against all the widdly Stevie Ray Vaughn and Gary Moore travesties that set off the last blues boom a few decades ago, with a stated aim to reclaim the myriad forms the music had taken before the Newport Festival, when it all went electric and white men started muscling in and commercialising things (yes, I know we're white, but nobody else wanted the job).

After Newport, the blues was three chords, a plodding rhythm and self indulgent twaddle on an electric guitar.
Before that, it was Three-line Field Holler, it was Delta Blues, it was Gospel, it was Country Blues, it was prison songs and work songs, it was regional variations from all points on the Mississippi from New Orleans up to St.Louis and north-east to Chicago. It was slide guitar, it was piano boogie, it was a thousand different things all melded together into one glorious tradition of black (and occasionally po' white) folk music.

And nobody gets to hear it played live any more.
Unless you sneak in to a Blind Willies gig (actually, a few more people have started playing it over the past decade but you can still count us all on the fingers of one hand).

We've mellowed a bit and allowed other blues-influenced music to leak in around the edges over the decades, so this is the only place where you'll hear delta blues mixed with Dylan, Neil Young, Velvet Underground and Captain Beefheart songs (we are the only band I know who play songs off Trout Mask Replica; in fact the only band I know who CAN play songs off that famously unlistenable classic).

Michael has been my main musical collaborator for nigh on thirty years now, through way more bands and sessions than is conducive to sanity.
He's a fellow Marxist, one of the finest delta slide guitar players I know of and he can play any style of blues and jazz piano from the last hundred years well enough to make grown men weep and other keyboard players break their own fingers.
He's also a librarian at the university and is as anal about books as I am.
And - like me - he's also a fan of appalling puns and wordplay. He has his own occasional (and cheese-fixated) band called Gordon Zola and the Rock Four (Americans may not get that one as I believe they mispronounce roquefort as "roke-fort") and amongst his many strange albums (don't try Amazon; he only releases stuff privately and - the ultimate in anti-Capitalist behaviour - gives it away free) are such punnish delights as "Cheeses of Nazareth", "Alice in Sunderland" and the splendid "Carnal Norwich".
You'll gather from the above that the two of us are probably best avoided socially.

Anyhoo …
Here is this week's racket: The Blind Willies play Muddy Waters' "Can't Be Satisfied".

We recorded this in my little studio one afternoon in the early/mid 1990s after we had completed a BBC kids' TV theme tune with Neil Morrissey that never got past the pilot stage (The Wallies; about some cuddly bees who lived in a wood and had stupid adventures, if you must know. It was one of a series of try-outs that eventually led to Bob The Builder).
We had spent the afternoon with the three of us recording multi-tracked, speeded-up vocals for the theme song and were pretty drunk by the time Neil left and we had some tape left, so we filled it with this.

Michael is singing and playing splendid slide guitar.
I'm playing my vintage Martin and trying not to fall off my chair.
I overdubbed my solo while Michael slept on the sofa.