Why do recent blues recordings sound so slick and uninspired?

check out T-Model Ford's Pee Wee Get My Gun. Fat Possum releases far too much crap, in my opinion, but this one is neither slick nor unispired. Great drumming by Spam.

I've heard some (not as many as I would like) recent recordings (last decade) that are pretty good, but in such a formalized genre it's really down to the ability of the performers. Delmark still releases some fine blues records. The Barkin' Bill record was really enjoyable, though he's more of an uptown crooner type working with blues material. Rockin' Johnny's records are nice - he's an amazing, tasteful player here in Chicago; his only drawback is his singing voice, but he seems to be improving in that area.

This question was sparked specifically some 80's-90's Otis Rush recordings. He seems to be as talented as ever, but something is missing. How could he have gone from a recording as raw and beautiful as "I Can't Quit You Baby" to playing what sounds like Starbucks music?

oh yeah, Otis Rush is definitely one of my favorite performers! I never heard his 90s recordings though. I'd like to check them out - the latest thing I have from him is a couple of his 70s lps. But yeah a part of me is kind of scared I'd have a similar reaction to yours.

And yeah, I second that Buddy Guy Sweet Tea album - that was great! Even if it was a little too self-consciously "rough" sounding, it was a lot of fun.

What is it with modern blues production values? I think they're a large part of what turns me off. As oops said, the sound is "way too clean."

And then there's the tendency of the songs to be stretched into 5-8 minute wanky jams. Yawwwn. I like my blues songs short and sweet.

But Sweet Tea by Buddy Guy was great.

http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0346/smith.php

Oh and Super Chiken played there two years ago! He's totally fun. Plus he had a song called "Camel Toe" way before Fannypack ripped him off.

And to Gear, what's wrong with "playing to the crowd"? That's all the blues has ever done!

Nothing wrong with playing to the crowd! But when that's ALL you do, it's a nightmare!

He's bored. Same as Buddy Guy before he just blew up with *Sweet Tea.* I'll take the last couple Blood Ulmer records, as well.

That's been the basic problem for a lot of it for the past couple of
decades.

When I was working at a daily in Pennsy we had to cover this big
do called the Bethlehem Music Fest every year. It's a "garden fest" for yuppies, the upper middle class and their children who want "music" delivered neat, unmessy and -- most of all -- not too loud or offensive. Always featured the blooz, lots and lots of blooz.

So it's a week of dogshit disguised as culture, legions of hacks,
wash-ups on the oldies circuits, some good acts willing to
be dogshit for thirty minutes and the big payday and the occasional
revelation who parts the polity's hair and is banished forever
from the event.

Lots of blues artists shoehorn themselves into this consumer niche because there's some money in it if you can keep the dilettantes
happy. It's blues for the Disneyworld crowd -- which, for example, describes Lang rather accurately. Fifteen years ago it
Jeff Healey was the man for them. He had the added advantage of being a blind white guy who played his guitar backwards. Smiling but
not too disgusting freaks are always cool in this arena. So
a guy with no arms because of thalidomide treatments to his
leper mom but who could play the blues with his feet, now that
would be out.

I'm not discounting the central point, which I think is true of any form that gets codified and commodified (listen to modern bluegrass vs. early Bill Monroe for a similar contrast). I just think it's worth keeping in mind how relative the whole notion of "slickness" is.

Spencer 'n' spittle OTM.

No, who's he?

RL Burnside - while I agree about RL.. I dont particularly like [i]Asspocket[/i].. which he did with Jon Spencer.. instead, Id say search out [i]Too Bad Jim [/i]

And I agree that the genre sounds pretty much uninspired.. its become watered down wanking bluesy-rock... There are a tremendous number of great recordings that you dont really need to look far... If I would pick one contemporary.. I'D say Shemekia Copeland (daughter of the late Johnny Copeland) is a talented artist..but even she shows her best doing covers (seek out her cover of her dad's song "Ghetto Child")

Creams.

1) if you know where your next meal is coming from
2) you check in with your broker before lunch
3) you name Eric Clapton when talking influential artists for blues

There's still plenty of turberculosis in the urban centers and prisons to keep the creative pot hot.

I like the less is more approach. on the Fat Possum leg of this, I really dig Jr. Kimbrough's sound. It has/had a nice minimalist droney quality to it and it had a lot more "feeling" to it.

I'm pretty sure this was brought up a year or so ago.

Why? What in the new "slick" blues sound resonates MORE than the old sound with certain foax?

it depends. the carters' arc recordings were state of the art. blind willie johnson i dunno. charley patton and other artists on paramount were recorded poorly and more important the 78s were pressed in the cheapest way imaginable, with cardboard fillings sometimes. keep in mind that masters aren't available for much of this music, so what we have to use are the best available 78s...sometimes in good shape, sometimes not. and while it's true that in comparison to today's ability to manipulate and control sound through tape and mixing boards and so on far surpasses the capabilities of recording studios of the past, different studios and different labels definitely had different sounds. the decca studios in america were notorious for their dryness, their lack of echo. and as far as the blues are concerned bluebird has taken much heat for the particular sound quality of their midcentury chicago recordings, a point that is lost on me because i'm not enough of an aficionado i guess... the performances on these recordings are often so strong that i never get around to noticing deficiencies or dullness in the recording.

this is a good question which i am unprepared to answer though i've given it some thought. when i worked at a radio station i was responsible for sifting through new blues releases among other things and was almost universally disappointed. what i found actually more tolerable than the neo-rootsy performers were the soul-blues guys who in some cases have been plying their trade since the days when that genre could actually claim to have been a bit current.

the recording of "roots" music...or rather the reification of rootsiness as a quality associated with a certain quality of sound, is an interesting notion.... i think it had much to do with the band (i.e. the band of big pink).... but i find it true that most "roots" production styles leave much to be desired.

and some definitely had the nattiness down pat

http://www.toad.net/~harpe/blues/carr.h1.jpg

But Jimmie Vaughan still makes me want to throw my speakers out the window. Cocktail party blues. *shudder*

Chitlin Circuit Double-entendre -filled Soul 2004 (and onward) Theodis Easley's "Stand Up In It" is a song of the year

I saw some soul-blues live last night, Johnny Drummer (who has a regular Saturday night gig at Lee's Unleaded Blues on Chicago's south side). All-black band (except for the white rhythm guitarist), mostly-black crowd. The warmup band played a bunch of 70's soul and funk numbers before introducing the star of the show, who played his entire set with a keytar around his neck (a guitar-shaped keyboard that was really popular with '80s synth bands). And guess what, they rocked the joint HARD. It doesn't bother me when chitlin'-circuit blues types play through cheesy 80's equipment, because whatever they play is gonna sound like sledgehammer soul and downhome blues no matter WHAT the equipment is!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FKZgVDvhRc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0LcYNrZYGQ

or my beloved Lee Boys:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=686Ni9wU8Po

there is a bonanza of 2nd generation Northern Mississippi shit right now. maybe the hipsters never talk about it cuz it didn't come out on Fat possum but anyway: Burnside Exploration:

http://ec1.images-amazon.com/images/P/B000E6UK2I.01._SS500_SCLZZZZZZZ_V1139948605_.jpg

Duwayne Burnside:

http://ec1.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/ciu/89/40/a22fd250fca0e5bdab716010.L.jpg

David Junior Kimbrough:

http://www.chefeddy.com/davidkimbroughjr.jpeg

and then of course you could classify things like the Tetuzi Akiyama record and Jonathan Kane as nu-blues ... certainly not "slick and uninspired"...

I've seen little evidence that "poor" and "indie rock" have much to do with each other.

actually i love the sacred steel stuff, just as long as it doesnt cross over into jam-band territory like robert randolph. (the jury's still out on the lee boys - the arhoolie cd i have is relatively traditional, but when i saw them live a year ago, you could tell they were reaching for the same crowd that sees randolph's shows)

Very curious about the David Kimbrough Jr.

Kimbrough's is very idiosyncratic -- eerie lyrics about battling whiskey addiction, lo-fi a cappella songs, etc -- amid the expected hypnotic NoMiss droners. He's got a scary falsetto -- he's the best singer I've ever heard in this genre, at least since Miss. Fred McDowell himself.

Burnside Exploration aren't very good singers, but they have that distorted psychedelia down. You can tell they are steeped in hip-hop too -- imagine if they could do a couple tracks with David Banner.

Have any of you all heard the North Mississippi All Stars screwed and chopped Electric Blue Watermelon EP?

I am, however, a huge fan of the bulk of Fat Possum's blues output.

I will definitely be checking out those Kimbrough and Burnside Exploration titles.

Thanks!

Simply Moody We Gotta Bust Outta the Ghetto
CDH
Bustin' Out of the Ghetto
Aim

Before you decide to take that casino vacation package and head to Mississippi for a gambling weekend, you might consult Moody Scott's masterful version of George Jackson's "Last Two Dollars." Simply Moody We Gotta Bust Outta the Ghetto brims with cautionary tales—the title track exhorts Moody's hometown of Hammond, Louisiana (as well as Argentina and South Africa), to clean up the drugs and violence—but "Last Two Dollars" provides a glimpse into a joyous, fucked-up, and desperate reality that more Americans should contemplate: "Lady at the casino/She lost all her money/She said, 'Don't feel sorry/Don't feel sorry, honey.' " So Moody lends her two bucks, and what does the lady do? "One goes for the bus fare/The other for the jukebox/Hear me some blues," she explains.

Simply Moody modernizes Deep South blues as effectively as anything on the Malaco label in the last 20 years—it's a lively, New Orleans–accented hybrid. The similarly titled Bustin' Out of the Ghetto collects funk sides he cut for Nashville's Sound Stage 7 label in 1968, and proves Scott understands readymades as well as he does casino culture. Both records reveal a performer as eternally youthful as Sharon Jones, and a lot more dapper.

moody scott's record sounded like real blues to me, even if all real blues these days seems either antiseptic or malaco-ized (they loved that cheesy synth shit down in jackson). i liked robert cray's "20" but didn't much the live record, which lacked the concision of the studio stuff. people ask "why do they sound so slick?" and cray's "20" sounds fine except overbright in the hi-hat and cymbal sounds.

dan penn's production of bobby purify last year was, to my mind, what a modern blues record ought to sound like. of course, he records on tape, as does nevers on another good blues record, basically, the candi staton record on astralwerks. they're soul, of course, as well as blues. part of the whole problem is that it's hard to play that way any more, as classically as they do on the great chess sides--that drumming is hard to do, it's so basic and so effective. perhaps, too, when you record it real good, the mistakes are magnified, because a lot of blues, it's great but there ain't much to it when you break it down, and once the magic is gone, what's left...?

xps

Same here - after Fat Possum started being distributed by Epitaph and started EQing their albums with really hot mixes (see: T-Model Ford's PEEWEE GET MY GUN or Elmo Williams & Hezekiah Early's slept-on TAKES ONE TO KNOW ONE), they really started kicking ass left and right.

Too bad that label doesn't seem to be putting out blues records antymore. After R.L. Burnside's death, plus the releases by Nathaniel Mayer and Little Freddie King, that was IT! Just about every promo CD on FP that's crossed my desk since then was straight-up indie-rock. Not even the rootsy, garagey type rock acts like they released in the past (Neckbones, Bob Log III), but alt-bands with no roots-music connections at all (like We Are Wolves, who I actually dig).