Photos: Robert Johnson, blues legend

Time tends to reduce great artistry to caricature.

Bob Dylan -- wasn’t he a protest singer? The voice of a generation? The guy who provided the soundtrack for world peace and civil rights by writing “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “The Times They are A-Changin’ ”?

And what about Robert Johnson? Didn’t he sell his soul to the devil? At some dark crossroads in Mississippi? And then he invented the modern blues?

But Dylan wrote only a handful of protest songs, quickly realizing they were an artistic dead-end, and Johnson never had any documented meetings with Beelzebub. With Johnson’s 100th anniversary arriving Sunday, and Dylan’s 70th birthday on May 24, it’s time to take a fresh look. Myths aren’t why the music of these two artists still has the ability to bowl over listeners who encounter it for the first time. There’s something else, but what exactly?

The 28th annual Chicago Blues Fest on June 10-12 in Grant Park will feature a 100th birthday tribute to blues patriarch Robert Johnson and a 40th anniversary celebration of local institution Alligator Records.

The Johnson tribute June 10 will include performances by David “Honey Boy” Edwards, Rick Sherry, Rocky Lawrence and Hubert Sumlin, the city announced Monday. The Alligator party will cap the festival June 12 with Lonnie Brooks joined by Michael Burks, Rick Estrin, Ann Rabson and Eddy Clearwater. Brooks will be preceded on stage by singer Shemekia Copeland, who began her career on Alligator.

Here is the complete lineup for the free festival, presented by the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events:
    

    Bruce Iglauer started Alligator Records in 1971 because Hound Dog Taylor’s music gave him no other choice. If he didn’t do it, who would?

    That imperative – the sense that the world must hear this, right now – guides Iglauer to this day. He has put out more than 250 albums by some of the pivotal blues artists of the last 40 years, including Koko Taylor, Albert Collins, Lonnie Brooks, Johnny Winter, Son Seals, Luther Allison, Corey Harris, Mavis Staples and Shemekia Copeland (some of Alligator's classic albums listed HERE).

        At his office in the three-story Alligator building on the North Side, he remains undeterred by a business that has dealt him his share of heartache: several of his closest friends, most recently the great blues singer Koko Taylor, have died; the record business has been in a decade-long economic decline; and the blues is a mere sliver of the U.S. music market, representing less than 1 percent of its sales. 

    Yet Iglauer remains an enthusiast, a vigorous advocate for the blues who runs his label with an energy that can verge on manic. He puts in long days, doing everything from producing records and listening to demos to assisting artists who need help paying bills and drumming up overseas business. He is currently exploring a licensing deal with a Shanghai media conglomerate to bring Alligator recordings to China. With a staff of 15, Iglauer’s Alligator Records remains a blues cornerstone, a $2 million a year business that dispenses $500,000 in royalty checks to artists annually.

On the 40th anniversary of Alligator Records and in conjunction with our interview with label founder Bruce Iglauer HERE, some classic Alligator recordings (listed chronologically):

“Hound Dog Taylor and the Houserockers” (1971): The album that started it all, a blast of unrivaled, grit-coated South Side boogie.

Koko Taylor, “The Earthshaker” (1978): A voice robust enough to knock down walls at any gin joint in town.

Albert Collins, “Ice Pickin’ ” (1978): A master class in guitar tone brimming with shiver-inducing accents.

Lonnie Brooks, “Bayou Lightning” (1979): Expressive blues guitar streaked with Louisiana soul.

Luther Allison, “Soul Fixin’ Man” (1994): The first domestic release by the guitar great in 20 years ignited his late-career rise.

Corey Harris, “Greens from the Garden” (1999): Among the most adventurous albums Alligator ever released, with convincing forays into funk, Cajun, reggae and folk.

Holmes Brothers, “Speaking in Tongues” (2001): Sublime harmonies steeped in the church, underlined by soul grooves.

Mavis Staples, “Have a Little Faith” (2004): The legendary gospel vocalist launched her comeback with this profoundly spiritual plea.

Charlie Musselwhite, “The Well” (2010): Starkly personal songs from the gentlemanly harp virtuoso.

Various artists, “Alligator Records: 40th Anniversary Collection” (2011): Fine two-disc overview of the label’s history, complete with liner notes by founder Bruce Iglauer.

greg@gregkot.com

3.5 stars (out of 4)

Producer-musician Jim Dickinson was a gentlemanly maverick who served as the unofficial historian and advocate for the most deeply imbedded strands of Southern music. His death in 2009 was a huge blow, not least of which to his family, which includes his sons Luther and Cody Dickinson. They’re the core members with bassist Chris Chew of the North Mississippi Allstars, who have been recording blues-steeped rock, soul and gospel for more than a decade.

The death of the Dickinson patriarch and the birth three months later of Luther Dickinson’s child inform the trio’s best album since its 2000 debut, “Shake Hands With Shorty.”

“Keys to the Kingdom” (Songs of the South) moves from anger (“This A’Way,” “Jumpercable Blues”) to acceptance (“How I Wish My Train Would Come,” “Hear the Hills”). Along the way there are potent collaborations with Mavis Staples on the gospel testifying of “The Meeting” and Ry Cooder on the sobering conviction of “Ain’t No Grave.” The album wraps with rollicking, randy takes on mortality (“New Orleans Walkin’ Dead,” “Jellyrollin’ All Over Heaven”) and a haunting coda by Jim Dickinson’s favorite piano player, Spooner Oldham.

The Allstars play with unassuming ardor, letting the rawness seep through the edges of the arrangements. Drummer Cody Dickinson in particular delivers exactly what each song needs, nothing less, and keeps things swinging. It’s the kind of unsentimental yet passionate tribute a musical legend and family cornerstone would surely appreciate.

greg@gregkot.com

    One of Buddy Guy’s most memorable performances is on the song “First Time I Met the Blues.” It’s a life-changing supernatural being in Guy’s telling, as scary as it is inspiring.

    Scott Holt, who will play Jan. 21 at Buddy Guy’s Legends, can relate. In his late teens while growing up in Tennessee, he became obsessed with the guitar and Jimi Hendrix. After six months of playing all day, every day, he saw Hendrix’s inspiration, Buddy Guy, in concert. When he met Guy later that night, Holt couldn’t even speak.

    “My father took me to his show and afterward he was talking to Buddy, explaining my music obsession to him; he had to do all the talking because I was just starstruck,” Holt recalls with a laugh. “But Buddy invites me to his hotel room the next day, and there we were sitting across from each other playing guitars and him telling me stories about Little Walter, Sonny Boy Williamson, Muddy Waters. I didn’t understand the depths of what was happening, but it was the beginning of what has been a 20-year friendship.”

    Ever wondered what’s the longest Keith Richards had stayed up while pursuing a song, drugs, kicks, the next misadventure?

    Nine days, it turns out.

    “I have been conscious for at least three lifetimes,” Richards writes in his fast-paced, pull-no-punches autobiography, “Life” (Little Brown), estimating that he sleeps on average twice a week. The Rolling Stones guitarist has built a well-deserved reputation for indestructibility in those three lifetimes, surviving drug addiction, legal shakedowns, life-threatening accidents, a parade of unsavory companions and unstable lovers, and his own reckless nature. Along the way he cowrote some of the greatest songs in rock history and created an archetype of cool that seems only to expand with the years. In a culture awash with impermanence, the guitarist with the skull ring and the half-cocked smile endures as a symbol of outlaw integrity.

    Underpinning it all is a devotion to music, and an innate musicality as a guitarist, songwriter and band leader that make all the rest seem like a series of distractions. For what really matters about Richards is the sound of those records he created with the Stones at their best, and this book unpacks the secrets of that quest with a passion as searing as the guitar solo on “Sympathy for the Devil” or the ringing, distorted riff that ushers in “Gimme Shelter.”

3 stars (out of 4)

Albums by aging stars pondering their mortality have become a cottage industry since Johnny Cash started working with producer Rick Rubin in the ‘90s. Since then, everyone from Gil Scott-Heron to Tom Jones has been making back-to-basics albums that deal at least peripherally with life’s long, final fade.

Buddy Guy, no stranger to songs dealing with chilling realities, addresses his 74 years with a mixture of drama and bravado on “Living Proof” (Silvertone) aided by producer, drummer and co-songwriter Tom Hambridge. Loosely tracing Guy’s life story from his boyhood on a Louisiana sharecropping farm to his current status as a septuagenarian blues icon, the album is free of the guest stars that have occasionally diluted the artist’s past efforts. The exceptions are cameos by Carlos Santana and B.B. King, with whom Guy sings an affectionate, low-key duet.

The production is a bit slick, the Chicago-style blues vamps fairly predictable. But Guy is still a menacing guitarist. On “74 Years Young,” he starts out acoustic, almost muted, as the singer measures how much time he’s got left. Then, about 90 seconds in, he cuts loose on electric guitar, not so much a solo as a bazooka blast of clustered notes. “Thank Me Someday,” “On the Road” and “Too Soon” all give Guy plenty of room to make the ground shake, and “Skanky” dispenses with vocals altogether so that Guy can make his ax swoop. At his best, Guy’s lust for violence and distortion has more in common with the late free-jazz master Sonny Sharrock or Sonic Youth than it does classic blues. Amid the album’s stolid, sometimes plodding traditionalism, Guy’s shrapnel-tossing tone brings some much-needed tension and surprise. 

greg@gregkot.com

In 1987, 18-month-old Jessica McClure fell down a narrow well in Midland, Texas, and was trapped for three days before being rescued. Among the millions worldwide transfixed by the ordeal was Charlie Musselwhite, the blues-harmonica virtuoso.

The event's life-altering impact on Musselwhite inspired a song that is the title track for his latest, heavily autobiographical album, "The Well" (Alligator), among the best releases in a career that stretches back to the explosive Chicago blues scene of the '60s.

Musselwhite had been drinking excessively since he came to Chicago in 1962 looking for work after growing up in the South. By '87, he was downing as much as two quarts of alcohol a day.

 
"In the beginning drinking was fun, but as I got older, that glow I used to get never came," he says. "But If I quit drinking, I'd get sick. I'd drink to be normal. I had a glimmer of sanity in that haze of alcohol and realized I had to get off. But I didn't know how. I felt trapped."

He slowly tried to cut down, and then was pushed to the finish line by  "Baby Jessica."

"She was trapped in there with a broken arm in the dark, in a life-and-death situation she was singing nursery rhymes to herself and being brave," he says. "It made my problems seem tiny. So as a prayer to her and myself, I decided I wasn't going to drink till she got out of that well. It was like I was tricking myself, telling myself that I wasn't going to quit for good, just until she got out. It took three days to get her out, and I haven't had a drink since. Made me wonder, 'Wow, what was that all about?' Thinking about quitting proved harder to me than actually quitting."

That decision revived Musselwhite's career 23 years ago. He's now on top form, and "The Well" marks the first time in his career that he's written every song on one of his albums. Most are deeply personal, tales of nights in jail and dealing with his mother's death. On "Dig the Pain," he builds a song on a mantra he used to repeat to himself when he was in the depths of dependency.

"Suffering was an everyday fact of life," he says. "The best way for me to handle it was to say I was digging it. That took the edge off it: 'Get into it, make friends with it.' It helped me cope, even if it didn't take it away."

Musselwhite's only solace came when he'd perform.
      
"Especially for me blues is healing in itself," he says. "I always felt blues was more than just music, but an attitude, like the other side of the coin from gospel. It's your comforter when you're down, your buddy when you're up. The spirit of the music is, 'We can get through this.' If I couldn't play, I don't know what I would've done."
      
The new album also looks back on his childhood in Mississippi and Memphis and his formative experiences as a blues harmonica player in Chicago after he arrived on the South Side looking for work at age 18. He was already a blues fan, and thought he'd gone to heaven when he discovered that giants such as Muddy Waters, Little Walter and Elmore James were playing in his South Side neighborhood almost every night. As a white guy he stood out in rowdy joints like Pepper's Lounge.
      
"Guys would later say to me, 'At first we thought you were a cop or crazy,' " Musselwhite says with a laugh. "They were rough places, but I never had any problems. When people found out I was from the South, that made it cool. I was living just around the corner from Junior Wells and we'd pass each other going to the liquor store."

At first Musselwhite had no intent of playing professionally, even though he'd been playing harp since he was a child. But one night a waitress whispered in Waters' ear that the kid at the bar could play, and the blues legend invited Musselwhite on stage. After that, the young harp player started getting calls from other musicians to sit in, and developed into a formidable talent. His 1967 debut album on Vanguard, "Stand Back! Here Comes Charley Musselwhite's South Side Band," helped define the cutting edge in contemporary blues, with Musselwhite putting a Chicago accent on his rural Southern harmonica chops.
             
"I was having a lot of fun in Chicago, but there wasn't much money in it," he says. "There was so much competition and I had to work a factory job to keep paying the bills. But after the first album came out, I got a call for a month's worth of work in the San Francisco area for good money. They were playing me on underground radio out there, and I got gigs all up and down the West Coast, playing in ballrooms like the Fillmore and the Avalon instead of clubs. Out there, the blues was exotic, and the hippies were hungry for it. I took a leave from my job and never looked back."

    greg@gregkot.com

Charlie Musselwhite: 9:30 p.m. Saturday at Buddy Guy's Legends, 700 S. Wabash, $20; etix.com.