CANNED HEAT: FUTURE BLUES (1970)
1) Sugar Bee; 2) Shake It And
Break It; 3) That's All Right, Mama; 4) My Time Ain't Long; 5) Skat; 6) Let's
Work Together; 7) London Blues; 8) So Sad (The World's In A Tangle); 9) Future
Blues.
The first significant change to affect the band
was the departure of Henry Vestine, who apparently had a falling out with
Larry Taylor and, for that reason, missed the chance to appear at Woodstock.
His replacement was Harvey Mandel, "The Snake", who had previously
made his name by appearing on Charley Musselwhite's Stand Back! album in 1966 and, for a few years, enjoyed the fame of
one of America's best-kept secrets in the sphere of wonder guitar playing (for
that matter, he was also the only member of the band in the Woodstock movie who
did not look like a bum picked fresh
off the street — probably didn't have enough time to assimilate). And while I
would not necessarily call Harvey a better player than Henry, one thing's for
sure: a bit of fresh blood, for a short while at least, helped get the band on
the right track, and produce an album that was at least more... interesting than the steamless Hallelujah.
Although they do not reintroduce any 40-minute
jams here, they get close enough with ʽSo Sad (The World's In A Tangle)ʼ, a
7-minute blues boogie that is not
ʽBoogie Chillenʼ, but has the same grim, kill-'em-all attitude. Lyrically, they
are concerned with the sad state of the modern world, so thoroughly deprived of
brotherly love and stuff (this was, after all, recorded already in the wake of
Altamont rather than Woodstock), but essentially, the words are just a front
for two excellent solos — I'd imagine the first one, consisting of almost nothing
but wobbling arpeggios, like a musical equivalent of an unexperienced
tight-rope walker, is played by Wilson (who was never a technically endowed
lead guitarist, but would always try out bizarre sound combinations when
soloing), and then the second one (and the third one after the last verse) is
Mandel, culminating in a very different set of distorted psychedelic
arpeggios, very different from your
average blues soloing. The song is a guitar lover's paradise, far more
interesting than the generic 12-bar ʽLondon Bluesʼ, although that one, too, has
some incendiary Mandel solos and an always welcome falsetto vocal from Wilson
(the lyrics are total tripe, though, probably improvised on the spot, about some
unhappy experiences the band had in London Town).
The short songs, this time around, tend to be
diverse and marginally inventive or at least gimmicky: ʽShake It And Break Itʼ
is a complete reconstruction of the old Charley Patton tune in the form of
(another) light boogie, but preserving the playfulness of the original (and
it's a good thing that they didn't have The Bear singing on it to crash it to
the ground); ʽSkatʼ, with Dr. John-arranged horns, is a bit of silly New
Orleanian fun with Wilson trying himself in the role of Ella Fitzgerald
(somehow, it's endearing rather than embarrassing); Wilbert Harrison's ʽLet's
Work Togetherʼ (the same song that is otherwise known as ʽLet's Stick
Togetherʼ, but with a different set of lyrics) makes great use of «distorted
woman tone» from Mandel and is precisely
the kind of material that The Bear was born to sing (half-drunk rousing anthems);
and the guitar overdubs on ʽMy Time Ain't Longʼ sound like a pack of ghosts
looking for fresh meat, because, well, his time ain't long and all that.
There's not a
lot of interesting stuff going here, but you can clearly see the
rejuvenated band trying to make almost every single number sound slightly more interesting than just
playing it by the book — which is why this is Future Blues, after all: even the title track attempts to be inventive
by playing around with a stop-and-start structure. It doesn't really work
(there's no point in cutting off the rhythm section after each line, because
there's no true suspense in that), but it's still better than nothing. And when
it does work, it is far more
satisfying than the technically more expert, but substantially much less
interesting modern school of electric blues that, for the most part, does not
care about innovation and development at all. So, thumbs up.
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