The organ part here is truly excellent.
John Mayall’s records might not have achieved the platinum success of those who passed through his band on their way to superstardom. Yet there were perks to being the band leader.
“We travelled to gigs in John’s Ford Transit and he built himself a bunk in the back of the van,” recalled Eric Clapton, who was Mayall’s guitarist in the mid-1960s. “We never stayed in a hotel so on the way back from Sheffield or Manchester, we’d all be sitting in the front on bench seats, while he’d be asleep in his bunk bed.”
Others who sat up all night on the long journeys home while Mayall slept peacefully in the back included the Rolling Stones guitarist Mick Taylor, the Fleetwood Mac trio of Peter Green, Mick Fleetwood and John McVie, Cream’s Jack Bruce and Andy Fraser of Free.
We Blues freaks owe Johnny boy a great debt…
That’s some line-up.
You can hear where Cream came from musically in that track.
Jack Bruce was the bass player in the Bluesbreakers for a time. That’s where he and Clapton met…..
A great loss. I always liked “Took the Car”, since hearing it on one of those sampler LPs in the early 1970s.
The piece Tim’s quoted illustrates how interconnected the British blues/rock scene was at the time. It was really just a bunch of mates into the blues. Living in Notting Hill in ’68 & likewise being a blues fan, inevitably one was part of the scene. They were just people you saw about. I can remember going to the 51 in Great Newport Street on Sunday afternoon & Clapton playing acoustic along with the friends I was there to see. No big thing. There really wasn’t much money in it then. People were playing the blues because they wanted to play the blues. Get on a Tube at Oxford Circus & travel 10 stops east & you entered another world where few had ever heard of them. Popular music was Motown etc
Until I pissed off in the mid 2000’s I was regularly using a couple of pubs in Belsize Park you’d regularly see members of the crowd. Still friends with some of them. Tony Ashton of Deep Purple fame used to play piano in the pub over the road if he was sober enough.
I’ve always thought there was a distinct dichotomy between groups (as they called them then) who were basically stage acts & Show Biz & this lot who were primarily musicians in it for the music. Similar to the jazz scene which it overlapped. I’s a long way from the modern scene which is largely pretty people doing dance routines & miming to a dead mic.
That’s some line-up.
If you want to listen to some interesting line-ups, the Bluesbreakers & also the Cyril Davies All Stars. Rod Stewart & Mick Jagger with Jimmy Page. I think the only way you’ll find the tracks is Torrent downloads. There’s a considerable number of pirates. Or there’s some compilation vinyl from the 70’s you might find undamaged. The record companies won’t help you. One of the people I know ( Alas likely knew. Last time we exercised dogs together he was in wheel chair) is Damian Korner, Alexis’s son. He owns the D-Ram material & there’s CDs of it. But EMI are sitting on the rights to a lot of the other stuff & refuse to release it.
My interest in the Blues came from Chris Barber the jazzman: he often invited American bluesmen to tour with him and then I’d hear a track on the wireless.
I particularly enjoyed Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee – I bought an EP of them. Nearly twenty years later I went to a concert by them. Quite droll: they obvs weren’t “on speakers” and played lots of solo pieces and scarcely any duets. Bit of a flop, really.
Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee. I think I’ve got most of what they recorded. I know what you mean by droll. There’s a sort of conversation going on between the two of them on most of their tracks.
One day I’m going to have to get round to sorting out my music. I digitalised about 500 vinyl in a months worth of dawn to .. er..dawn in the,process of fucking off. The vinyl along with my ACOS/Rega deck went to one of the best guitar session men in the UK. Hope he’s looked after the deck. Even Rega haven’t got a Series 1. They’d like one. Still haven’t got round to cleaning it up, de-popping scratching etc, separating the tracks, reformatting to MP3 & annotating. Since there’s about 120Gb of raw, reckon there’s five years work there. Maybe I’ll live that long.
Bloke in Spain,
Tony Ashton has no ‘Deep Purple fame’, other than he was in another band with Paice and Lord.