As a kid I went through long stretches where I bought records that I understood to be important to the development of rock music; so, inevitably, I had a protracted blues phase. There was something puzzling about this music, though, a discord between what I read and what I heard. In print I gathered that blues was fundamentally social; I was always reading something about the big names of the genre getting their start playing fish-fries, juke joints, and rent parties. From these descriptions blues sounded like party music designed to get people dancing, but the music I was hearing was for the most part slow, brooding, and personal, often performed by a single guitar and voice. Even with, say, Muddy Waters' full band and a faster tempo, I still couldn't imagine dancing to 12-bar. What kind of parties were we talking about?
Somewhere along the line I acquired an album by Mississippi Fred McDowell called Somebody Keeps Calling Me, and, hearing "Shake 'Em on Down" and "Drop Down Mama" it all made sense. McDowell's guitar playing on these songs was all about rhythm, a distinctive syncopated chug that emphasized the offbeats and often stayed on a single chord. The structure seemed so much more open and inspired movement. This blues sounded like a party. Up near McDowell in the Mississippi hill country lived a man 22 years his junior named R.L. Burnside who heard his elder play and ultimately put his own spin on the stomping monochord vamp.
Burnside recorded his share of solo acoustic 12-bar, but he'll be remembered for driving electric blues. He died recently. In the last 10 years of his life he enjoyed a modest amount of fame in the indie world due largely to this record, a 1996 collaboration with the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion originally released on Matador. Burnside had already toured with the Blues Explosion by this point. When Spencer got the idea to cut a record, the band dispatched to an isolated spot in rural Mississippi with nothing but their equipment and what one imagines was a vast amount of booze. It's hard to imagine a more masculine scene: A half-dozen guys in a hunting cabin, drinking whiskey, cursing a blue streak, talking about women, and playing the kind of raunchy blues where "I'd rather see you dead than with another man" is as close as one gets to "I love you."
No question A Ass Pocket of Whiskey has a fair amount of contextual baggage. Just the idea, a bunch of privileged indie rockers in the presence of a senior citizen performer from a different universe. So much opportunity for condescension and general bad faith. Even the sound of Spencer's voice, the man forever burdened by his background as a semiotics student at Brown, yelping words of encouragement every few bars ("Aw, yeah! R.L.! Snake drive!"). It's going to bug some people.
Me, I think it works. More than anything Spencer's shouts remind me of Johnny Winter on Muddy Waters' comeback album Hard Again, the sound of an admirer in the presence of a hero, rallying him to hit the heights that originally brought the followers into his orbit. He knows he sounds like a dork. These guys, all of them, are having a ball. The band is loose but swings, the production is appropriately rough and leaking like a sieve, and the song selection draws from Burnside favorites. Listen to this take on "Shake 'Em on Down" and compare it to those on other Burnside records. The menace of the chords and behind-the-beat looseness of the drums can't be touched. That the Blues Explosion combed the entire Lower East Side in search of the perfect guitar/amp interface pays off. This record sounds like a blues album should.
The entire record is filled with funky rhythms, even the weird spoken story-songs like "The Criminal Inside Me" and "Tojo Told Hitler" where the Blues Explosion comps while Burnside talks shit. It all feels thrown together, with tracks that begin mid-song and sudden exclamations that send the recording deep into the red. In this context the offhand nature is a plus. A Ass Pocket of Whiskey is smart and funny and full of life. Fine American music we can all be proud of, now back on Fat Possum where it belongs and where the final chapter of R.L. Burnside's life began.
