Timeless blues performances out on DVD

Sept. 16, 2003 — They barnstormed their way around Europe in the early ’60s, playing for packed houses the same music that barely got a ripple of attention in the United States. Now, two generations later, in the Congressionally-decreed “year of the blues,” music fans can witness performances by the best and brightest talents of the blues genre taking the continent by storm.



The power of the music wasn’t lost on some of the British kids who evolved into today’s rock royalty. For Jagger, Page, Richards and others, it was the embodiment of rock music’s DNA.



For eight years (1962-1970), the American Folk Blues Festival was a staple of the European concert scene. Now, almost three hours of several festival shows are available on “The American Folk Blues Festival 1962-1966 (Vols. 1 and 2),” two smartly packaged, stunningly sharp DVD releases of previously unseen performances (a companion CD with highlights of the performances is also available).



These treasure troves show veteran players that clearly have their mojos fully operational: Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Memphis Slim, Big Mama Thornton, John Lee Hooker, Victoria Spivey and others are seen in their prime.



Witness Otis Rush’s smoldering 1966 rendition of “I Can’t Quit You Baby,” laying down the template for the Led Zeppelin version that followed three years later; Hooker covering his “Hobo Blues” with a simple but undeniable power; Mississippi Fred McDowell’s haunting “Going Down to the River”; Texas guitarist Lightnin’ Hopkins’ blistering cover of “Mojo Hand”; or the gale-force presence of Howlin’ Wolf on three songs backed by the even-then-legendary Willie Dixon.



They’re players we were lucky to have; we’re just as fortunate to get the performances themselves. The black-and-white videotapes from the shows, recorded for German television station Sudwestfunk, were believed to be lost for decades, though bootleg versions were said to have circulated in Europe for years. That’s until about 2000, when Reelin’ in the Years Productions, a San Diego music-video licensing firm, got the rights to the Sudwestfunk clips.



From staged to onstage

What’s striking about these performances is the ensemble style of their presentation. Not only do the players introduce each other with unscripted comments; they also play as backup musicians for each other — Junior Wells gets help from Rush on “Hoodoo Man Blues”; Otis Spann and Dixon support Williamson on “Nine Below Zero” — in a collaborative effort refreshingly free of prima donnas. Then there’s the not-quite documentary approach taken by the filmmakers, chief among them Michael Ballhaus, the cinematographer who went on to work with such top directors as James L. Brooks (“Broadcast News”), Mike Nichols (“Working Girl”) and Martin Scorsese (“Goodfellas,” “Gangs of New York”), among others.



The earliest performances are basically set pieces, with the musicians appearing against stagy, theatrical backdrops meant to represent life in the American South — a European attempt to contextualize this indigenous American music. “Every year they tried a different approach,” said John McDermott, author and one of the compilation producers. “In the early period, the producers were hungry to tell a story, and they went to great efforts building sets and having spoken introductions.”



These gave way to straight-up concert footage, with the interplay between performer and audience left intact. McDermott said that in the later performances (1964-66), the filmmakers better “realized the power of the music — that, from a standpoint of articulation, nothing spoke more strongly and more clearly than the music itself.” It’s that music that these German audiences react to as they sit in rapt attention, spellbound or confused, clearly not quite sure what to make of it all, but willing to listen.



Rock and roll DNA

For some of the British kids who evolved into today’s rock royalty, what to make of it was a chance to witness the DNA of rock music itself. The power of the music wasn’t lost on Jimmy Page; the Rolling Stones’ Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Brian Jones (who rode together in a panel truck to get to one of the shows), or former Stone Bill Wyman (who wrote the foreword of the commentary enclosed with each compilation disc).



It’s one of the enduring ironies of popular culture that the blues — the music that figures so centrally in the very existence of rock — is so consistently ignored by the buying public. Sales of blues records have declined in recent years to under 4 percent of total recorded-music sales, according to 2001 data from the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry.



But for McDermott, the sales of blues isn’t necessarily an indicator of its influence in today’s music.



“The blues was always counterculture music,” McDermott said in an interview. “Even in the blues from the ’60s, at the height of the blues era, when these guys came back from Europe, it never was at the level where an artist like Stevie Ray [Vaughan] could play stadiums and arenas. Muddy Waters played clubs and theaters. It’s not always about the sales per se.”



“The original artists, I think, laid the groundwork for the undercurrent of what’s become rock and roll. A number of people are doing blues in an interesting way, taking it into the future,” McDermott said. “The language, the flavor, the party element of the blues has been taken up by hip hop.”



It's official: 2003 is the Year of the Blues



Welcome abroad, strangers at home

Another important aspect of these performances is where and when they’re mostly taking place. There’s no ducking the irony of the positive reception to these stars in a concert hall on a continent thousands of miles from their racially troubled native land, where segregation and discrimination were constants, and the Voting Rights Act hadn’t even come to pass.



“Considering the lives they had in the States and the hardships they faced in the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s, to come over to Europe and be treated like kings had to be a special thing,” McDermott observed. For sure, American reception to this music was slow in coming: it wasn’t until May 1965, for example, (when Howlin’ Wolf appeared on ABC’s “Shindig” show) that a blues star showed up on prime-time TV in the United States — and only then at the insistence of the show’s topline guests, the Rolling Stones.



The “American Folk Blues Festival” series may be similarly dissed by much of the modern buying public; the collections won’t likely go down well with those whose sensibilities run to Britney’s latest or 50 Cent’s loudest. But in all the important ways, today’s music comes from this wellspring of audible, visible history.



“All we did,” a self-effacing McDermott said, “is bring this to people — not interpret it or get in the way, but to present it as it was.” Fans of blues — fans of modern American music in general — can be thankful for that.