Hindu Love Gods

Hindu Love Gods was a side project of REM members, without Michael Stipe, with Warren Zevon as lead singer on the eponymous album released in 1990, with mostly blues covers and Prince’s “Raspberry Beret,” Georgia Satellites’ “Battleship Chains“, “I’m a One-Woman Man” and Woody Guthrie’s “Vigilante Man” as the non-blues cuts.

According to the official legend these tracks were cut in a single night during the sessions for a Warren Zevon album on which the REM guys were playing, and were not intended for release, though one wonders why the songs were recorded so well in the first place if there was no intention to release.

Frankly, I have never cared much for REM because their jangly style of indie pop rock just did not do it for me and I have never understood how REM got to be big, important and significant. The only REM album I’ve ever liked, is Monster (1994) and that is because it sounds like the kind of mid-Sixties garage band punk I am fond of.

The Hindu Love Gods (1990) record came in a rough, industrial looking cardboard sleeve, as if it were some bootleg. This must obviously have been intentional, given the story of the drunken recording session that was not meant for public consumption. I cannot even remember whether the band members were identified anywhere on the cover. I bought it at budget price, probably from Ragtime Records in the Golden Acre of Cape Town, because the band name rang a vague bell (I would have read a review of the album in one of the UK pop monthlies I was buying at the time) and because of the recognisable blues tunes of the track listing.

Allegedly the blues are in the air Americans breathe and is supposed to live somewhere in the very heart and soul of American musicians whether they play the music or not. I would never have thought of the REM guys or Warren Zevon to have had any background in blues and perhaps they learnt the songs on the night they recorded them, but some of these songs are such standards that I would think the guys could well have learnt to play the. Long before. REM was formed in Athens, Georgia, in die heart of the South where blues come from and this must be where they at least heard, or had an opportunity to hear, blues.

The band did not try to recreate an authentic blues band vibe. They were having fun and turned up the amps and rocked out, with the blues tropes as the cornerstones. Someone must’ve had a fondness for the music of Prince, whose “Raspberry Beret” was a mid-Eighties hit for him from the psychedelic experimentation era of Around The World In A Day. The Georgia Satellites was a good, old-fashioned Southern rock and roll band that made a number of albums of good time, frat party rock and roll.

The album opens with two Robert Johnson tunes, although firs cut “Walking Blues” is also associated with Muddy Waters whose “Mannish Boy” is a highlight of this set. The guys do Albert King’s “Crosscut Saw,” and “Wang Dang Doodle”, which is associated with Howlin’ Wolf. The playing is tough and Zevon growls the blues with the appropriate menace without trying to sound too black. I would also never thought that Peter Buck could play like this, with a really vicious attack at times, without aping any recognisable blues guitar style. He mainly sticks to sharp rhythm guitar

“Junko Partner” is an old New Orleans piano blues I associate, in different versions, with Jelly Roll Morton and Champion Jack Dupree, and now also Hugh Laurie, and here this piece of New Orleans braggadocio is performed with a swaggering insouciance that probably makes it the centre point of the whole album. This is the tune I would have put out as the potential hit single off the album.

Both “Raspberry Beret” and “Battleship Chains” are taken at a fast, joyous lick that suits two frat party anthems. One can visualize the Hindu Love Gods, in Pacific Northwest punk finery, being filmed as the house band at some  dingy dive in a Sixties teen exploitation movie, knocking out cover versions like these for the dancing pleasure of a drunk college crowd.

Maybe that is the high concept of the album: the boys wanted to make a record in the style of the punk forebears who were inspired by the Rolling Stones and Yardbirds and who played a mixture of straightforward rock and roll and rocked up blues with a psychedelic twist. The Hindu Love Gods could have been a long lost combo from Portland, Oregon who were major movers on their local hometown circuit, managed to get out this one record and never meant diddley squat in the rest of the world.

This record is good fun and rocks like a Tasmanian devil.

Joe Bonamassa

From Wikipedia:

Unlike other successful blues-rock guitarists, Bonamassa's influences are British and Irish blues acts, rather than American artists. Comparing the music in the United States to the "European" versions of the blues, Bonamassa found the English blues - fostered by the Jeff Beck Group, Eric Clapton and Irish blues player Rory Gallagher - to be far more interesting to him than the original Delta blues players. In an interview in Guitarist magazine (issue 265), he cited the three albums that had the biggest influence on his playing: John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers with Eric Clapton (the Beano album), Rory Gallagher's Irish Tour and Goodbye by Cream. He also stated Stevie Ray Vaughan's Texas Flood was a big influence at a young age. He also listed the early blues playing of Jethro Tull as one of his influences, putting both Martin Barre and Mick Abrahams as important musicians to him. His first solo album was named after and includes a cover version of Jethro Tull's "A New Day Yesterday" from their album Stand Up.

I keep hearing about Joe Bonamassa as the leader of the current pack of young blues rock musicians and seeing his albums, without actually being interested enoug to buy any of it. Without hearing a note of what he played I already had the idea, from the sources of praise and his looks, that he would be playing a kind of blues that would be like Aerosmith playing bues, with more of a hard rock edge to it than actual  blues. The music could technically be classified as blues for reason of the chord progressions and scales on which it is based, but would otherwise have little in common with the kind of blues I prefer listening to. The bottom line was that I strongly suspected that I would not care for the music of Joe Bonamassa.

This doubting preconception was confirmed when I watched some YouTube clips of Bonamassa performances. There is also a documentary about a series of shows he played in London with the astonishing concept of playing with different bands in different contexts, from trio to horndriven big band to solo performances, over a relativley short period to showcase his influences and ability to take on various aspects of blues rock.

Bonamassa was a child prodigy who met B B King when he was a boy and has been a hard worker in the genre ever since.  That is the key for me to what Joe Bonamassa is doing today. He is a true journeyman musician who is technically probably gifted and certainly works hard, but has no spark of brillliance or real innovation. Hard work and dedication to the craft, and possibly being a nice guy, are the bases of his success and not any kind of genius. Bonamassa is likely to have a long and commercially successful career yet one day fade from the scnee without a legacy of classic songs that will remain in the blues canon for centuries. He is the kind of guy who plays the standards, and perhaps reinterprets them; he is not the guy to write standards.

The worst part is that Bonamasa even looks like an accountant who’s learnt to play the guitar, met some heavy friends along the way and likes jamming with them in his musician’s man cave on a weekend. The triumph of the technocrat: interminable, musically complex guitar solos without a spark of emotion or soul. This is not the mark of a genius, just of someone who has applied himself to his craft.  This devotion to proficincy may give the man a long career and lead to peer approval and music industry honours as he gets older and yet  Joe Bonamassa’s legacy will not includea single  essentiak, classic record or performance. His legacey will be simply more proficient guitarists like himself.

Blind Faith plays Hyde Park 1969

The brief lifespan of Blind Faith was, in modern parlance, an epic fail. The band was put together as the first supergroup of rock musicians who’d been successful in other bands, who got together because they liked to play together and were offered enough money to embark on the project.

Blind Faith played its first gig as a free concert in Hyde Park, released one album (with a controversial cover) and then fell apart after its one and only American tour.

One explanation for the failure was that the four individuals were not childhood friends but professionals who’d joined up for a big money gig and when the gig turned sour they had no reason to stick together. The other explanation was that Eric Clapton, as the biggest “name” musician in the group, wanted to distance himself from the excesses of Cream, to just play songs of normal length, while the audiences, especially in the USA, wanted him to recycle Cream and were not interested in listening to, and getting to know, the new material.

Ginger Baker and Eric Clapton were fresh out of Cream, but both had a longer pedigree than that, Stevie Winwood had been a star in the Spencer Davis Group and Traffic, and Ric Grech came from Family. I’ve always been curious how Grech got this gig because Family, although possibly successful, had nothing like the reputation of the bands his new band mates had been with.

Blind Faith was supposed to be a democratic unit, a genuine synergistic group, rather than a quartet of genius musicians, and a band where songs would be more important than individual instrumental proficiency. The band would play as an ensemble and not as four soloing virtuosos.

The movie of the Hyde Park show is filmed and put together a little like the famous Rolling Stones free concert at the same venue after the death of Brian Jones, with some scene setting footage and a brief biography of the previous career of each band member to emphasise the supergroup nature of the ensemble. The scenes of the hipsters and scene makers of “swinging London” are almost quaintly curious now, evidence of a bubble of hipness that existed for and was perpetuated by the people who were in it and who generally look as if they are play acting in their self conscious finery and cool attitudes.  It is almost ridiculous.

The band, performing for an audience in excess of 100 000 people, plays all the tracks from the debut album plus the Rolling Stones’ “Under My Thumb” a blues announced as “I’d Rather see You Sleeping In The Ground” and a Steve Winwood composition “Means To An End,” that is not on the debut album.

Grech, Baker and Winwood line up at the front of the stage and Clapton stands behind Baker, almost out of the line of sight of the audience, obviously as part of his plan to be a member of the band and not the star guitarist front man. 

Clapton plays an odd hybrid guitar that has a Telecaster body and a Stratocaster neck. His guitar tone, sound and attack is nothing like that heard in his previous bands. For the first time we hear the Clapton guitar sound and more laid back approach to playing that because his trademark from the Seventies onward. He was no longer playing the overdriven Les Paul with its “woman tone” and powerful, intricate and fast solos. From Blind Faith onwards Clapton plays mostly a Stratocaster, with its brighter, cleaner tone and he plays slower and more thoughtfully. For this reason alone, plus Winwood’s keyboards, Blind Faith sounds nothing like Cream. Blind Faith is a soulful band with a loose, bluesy swinging sound. Even Ginger Baker plays more conservatively and conventionally than he did in Cream. Blind Faith certainly do sound like a band that wants to sound like a combo of musicians concentrating on making the songs shine and not being into outrageous virtuosity for the sake of it.

The performance is low key throughout, perhaps because the band had not yet read tested their material and were careful to do well and perhaps a tad nervous to make their debut in front of such a huge crowd. In a way I was reminded of the Cream reunion of 2005 where even that version of Cream no longer had the power and fire of the young band. Clapton and Winwood have also gotten together a few years later to play a series of gigs, similar to the Cream reunion shows, probably to remind us all of the lost opportunities of Blind Faith. I’ve not bothered to listen to that stuff. The two men might have remained mates throughout their careers but this move totally smacked of commercial possibilities rather than a genuine desire for another taste of the old, brief magic. If I did not care much for most of Clapton’s output during the Eighties, I positively disliked Winwood’s solo career.

It was only somewhere in the late Nineties that I first heard the Blind Faith (1969) album in its entirety. When Chris Prior still rules the late night airwaves with Radio 5 he often played songs from the album, like “Sea of Joy” and “Can’t Find My Home” and I knew Clapton’s version of “Presence of the Lord” from the Timepieces: Live in the Seventies album quite well. This meant that I was well acquainted with half of the 6 tracks on the album, and over time I might have heard “Well Alright” and “Had To Cry Today” at least once each. It was only the final track, the long Ginger Baker composed jam “Do What You Like” that was completely new to me.

The first impression of the album is that at least 5 of the 6 tunes are strong compositions played with a good deal of brio and are powerful in their own right. “Sea of Joy” even has a catchy Cream-derived riff and both “Can’t Find My Way Home” and “Presence of the Lord” are gospel rock at its best and deserved classics. “Do What You Want To Do” is a real overlong drag of a jam, thankfully positioned at the end of the album so that one can listen to all the good stuff first and then switch off, and illustrates why Baker got so few writing credits with Cream.

It is perhaps a good thing that Blind Faith released only this one studio album. That record and Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs (1970) represent two once-off recording peaks in Clapton’s career, that otherwise is worthy but with few highlights between 461 Ocean Boulevard and From The Cradle.

Ginger Baker followed an eclectic career path after Blind Faith, Winwood revived Traffic, and then followed a adult pop career of little merit and Ric Grech played with Baker in Airforce, also joined the new Traffic and then essentially followed a career as studio musician and sideman until his death in 1990 at the age of 43.

Blind Faith is used as an example of how greed motivated the construction of a group that could not withstand the commercial, and other, pressures, made up of mature musicians who had no great reason to play together once the going got unnecessarily tough. That is sad. They recorded a corker of a debut album. That is good. We can even watch the video of that first gig to get some kind of understanding of what the fuss was all about. That is excellent.