Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues

by Peter Guralnick

  “We were taken into the depths of Chicago, and we went to record at the Chess studios—J.T. Brown, Willie Dixon, Buddy Guy, Shakey Horton were there. It was tike living out the wildest fantasies you could possibly want—we were all thrilled. To play their music in the studios where they recorded those songs … It could have gone horribly wrong [but] truly didn’t. There was a moment where there was a testing—the [Chess artists] were blown away by how this little bunch of English kids could sound so … it was so heartfelt by us bunch. J.T. Brown turned around and said, ‘That was good.’“—Mick Fleetwood

  Van came in, everyone said, “Van is very eccentric. He could come in and decide he doesn’t like this and leave.” I said, “Well, that’s entirely his prerogative. What I’m going to do is just rehearse the band for an hour.” So we played the blues for an hour and got it down, and it’s sounding gorgeous. Van walked in during the middle of one of the takes and said, “What key is this in? Is there a guitar?” He just wanted to get straight in and play. He was only there for a couple of hours. He went straight in, did those numbers, did the interview for the film, and left. He liked the vibe.

  I personally have always loved listening to musicians working and discussing music together. The way to identify great musicians is if you put an album on, they’ll all respond at the same moment to something that someone who doesn’t understand won’t even hear; if it’ll just be some little turnaround, and they all go, “Ahhh!” And they’ll do it together, it will be an entirely collective move. And this was like putting those musicians together who would all make the same collective response. It was a joy.

  I operated one camera during the jam session. I’m sometimes tough on other cameramen who don’t have the nerve, or actually, really don’t have the authority, to get that close to Van Morrison or Tom Jones. Because I’m in there and I’m directing it, I think they tolerate me more, so I can get right in their face. Sometimes the only way to film musicians is to get that close. I do feel that sometimes, cameramen or camerawomen are polite, and they want to stay back, and you get a polite wide shot. But sometimes you just want to get right in. I want to see exactly what their hands are doing and not necessarily with a telephoto lens. I want to get the sense of being somehow part of what’s going on.

  I make big-budget films, and I make very small independent films. I make documentaries, I take photographs, I make recordings, and I am obsessed with recording and documenting and capturing moments that I think are special. After all this time, I think that my eye has developed in a way that is individual enough for me to trust it now. If I see something, I don’t need someone else to endorse it; I kind of go, Let’s get that. I follow my own instinct. When I first started, I often got talked out of certain things, and I regret many instances of that.

  Doing this documentary made me realize that there is so much music out there. I wanted to go to New York and just sit with Elvin Jones for a weekend and watch him play the drums and talk about drumming and how he changed the world as a drummer. Years ago I made a list of people whom I wanted to interview—and it included people who have now departed, like Dizzy Gillespie, but there are still a lot of them on that list—and just have them play music in that kind of environment where you are not forcing it and it does not have to be an event; it’s an intimate thing, pretty much like Wim Wenders did with Buena Vista Social Club.

  It surprised me how touching this documentary turned out to be. Because I was in postproduction on one film and preproduction on another, and so I was running to these venues to film interviews without any notes—but the notes were already in my head. I knew what I wanted, so each time it was like a one-to two-hour conversation, in and out. I knew the questions I wanted to ask, and I knew—not the answers, because that would have been presumptuous—but I knew enough about the musicians and I felt enough of an intimate knowledge of them to lead them into the area where I thought they would be most interesting. In my head, I had this sort of sense of how this patchwork would cut together. What I was not prepared for was just how very incredibly proud I felt of this group of British guys who had a ball and loved what they were doing. It was summed up in a way by what Eric Clapton said: It was almost like his mission to respect this music, not to adulterate it, not to convert it into heavy metal or something like that, but to really play it in an original way, at the same time retaining a deep respect for where it came from, and also talking about where it came from and giving the credit straight back to the source, which was what we consider to be a sacred group of black musicians who we felt were unsung heroes. And there is a kind of unselfishness and a dedication about that, when I saw the whole thing cut together for the first time, I was actually deeply moved by it. And it was very gratifying having someone of iconic status, like B.B. King, saying, “Thank you, because if it hadn’t been for you guys, I don’t think I would have been here talking to you today,” or words to that effect. I found that so moving. And therefore I think the film is very worthwhile. I am really proud of it. It was worth making. I think it was valid to make it, and I am glad I did it.

  Tom Jones and Jeff Beck jamming at Abbey Road studios

  —Mike Figgis

  A CONVERSATION WITH ERIC CLAPTON [1990] BY PETER GURALNICK

  I don’t think I’d even heard of Robert Johnson when I found the record; it was probably just fresh out. I was around fifteen or sixteen, and it was a real shock that there was something that powerful. A friend of mine gave it to me, a very dear friend who was at school with me, and we were both avid blues collectors. This guy always seemed to be—I don’t know why—one step ahead. You know, it was almost like something he did to spite me, as if whatever I was into, he would come up with something sharper. And he came up to me and gave me this record and said, “See if you can learn some of this.” You know? I played it, and it really shook me up, because it had—it didn’t seem to be concerned with appeal at all. It was like all the music I’d heard up until that time seemed to be structured in a way for recording. What struck me about Robert Johnson’s record was it seemed as if he wasn’t playing for an audience. It didn’t obey the rules of time or harmony or anything. It all led me to believe that here was a guy who really didn’t want to play for people at all, that his thing was so unbearable for him to have to live with that he was almost, like, ashamed of it, you know. This was an image, really, that I was very, very keen to hang on to.

  What was it about Robert Johnson that initially drew you in? Was it the lyrics, the music … ?

  I was very much of a working-class kid when that [Robert Johnson] record was around. But it was as if there was some kind of radar that … It’s far too magical to be put down as pure chance somehow. Why would it mean so much to me, or for someone like Keith Richards, to hear that in England of all places? Why didn’t we grow up listening to European music or English music?

  Why did black American blues get through to me? I don’t know…

  Tell me about the first time you met the blues.

  I think it was Sonny Boy Williamson at this blues festival they had once a year in England, around ‘63. Or Memphis Slim. The first guy I saw play that way live was Matt “Guitar” Murphy when he was with Memphis Slim. I ventured to talk to him after the show. This was at the Marquee Club. And he disappointed me, because he said that he didn’t care about the blues, he was just doing this for the bread. He really considered himself a jazz musician. What a kind of wake-up that was! But, you see, I’d already selected my heroes at that point, and the guys that were coming over weren’t necessarily my heroes. My heroes were Muddy and Little Walter. The first person I saw who was my hero was Little Walter. Somehow or another he’d got himself into a tour of England on his own. I don’t know how the hell that happened, because he was pretty hard to deal with, but I loved him. I mean, I saw him play with a pickup band at the Marquee Club, and every number he would start and stop and tell them it was all wrong, and he’d start it again. It was sheer chaos. And the promoter of the club was saying, “Ahh
h, what did I get involved in here? This guy is drunk. He’s drinking two bottles of rum a day.” To me it was pure magic, just the sound that came out—I mean, he could not not play. You know what I mean? He was very reticent to get into anything for very long, but whenever it happened, even if it was just, like, for thirty seconds that he’d blow, it was heaven for me. And I just thought, Well, these guys can’t—they don’t understand. This is what it is; you take the rough with the smooth. You’re lucky to have this guy here. You’re lucky he’s alive and that he condescends to play for you. No way I could complain about that. No way. I thought it was magic.

  What was the blues scene like in London at that time?

  I was a student in Kingston, which is just on the outskirts of London, so I would go into London and bum around a lot when I was in my late teens. There was Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies and, of course, later the Stones. I found it very, very exciting. Except that Alexis was a little jazz-oriented, he was into a Cannon ball Adderley kind of thing now and then instrumentally, and he wasn’t a great singer, but he would do great material. You see, the thing to me, it was like the simplicity of the blues was almost impossible for anyone to master. So they would—even if they were playing [the] blues, they would lean toward the jazz side of things to give it some respectability. The only person on the scene then who was playing blues fairly straight, and even then with a little jazz, was John Mayall. Which is what attracted me to John, you know. He was strictly a bluesman.

  What about yourself? As you started playing professionally, did you have any doubts about the authenticity of your own playing, about your own ability to play the music?

  Not at all. In fact, because of the isolationist point of view of it being in England, I was actually very dogmatic, and I considered myself a kind of bearer of the flame, you know. I was very proud of what I was doing. I didn’t have any self-doubts at all.

  What about the racial issue?

  I think my ego made me regard it as being all right in my case, but not all right in anybody else’s. Do you know what I mean? So that I didn’t really like any other white guy’s playing. Except for mine.

  For some reason, I believed that I had the kind of hidden key.

  And you had no hesitation about playing a song by Otis Rush, say, one of your idols?

  No, I would just play it. We were playing “All Your Loving” then. What I was doing, even at that stage, was taking the bare bones of what Otis Rush was doing, or Buddy Guy was doing, or B.B. King or Freddie King, and then playing my way. For instance, “Hideaway” isn’t anything like Freddie King’s version, really. I had the confidence to play my version even then, and when I did, and when I got a reaction, I knew I was doing the right thing.

  Was this challenged at ail when you played with guys like Sonny Boy Williamson?

  Yeah, of course. I mean, then you had to kind of own up. Especially with Sonny Boy. I was with the Yardbirds, and we were becoming more of a pop band at the time that he came along. And you could see that he didn’t think much of us at all. He made us very aware of the fact of our shortcomings.

  How did you respond to that?

  I did my best and tried to play the way that I thought he would like. And on certain occasions he did seem to sort of approve. You know, begrudgingly. I found out later that he wasn’t really one to give encouragement. He got the best out of you by being pretty aggressive.

  Did this at all challenge your romance with the blues?

  Not at all. No. Because I considered him to be right. And us wrong. You see, I knew his songs, I had heard them, but at that point in time it hadn’t occurred to me that to know a song was different to being familiar with it. I thought it would be in a key, and it would have a tempo—I didn’t realize that the detail was important. It didn’t occur to me that there would be strict adherence to a guitar line, to an intro, to a solo. And that’s what I learnt very quickly

  Eric Clapton and Howlin’ Wolf recording 1971’s The London Sessions

  with him. Because he didn’t just want to count it off. That’s what really shook me up—because I thought we could get away with just busking it, and he wasn’t at all happy with that. We would rehearse, but still, even then, we were nowhere near getting it right to his satisfaction. And it was a little bit panic-making, but at the end of the day, when we got onstage, it was different. In rehearsals he’d be really mean, and no matter what you did, you could never please him. But onstage, then he would forget, because he was dealing with the audience and he wouldn’t be so concerned with what you were playing. Given the situation that I was in—a band of musicians who were less well equipped to deal with it—I felt that it was my responsibility to bridge the gap between him and the band. I was the liaison. And what it did, in a way, was to strengthen my belief that that’s where my root was. Which happened later with Muddy and all the other great bluesmen I played along with. They rekindled my fire.

  It was an education in the blues.

  Very rapid. The one other time that really shook me up was playing with Howlin’ Wolf. But I could see that I was better equipped than anyone else, in that sense again. And it gave me a sense of pride in myself, and in my knowledge of the genre, that I could deal with it better than, say, Ringo, who decided on the first night he was never going back in the studio with anybody like Howlin’ Wolf. Because Howlin’ Wolf, on the first night he was just so miserable and so scathing to everyone—because we were going to approach it from a fairly ad-lib point of view. His attitude was the same as Sonny Boy’s. You know, like, We’re going to do “Little Red Rooster,” and it goes like this. And it doesn’t go like anything you think it goes like. And he was tough and very aggressive, and a certain number of the guys in the studio were just too shook up to come back the next day. And I was pretty shook up, too. It scared me. You see, I was already going along a different path. I was a rock musician. And it’s not that I’d left my blues roots behind; it’s just that I’d forgotten a lot of the ways things went. And to get it all back in the space of an evening is no easy job. But I spoke to the [album’s] producer from Chicago [Norman Dayron], and he said, “Well, come back tomorrow. It’ll be all right.” And I did, and it was better. But Ringo didn’t come back. He didn’t see the point. It wasn’t that much of an issue for him. But I wanted to get it right. I really did. You see, it introduced me to the reality of playing. Because up until then, it had always been a bit of a fantasy you know, listening to the records and harboring a sense of belonging to it. Which no one else could really shake until I met the real guys, and then I felt a bit of a stranger. But it fortified my urge to get it right. Because once you got the reward, it made you realize that there was something there. That I did have something there. That I could make these guys smile.

  Did you have a sense of anything else going on? That there were others like you out there?

  I had the first Butterfield album right after it came out. It was just by word of mouth; I can’t remember how I found out about it. But I thought it was great. Especially Butterfield’s playing. I thought Bloomfield played too much. It wasn’t until I met him that I realized it was his character to be that way. He couldn’t hold himself in rein. He was just one of those ebullient characters. But I loved it all the same.

  Did you see that as offering you …

  A chance? Yeah. ‘Cause they came to England, and they came looking for John Mayall, and we hung out and played together, and I realized then that if I wanted to go to America and play that it was going to be acceptable.

  Did this help resolve the whole issue of actually singing the blues? Because you really hadn’t sung much up till then.

  Yeah, I thought Butterfield was the first one I heard who could come anywhere near it. John Hammond I thought too much “characterized” it. It didn’t seem like it was coming from him. More that he was … imitating. I mean, I wasn’t convinced as much as I was with Butterfield. My singing doesn’t stand up to the test, ‘cause I don’t consider myself a singer. I still consid
er myself a guitar player, and I always did.

  Was it a huge leap for you to do your first vocal [on the Robert Johnson song “Ramblin’ on My Mind”] on that John Mayall album?

  Well, I’d been singing and playing in that style for so long it was really just a question of turning

  the tape machines on. The leap came in accepting that this thing was going to go onto plastic and would be recorded. Accepting that took a lot of convincing from John, who really kept having to tell me that it was worth it.

  You said that Muddy Waters acted as a kind of mentor to you, that he served almost as a kind of salvation. Personally?

  When we worked together [on an extensive 1979 tour], yeah, he was doing a lot of character building for me. ‘Cause I was losing my identity at the time. I didn’t know where I was going. I lured myself off the path of being a blues player and was trying to … I even got into country music. I was very heavily influenced by J.J. Cale in those days and wanted to find a different way to play. We talked about that a lot, and Muddy would say, in a very simple way, “Well, I love listening to your band, but my favorite song you do is ‘Worried Life Blues.’ That’s really where you’re at, and you should realize that. You should realize it and be proud of it.” And he helped to instill that feeling in me again. Because at the end of the day, I got something out of his company, and his music, that I could get from no one else. And it was only by getting back with Muddy, and then occasionally seeing Buddy Guy and people like that, that knocked on the door again. The knock that reminded me where I was really from.