R.L. Burnside: Magic Blues

On R.L. Burnside's new CD, they're calling him Mr. Wizard. Which is okay with Mr. Burnside, who subscribes to the Borscht Belt line "they can call me anything as long as they don't call me late for supper." Which proves not only that Burnside likes his humor well lived-in but that the Catskills and Mississippi hill country have more in common than one might think.

It's the same with dirty, hard-edged blues and punk rock. Which is proved by the 70-year-old singer/guitarist's hell-raising new CD, Mr. Wizard (Fat Possum). What's different is age and culture, but the spirit of rebellion, the need to convey gut-level emotions and make people react, and the desire to play loud as the Devil with a firecracker jammed up his ass are shared. Although the culture of underground punk and the culture of Mississippi juke-joint blues exist comfortably in parallel, the chemistry of the two when mixed can result in something smelling like burning sulfur.

That was the problem with A Ass Pocket of Whiskey, Burnside's last Fat Possum album, which was a collaboration with the smoke-and-mirrors punk ensemble the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. Unfortunately, Ass Pocket sounded more like a coup than a co-op, with Explosion drummer Russell Simins putting down such a stiff-necked, rock-educated rhythmic drive that it drained Burnside's music of its lively, loose, volatile swing. Spencer also helped nail Mr. Wizard's wings to the ground with his four-dollar-bill outbursts of jive talk and trust-fund "bad-ass" exhortations. In short, the Explosions' contributions, as well-intended as they were (please applaud Spencer for carrying Burnside as an opener on a series of tours), crippled the album.

Like A Ass Pocket of Whiskey, Mr. Wizard sports a cover by Derek Hess, Ohio's answer to rock-poster-art kingpin Frank Kozic. Like Ass Pocket, Spencer and company appear again, but on only two cuts -- not enough to do damage. So on Mr. Wizard we get mostly Burnside with his road dogs, guitarist Kenny Brown and his drummer grandson Cedric Jackson, and together they howl at the moon like a horny blue-tick hound with the smell of female in his nostrils. Which is another way of saying this CD is raw, right, and roaring with passion, ass-kicking rhythms, crazy-butt guitar, and soulful vocal majesty. R.L. might be old enough to be your father or grandfather (albeit at least twice as cool), but this is not your father's or grandfather's blues.

And yet, it is, too. Listen to Burnside firing up his guitar alone, as drones and stray harmonics zing under a rhythm-and-slide accompaniment to his high-voiced vocal on his mentor Fred McDowell's gospel blues "Over the Hill." It's stone old-time country blues, and traditional as it gets. Now check out that Grammy winner Beck's first hit, "Loser," noting how the slide guitar's just a nick away from what Burnside's laying down. (Beck, by the way, is also a Burnside enthusiast.) I'll tell ya: R.L.'s shit cuts through time, space, and even thick heads if you open your heart and mind to it.

But Burnside can preach to the unconverted better than I. Mr. Wizard's "Snake Drive" has a groove so deep George Clinton would have to form a human ladder with every member of all his Parliament/Funkadelic line-ups to crawl out of it. And it's got a rabid slide-guitar solo from Kenny Brown that's the kind of screaming freedom I've not heard since jazz stringslinger Sonny Sharrock passed. And no punk pounds a fractured and worn drum kit harder than Cedric Jackson. And if there's any confusion about what Mr. Burnside's saying when he tell us that "Georgia women got sweet jelly roll," the sweaty slow grind of the big lascivious beat spells out s-e-x.

Hell, this is blues in its bottom-line, elemental form, played by the man who may be its most zealous living practitioner. And it doesn't necessarily need the help of fancy CD covers or Beatle-booted punks to touch everybody. It just needs to be heard.

-- Ted Drozdowski

(R.L. Burnside plays the House of Blues in Cambridge's Harvard Square this Saturday, March 15. Call 491-BLUE.)