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Raw power

Two new blues explosions

by Carly Carioli

If it weren't for Matthew Johnson, 70-something-year-old T-Model Ford probably would have died unrecorded. A poverty-stricken convicted murderer, Ford is a Mississippi bluesman who's been playing in backwater juke joints unheralded and unheard by all but a handful of locals for 60 years. As the young white proprietor of Fat Possum Records, Johnson is a guy who's made an unlikely career of discovering (and rediscovering) the likes of R.L. Burnside, Junior Kimbrough, and T-Model and making out of them marketable commodities. Depending on who you talk to, Johnson's either a brilliant talent scout or a clever Svengali (or some combination thereof). Either way, he's raised the profile of raw Mississippi blues through unorthodox moves like pairing 71-year-old Burnside with New York noisemaker Jon Spencer (of the Blues Explosion) on Pee Wee Get My Gun and signing a deal to have the punk label Epitaph distribute Fat Possum. Johnson clearly has a commitment to, and an affection for, Mississippi hill-country blues as it's played by the musicians at their roughest and rump-shakin'-est, and the thrilling rush of its discovery.

That sense of discovery is what Johnson shares with the Blues Explosion's other guitarist, Judah Bauer. And it's what fuels the debut album by Bauer's side project with his drumming brother Donovan, Twenty Miles. Cut in the same room as T-Model's album, at roughly the same time, with the same lo-fi recording equipment, and even borrowing T-Model drummer Spam, Twenty Miles (also on Fat Possum) sounds exactly like what it is -- a kind of ultimate fantasy camp for blues junkies, created by a kid who played along with a bunch of old Folkways albums, studied them, and, if he didn't quite turn into Mississippi Fred McDowell, did manage to get down the rudiments of Fred's rust-damaged slide technique and a hell of a lot of the indefatigable spirit. The only vaguely punk moment on the album is at the outset, an intro that sounds like hardcore transcribed for slide dobro, with a few bars of the Dead Kennedys' "Holiday in Cambodia" tacked on at the end. If you ever noticed that the riff from the DKs' "Nazi Punks Fuck Off" sounds remarkably like McDowell's "Shake 'Em On Down," you'll get the joke, and the connection.

Much more characteristic, though, is Bauer's version of McDowell's own "Pieces of Clay," where he takes a shot at playing his hero like a kid who's talked the train conductor into letting him handle the throttle on a long straightaway. Even the departures on Bauer's album display his deep affection for blues tradition -- like persuading the reclusive Othar Turner Fife and Drum ensemble into sitting in on a couple tracks. Of course, Bauer wanted to play with them, which presented a problem, since there's never ever been guitar on a fife-and-drum recording. So though Twenty Miles is not authentic in a strict orthodox sense -- not gonna make it into the Smithsonian or anything, but nobody dances there anyway -- the sessions are one of a kind and fun as hell, with the ethereal whistle and earth-shaking razzle-dazzle stomp of Othar's corps rattling along with Bauer's groaning slide. "Get out of here," Judah moans on one of the fife-and-drum tunes, "I'm Not a Man" -- which is probably a censored version of what Othar said when he was approached about the deal.

But those kinds of conflicts aren't limited to cultural clashes between white boys and their hired-hero hands. As it's related in the liner notes to Pee Wee Get My Gun, during the sessions T-Model took to telling his old friends Frank Frost and Sam Carr, who sat in on keyboards and drums on a couple of tracks, that he was "gonna remember you sorry fuckers how it's done." And he sure enough does.

Even though Johnson's liner notes frame Ford as a psychotic ghetto cross between Sanford and Son and Hee Haw -- most notably on the tribal polyrhythmic shuffle "I'm Insane," which revolves around repeated threats directed at his unfaithful girlfriend Stella -- T-Model's virtuosic command of a postwar version of the drone-heavy Mississippi hill-country blues idiom shines through with cutthroat determination. It's a looser and funkier version than R.L. Burnside's, though no less rhythmically anomalous. "Cut You Loose" and "Where You Been" sear like a rickety pick-up barreling down the highway at 95 miles an hour, in a constant state of disrepair but none the worse for wear. "I been shot/I been cut . . . I been hit upside the head," he growls at one point. The delicate synergy between T-Model's rowdy fatback tones and Spam's spare snare-and-bass drumming always seems about three seconds from collapsing. But that does nothing to diminish the certainty of their control.

Carly Carioli can be reached at ccarioli[a]phx.com.