The Reverend's Favorite Blues-Rock Artists

You couldn't live in Nashville during the early 1970s and not hear the Allman Brothers Band on the local rock radio station (mighty 'KDA-FM!). Southern rock was ubiquitous in Middle Tennessee during the decade, and as much as I liked Charlie Daniels and the Marshall Tucker Band, Allman Brothers Band albums like Idlewild South and At Fillmore East had that underlying blues quotient that I craved…and let's be honest, shall we, few have ever played blues guitar like the late, great Duane Allman!

My first exposure to the blues came through British blooze-rock supergroup Cream (with Eric Clapton) and their groundbreaking, earthshaking Fresh Cream album. Sure, I was a little too young to check 'em out in their prime, and I clocked in a couple of years after the fact to experience the raw thrills-and-chills in real time, but listening to Clapton scorch blues standards like Willie Dixon's "Spoonful" and Muddy Waters' "Rollin' and Tumblin'" is worth the price of admission no matter how late you come to the party. By the time that I glommed the band's magnificent Disraeli Gears album, with psychedelic-blues jams like "Strange Brew" and "Sunshine Of Your Love," I was hooked….

These Boston flame-throwers helped bring the blues to the snot-nosed hordes of teen America during the early-1970s with albums like 1971's The Morning After and the following year's "Live" Full House album, with its smokin' covers of Otis Rush's "Homework" and John Lee Hooker's "Serves You Right To Suffer." Peter Wolf was a jumpin'-n-jivin' frontman in the best blues tradition, J. Geils was an incredible guitarist, and the mighty Magic Dick wielded a harp like nobody since Little Walter. Sure, the band veered into glammy pop-rock territory during the '80s that, while entertaining (and commercially successful), downplayed their deep blues roots. Still, those first three or four slabs o' vinyl are priceless in my estimation.

There's not much about the legendary Jimi Hendrix that hasn't already been said, and while it was probably 1969 or '70 before I discovered the trailblazing fretburner, I made up for my tardiness by latching onto everything that was even remotely Hendrix-related for the next decade. His influence on a legion of rock guitarists is beyond estimation, but not often discussed is how he took the blues to an entirely different plane of existence. Drawing upon deep blues, soul, and R&B roots, nearly everything that Hendrix wrote was influenced by his early years, as seen through the foggy, druggy, psychedelic-rock-tinged prism of the times. There will never be another like Jimi, so go straight to the source and experience the master himself.

It was my fascination with Eric Clapton and Cream that brought me around to John Mayall's Bluesbreakers band and the legendary Bluesbreakers with Eric Clapton album. The seminal blues-rock album of the 1960s, this is the one that would launch a thousand and one blues bands in the United Kingdom. Although Clapton left to form Cream, Mayall soldiered on with uniformly entertaining albums like 1967's A Hard Road and guitarists like Peter Green (Fleetwood Mac) and Mick Taylor (The Rolling Stones).

More than any other band during the 1970s, Jimmy Page and Led Zeppelin picked up the blues-rock gauntlet thrown down by Clapton and Cream and ran down the street (and around the corner) to the bank with it. Page had genuine blues-rock credentials as the final guitarist in the long-disintegrating Yardbirds band, and when he put Zep together he matched his unique blues vision with an over-the-top and loudly-amped rock soundtrack. While Zeppelin may have ripped off Willie Dixon on their first couple of albums, in the process they made blues fans out of a lot of their mindless followers.

Irish-born blues-rock guitarist Gallagher was never well-known in America beyond a small cult following, but his presence on Muddy Waters' much-maligned London Muddy Waters Sessions in 1971 helped breathe life into an otherwise moribund recording session. Throughout the 1970s, Gallagher released a string of accomplished six-string showcases, his blustery blues-rock performances throwing off sparks from wax like Tattoo and Blueprint and his frequent live releases whenever you slapped any one of his LPs on the turntable. Although Gallagher would tragically die before his time in 1995, he left behind a wealth of recorded material for future fans to explore. Today, Gallagher's star still continues to shine brightly….

More than any other band, the Rolling Stones can be held responsible for bringing American blues music back home to pasty-faced white kids in U.S. suburbs everywhere. Counting several veterans of Alexis Korner's blues bands among their ranks, early on the Stones were great interpreters of blues and R&B music. Early Stones discs like England's Newest Hit Makers, 12x5, and Now! offered eager audiences a mix of fresh originals and covers of classic Chuck Berry, Bobby Womack, Bo Diddley, and Willie Dixon songs. By the time the Reverend discovered these bad boys, around 1968, they were well on their way to becoming legends. Did I mention that they were named for a Muddy Waters song? Folks, you don't get any more blues-rock than that!

Once, in the Reverend's pre-blues appreciation ignorance, I traded a copy of the Yardbirds' Live Yardbirds: Featuring Jimmy Page album, along with a handful of other discs, to my buddy Spinky for a Quadrophonic stereo. I quickly realized my mistake and grabbed whatever Yardbirds albums that I could from among the meager selection that was in-print and available to collectors in the mid-1970s. With Hall of Fame caliber guitarists like Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, and Jimmy Page, there's a lot to like about the Yardbirds, and the band's Five Live Yardbirds, with Clapton up front and covers of classic Howlin' Wolf, Bo Diddley, and John Lee Hooker, is a classic of blues-rock music.

When some crucial titles in the ZZ Top 1970s-era catalog were reissued a few years ago, Nashville record store maven Grimey said to me "this stuff is so simple that anybody could play it." True, but the real truth is that nobody plays it quite like "that little ol' band from Texas." Red-hot slabs like Rio Grande Mud and Tres Hombres schooled a generation of young booger-rockers in the ways of the blues, doing so without the benefit of resorting to a single blues cover. Billy Gibbons remains both one of the most acclaimed, and the most often overlooked of blues-rock guitarists; while the band strayed, J. Geils-style, into the glam world of MTV during the 1980s, these days they crank it out as greasy, loud, and bluesy as they ever did.