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By Root 7614 0

you had the bit of shellac that was from the original pressing from the original company. Later on, everybody would argue about it. Mick and I were smirking at each other across the room, because we were only there to find out a bit more about this new collection of records that had just arrived that we’d heard about. The real magnet was “Hell, I’d love to be able to play like that.” But the people you have to meet to get the latest Little Milton record! The real blues purists were very stuffy and conservative, full of disapproval, nerds with glasses deciding what’s really blues and what ain’t. I mean, these cats know? They’re sitting in the middle of Bexleyheath in London on a cold and rainy day, “Diggin’ My Potatoes”… Half of the songs they’re listening to, they have no idea of what they are about, and if they did they’d shit themselves. They have their idea of what the blues are, and that they can only be played by agricultural blacks. For better or worse it was their passion.

And it certainly was mine too, but I wasn’t prepared to discuss it. I wouldn’t argue about it; I would just say, “Can I get a copy? I know how they’re playing it, but I just need to check.” That’s what we lived for, basically. It was very unlikely that any chick would get in the way, at that point, of getting a chance to hear the new B.B. King or Muddy Waters.

Mick sometimes had the use of his parents’ Triumph Herald at the weekend, and I remember we went to Manchester to see a big blues show, and there’s Sonny Terry and there’s Brownie McGhee, and John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters. He was the one we wanted to see particularly, but also we wanted to see John Lee. There were others, like Memphis Slim. It was a whole revue that was going through Europe. And Muddy came on, acoustic guitar, Mississippi Delta stuff, and played a magnificent half an hour. And then there was an interval and he came back with an electric band. And they virtually booed him off the stage. He plowed through them like a tank, as Dylan did a year or so later at the Manchester Free Trade Hall. But it was hostile—and that’s when I realized that people were not really listening to the music, they just wanted to be part of this wised-up enclave. Muddy and the band were playing great. It was a knockout band. He had Junior Wells with him; I think Hubert Sumlin was on there too. But for this audience, blues was only blues if somebody got up there in a pair of old blue dungarees and sang about how his old lady left him. None of these blues purists could play anything. But their Negroes had to be dressed in overalls and go “Yes’m, boss.” And in actual fact they’re city blokes who are so hip it’s not true. What did electric have to do with it? Cat’s playing the same notes. It’s just a little louder and it’s a little more forceful. But no, it was “Rock and roll. Fuck off.” They wanted a frozen frame, not knowing that whatever they were listening to was only part of the process; something had gone before and it was going to move on.

Passions ran very high in those days. It wasn’t just mods against bikers, or the loathing of the threatened trad jazzers for us rock and rollers. There were micro-squabbles almost unbelievable to imagine now. The BBC was giving live coverage to the Beaulieu Jazz Festival in 1961 and they had to actually shut down the broadcast when trad jazz and modern jazz fans started to beat the shit out of each other, and the whole crowd lost control. The purists thought of blues as part of jazz, so they felt betrayed when they saw electric guitars—a whole bohemian subculture was threatened by the leather mob. There was certainly a political undercurrent in all this. Alan Lomax and Ewan MacColl—singers and famous folk song collectors who were patriarchs, or ideologues, of the folk boom—took a Marxist line that this music belonged to the people and must be protected from the corruption of capitalism. That’s why “commercial” was such a dirty word in those days. In fact the slanging matches in the music press resembled real political fisticuffs: phrases like “tripe mongers,