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(Reader’s Voice) Oh no! It’s The Beano Album Thread Revisited.

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Young Johnny Concheroo must be the luckiest boy in all of Afterword Town. That’s because he is the proud owner of an object that is both precious and magical. A totemic artefact you might say. In fact, in the history of 60s British blues it’s right up there with the black cat bone, the mojo hand, gris-gris, and even, dare I say it, the mythical John the Conqueror root.

Yes, young Johnny now has a copy of the actual Beano comic which appears on the cover of the seminal 1966 LP Blues Breakers: John Mayall with Eric Clapton (aka The Beano Album.

But let’s stop talking in this ridiculous third person fashion for a moment and cut to the chase. Yes, it arrived today, not very well packed I must say, but thankfully undamaged. I’m talking about issue #1242 of The Beano comic, with the cover date May 12, 1966. So what? you may say. What’s so special about a tatty old kids’ comic? Ah, but this is not just any old comic, it’s the very same issue of The Beano that Eric Clapton is pretending to read on the cover of the aforementioned LP

I’ve had a copy of #1242 (as we call it) before of course, but that was decades ago, back when it really was just an old comic of no real value. Like so many other things which connect us to our youth however it got thrown out during one of the countless flat/house shifts over the last half century. But I’ve wanted to replace it for some time now and finally lucked into a reasonably priced copy on eBay last week.

While most original mid-60s issues of The Beano can be had for around $20 (£10), these days a clean copy of the Clapton issue can sell for upwards of $200 (£100) on eBay, not a bad return considering the 1966 cover price was just 3d (which, almost unbelievably, converts to one new penny). I won’t tell you how much I paid but thanks to a blurry eBay photo and very little in the way of description/hype it was much less than that.

All of which prompted me to revive this golden oldie thread.

So, at the risk of alienating all those gathered here who believe that the 60s was nuthin special, come with me now as we return to 1966 and take a long, hard (if not exactly sideways) look at one of the most important records in British rock history.

http://i.imgur.com/Wo3ELxa.jpg

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Comments

  1. http://i.imgur.com/Io1TY2s.jpg

    Long ago and far away on the old Afterword blog I posted a thread suggesting that the July 1966 album Blues Breakers: John Mayall with Eric Clapton (aka The Beano Album) just might be one of the most important British records ever. A bold claim perhaps, but allow me to explain.

    To the casual observer it may appear to be just a loose collection of blues numbers, but The Beano Album ‘s massive influence far exceeds the sum of its parts. Firstly, no white guitarist (British or American) had ever played electric blues with the authority and authenticity that Eric Clapton brought to this album (not many black players had, either).

    By insisting on playing his guitar parts at stage volume in the studio, Eric pushed 60s recording technology to its very limits, sending the VU meters into the red and the white-coated Decca technicians into meltdown. Luckily he had a hip young producer and engineer on hand in the shape of Mike Vernon and Gus Dudgeon who backed him all the way – as, it must said, did his boss John Mayall.

    Before long, every group in the land would ask to record like this and Clapton’s sweet, overdriven sound quickly became the holy grail for guitarists the world over. That guitar sound would soon kick-start the entire British blues boom of the late 60s which in turn developed into 70s stadium rock and subsequently heavy metal. No Beano Album, no Fleetwood Mac, Jethro Tull and Led Zeppelin or even no Metallica, perhaps?

    Should that sound ridiculously fanciful, let’s remember that Edward Van Halen name-drops The Beano Album at every opportunity and actually recorded a tribute to Clapton titled Bluesbreaker on his Star Fleet Project collaboration with Brian May.

    The album had some influential fans early on, too. When Chas Chandler was trying to persuade Jimi Hendrix to come to London in late 1966, the deal-breaker was the promise of an introduction to Eric Clapton. The then-unknown Hendrix genuinely wanted to meet the man who had made his current go-to blues record, The Beano Album.

    Some accuse the white blues bands of exploiting black musicians, but I’d strongly disagree with that. The impact of a bunch of young, good-looking white kids in Carnaby Street clothes playing fiercely authentic blues guitar at high volume, the like of which had never been seen or heard before did more to introduce the music to a mass audience than anything that had gone before. This in turn would benefit an entire generation of black musicians. B.B. King, Muddy Waters, Albert King and a host of others suddenly found themselves escaping the Chitlin’ Circuit and playing lucrative gigs in front of wildly appreciative white rock audiences at venues such as the Fillmores (East and West) thanks to this new-found awareness. Black musicians also gained exposure when their songs were covered (and, yes, sometimes stolen) by the new wave of white rock bands.

    Above all, The Beano Album played a massive part in selling American music back to the Americans, which in turn directly changed the course of rock music in general.

    The Beano Album not only had a profound impact on the music itself, but it also prompted major changes to the equipment and technology that made it possible. Together with the Fender Stratocaster, the Gibson Les Paul is without doubt the most famous and recognisable guitar model in history. It seems incredible now, but in the late 50s Les Paul sales had slumped and it actually went out of production at the end of the decade. The model was then unavailable for the next eight years. Clapton’s use of a 1960 Les Paul on The Beano Album (and onstage with Mayall and early Cream) popularised the instrument again and suddenly every guitarist worthy of the name had to have a Les Paul in order to get that elusive Beano Album sound. Second-hand prices soared and this lead directly to the guitar’s reintroduction in 1968.

    Similarly, Clapton’s use of Marshall amplifiers, first with Mayall, then Cream, would also have far-reaching implications for the tiny British company about to become a world famous brand name.

    The Beano Album– not just a yawn-inducing collection of 12 bar blues after all, then?

    Five Interesting Facts about The Beano Album:

    1) Although the original mono LP was released in July, 1966, the stereo version didn’t appear until 3 years later in 1969

    2) During the last track on side one (track 6 on the CD), a cover of the Ray Charles song What’d I Say, Clapton launches into the riff from Day Tripper. That’s even more significant when you realise that The Beatles’ single was only six months old when The Beano Album was recorded.

    3) There was originally some chalk graffiti on the wall behind the band reading “Wilson is a nit”. Harold Wilson was PM at the time (1966) and while hardly the most Wildean of jibes, it was felt the line may cause offence, so it was scrubbed off during the photo session. It’s still possible to see “a nit” over on the right however.

    4) The Gibson Les Paul Clapton plays on the LP (he’s pictured with it on the back cover) was bought second hand for £80 from a guitar shop on London’s Charing Cross Road in 1965. The story goes that Andy Summers, future guitarist with The Police, then playing with Zoot Money’s Big Roll Band (he’s older than you think, folks) knew Eric was looking for a Les Paul and found two in the shop. He bought one himself and tipped Clapton off about the other.

    5) The Beano Album directly inspired the name of the band Thin Lizzy:
    From Wikipedia:
    The band’s original guitarist Eric Bell, who was a fan of John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers, bought a copy of The Dandy comic after seeing Eric Clapton depicted reading a copy of its sister publication The Beano on the cover of the 1966 album Bluesbreakers with Eric Clapton.

    He suggested Tin Lizzie, the name of a robot character from the comic, itself named for the common nickname for the iconic Ford Model T car. Bell also suggested they change ‘Tin’ to ‘Thin’ to play on the Irish accent’s propensity to drop the ‘h’.

    After a while, Lynott and Downey agreed to the idea and the name stuck, as they thought the confusion was amusing and would create a talking point. For some of their early gigs, the band were mistakenly promoted as “Tin Lizzy” or “Tin Lizzie”.

  2. I was once told, in a job interview, that if I played my cards right, kept my nose clean and got stuck in, I could one day be editor of The Beano. I laughed derisively at the time but nowadays of course I see it as an opportunity missed. What makes it even worse is, I got the job.

  4. Sadly, I never got to storyboard Oor Wullie, draw Alf Tupper, suggest a denouement in The Broons that didn’t involve Grandpa mishearing something or even be given a free copy of The Beano – we had to pay for them.
    On the other hand, I did write hundreds of letters purporting to be from readers and for a couple of weeks whilst the real bloke was on holiday (in Las Vegas), I was Francis Gay.
    Even more sadly, this is all true.

  5. There were certain recurring themes in 50s/60s British comics. One was a strange obsession with eastern exotica such as snake charming, flying carpets and, as illustrated here, beds of nails.

    Hence we get “Abdul the Fakir and his Bed of Nails” on the front cover.

    You would be accused of Islamophobia (or worse) if you tried that today.

  6. What about ‘The Wolf of Kabul’, aTE Lawrence figure who was accompanied everywhere by his ‘oriental companion’ Chung?
    And just to rub in the imperialist nature of the strip, ‘Chung’ despatched the baddies – always native insurgents – with the deft use of ‘cilcky-ba’, an old willow bat encased in brass.
    I preferred ‘The Numbskulls’ myself.

  7. Respect Gary! A man who the letters for The Beani in our midst

    In our house we read Look and Learn and occasionally The Eagle which makes us sound far posher than we were.

    But it was a total revelation when I discovered the Beano and Dandy. Desperate Dan has been my role model ever since.

  11. I used to get the Beano, Dandy, Beezer and Topper posted to me every week by my granddad. Had the fates been unkind to me my nickname from the age of five could easily have been Dando.

      • Nope. Twang Jr scored a bundle of old Beanos on a market stall for a song and rereads them constantly. Also we have some place mats made out of old Beanos which are fun. It lives!

          • Indeed JC, DCT’s flagship, The Sunday Post was said to be the most popular newspaper in the world, being read by a whopping 79% of Scottish adults. As verified by The Guiness Book of Records. It truly was an institution, pawky stories, reactionary politics, made up letters and all.

  12. Well everything bought, almost all wrapped, done the big supermarket shop, mincers and sausages rolls made…just need to collect bird and family tomorrow – bring it on!

  13. i suppose a very valuable Beano would be one where Biffo is listening to Eric Clapton and being unimpressed. After all, Eric doesn’t seem to be amused in that picture.

    There were a few strips in the Beano featured real pop stars. If memory serves, Minnie the Minx was a Toyah fan.

  14. Come to think of it, he’s actually reading the inside of the comic so Biffo would be wrong to take personal offence.

    It’s possible that Eric had already enjoyed the cover story, stitched back his sides, and moved on to Lord Snooty, Bash Street Kids, Minnie the Minx, General Jumbo, Billy the Cat or something like that.

  16. Yes I think Viz owes its very existence to DC Thompson as well as whoever it was that produced the coffee break magazines Titbits and Reveille – these were the ones that had the Top Tips and the letters pages that inspired Viz.

    I thought I had read somewhere that Viz and DC Thompson had a falling out over a strip called “Wanker Watson”, which was a perfect recreation of a public schoolboy character in the Dandy called Winker Watson who got up to high jinks, japes and pranks. Of course, in the Viz version, the same boy supplies his dorm with pornography.

  17. Yep, litigation was initiated which led to Viz publishing a strip called ‘DC Thomson, Miserable Scottish Git’. In retaliation, DCT, came up with ‘The Jocks and The Geordies’, which seems like quite a civilised way to settle an argument; the funniest wins.
    My fav Viz DCT piss take was ‘Black Bag’, the faithful Border bin liner who once rescued Brotherhood of Man when they were stuck down a well.

    • The Jocks and the Geordies was a revival of an old strip that was around in the 70s – 80s. There was nothing particularly Geordie about the Geordies, but the jocks affected massive Tam O’Shanters and one of them was called Wee Eck.

      I wonder what happened to him…?

  18. I also recall that they had another brilliantly-done strip called “Desperately Unfunny Dan” where Dan’s feats of super strength were met with bored sighs rather than admiration. These strips are a tribute, really.

    • I love the fact that the artist who drew The Broons and Oor Wullie was the same one who did Lord Snooty and his Pals and Desperate Dan (and many others)

      And he was an Englishman – Dudley D. Watkins

    • The two things were entirely unconnected really.

      I’d been an avid reader of all the DC Thompson comics (and especially Dandy and Beano) since the mid-50s.

      It was hard to avoid them. For example The Beano’s weekly circulation in April 1950 was 1,974,072; it currently sells slightly over 31,000 copies per week (figures from Wiki).

      Then, one day in 1966 a pal said “There’s a record you really have to hear” and he took me to Cann’s record shop in the centre of Sheffield. In the basement they had those listening booths – the proper sit-down type with a door, not just the kind you stuck your head in – and he asked them to play the LP Blues Breakers: John Mayall with Eric Clapton for us.

      I’d never heard electric blues before and was barely aware of Eric Clapton, but this was a revelation of the highest order. This record changed EVERYTHING for me.

      As much as the Beatles, as much as Dylan, The Beano Album informed and influenced everything I listened to thereafter. And it still does to a large extent.

      As for the comic Clapton is reading on the cover. It’s achieved massive significance in recent years of course, but I don’t remember it being such a big deal at the time. In 1966 we just thought Eric was taking the piss (which he probably was) and left it at that.

      • I’ve always thought of it as a way of mildly modifying the BB’s image as drily studious academics of the Blooze, veritable Casaubons of the Delta.

        “Look! We have a sense of fun too.” It would have probably been more accurate to have JM peering into a copy of Mega Boobs Weekly* but you can’t have everything.

        (*I did not make this title up)

          • For a guy with such an earnest reputation, EC’s always had quite a nicely understated (English) sense of humour.

            I’ve met Hughie Flint, very much cut from the same cloth. Lovely guy, cross between Slartibartfast and Charlie Gillett, with a touch of Patrick Stewart thrown in for the ladies.

            • That was the thing back then, wasn’t it? Music was a real job and musicians had careers, not just a five minute flirtation with fame, courtesy of reality TV.

              Every one of those four blokes on the cover of The Beano Album went on to do something great and/or meaningful.

    • Great thread and we’ve only scratched the surface. After The Beano, The Topper, The Dandy and The Beezer, there were the ‘older’ publications – The Victor and The Hotspur for boys and Jackie, Judy and various others for girls. All of them were big money makers for DCT containing no end of legendary characters. For instance, Alf Tupper ‘The Tough of the Track’, a jobbing welder deemed too working class to join the local athletics club but who nevertheless beat the posh blokes in every race, usually after spending all night welding the grandstand. After a swift breakfast of fish and chips, Alf invariably breasted the tape first, uttering his famous catchphrase: ‘I’ve run em!’

  26. I discovered the Beano album by a series of coincidences – my mate’s Dad mentioned that head gone to school with John Mayall – he didn’t know what a big figure he’d become but he remembered him. The following day I saw one of th “World of” compilations of Mayall, noting that this was the same dude Pete’s Dad knew. Then that week there was a Mayall retrospective in Sounds when they went through his albums, one by one, talking about Eric, then Peter Green, then Mick Taylor….by now I was hooked, so I bought The World of and loved it from the off – it is mostly from Bluesbreakers, A Hard Road and Blues from Laurel Canyon and every track is a killer. I compiled my own personnel list from the Sounds article so I knew who was doing what, though of course once your ears are opened up the difference between EC/PG/MT is stark – all brilliant and all co,platelet different. I must unearth the vinyl and see if that listing is still there….probably is!

  29. Great thread

    I put the Lo in question on the other night, prompted by this thread. Dunno whether it is the shitty Oz pressing but it sounded pretty ordinary. For me I went back to it rather than being the epiphany it was for JC. Is the deluxe reissue a better sounding version?
    One thing though – that drum solo in What’d I Say is one of the more intrusive unnecessary solos in modern recorded music.

    • Hi Junior, glad you could join us. Yes, What’d I Say is probably the throwaway track on the LP, but there aren’t too many other duffers.

      We discussed this on the old blog, but I suppose anyone coming to the Beano Album cold now would probably be underwhelmed by it, especially after the hype I’ve given it above. After all, it’s all been done so much louder, stronger and I hesitate to use the word, better, since 1966.

      But the point is, it was the first of its kind. No one had made an album that sounded like this before, certainly no one white. And it open the door to so many other great things: Cream, Hendrix, the British Blues Boom, Free, Savoy Brown, Chicken Shack, Ten Years After, Fleetwood Mac and so on into 70s stadium rock and beyond. The re-introduction of the Les Paul guitar, the invention of light gauge guitar strings, the popularisation of Marshall amps and other stuff we take for granted now.

      I’d maintain all of that came as a result of The Beano Album.

      • I sort of agree but the best tracks are still as good as it gets, such as Have you heard, Key to love, Hideaway, Little Girl…most of them in fact. I think What I’d say is a throw away, but I love Eric chucking in the riff from Day Tripper. It’s fun!

  30. Stay with this, it is relevant!

    A few years ago, my great uncle Robert died. A quiet, serious Scot, he was a part of village life in Cheddar where my dad grew up. I knew he was the chap who did the beautifully written calligraphic place cards for family gatherings, but other than being a keen gardener, he was very much in the shade of the force of nature that is my great aunt Terry.

    He passed away the way I’d want to go – after a weekend’s gardening he took ill o a Monday and went peacefully a couple of days later. At his funeral I discovered that he’d been a DC Thompson artist and had drawn and inked some of the first edition of the Dandy, and many more. Had he not been in his twenties when war broke out, he might have worked there til his retirement. As it was, he was posted to Somerset, where one of his jobs was to light beacons by a reservoir near Cheddar, in an attempt to fool German planes into thinking it was Bristol. Sometimes it worked.

    DC Thompson’s loss was Terry’s – and our gain. But he never mentioned it, or anything about his past, other than helping Cheddar get twinned with a town in Germany.

  31. I’d love to own the Beano album on vinyl. Someone I follow on twitter found a copy (stereo) at a boot sale this year for something stupid like a pound. I was rather envious*.

    *ridiculously jealous

    • Oh, don’t. I bought a (I believe) original copy of the Beano album in about 1988 off a bloke at school, when such records were at their most unfashionable. He was probably saving up to buy an INXS cd. I had a vague inkling of its value, so I wrote my name on the inside of the cardboard sleeve, so as not to spoil it.

      It didn’t help. As was usual at our shitty minor public school, certain folk would nick stuff on the last day of term if they were off early. Yes, I know who it was, but I have let it go, as the young set say. I have it on CD (the mono/stereo combo). Can’t bring myself to get it on vinyl again (sniff).

      In the last few years, I’ve played with a hardcore blues fiend who decries this record for being a collection of pale imitations of the original songs. He plays in a cover band.

    • As I mentioned above, the Beano Album mono/stereo thing is quite strange. The mono version was released in 1966, then it was another three years before the stereo version arrived, almost as an afterthought in 1969.

      Over the years I’ve found the mono version turns up far more than the stereo one and I’d say the stereo version is much rarer. But a quick check on Popsike shows both versions appear to sell for around the same price with 50 quid being the average.

      • My Bluesbreakers and Hard Road are both mono, but the World Of is stereo. I’m not sure if HR are different mixes because on World of’s “Supernatural” you can’t hear any organ but on the actual album is it quite clear.

          • Don’t you think the stereo Beano was probably cobbled together to cash in on the stateside success of (the) Cream, most specifically on nascent FM radio?

            I’m guessing stereo meant nish to most UK record buyers in 1966.

            • I seem to remember reading, sometime in the very early ’70s that quite a few original supposedly-mono albums were in fact in stereo, but just labelled, packaged and sold as mono, due to record companies wishing to cater to the emergence of stereo radiograms etc. but not wanting to spend out on having 2 different mixes produced and pressed.

              • They would be easy to detect though as the mono and stereo pressing plates have different matrix numbers (visible in the dead wax of the run-out grooves) .

                I don’t want to get too technical, but that’s usually how it works.

    • Those fine folk at Sundazed have done a splendid reissue of the mono Beano album on 180g vinyl. I just got my copy yesterday and damn fine it is too. Those of a certain age may also be amused by the name of the trumpet player – one Dennis Healey…

        • I believe it’s an exact reissue – they sourced the original UK mono masters for the mix, and the back cover has photos and sleeve notes by Neil Slaven. Because Sundazed is a US label, it doesn’t have “DERAM” next to John Mayall’s name on the front, but “LONDON” in the bottom left corner. The label on the record is the old red London label.
          I believe that the baritone sax player on the album, John Almond, went on to join Mayall’s acoustic blues group post-Bluesbreakers and Mayall’s move to the States. Memorably described by Chris Welch on the sleeve notes for “Turning Point” as a ‘looner-extrordinary’…

          • That “Deram” logo is a bone of contention with me. The Beano album was always a Decca album and never originally appeared on the label’s Deram prog offshoot.

            However, in the CD age all those famous UK Decca albums began to be reissued with Deram logos. I can only assume that this was for the benefit of the US market where the Decca label existed as part of the Brunswick label and operated totally independently of the UK label.

            Still with me?

          • Starting a Mayall sub thread, the later album “The Turning Point” is a gem too. No fuck off lead guitarist, no drummer but clearly a blues album, with finger style guitarist Jon Mark, blog member Almond on saxes (quite stupendous saxes actually – YouTube “California”), Steve Thompson (who?) on bass and Mayall on everything else, it’s a radical reinterpretation of the blues with a Laurel Canyon vibe, recorded live in LA. The Beano album quite rightly gets all the attention, but I think this is a brave, and whilst sometimes flawed, attempt to do something new with a genre which even then had pretty well defined limitations. No one has attempted anything like it since. And it’s great music, BTW.

            • I believe that Steve Thompson played bass with the excellent Stone the Crows after James Dewar left. He’s on their albums “Teenage Licks” and “Ontinuous Performance”.

              Here’s a quote from MOJO in May 1994 which suggests that Peter Green, rather than Jimmy McCulloch,could have replaced Les Harvey after his sad on-stage electrocution:

              * Maggie Bell “I met Peter Green in 1972 through Steve Thompson who’d been with John Mayall and who played bass in my band, Stone The Crows. Steve said that Peter had been out of the limelight for somewhile and would be good to get as a replacement for Les Harvey. We picked him up at the station and he had this rucksack and his hair cut really short and looking very healthy. We were supposed to do this festival and we spent six weeks rehearsing at Ronnie Leahy’s house. He was playing so well right through rehearsals, and then two days before the festival we got a phone call to say that he couldn’t make it. It just wasn’t to be.

              “Peter was a very quiet and shy person; he seemed to think that people were looking at him or taking the piss. Fame can be a terrible thing … Peter wasn’t into all that; he’d just as easily sleep on your sofa, he despised money. As long as he had enough to get along, enough for a packet of cigarettes and a couple of beers, he was quite happy.”

              • BTW, I’ve got the Mark-Almond album “Other Peoples Rooms”. Haven’t listened to it for years but, thanks to this thread, will do so tomorrow. John Tropea, Will Lee and Steve Gadd are in the band so should be good . . . .

            • When Mayall left Decca and moved to Polydor in 1969, those first few LPs threw us all into confusion.

              No pin-up boy guitar heroes and, as you say, no drums on some of them.

              One or two even featured a nylon string guitar. It was a bitter pill to swallow at the time, but those albums sound really good now.

              Jon Mark lives in New Zealand now, I believe.

                • It’s a pretty good overview and a great place to start.

                  74 tracks over 4 discs.

                  Discs 1 & 2 is all Decca material from the main albums with some rarities, singles A & B-sides, the rare Mayall/Paul Butterfield EP etc. But I’m pretty sure all the material has been available on the CD re-issues of the albums over the years.

                  Discs 3 & 4 are taken from the early Polydor albums. Not quite as interesting to me, but it’s good to have it all in one place. Again, none of it is previously unavailable.

                  It includes a 38 page booklet which is lovingly illustrated with plenty of record sleeves, some nce live shots of Clapton, Green and Taylor (and Johnny Almond!) and alternate shots of the Beano Album sessions!

  33. You’ll probably be aghast at this, Conchmeister, but I probably first heard the ‘Beano album’ last night, at a pal’s place – requested as a result of your thread. I feel I’ve probably heard it, or some of it, before here or there, but I’ve never consciously ‘heard it’. It was okay.

    • I can see that Colin. Although, as @twang pointed out, The Beano Album contains very few duff tracks, hearing it for the first time today is probably not going to result in a Damascene conversion, purely because it sounds like so many other blues rock albums.

      But in July 1966 it was first in a field of one.

      • Indeed, JC. I have no doubt that you are correct. If I borrowed my friend’s copy and really listened to it, loud, with no distractions, and my ‘historical head’ on, I’m sure I could get within a glimpse of the doorway to the Flamingo in 1966.

        Funny thing is, though, Ronnie Jones (of the Night-timers) told me that most of the punters, if they were on a double-header with the Bluesbreakers, would go for a wander when they were on. The Bluesbreakers were musically a Marquee band, but agented by the Flamingo guys, alongside a lot of soul-ish R&B bands.

  34. And perhaps I should point out here that in the USA Mike Bloomfield was moving in very much the same direction as Clapton and the debut Butterfield Blues Band LP was released in late 1965, several months before the Beano Album.

    But although groundbreaking, it was a tame affair in comparison with the BBB’s more experimental second LP East-West which appeared in August 1966.

    • I remember looking out Bloomfield back in the day and whilst he hit some nice notes on Supersession, he had that pingy tightness you also get with Robbie Robertson – and whilst there’s nothing wrong with pingy tightness, it sounds stiff and clumsy compared to Clapton’s fluidity. Butterfield is a monster though.

      • That’s true, but as Clapton said when he first toured America with Cream in 1966, “There was nothing to beat, it was like they (the white groups) had been listening to all the wrong records”.

        Notably he excluded Mike Bloomfield from that criticism citing him as the only white player he rated.

        He went on to say that by the following year (1967) the Americans had caught up considerably.

        As for Bloomfield, I enjoyed his work with the Electric Flag, BBB and Super Session, but he never really fulfilled his potential. It was the drugs that got him, I guess.

      • Prior to the internet settling all manner of pub arguments and discussions, various newspaper columns performed such a service, usually written under the byline of that redoubtable journalist ‘Phillip Space’.
        The Daily Mirror for instance, had ‘The Old Codgers’ although it was finally laid to rest in 1990.
        Not so The Queries Man in the Sunday Post, who, even to this day, continues to answer queries ranging from legal argument to football trivia; a reliable service for the bewildered reader.
        Every few years or so, in order to provide some levity for the poor drone who had to research and answer the questions – nearly always a very junior member of staff – the self same query was surreptitiously added to the pile: ‘Please settle a family argument – how tall is Kenneth McKeller?’
        It didn’t go unnoticed of course, subsequently becoming a topic of discussion on The Guardian Unlimited Talk Form and then – joyously – part of Billy Connolly’s stand-up routine – ‘
        “A ‘family argument’ – You can just imagine it – “I tell you, he’s 5 foot 9 if he’s an inch!” “Ya fuckin’ liar , he’s about 6 foot!” “Take that! … OOYAH!”
        So, as The Queries Man might well say, ‘Now you know…’

  39. Re my earlier comments. I think it is a great album , great playing and real blues feel my comment was more to the sound. Compared to a lot of blues I was listening to , electric blues, the sound on my Aussie pressing is pretty shitty

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