EDDY “THE CHIEF” CLEARWATER

Soul Funky

Cleartone Records

by Terry Abrahamson

         To truly understand and appreciate Eddy Clearwater's Soul Funky it's best to have a little background on the circumstances that inspired this new live album.

In 1967, Eddy Clearwater was playing the 9 High Lounge in Cairo, Illinois, named for the poker hand that won the papers on a dive so sorry that the top shelf was under the floorboards. Late that night, he returned to his dressing room/car/hotel room to find half-dead Wynonie Harris slumped in the back seat, his twisted fingers clutching a soaked and crumpled Crown Royal sack. "Don't say nothin', Son," Wynonie  rasped in a voice that no longer had a prayer with Little Ol' Lucy Brown.  As he peeled back the purple velvet lips and squeezed out what looked like a pork chop drenched in molasses and Beaujolais, the Pride of Omaha continued: "First bite's for you."

          Eddy Clearwater took the bag, feeling the unexpected sizzle of the raw meat through the velvet as he breathed in the olfactorial cocktail of New Orleans, Timbuktu and a back alley in Heaven's bad neighborhood...and thought he heard Wynonie say "It's sole." One bite led to another....after another, until nothing remained but an empty sack and the dimly sweet 3 a.m. aftertaste of "Lord, what have I done?"

          "What kinda sole you say this was?" Eddy asked as the dressing room hit a bumpy road. "The soul...of Sonny Boy Williamson," Harris rasped back in his patented finger-on-the-Louie Prima-record laugh that now rapidly withdrew into a faraway echo. "Two years marinatin' in the blood of Champion Jack Dupree, then hung from a meathook high on the KFFA tower the night of Arkansas' Storm of the Century, takin' more hits than Sonny Payne on McLemore Avenue!" And Eddy Clearwater's head hit the Studebaker floor. 

photo: Jennifer Noble

          He awoke 37 years later, although legend whispers of a solitary somnambulant episode in 1988. Albert Collins' birthday party.  As at any gathering that included the Master of the Telecaster, that night's highlight was Albert making the strings of his Fender speak the word long associated with a man's Sophoclean jones for mom's apple pie. In a quiet moment, still-sleepwalking Eddy asked Albert to teach him the trick. But Eddy was a lefty, and could only get the guitar strings to say "Do bread come with this?"

          Not oblivious to his compadre's sense of failure, Albert moved to his closet.  "Cheer up, Eddy. Got you a present." From the closet, Collins pulled an elaborately flowing Cherokee chief headdress and beamed: "A Indian feather wig."  Eddy was unimpressed. Albert was undaunted. "You already gots the name for it, Brother. So you just call yourself “The Chief,” and put this sucker on...." Albert's eyes shimmered like how a seal sees the sunlight through an oil slick. "...and they gon' see it and every woman in that crowd, their minds just shut down,’cept for one thought:  where one of them feathers could go, what one of them feathers could do, and how all that's gon' feel. Try it one time, Eddy Boy. You'll swear you got Bobby Bland sittin' up there on your head!" They both smiled.

photo: Lynn Orman

          The Indian Feather Wig was still on his head when he opened his eyes onstage a quarter century later, this past January 10th at SPACE in Evanston, backlit by six pillars of fire illuminating the way to The Blues That Time Forgot. Raw. Real.  Playful. Ruthless. Surreptitiously Libidinous to the Dirtiest Extreme. Piercing and Powerful Beyond the Point of Exhaustion. And it's all captured on Soul Funky as something so wild seldom is. Yeah, yeah, there's a little after-the-fact studio tweaking. But it doesn't rustle one shorthair on the biggest set of balls a Blues album has had in my memory. 

          Soul Funky explodes with a Johnny Otis we-hope-you're-here-for-the-showbiz jackhammer,  Ronnie Baker Brooks' “They Call Me the Chief.” Eddy's voice doesn't have the sweetness of Otis Rush. It doesn't go for the high drama of Howlin’ Wolf’s straddling species boundaries. It won't vaporize your marrow like Elmore James. But it's so right. And Brooks' "death by 1,000 cuts" guitar gives “Chief” a slashing savagery that would make film director John Ford drool.

Eddy & Ronnie/photo: Lynn Orman

          “Hypnotized” leaves no time for a transfusion; no time for you to pull yourself up off the floor. Eddy rides his pipes from a quiver to a roar and back again all in a single phrase as he punctuates every seemingly heartfelt line with an implicit over-the-shoul-der "the bitch is buyin' it" wink.  Still, even when his "I get so aroused" admission all but reveals that he's merely moving his lips in collusion with the ventriloquist in his pants, Eddy's intentions sound relatively noble as Brooks proceeds to pop every button and undo every zipper with satanic precision. This is the guitar your mama warned you about.

          “Too Old to Get Married, Too Young to Be Buried” answers the age-old question "What would happen if this band took a hunk of cornbread and sopped up the inside of that enchanted Crown Royal sack, snarfed it down...and Eddy and the band exhaled the fire?"  If you're hearing what I'm hearing, it's Wynonie, Louie Jordan, Chuck Berry and Little Richard jamming on a bed of red-hot coals in a four and a half minute rave that goes by in what feels like 40 seconds. I'm guessing Brooks wrote this to keep those old guys alive and to see if he could kill Eddy. He's one for two. Eddy Clearwater ain't too old for nuthin'!

photo: Lynn Orman

          Sonny Boy follows Wynonie to the stage on “Good Times are Coming,”  invoking the spirit of the Black Saint Nick, "Sanny Claus."  Give The Chief his due on this one; channeling the great Rice Miller is no easy feat for a guy with more teeth than fingers.  Keyboardist Johnny Iguana, who has all 12 cuts on his dance card, romances this baby with the sweet-talkin'est fingers that ever melted ivory. And guitarist Shoji Naito is an unexpected treat for those figuring they had to wait for the great Billy Branch to lay down some Chess-level harp.  

          It only gets better, as the entire audience is dragged down to 2120 South Michigan for “Came up the Hard Way,” a lonely, bone-chilling walk to the electric chair.  Maybe you'll buy into Eddy's tale of woe. Or maybe, like me, you'll take it as a well-practiced hustle cued  by that Collins cackle trickling down from The Big Old Pomade Swamp in the Sky.  Either way, you gotta love the return of Eddy’s growl/quiver combo, sliding the end of "I had to work both night and day" into the I Love Lucy reducing belt to get double digit syllables out of "day."  Go on, Eddy: check that bag of tricks at the curb. It ain't never gonna fit in the overhead compartment.

          In the old days of the LP, and in less-impassioned hands, a number like “Cool Blues Walk” would have been begging to assume the role of "filler."  But this band wouldn't know filler if they were handcuffed to my old Zenith Circle of Sound bathroom heater speakers and forced to listen to an eight hour loop of The Beatles' “Revolution 9”.  In fact, if there's any justice in this world, “Cool Blues Walk” should take its place beside Little Milton's “If Walls Could Talk” among Blues anthropomorphization's elite. These Blues don't just walk. They moonwalk at 45 degrees up  a whiskey-drenched Slip 'n Slide, pirouette like Nureyev, roll their hips like The Bobby Rush Dancer That Got Away and drop to their knees like James Brown. And with one go-for-broke lick of his lips, Eddy evokes the spirit of Champion Jack Dupree to speak/slur/sing us down to Beale Street and back. "Keep on walkin', Baby:" he shouts it from the stage, but his heart is planted in a rusted folding chair on the sidewalk, leaning back against a brick wall: the best seat on The Stroll.

          “A Good Leavin' Alone” is nothing short of a Mississippi Medicine Show Miracle. Brooks hits us right between the eyes with Elmore James and we're dead before we hit the ground.  Without missing a beat, as the carnival crowd parts for him like the Red Sea, Billy Branch - the guy they paid the extra dime for - leaps to the stage, catches the spotlight and disappears into his harp.  And what comes out raises the dead, heals the sick, brings eyesight to the blind, turns a sandwich into a banquet and just might make walls talk.  Amazingly, Eddy still elbows his way to the front, with no small thanks to Champion Jack, a Muddy Waters cameo and a Hound Dog Taylor "Look out!"  that had me bolting upright in my bed at the Blues VA, shaking off one more episode of Phantom Cheap Afro Wig Syndrome. This is the time capsule song: the birth of The Politically Correct Blues, as Eddy responds to his baby’s four in the morning indis-cretions by giving her "A Good Leavin' Alone."  Sorry, Sonny Boy, but I wouldn’t be holding my breath for Eddy to cover “Your Funeral and My Trial”.

          Song after song buries us alive in the Blues, digs us out and does it again before we can catch our breath to beg for more. Even the title song, featuring a bizarre “White Room” meets “Lady Marmalade” intro that drops us at the head of a seconal-soaked conga line from the Bar Mitzvah Don Cornelius never had, begrudgingly won my heart. Yes, it's the most unexpected conjuring of Cream since Ella Fitzgerald's take on “Sun-shine of Your Love”, but you can dance to it. Hell, you can dance to all of it. And if, after a listen or two, the Wynonie/Sonny Boy/Champion Jack/Albert Collins references aren't ringing true, it’s only because this rare gift from a stage full of Blues masters has inspired even better ones.