Blues Brothers - Briefcase Full of Blues

"Good Evening, Ladies and Gentlemen and welcome to the Universal Amphitheater. Well, here it is the late 1970's going on 1985. Y'know so much of the music we here today is pre-programmed electronic disco, we never get a chance to hear master blues men practicing their craft anymore. By the year 2006, the music known today as the blues will exist only in the classical records department of your local public library. So tonight, Ladies and Gentlemen, while we still can, let us welcome from Rock Island, Illinois, the blues men of Joliet Jake and Elwood Blues - The Blues Brothers." - Elwood Blues

As a kid I remember seeing them on SNL and they were amazing. I was a tad perplexed as I thought there would be a punchline ... this wasn't a joke. This was reverence and it may have been wrapped in a performance piece, but this was serious stuff and it was delivered like a love letter. From what I've read it was Dan Aykroyd who was the music aficionado, and introduced John Belushi to the blues. John was a quick study.

I saw the show that launched them. April 22, 1978. Steve Martin was the guest host. Steve returned the favour when he was in residency at the Universal Amphitheater in Los Angeles in September of 1978. The Blues Brothers brought with them a full on blues revue.

John transformed into Joliet Jake Blues and he handled lead vocals, and boy he was good. Really good. Elwood Blues, Dan Aykroyd's alter ego played a mean harp. It's important to note that they were all in on their aliases and their real names only appear in Special Thanks section of the liner notes. The band who brought the songs to life were (or just look at the picture if it's readable):

Steve "The Colonel" Cropper - guitar
Matt "Guitar" Murphy - guitar
Donald "Duck" Gunn - bass guitar
Steve "Getwa" Jordan - drums
Lou "Blue Lou" Marini - tenor sax
Tom "Triple Scale" Scott - tenor sax
Tom "Bones" Malone - tenor sax, baritone sax, trombone and trumpet
Paul "The Shiv" Shaffer - hammond organ, wurlitzer electric piano and acoustic piano

I remember seeing the record, and reading the back cover to see who played in the band. At the time I didn't recognize many of the names, but I never forgot them. Over time I'd see there names pop up all over the place. Paul who was part of the SNL band at the time before becoming David Letterman's musical director. Paul apparently missed out on being in the movie because John fired him for working with Gilda Radner. She was making a record of her own and John didn't like to share. All would be forgiven later and he'd return, and it would be glossed over as a scheduling conflict.

Regardless, it must have been a hell of a show. Buy tickets to see Steve Martin and you get treated to a legendary blues show that was recorded and released as Briefcase Full of Blues, an album that would go double platinum and in the process become one of the best selling blues album of all time. That's a hell of a love letter.

The songs here are so good, and heck even the faux Jamaican accents on "Groove Me" isn't as irritating as you'd think. I'm not culling "Groove Me" as a highlight, that honour is reserved for The Downchild Blues Band's "Almost" as well as Elwood's lone lead vocal on "Rubber Biscuit" which just kills. I'll also single out "Soul Man" and "Flip, Flop & Fly" but dang it, the whole album is so good.

The Blues Brothers were ambassadors for the blues and they introduced the blues to a whole new generation. Thankfully the 2006 prediction did not come to pass, although maybe it did as the music industry as a whole had more or less imploded earlier than 2006.

While The Blues Brothers are probably best remembered for the movie, they were the real deal even if only for a moment.

Styx - Paradise Theater

Styx was hands down one of my favourite bands as a kid. They were a strange band, even back then. They were a hard rock band, almost progressive at times, who had a penchant for sucky ballads. I know there's a tendency for people to zero in on "Babe" as the song that killed the band's credibility. The roots go way back to almost the beginning when Styx released "Lady" on their second album. It showed a side to the band that needed to be kept in check, and for the most part the band kept things on a pretty tight leash. The band had been setting a gruelling pace, releasing an album a year (two in 1972) and by the time they released Paradise Theater (if I end up writing theatre later it's because that's how we spell it here) in 1981 they'd dropped ten albums in less than a decade. I snapped this up as soon as I saw it, and it became a fixture on my turntable. Like the band had announced on "Borrowed Time" from 1979's Cornerstone , ...

Billy Rankin - Growin' Up Too Fast

Growin' Up Too Fast was never widely released on CD (if at all), and it was one of the albums I really wanted to get back after a basement flood wiped out my vinyl collection in the '90s (when no one really gave a shit about records, and my insurance gave me a couple hundred bucks for an appraised $10,000 collection). Way back in 1984, my (dearly departed and greatly missed) buddy Dave let me borrow his cassette copy, which included a bonus track of "Get It On (Bang A Gong)." When I eventually bought the album, I didn't know it was a bonus track, or even what a bonus track was. If that sentence was hard to read, just go back and skim it. I'm sure you'll get the gist. I'd find out later Billy was an off-and-on-again member of Nazareth and wrote some absolutely killer songs for them. At the time, though, all I knew was this guy laid it out cold with the opening cut, "Baby Come Back," then proceeded to lay down one killer tune after another bef...

Garfield - Strange Streets

I'd seen this before in the bin, but kept flipping through the stacks. I'd see it a few more times, each time stopping to look at it a little more. There was something kind of cool about the cover where the stylized Celtic knot had the dotted yellow line - it was a strange street for sure. I pulled the record out of the jacket and I was struck by the centre image. There was the familiar Mercury label, the same one I'd seen a thousand times on BTO's Head On album. Well, I'd bought things based on odd associations before - like when I had to buy anything that Solid Rock Records released (this was generally a good thing) - so who knows, maybe this was a hidden gem. There weren't any real scratches or rash, just a lot of dirt and dust. It seemed to clean up okay, but we'll see how it goes. The album opens with the title track, and this wasn't straight-ahead pop or rock. It was leaning toward the progressive, but with a pop bent. Oddly enough, the vocals rem...

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