I
don’t know. Maybe the blues just ain’t fair. It’s not like anyone with a
harmonica or a guitar and a dream was ever promised a fair shake. But it just
seems sometimes the cream doesn’t rise to the top. Cream like British blues
legend John Mayall.
Mayall has been playing the blues
for over 40 years. And just about anybody that counts in British blues has
passed through the hallowed halls of his Bluesbreakers. Peter Green, John
McVie, and Mick Fleetwood got their feet wet with Mayall before forming
Fleetwood Mac (initially a way-cool, chick-free Brit-blues outfit). Mick Taylor
went on to join The Rolling Stones during arguably their best and most raucous
period. Andy Frasier broke free to form Free. Before (ex-Yardbird) Eric Clapton
and Jack Bruce went psychedelicly heavy with Cream, they too were
Bluesbreakers. Some pretty heavy history, yet Mayall concedes now is the time for the Bluesbreakers.
This is the best line-up.
“It’s the best band I’ve ever had,”
he says from his home in Laurel Canyon, California. “Proven by the fact we’ve
been together so long. It’s like a well-oiled machine.” A machine that plays
over 120 shows annually.
Mayall was first hipped to it all
through his dad’s record collection. Six-string cats like Eddie Lang, Lonnie
Johnson, Django Reinhardt, and others turned him on. By age 13 he was teaching
himself to play on borrowed guitars and secondhand harmonicas. But after going
to college for art and a stint in the British Army, Mayall began a successful
career as a graphic designer. He served raw-boned Chicago blues through the
English fog strictly on the side.
“I never intended to make a career
out of it,” he says. “It was just a hobby until I was 30 and then the whole
movement started with Alexis Korner in London. That was the trigger.”
At a time when the blues in America
was generally black and ignored, white, European artists like Mayall helped
bring it to the gentry, leaving a profound and lasting effect on the blues as
well as its many bastard offspring.
This movement took American black
blues, retooled it, and ultimately resuscitated it. It was also during this
period that Mayall backed up the heroes he emulated like T-Bone Walker, John Lee
Hooker, and Sonny Boy Williamson.
“It was really great to be in the
presence of your heroes and learn such a lot from them by playing with them,”
Mayall says. His laidback approach and reverence for the blues have obviously
come from these influences, proving influential in his style and his dynamics.
“I think there was a tendency at the
beginning where everybody plays flat out at full volume. You start to play with
those guys and you realize it doesn’t have to be loud all the time. You can be
more effective.”
Mayall recently celebrated his 70th
birthday in a star-studded concert. The resulting recording, John Mayall & The Bluesbreakers And
Friends, is now available on a double CD and DVD. It serves as testimony to
Mayall’s talent and historic significance, despite being perhaps overlooked.
“Well that’s something one has no
choice over,” he concedes. “We don’t decide what we do and what’s popular, and
what our position in the world is. We just do what we believe in and hope for
the best.”
John Mayall
& The Bluesbreakers with guests The
White Devils play Thursday, March 18, at Milestones, 170 East Avenue, at 8
p.m. Tix: $18 to $20. 325-6490
This article appears in Mar 17-23, 2004.
