Fat Possum:
They're lowdown, they're flawed, and they're
dishing up the world's greatest blues recordings.
Summer 1999
by Michael Koster
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I think the blues started back in the Garden of Eden—when Adam and Eve got thrown out."
—John Lee Hooker
The Place: Clarksdale, in the heart of the Mississippi Delta.
The Time: Near midnight.
The Setting: Crossroads juke joint, a rundown, beerstained, flatboard building known for serving Budweiser with mints (mints conceal the alcohol vapors from beautiful women and nosy state patrolmen) and for showcasing the world's finest blues.
The Culprits: Kenny Brown, best known as R.L. Burnside's guitar player (Burnside calls him that trusty "white boy on guitar"). And Paul "Wine" Jones—a short, ascetic black man with a graying goatee—one of the Delta's unsung heroes of electrified country blues.
The Action: Brown is pounding out a blues/country/rock set, and has just launched into his very smoking version of "Jumper On The Line" when a very drunk Wine Jones literally stumbles onto the stage, grabs the mike, and with a voice full of guts and dirt and hard times rips into Howlin' Wolf's "Poor Boy."
The Problem: Wine is singing the wrong damn song.
The conclusion: This was Clarksdale, Mississippi, where perfection is somewhere near the bottom of folks' priority list. And Wine sounded damn good, regardless. So what the hell.
There was a jugload of heart and spontaneity in that moment, the kind folks just don't see much of in this sorry era of diluted, boogie-woogie beer-commercial "blues." But in Clarksdale, which has been cloaked in a beer-&-blues shroud every weekend since long before even Robert Johnson was walking its streets, the milked-down, second-rate drivel most of us are used to doesn't get much play. Southern folk enjoy the kind of music for which many of us non-Mississippians have an insatiable thirst: real-deal blues, phenomenally flawed, dripping with character. I never would have witnessed that moment in the Crossroads, nor been vaguely interested in tromping out to the Delta like a damn fool in the sweltering heat of August, if a little record label in Oxford, Mississippi, hadn't stoked my interest. Both men on stage that night record for Fat Possum, which sprung up in the early '90s and has since released the most important blues recordings of the decade.
Fat Possum is drawn like a magnet to rough-cut characters like Wine, to bluesmen so earthy their tattered trunks seem to sprout like trees right out of the Mississippi mud. It's a sort of anti-B.B. King approach, one that has spawned some of the gutsiest blues recordings ever set to tape. "Raw" is the word most associated with Fat Possum, and only in recent years has the attention generated by the label's gritty, eccentric, mostly excellent recordings allowed part-time bluesmen like Wine to give up day jobs as farmers, welders, mechanics, and the like to play the blues full time. Take Wine's 1995 release, Mule, a 10-song exercise in mating simple, direct rural blues with fuzzy wah-wah intensity (Brown played some guitar on Mule, so Wine's boozy moves that night in the Crossroads probably came as no surprise), and one of Fat Possum's strongest efforts to date. There's something gloriously grimy about Wine's molasses voice, hellhound-on-my-trail lyrics, and scratchy textured rhythms. Hardly anyone's heard of the guy. But next to R.L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough, Wine may be the most compelling artist on Fat Possum's impressive, ever-expanding roster.
Burnside—a longtime juke-joint owner, farmer, and bluesman—is spearheading Fat Possum's odd invasion of crusty old men. With two classics behind him already—1994's Too Bad Jim, widely acknowledged as some of the finest electric blues ever cut; and the hilariously obscene 1996 masterpiece, A Ass Pocket Of Whiskey—Burnside sells. Not hugely, but then real-deal blues recordings never do. Like many of his label mates, Burnside is in his 70s, in his prime, and seemingly unstoppable. He is the single most influential bluesman of the decade in terms of turning on the younger generation to the joys and pains of the genre—no doubt their first exposure to pure, raw blues. Theater-packing icons like B.B. King and John Lee Hooker, who get enormous amounts of press for enormously boring late-career albums, coast to the end of their careers with uninspired, by-the-numbers albums and tours. Burnside should be a lesson to them; he continues to push the envelope with idiosyncratic recordings and gig after gig in intimate clubs—the way blues should be played. Most importantly, he is the gatekeeper: the doorway by which people have discovered the Paul Wine Jones and Junior Kimbroughs of the world.
If Burnside is the best known, Kimbrough is hands-down Fat Possum's most respected artist. He is the all-time greatest purveyor of what the revered writer and producer Robert Palmer (Palmer wrote the classic Deep Blues, and has since passed on to that great juke joint in the sky) called a "churning, jamming, one-chord exercise in stamina and mass hypnosis." Kimbrough remains the undisputed king of cutting the deep, bluesy groove and snaking in and out and on top of it with more character and depth than any other bluesman before or since. While this makes him somewhat of a one-trick pony, mastering that maneuver better than anyone else within the narrow confines of the blues hatched an entirely unique sound. That's why Fat Possum brags, rightly so, that he's one of the genres' most important and original figures—right up there with Fred McDowell, Son House, and Bukka White. A Junior Kimbrough song is unmistakably a Junior Kimbrough song, and on those rare occasions he feels strongly enough to cover someone else's tune, he carves into it so deeply that it sheds its original skin and becomes wholly his. Since story line is pretty much irrelevant, to call his severely limited love-me-all-night-long lyrics a series of blues cliches would be to miss the point; his gusty vocals serve more often than not as another musical instrument beholden like any other to that Deep Groove. When Kimbrough recently passed away at age 67, the blues lost one of its greats. But he left behind four landmark recordings on Fat Possum—Sad Days, Lonely Nights, All Night Long, Most Things Haven't Worked Out, and God Knows I Tried—must-haves for anyone even vaguely interested in contemporary blues. Don't piss your money away on the latest celebrity-packed B.B. King disc. Pick up Most Things Haven't Worked Out instead, and open up a whole new world.
On the other end of the Fat Possum spectrum—somewhere toward the back of the classroom—sits the plainly disturbed, one-man band known as Hasil Adkins, a backwoods Daniel Boone redneck type who sounds like a cross between Hank Williams on crack and a disoriented street walker who stumbled into a recording studio and conned the engineers into letting him record. The hell of it is that despite Adkins' general lack of skill, it works—not because his songs are great in and of themselves, but because Adkins' 1997 recording, What The Hell Was I Thinking?, captures his depraved charm to a T. He is yet another example of Fat Possum's skill at choosing idiosyncratic musicians whose music is drenched with character.
Don't get the wrong idea. Like I said, Fat Possum is far from perfect, which is both its unique strength and its fatal flaw. Not all of its recordings are knock-dead greats, or even worth listening to for that matter. Burnside's first couple of discs have their moments, but are mediocre at best. And his latest "dance mix" album, while admittedly a savvy marketing tool for the dance club crowd, is a complete bomb artistically. While the infinitely untalented Adkins defied all reason by putting out a great disc, a recent release by the infinitely untalented Bob Log begs the question: What in the hell was Fat Possum thinking? And Fat Possum liner notes, refreshingly educational and anecdotally rich under producer Robert Palmer's direction, have descended into annoyingly empty frat-boy drivel. But for every miss, you can expect two or three hits by a label with more depth and foresight than I've seen since Sub Pop began signing Seattle garage bands in the mid-'80s. There are many fine bluesmen of the gloriously unpolished ilk—T-Model Ford, Elmo Williams, Robert Cage, Johnny Farmer, and Asie Payton, to name a few—who, because of Possum's sharp ear, have finally been given their long-overdue, much-deserved chance. If you like your blues rough and real, full of the kind of chaos and spontaneity that Paul Wine Jones and Kenny Brown cranked out that night in the Delta, it doesn't get any rougher or realer than Fat Possum.
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THE CLASSICS
R.L. BURNSIDE/Too Bad Jim (1994)
JUNIOR KIMBROUGH/Most Things Haven't Worked Out (1997) THE DUDS
CEDELL DAVIS/Best Of (1994) 10 Essential Blues CDs
(picks by Carter Grice, owner of Santa Fe's EarShot Music)
6. MISSISSIPPI FRED McDOWELL (Rounder) |
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