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DVD video |
| 6.609 Ft
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| 1. | Birthday Blues
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| 2. | Rolling With The Blues
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| 3. | Parchman Farm
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| 4. | Riding On The L & N
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| 5. | Little Girl
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| 6. | It Ain't Rain
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| 7. | Stepping Out
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| 8. | Room To Move
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| 9. | One Life To
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| 10. | Backstage Interview
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John Mayall - Guitar, Harmonica, Keyboards, Vocals
Bobby Haynes - Bass
Coco Montoya - Guitar
Paul Hines - Drums
Walter Trout - Guitar
This DVD was filmed at Iowa State University circa 1987 and features John Mayall's Bluesbreakers including Walter Trout (guitar), Coco Montoya (guitar), Paul Hines (drums), and Bobby Haynes (bass). John Mayall is widely acknowledged as the father of British blues having baptized a whole generation of white, British musicians and an audience who might otherwise never have discovered the blues. Apart from having discovered - in Eric Clapton, Peter Green, and Mick Taylor - three of the most acclaimed guitarists of the rock era, his blues school fostered the talents of a roster of artists who have since profoundly influenced the course of rock 'n' roll. Mayall's new incarnation of the Bluesbreakers, officially launched in 1984, included future stars in their own right, guitarists Coco Montoya and Walter Trout and quickly proved to be as innovative and technically gifted as their peers. This DVD brilliantly documents their abundant ability.
* Gary Peet - Executive Producer
* Kim Lyon - Executive Producer
Previously released by DFP under the title Live in Iowa 1987, Quantum Leap's video Live at Iowa State University captures a performance by John Mayall's Bluesbreakers at an Ames, IA, club called the Maintenance Shop, which looks like a college rathskeller. The walls are exposed brick, and Mayall performs on the floor before a couple of hundred fans seated at tables and drinking beer from plastic cups. The fifty-something British bluesman, sporting a suspiciously full head of shag-cut long hair and a motorcycle muscle shirt, jumps from electric keyboard to electric guitar to harmonica during a 49-minute, nine-song set that includes vintage songs such as "Parchman Farm" and "Room to Move" along with newer selections. The band includes guitarists Walter Trout and Coco Montoya, but it's really Trout who gets the most attention with some long solos, notably on the instrumental "Stepping Out," while Montoya frequently amuses himself by going out into the audience, sometimes even sitting down and sharing a drink with audience members while playing. The show is an enjoyable one from a thoroughly professional blues-rock band and probably representative of what a Mayall-led group of the mid-'80s sounded like on an average night. The extras include text biographies and discographies of Mayall, Trout, and Montoya, and a 49-second backstage interview with Mayall. (The cover of the DVD shows the approximate running time as 85 minutes, but that estimate includes 37 minutes of excerpts from other DVDs issued by the company on subjects ranging from Duke Ellington to female wrestling.)
--- William Ruhlmann, All Music Guide
John Mayall
Active Decades: '60s, '70s, '80s, '90s and '00s
Born: Nov 29, 1933 in Macclesfield, Cheshire, England
Genre: Blues
Styles: Modern Electric Blues, Blues-Rock, Electric Harmonica Blues, British Blues, Blues Revival
As the elder statesman of British blues, it is John Mayall's lot to be more renowned as a bandleader and mentor than as a performer in his own right. Throughout the '60s, his band, the Bluesbreakers, acted as a finishing school for the leading British blues-rock musicians of the era. Guitarists Eric Clapton, Peter Green, and Mick Taylor joined his band in a remarkable succession in the mid-'60s, honing their chops with Mayall before going on to join Cream, Fleetwood Mac, and the Rolling Stones, respectively. John McVie and Mick Fleetwood, Jack Bruce, Aynsley Dunbar, Dick Heckstall-Smith, Andy Fraser (of Free), John Almond, and Jon Mark also played and recorded with Mayall for varying lengths of times in the '60s.
Mayall's personnel has tended to overshadow his own considerable abilities. Only an adequate singer, the multi-instrumentalist was adept in bringing out the best in his younger charges (Mayall himself was in his thirties by the time the Bluesbreakers began to make a name for themselves). Doing his best to provide a context in which they could play Chicago-style electric blues, Mayall was never complacent, writing most of his own material (which ranged from good to humdrum), revamping his lineup with unnerving regularity, and constantly experimenting within his basic blues format. Some of these experiments (with jazz-rock and an album on which he played all the instruments except drums) were forgettable; others, like his foray into acoustic music in the late '60s, were quite successful. Mayall's output has caught some flak from critics for paling next to the real African-American deal, but much of his vintage work -- if weeded out selectively -- is quite strong; especially his legendary 1966 LP with Eric Clapton, which both launched Clapton into stardom and kick-started the blues boom into full gear in England.
When Clapton joined the Bluesbreakers in 1965, Mayall had already been recording for a year, and been performing professionally long before that. Originally based in Manchester, Mayall moved to London in 1963 on the advice of British blues godfather Alexis Korner, who thought a living could be made playing the blues in the bigger city. Tracing a path through his various lineups of the '60s is a daunting task. At least 15 different editions of the Bluesbreakers were in existence from January 1963 through mid-1970. Some notable musicians (like guitarist Davy Graham, Mick Fleetwood, and Jack Bruce) passed through for little more than a cup of coffee; Mayall's longest-running employee, bassist John McVie, lasted about four years. The Bluesbreakers, like Fairport Convention or the Fall, was more a concept than an ongoing core. Mayall, too, had the reputation of being a difficult and demanding employer, willing to give musicians their walking papers as his music evolved, although he also imparted invaluable schooling to them while the associations lasted.
Mayall recorded his debut single in early 1964; he made his first album, a live affair, near the end of the year. At this point the Bluesbreakers had a more pronounced R&B influence than would be exhibited on their most famous recordings, somewhat in the mold of younger combos like the Animals and Rolling Stones, but the Bluesbreakers would take a turn for the purer with the recruitment of Eric Clapton in the spring of 1965. Clapton had left the Yardbirds in order to play straight blues, and the Bluesbreakers allowed him that freedom (or stuck to well-defined restrictions, depending upon your viewpoint). Clapton began to inspire reverent acclaim as one of Britain's top virtuosos, as reflected in the famous "Clapton is God" graffiti that appeared in London in the mid-'60s.
In professional terms, though, 1965 wasn't the best of times for the group, which had been dropped by Decca. Clapton even left the group for a few months for an odd trip to Greece, leaving Mayall to straggle on with various fill-ins, including Peter Green. Clapton did return in late 1965, around the time an excellent blues-rock single, "I'm Your Witchdoctor" (with searing sustain-laden guitar riffs), was issued on Immediate. By early 1966, the band was back on Decca, and recorded its landmark Bluesbreakers LP. This was the album that, with its clean, loud, authoritative licks, firmly established Clapton as a guitar hero, on both reverent covers of tunes by the likes of Otis Rush and Freddie King and decent originals by Mayall himself. The record was also an unexpected commercial success, making the Top Ten in Britain. From that point on, in fact, Mayall became one of the first rock musicians to depend primarily upon the LP market; he recorded plenty of singles throughout the '60s, but none of them came close to becoming a hit.
Clapton left the Bluesbreakers in mid-1966 to form Cream with Jack Bruce, who had played with Mayall briefly in late 1965. Mayall turned quickly to Peter Green, who managed the difficult feat of stepping into Clapton's shoes and gaining respect as a player of roughly equal imagination and virtuosity, although his style was quite distinctly his own. Green recorded one LP with Mayall, A Hard Road, and several singles, sometimes writing material and taking some respectable lead vocals. Green's talents, like those of Clapton, were too large to be confined by sideman status, and in mid-1967 he left to form a successful band of his own, Fleetwood Mac.
Mayall then enlisted 19-year-old Mick Taylor; remarkably, despite the consecutive departures of two star guitarists, Mayall maintained a high level of popularity. The late '60s were also a time of considerable experimentation for the Bluesbreakers, which moved into a form of blues-jazz-rock fusion with the addition of a horn section, and then a retreat into mellower, acoustic-oriented music. Mick Taylor, the last of the famous triumvirate of Mayall-bred guitar heroes, left in mid-1969 to join the Rolling Stones. Yet in a way Mayall was thriving more than ever, as the U.S. market, which had been barely aware of him in the Clapton era, was beginning to open up for his music. In fact, at the end of the 1960s, Mayall moved to Los Angeles. Released in 1969, The Turning Point, a live, all-acoustic affair, was a commercial and artistic high point.
In America at least, Mayall continued to be pretty popular in the early '70s. His band was no more stable than ever; at various points some American musicians flitted in and out of the Bluesbreakers, including Harvey Mandel, Canned Heat bassist Larry Taylor, and Don "Sugarcane" Harris. Although he's released numerous albums since and remained a prodigiously busy and reasonably popular live act, his post-1970 output generally hasn't matched the quality of his '60s work. Following collaborations with an unholy number of guest celebrities, in the early '80s he re-teamed with a couple of his more renowned vets, John McVie and Mick Taylor, for a tour. It's the '60s albums that you want, though there's little doubt that Mayall has over the past decades done a great deal to popularize the blues all over the globe, whether or not the music has meant much on record.
--- Richie Unterberger, All Music Guide |
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