Story of the Album: Blues best cure for any ailment

I was a skinny, white, blue-eyed kid from Spokane with long, platinum blonde straight hair who couldn’t even play a flutophone worth a hell. Johnny Winter was a skinny, white, albino man from Texas with long, platinum blonde straight hair who could play his guitar like ringing a bell.

I’d listened to plenty of rock by the early 1970s on Spokane AM/FM radio and the occasional Beatles or Creedence Clearwater Revival album my semi-hip college professor dad had in his collection. But, to face the sad facts, I was raised on dullish folk music like the terminally unhip Brothers Four and Peter, Paul and Mary.

Then, one 1973 evening, in the deepest mire of my adolescence, I played a borrowed record album and everything changed. The first time I put “Johnny Winter Live And” on the turntable of my dad’s semi-decent Sony integrated stereo in the basement rec room and dropped the stylus down and heard the powerful, bluesy, stinging, soaring, rocking and speed burning guitar of Winter and the tight play of his band, Rick Derringer (guitar), Randy Hobbs (bass), and Bobby Caldwell (drums), something blew open in me. To be specific, it was the one track, “It’s My Own Fault,” an older blues standard he covered live. I’d never listened to much blues music, and this slow, painful, hard scorcher rocketed into my head and heart like a guitar- guided, multi-warheaded music missile and flash welded in me, the first honest and emotionally grounded connection I’d ever felt to music.

As a struggling adolescent going through struggling adolescent crap, this slow propulsive blues song with crescending showers of stinging guitar notes, Winter’s bluesy and powerful voice and a simple, driving rhythm, truly lifted my spirits and made me feel better in a way I’d not experienced.

If you don’t get blues music, you’ll never understand why it is the perfect music for pain, confusion, weariness and depression. It roots deep into the emotional brain and electrically shocks and amplifies the brain’s pleasure neurochemicals into waves of rhythmic, irrepressible, azure-hued ocean surf breakers washing away, for a little while, the gasping starfishes, smashed seashells, and beer bottles broken about in your life and head. At least, that’s my metaphorical hypothesis for the power of blues music.

I played this album, and particularly this one song, endlessly in a repetition-compulsion aural drug-hit-seeking way. Eventually, we tend to satiate on the same doses and types of positive sonic reinforcers and search for new and stronger hits of music happy. For me, I’ve been a lifelong lover of many genres and sub-genres of popular, alternative, independent, mainstream and (insert modifiers)-core music, and forever lost more than a few Hertzes from my upper-range hearing frequencies during live rock concerts so loud they hurt, but only the blues, with its simple but perfect AAB structure and lyrical focus on pain, heartbreak and redemption with a price, does what it does when I need it done. And yeah, it’s my own fault, baby.