“In a suburban living room in 1967, two teenage rock ‘n’ roll fans … slipped an LP onto the turntable and cranked up the volume. … ‘Ladies and gentleman [sic],’ said the announcer, ‘how about a nice warm round of applause to welcome the world’s greatest blues singer, the king of the blues, B.B. King!’”
Thus opens John Milward’s fascinating new book. Crossroads: How the Blues Shaped Rock ‘N’ Roll (and Rock Saved the Blues) (Northeastern University Press, 2013). By focusing on the relationship between blues and rock and contrasting how blues entered the cultural consciousness of the young, white populace differently in the US and the UK, Milward approaches well-trod territory and makes it new. He also gives voice to the journey of many a middle aged white music fan, including my own. At the very moment when Milward and his friend dropped a needle on B.B King’s “Live at the Regal” LP, I was excitedly unwrapping a copy of Albert King’s “Born Under a Bad Sign” album. And we’d both selected our treasures on the recommendation of the same man: a fellow by the name of Eric Clapton. In interviews and album liner notes, Clapton tirelessly credited his musical heroes. We American teenagers, having been slayed by the British bluesman’s playing on 1966’s “Bluesbreakers: John Mayall with Eric Clapton” and 1967’s “Fresh Cream,” began our search for the music that set this young guitar player on his unlikely path of becoming a British Ambassador to America of America’s own creation.
It’s this vision – tracking how American blues music that had lost favor in its homeland crossed the Atlantic and influenced young, white British musicians who then re-introduced the music to white fans in the music’s birthplace – that makes Crossroads at once revelatory, familiar, informative, and enjoyable. Milward has crafted a fine, highly readable work that combines the personal journeys of musicians and listeners with the cultural journey and evolution of an art form.
In large fashion, the book proceeds chronically. It opens with a “prelude” that, through a single musician – Robert Johnson, provides both a dramatic example of a blues musician influencing rock artists and a convincing springboard to Milward’s sub-thesis of how rock music saved the blues. A struggling “walking musician” when he entered a San Antonio recording studio in in 1936, by the 1990s, a half century after his death, Johnson’s music had entered the rock music lexicon, had sold over a million copies, and Johnson was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, making him, writes Milward, “American’s first rock star.”
The following pages quickly chronicle the immigration of southern blues musicians like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf to Chicago and, via recordings by companies like Chess Records, across the Atlantic where they catch the ears of aspiring musicians like Mr. Clapton and Mick Jagger and Keith Richards who would soon form a band named for one of Waters’s songs, the Rolling Stones.
It is at this juncture where Milward offers significant new insights on this well-known cultural migration. “In the US the post war decade of prosperity” had given rise to “the economic clout of the teenage consumer” who had little use for an old, dreary art form. “British kids,” on the other hand, “grew up in the haunted economically challenged shadow of World War II.” The blues resonated with British kids in a way that it did not for their peers across the pond. In addition, because they were removed from the cultural and racial context of the music, British musicians were naturally “less purist in their approach to the blues” than were their American counterparts. So, argues Milward, the music not only took hold in England, but musicians there were able to transform it into something more appealing to American teens.
Milward offers a couple of intriguing examples of the impact of the British blues aesthetic on American blues players. In a very short span of time, we go from hearing Muddy Waters complaining that rock music “hurt the blues real bad” to BB King being received as the “chairman of the board” by an all-white audience at the Fillmore West in San Francisco. Timing, it appears, was everything. Buddy Guy recalls Leonard Chess of Chess Records asking him to turn down during his recorded performances because his playing “was too loud, just noise.” Chess changed his tune after witnessing the success of that noise, but Guy had moved on to Vanguard Records.
What follows these chapters is an intriguing and imaginative journey that bounces from black American blues artists, to the British blues revivalists, and back to the white blues artists in the States, while never losing its narrative thread. Crossing and re-crossing the Atlantic, Milward the illuminates links among Cream, Fleetwood Mac, Hendrix, Bonnie Raitt, Traffic, Ry Cooder, Rolling Stones, and Janis Joplin.
Near the end of Crossroads Milward recounts an exchange, literally and figuratively, between Stevie Ray Vaughan and his musical mentor, Albert King. Vaughan had loaned King some money and when he asked for its return, King responded, “Come on now son, you know you owe me, don’t you?” Vaughan later conceded to a friend that based on the great slow, blues bends he’d lifted from King’s playing, he’d gotten the better of the bargain.
The Vaughan-King anecdote is a fair stop-frame summary of Milward’s thesis. Blues and rock influenced one another, resulting in benefits to both. What one musical form gained in artistry, it returned to the other in promotional value. It’s difficult to determine which came out ahead in the bargain. But, it’s beyond debate that this musical listener and many of his comrades gained immeasurably from the exchange.
Crossroads is both an important and immensely enjoyable read. Milward beautifully illuminates the relationship between the two musical genres. It’s a fascinating presentation that makes listening to the music even more meaningful and gratifying.
* Muddy Waters
