“I used to sing this next song when I was a wee little girl in Dublin,” says Imelda May in introducing the third song of her mid-day set during the final day of Lollapalooza. Her accent, not evident when wailing the two opening, scorching rockers, is so thick that folks around me are asking one another, “What did she say?”
She motions to her guitarist (and husband), Darrell Higham, when observing that the song’s original recording featured the magnificent guitarist Hubert Sumlin.
“This was originally recorded by the great Howlin’ Wolf right here in Chicago at Chess Studio and it is a fittin’ honor for us to play it for you now.”
What follows needs no translation; this striking woman who is dolled up like a fifties rocker babe belts out one of the finest covers of Poor Boy this side of Willie Dixon. She cries, moans and shouts, working Wolf’s trademark “oh, ooh, ooh” through three octaves, from a raspy bass to an operatic soprano. May works the audience as well as she works this nugget from the golden era of Chicago blues. She poses, pouts, morphs from sultry to threatening and goads the crowd into a call and answer of Wolf’s famed three-syllable refrain.
May’s reference to Higham while intoning the great Hubert Sumlin was not a frivolous us exercise. Higham is as fine a guitarist as one might encounter. In the recently-published book, Rockabilly – The Illustrated History (The Twang Heard Round the World), no less a guitarist than Brian Setzer listed Higham among history’s top five Rockabilly guitarists (OK, Setzer cheats and gets in seven guitarists by listing a three-way tie for fifth). This rightly puts Higham in the same crowd as Cliff Gallup, Scotty Moore and James Burton. We ought to include him among the blues greats, too. Higham holds down Sumlin’s angular riff while May moans away, but when he takes his solo he mixes some Sumlin and early Buddy Guy with a pinch of Cliff Gallup and a dash of James Burton. The musical gumbo leaping from his Gibson ES-350 is so astonishing that I force myself to wrest my eyes from the magical display to glance around the crowd to see if others understand what they are witnessing. Well, a couple of kids are playing air guitar, but without the distortion and volume of their guitar heroes, most in this crowd fail to perceive the genius before them. Still, though May and band began their set with a modest crowd, folks have been streaming toward the stage and, now, there must be 5,000 bobbing heads and swaying bodies fanning out in front of the stage. These kids (and a few of us old-timers) do recognize art when they hear and see it.
There’s a lot of artistic merit on the stage to perceive. May works both song and crowd with peerless skill and reaches for the bodhrán, a notoriously difficult-to-play Irish percussion instrument, when giving band members space to solo. Higham effortlessly moves from flatpicking to playing banjo rolls with pick and fngers to smoothly sliding through some chord melody. Drummer Steve Rushton can lay down a simple, 4/4 rockabilly beat, but he can also play jazz and he inflects the music with nuance and polyrhythm where appropriate. To mangle a Mark Knopfler lyric, this is a trumpet-playing band, with Dave Priseman blowing the horn when not playing guitar or adding percussion. While in most contexts a band can be no better than its drummer, a rockabilly band can be no better than its bassist. This is a good band, then, because Al Gare plays a mean slap bass and a smooth electric bass.
May’s set is composed mostly of tunes she penned, with a majority coming from her 2011 (2010 in the UK and Europe – we Americans are behind the cultural curve again) CD, Mahem, including the blistering title track and a rousing “Johnny Got a Boom Boom,” about a stand up bass player and featuring, well, the stand up bass player. She’s just as convincing on the covers, including that scary Wolf cover, Johnny Burnett’s “Train Kept a Rollin’” (with Bingham playing a note-perfect rendition of Paul Burlison’s solo in the original), and the set closer, the Ed Cobb-penned “Tainted Love” (a 1965 hit for Gloria Jones and a 1981 hit for Soft Cell). It’s a great choice for a closer into which May even manages to work a Wolf tribute. The crowd may not catch the nuance, but they do know a good vibe when they hear it and I’m confident that May and band have gained more than a few new fans.
Throughout the Festival’s last day, I manage to catch some great acts. New Jersey Punk rockers, Titus Andronicus, whip their devoted crowd into a patriotic, flag-waving frenzy. Ryan Bingham and the Dead Horses prove that they are anything but dead with a gripping, grinding country rock/blues that perfectly suits Binghamn’s world-weary lyrics and even more weary-sounding voice. The re-assembled Cars prove the merit of simple, well rehearsed and well played rock & roll. The 1980s cool, though, doesn’t seem to inspire the audience and lead singer Ric Ocasek’s use of an iPad as a Teleprompter probably doesn’t help matters. Closers Foo Fighters put in a rambunctious set that has the audience dancing in the rain and, then, mud. But, it’s May’s brilliant mix of past, present, and future that stays with me. She and the band have a foot firmly planted in the music of half a century ago, but they all, and especially May, know how to present it to a present day audience. The music has a polish that makes punk rockers seem quaint and an urgency that makes the stadium rockers apperception pretentious. Mostly, though, it’s got a combination of professionalism and emotional content that, to my ears and the apparent apparent senses of several thousand young concer goers, overwhelms the electronic dance music that is coming to dominate Lollapalooza. They’ve seen and heard the past and recognize it as the future.
OK, I confess that my observations are likely wishful thinking. Moreover, to be sure, it’s a joy to see 15,000 kids drawn to and moved by music from midday to midnight, whether it’s to a strummed acoustic guitar or to quirky, computer-generated beats. And, seeing this scene for the first time was a mind-broadening experience. But, still, witnessing a bunch of kids wreaking mayhem to some hard-core, top-level rockabilly warmed my heart.
Love live rock and roll… and rockabilly.
