The Fat Angel Sings

John Mayall, tireless and influential British blues pioneer, dies at 90, John Mayall  introduced Eric Clapton, Peter Green, Jack Bruce and Mick Taylor to the world, and has made 60 albums in nearly 60 years, Plenty of British bluesmen have sold more records, but few command as much respect as John Mayall OBE. With a back catalogue of close to 60 albums, and kick-starting the careers of countless stadium-filling galacticos, there’s a solid pub argument that nobody has done so much, for so long, to keep British blues afloat. No wonder they call him the Godfather. 

A statement on Mayall’s Instagram page announced his death Tuesday, saying the musician died Monday at his home in California. “Health issues that forced John to end his epic touring career have finally led to peace for one of this world’s greatest road warriors,” the post said

Mayall almost missed the boat. Born near Macclesfield in 1933, he grew up in thrall to his father’s imported collection of blues 78s, and taught himself piano, guitar, harmonica and ukulele during downtime at art school. But National Service knocked him off track, and he returned to 1950s Britain to find a monopoly of trad-jazz bands “all playing the same tunes”. 

At last, in 1962, he sensed revolution in the air, and the following year he hit London like a train. Even back then, pushing 30, the bandleader seemed like an elder statesman; a silverback among the cubs of the nascent British scene, whose gravitas, brittle wit and deep knowledge of the genre’s roots made him a big fish at Alexis Korner’s Ealing Club. 

“London was booming,” Mayall recalls. “I was just glad the music I’d played since I was a kid was now a viable thing.” With impeccable timing, Mayall launched The Bluesbreakers, and so began an imperious early run of albums that remain set-texts for anyone remotely serious about the blues. This was Mayall’s band (the turnover of hired/fired members backs up his former guitarist Walter Trout’s observation that he was a “benevolent dictator”). But alongside the prolific songwriting, stinging musicianship and tremulous vocals, his genius lay in the nabbing and nurturing of ‘next big things’. In the 60s especially, the talent on the payroll was staggering – Eric Clapton, Peter Green, Jack Bruce, Mick Taylor. And Mayall always let his charges off the leash. “Any person who joins my band,” he noted, “they’re all equal, whatever their age.” 

Mayall and Clapton shared a passion for Chicago blues, and the guitarist later remembered that Mayall had “the most incredible collection of records I had ever seen.”

The piano was his main instrument, though he also performed on guitar and harmonica, as well as singing in a distinctive, strained-sounding voice. Aided only by drummer Keef Hartley, Mayall played all the other instruments for his 1967 album, “Blues Alone.”

Mayall was often called the “father of British blues,” but when he moved to London in 1962 his aim was to soak up the nascent blues scene led by Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies. Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Eric Burdon were among others drawn to the sound.

The Bluesbreakers drew on a fluid community of musicians who drifted in and out of various bands. Mayall’s biggest catch was Clapton, who had quit the Yardbirds and joined the Bluesbreakers in 1965 because he was unhappy with the Yardbirds’ commercial direction.

He is credited with helping develop the English take on urban, Chicago-style rhythm and blues that played an important role in the blues revival of the late 1960s. At various times, the Bluesbreakers included Eric Clapton and Bruce, later of Cream; Mick Fleetwood, John McVie and Peter Green of Fleetwood Mac; Mick Taylor, who played five years with the Rolling Stones; Harvey Mandel and Larry Taylor of Canned Heat; and Jon Mark and John Almond, who went on to form the Mark-Almond Band.

Mayall, now 90, retired from the road in 2021, but continues to make music that pleases the hardcore but make little dent in the mainstream (his last album, 2022’s “The Sun Is Shining Down“, was his 60th). And while it’s unlikely he’ll produce anything to shuffle the pecking-order laid out here, you can bet he’ll go down trying. 

“With music you can be any age,” he noted in 2012.  “What is the Best John Mayall album of all time?” or “What are the top John Mayall albums?”. John Mayall released a great deal of albums throughout his long and prolific career. John Mayall can easily be considered one of the best blues musicians. 

John Mayall And The Bluesbreakers – Blues Breakers With Eric Clapton (Decca, 1966)

The inevitable first purchase, 1966’s so-called Beano album is the high-water mark of the 60s British blues boom, Mayall’s finest hour and Eric Clapton’s precocious launch pad. 

From the languid opening swoop of Otis Rush’s All Your Love, through the jet-fuelled Hideaway, to spring-heeled Mayall originals like Key To Love and Little Girl, this is amped-up blues rock that walks a tightrope between reverential and rip-it-up exciting. Nearly 50 years after it hit number six in the UK, there’s a case for saying that nobody involved has ever flown higher.

John Mayall And The Bluesbreakers – A Hard Road (Decca, 1967)

Producer Mike Vernon hit the roof when The Bluesbreakers rolled into Decca Studios without Eric Clapton. He needn’t have panicked. The canny Mayall’s new signing to his Bluesbreakers, 20-year-old nonentity Peter Green, was patently up to snuff, whether bleeding soul over his self-penned instrumental The Supernatural, detonating Freddie King’s The Stumble, or dovetailing with Mayall on top-drawer originals like the morose title track.

Green and bassist John McVie would split that same year for Fleetwood Mac, but their legacy is an album that snaps at The Bluesbreakers’ heels.

John Mayall And The Bluesbreakers – Crusade (Decca, 1967)

Mayall was outraged by the untrumpeted death of J.B. Lenoir, and Crusade was his attempt to force the blues down the throat of the mainstream (“I hope you’ll join forces with me,” he writes in the sleeve notes).

With Green gone, his eye had settled on a teenage Mick Taylor, who brings equal parts soul and swagger. Crusade took just seven hours to record and mix, which perhaps accounts for its wham-bam brilliance. The band tips its hat on The Death Of J.B. Lenoir, and Taylor arguably pips Clapton’s Hideaway with his jaw-dropping instrumental Snowy Wood.

John Mayall – Blues From Laurel Canyon (Decca, 1968)

Mayall had spent the summer of 1968 crashing at Frank Zappa’s dissolute Laurel Canyon home. This loose concept album is his postcard, opening with the roar of an airliner touching down “Vacation”, then lurching through sticky accounts of musos “The Bear” and LA groupies the jazzy “Miss James”. 

The rhythm section of drummer Colin Allen and bassist Steve Thompson provide a taut backbone, but the star of the piece is a ridiculously precocious Mick Taylor, whose pugnacious, heart-in-fingers fretwork made his exit for the Stones the following year feel like a step down.

John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers – Bare Wires (Decca, 1968)

Bold moves all round, as Bare Wires binned the Crusade rhythm section, added brass and kicked off with a 23-minute title ‘suite’. Jazzier and lyrically introspective, the album rewarded open-minded listeners with a volley of cuts that still dazzle, from the rug-cutting funk of No Reply (Mick Taylor working the wah-wah pedal with Hendrix-worthy panache) to the parping slow-blues of I’m A Stranger. 

It tested the faith of his trad-blues fans, but the consensus was a thumbs-up: Bare Wires gave Mayall his highest UK chart placing (number three) and broke him in the States.

A small but enduring thing. Though Mayall never approached the fame of some of his illustrious alumni, he was still performing in his late 80s, pounding out his version of Chicago blues. The lack of recognition rankled a bit, and he wasn’t shy about saying so.

“I’ve never had a hit record, I never won a Grammy Award, and Rolling Stone has never done a piece about me,” he said in an interview with the Santa Barbara Independent in 2013. “I’m still an underground performer.”

Known for his blues harmonica and keyboard playing, Mayall has had a Grammy nomination, for “Wake Up Call” which featured guest artists Buddy Guy, Mavis Staples, Mick Taylor and Albert Collins. He received a second nomination in 2022 for his album “The Sun Is Shining Down.” He also won official recognition in Britain with the award of an OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire) in 2005.

Clapton, interviewed for a BBC documentary on Mayall in 2003, confessed that “to a certain extent I have used his hospitality, used his band and his reputation to launch my own career,” “I think he is a great musician. I just admire and respect his steadfastness,” Clapton added.

Mayall encouraged Clapton to sing and urged Green to develop his song-writing abilities.

Mick Taylor, who succeeded Green as a Bluesbreaker in the late 1960s, valued the wide latitude which Mayall allowed his soloists. “You’d have complete freedom to do whatever you wanted,” Taylor said in a 1979 interview with writer Jas Obrecht. “You could make as many mistakes as you wanted, too.”

Neil Young’s “On the Beach“, an album that, to put it mildly, is not a very sunny one. Young himself called it one of the most depressing records he’s ever made — and that was after he wrote and recorded the famously funeral “Tonight’s the Night”. But that album could be joyful at times, like the groovy movie in “Speakin’ Out,” or the fried eggs and country ham in “Albuquerque.” You won’t find any breakfast delights on “On the Beach”, but you will find three songs with the word “blues” in the title.

Every hardcore Neil Young fan worships “On the Beach“, and not just because it became a cult rarity within a decade of its release. It stopped being pressed on vinyl in the early Eighties, effectively vanishing from view, and it wasn’t released on CD until 2003. You can hear “On the Beach” anytime now, as easily as you can hear After the Gold Rush or Zuma, but it’s lost none of its uniquely haunting beauty.

There’s simply nothing like it in his catalogue. We love “On the Beach“ because it’s the most raw and personal Shakey ever got, the moment he rooted himself in his melancholy, drank up the pain, and used it to push further than he ever had. He was incredibly bummed out — and very, very, very stoned. We wouldn’t have him any other way. 

You can thank the honey slides for that. The infamously potent concoction of fried weed and honey fuelled the recording sessions at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles, which is probably why the music feels like a frenzied high on the verge of becoming a very bad trip. (Neil told an audience that year that the secret ingredient was “poor-grade marijuana, worse than you get on the street. You take it and you get your old lady, if you got one, to cook it up on the stove.”) The peak of that honey-slide haze comes when he takes on a wild-eyed, Manson-esque persona in “Revolution Blues,” barreling around L.A. on a destructive spree. “Remember your guard dog?/Well, I’m afraid that he’s gone!” he sings, with a menacing grin you can hear through the speakers. He goes full Tex Watson in the final lines: “Well, I hear that Laurel Canyon is full of famous stars/But I hate them worse than lepers and I’ll kill them in their cars.” 

 “Heart of Gold Pt. 2,” it’s not. But even in this sweat-soaked nightmare, Young manages to toss in a glimmer of his real-life despair, admitting, “But I’m still not happy/I feel like there’s something wrong.” Looking back, he was absolutely correct about that.

His bleak mindset at the time was the result of several factors, mainly his crumbling relationship with actress Carrie Snodgress, the woman who had inspired him to write “A Man Needs a Maid” just a couple of years earlier. “Pretty dark, not really that happy,” he said in the definitive 2002 biography Shakey. “I think it was a period of disillusionment about things turning out differently than I had anticipated. I think I was starting to realize what a fucked-up life I had chosen for myself with Carrie.”  

His career wasn’t bringing him much joy, either. Refusing to satisfy audiences who wanted another Harvest (“I can’t write the same book every time,” he told Rolling Stone in 1975), he made the movie soundtrack Journey Through the Past and the live album Time Fades Away, the latter recorded on his massive, miserable Harvest tour. Neither one came close to matching the gigantic commercial success he’d seen in 1972.  

Young wasted no time clapping back at the critics, kicking off “On the Beach” with the rollicking “Walk On.” The opening lines set the tone for the rest of the record. “I hear some people been talking me down/Bring up my name, pass it ’round.” The track, recorded with his right-hand man Ben Keith and the Crazy Horse rhythm section of Ralph Molina and Billy Talbot, sounds almost dementedly upbeat. The lesson: Do not piss off Neil Young.  

But that was just the start of his complaints. Like many people in the summer of 1974, he was feeling burned out by the Patty Hearst kidnapping, the Watergate scandal, and other lurid headlines. “I never knew a man who could tell so many lies,” he says of Nixon on “Ambulance Blues.” The disgraced president resigned two weeks later. If the hippie dream had ended with Altamont and the Manson murders in 1969, now it felt like the world was just rubbing everyone’s face in it. Nihilism was the mood of the day, and it struck a chord with Neil. 

On the iconic album cover that he designed with Gary Burden, Neil stands on an overcast Santa Monica Beach in a cheap white-and-yellow polyester suit. Tacky floral patio furniture sits in the foreground, next to the taillight of a 1959 Cadillac sunken into the sand. (Another old dream dead and buried.) “SENATOR BUCKLEY CALLS FOR NIXON TO RESIGN,” reads the headline of a local paper. But Young isn’t paying attention to any of it. He’s turned away from the camera, hands in his pockets, looking out at the ocean. The sky is about to rain. 

“You go down to the beach and watch the same thing, just imagine every wave is a different set of emotions coming in,” he told Melody Maker in 1985. “Just keep coming. As long as you don’t ignore it, it’ll still be there. If you start shutting yourself off and not letting yourself live through the things that are coming through you, I think that’s when people start getting old really fast, that’s when they really age.”  

“On the Beach” has a seriously impressive list of personnel, from the Band’s Levon Helm and Rick Danko to his CSNY bandmates David Crosby and Graham Nash. That’s what being Neil Young in the early Seventies got you. But the most notable guest at this doomer shindig might be Cajun slide-guitar ace Rusty Kershaw. Not only did he cook and distribute those honey slides with his wife, Julie, and play some swampy fiddle to boot, he’s also responsible for shaping the sound of “On the Beach“. Kershaw convinced the band to sit extremely close together in the studio, and made sure they didn’t rehearse prior to recording, creating an intimate, intuitive vibe. With a ginormous beard and overalls, he was a figure known for his joyful debauchery. Young wasn’t in the right headspace to be the life of the party. Kershaw did it for him.  

Few records have a more staggering Side Two than “On the Beach“, an emotional bulldozer of just three songs. “The whole B side of this album, you can just put it on and get lost,” Father John Misty once told us. “You can get stoned and go inside this little universe. And when the song ends, go back to the beginning.” It starts with the title track, a stormy, stunning glimpse into Young’s mind as a celebrity and perpetual outsider. He needs to be surrounded by others, but he can’t bear to socialize with them. He’s thinking he’ll get out of town, get out of town. The hand drums, played here by Keith, make this one spooky dirge. 

Young laments and processes his fallout with Snodgress in the devastating “Motion Pictures (For Carrie),” his most vulnerable moment on the record. “I’m deep inside myself, but I’ll get out somehow,” he promises. The song is so intense and personal that Young has only played it a single time, when he premiered “On the Beach“ material at a surprise show at New York City’s Bottom Line in May 1974. Catching it live is the ultimate holy grail for fans.  

The record culminates with “Ambulance Blues,” a nearly nine-minute masterpiece that is widely regarded as one of his very best songs, second only to “Powderfinger.” It starts with a wistful look back at his early career, playing in Toronto coffee houses like the Riverboat and living in an apartment at 88 Isabella Street. He’s so bummed out, he’s even mourning his old apartment building as if it were a tragic heroine: “Oh Isabella, proud Isabella/They tore you down and plowed you under.” 

That era was not even a full decade in the past, but Young was painfully nostalgic for it, yearning to go back to a simpler time. His voice sounds deeper, weathered, and a bit distant — which was intentional. “Robert De Niro gained fifty pounds for Raging Bull, Neil did the same thing for his music,” bassist Tim Drummond said. “He was smoking two packs a day to get a late-night, frog-in-his-throat voice.”  

Using his aching harmonica and a melody he later admitted he nicked from English folk master Bert Jansch, Young continues to reflect on everything that’s happened since those early days, including the dead-end state of CSN (“you’re all just pissing in the wind”) and the recent deaths of Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten and roadie Bruce Berry. “An ambulance can only go so fast,” he says. “It’s easy to get buried in the past/When you try to make a good thing last.” He tells a surreal story about a kidnapping plot and gets some parting shots in at those ungrateful critics and President Tin Soldiers. Then the needle swings back and “On the Beach” ends. Fifty years later, it’s still echoing in our heads.

Experimental indie rock lifers Oneida came to their 17th album in circuitous fashion. Singer/guitarist Bobby Matador created templates for songs from his home in Boston, and then sent them to the rest of the band in NYC to finish. “We were working out the songs in New York without Bobby. We would start outriding the riffs, and then Shahin and Jane would add wild, out-of-tune licks,” says drummer Kid Millions.

“It seemed so perfect.” What started as straightforward, hooky songs in the same vein as Oneida’s 2022 album “Success” turned darker, looser and decidedly louder. “Expensive Air” rocks with defiant fists in the air, and with those ragged riffs (and Kid Millions’ heavy-on-the-fills style) they really rip it up. Bobby says if “Success” was “like laughing in a car gunning carelessly through an ice storm,” then “Expensive Air” is “how you laugh at yourself as the car spins into the ditch, or a tree. Same trip, but a little closer to the bone.” Buckle up.

A song is a song until it isn’t, until it’s pushed to its limits and beyond to become harder, faster and more dissonant. The music on Oneida’s 17th full-length album, “Expensive Air”, all started as tightly structured, melodic rock songs—very much in line with the non-stop bangers of “Success” from 2022—but along the way, they changed.

released July 19, 2024

Oneida is:
Kid Millions
Bobby Matador
Hanoi Jane
Barry London
Shahin Motia

Gillian Welch & David Rawlings release their 10th album together, “Woodland”, on August 23rd. Here’s the first single.  Recorded in Nashville, Tennessee at Welch and Rawlings’ own Woodland Sound Studio. Produced by David Rawlings. “Woodland is at the heart of everything we do, and has been for the last twenty some years,” the duo say. “The past four years were spent almost entirely within its walls, bringing it back to life after the 2020 tornado and making this record. The music is (songs are) a swirl of contradictions, emptiness, fullness, joy, grief, destruction, permanence. Now.”

On their first original composition since 2011, Welch and Rawlings demonstrate their penchant for deeply personal song writing and compelling performance. A journey through their clear adoration of folk and country music, ‘Empty Trainload Of Sky’ is the perfect accompaniment to a summer’s evening, even if you don’t reside on a ranch in the rural United States.

Acony Records is proud to announce “Woodland“, the new album from Gillian Welch & David Rawlings. “Woodland” comes out on August 23rd,

Laura Jane Grace unleashed another new punk song with her new band The Mississippi Medicals, “Karma Too Close.” “How’s your Karma? Coming a little too close for comfort? Mine too,” she says. “Take heart, keep your focus, keep going and also don’t forget to kick back and listen to the rippin electric sitar solo that Mike Patton plays.”

Europe! Uk! Ireland! You have asked and now here is the answer! I’ll be heading across the proverbial pond this November for a full month long run. Unfortunately some of the Mississippi Medicals have prior touring obligations but the good news is this will still be a full band tour. I’m bringing Paris Campbell Grace with me and we’ll be backed by Jacopo Fokas on bass & Ramirez O’Riley on drums and with that said I give to you “Laura Jane Grace & the Trauma Tropes”! We’ll also be joined on this run by Pet Needs opening the show… Oh, and John Gerhardt will be there holding the stage down too!

Recorded as part of the same daydreaming puzzle as “Unwishing Well”, “Still Clouds at Noon” brings out the slowcore/sadcore elements that drift through The Reds, Pinks & Purples’ melancholy catalogue. Donaldson names ’90s hometown San Francisco acts such as American Music Club and the more obscure Timco as pivotal to his guitar playing and development as a songwriter, both of which shine bright here. The slower tempo ballads on “Still Clouds…” often culminate in heavy fuzz drenched codas and showcase the more abstract poetic side of Donaldson’s lyricism. There’s an inherent pop-sensibility always at work though, with ear-worm melodies appearing over intoxicating circular riffs.

Formerly a Bandcamp only digital release, this white vinyl version is remastered and adds two unreleased tracks, one featuring Mark Monnone from Australian pop-legends The Lucksmiths on bass. Tour/Bandcamp exclusive, edition of 500 on black vinyl.

released July 22nd, 2024

Vancouver duo Japandroids announce their fourth and final record ‘Fate & Alcohol’ out October 18th. At once a return to form, and a thrilling step forward, this album is a monument to the chemistry they’ve honed over nearly two decades side-by-side.

Japandroids have returned with their first new album in seven years (not including 2020’s live LP) called “Fate & Alcohol“. The first single to be released from the project, “Chicago,” begins with—surprise, surprise—a flurry of guitars beneath Brian King singing of “two shots of the good stuff” and “being tired of being tired.” A bit cliché, I guess, but also, this shit rips harder than Malört. When he sang about sweating through his shirt?

“On our last record we wanted to broaden the definition of a Japandroids song and purposely left our demos quite open and malleable so that we had more flexibility to experiment in the studio,” King shared in a press statement. “At the time, this approach was new and exciting, and inspired us to be bolder, to take more chances.

We were aiming for a more cinematic take on our signature sound. This time, we made certain that every song ripped in our jam space before [producer] Jesse [Gander] ever heard it. If you listen to our first demo of ‘Chicago,’ it’s obviously much rougher than what you hear on record, but it’s all there. Even on a blown-out iPhone recording, the energy was obvious, and the feeling cut through loud and clear.”

releases October 18th, 2024

All songs written by JAPANDROIDS

Laura Jane Grace is a major figure in today’s rock scene as both a solo artist and the front person of Against Me!, which she founded in Naples, FL in the late 1990s. As a working artist, she has released four solo offerings and seven albums with Against Me!, and in 2012 went public with her gender transition in the pages of Rolling Stone. In her music, she continues to detail her journey all while staying true to her earlier themes of outspoken political critique – environmentalism along with personal and social liberation – with a base in American music including country and folk-rock, with a penchant for noise and anarchy.

“I’m Not A Cop” is taken from latest album, ‘Hole In My Head’

Eight CD Box Set include’s a massive 88 tracks and explores the era which included four Faces studio albums “First Step”, “Long Player”, “A Nod Is As Good As A Wink…To A Blind Horse”…, and “Ooh La La” as well as several solo albums that Rod Stewart recorded with most of the band “Gasoline Alley, “Every Picture Tells A Story”, “Never A Dull Moment”, and “Smiler“. 

Amongst the many rarities is a stereo mix of the May 13th, 1971, Paris Cinema concert, which was only broadcast in mono, and a February 1973 show that was never aired due to the BBC’s concerns over the band’s on-stage banter with the rowdy audience (!). All audio has been remastered with the full participation of the remaining band members Rod Stewart, Ronnie Wood and Kenney Jones.

The Blu-ray includes newly restored footage of the Faces’ April 1972 appearance on Sounds for Saturday

This large format set comes with a 48-page booklet with new commentary from surviving band members and archival quotes from Ronnie Lane, Ian McLagan, and BBC broadcaster John Peel, the latter of whom was very important, as the band acknowledge:

Rod Stewart says, “If it wasn’t for John Peel, the Faces would never have broken through”. Ronnie Wood concurs, “He gave the Faces our first break” as does Kenney Jones: “John Peel helped the Faces so much in England, in the press and on his show.” 

It is therefore appropriate that John Peel’s Christmas Carol Concert rounds out the collection. Originally broadcast on Boxing Day 1970, this unique holiday performance features Stewart singing “Away In A Manger” and a Christmas carol medley sung by a choir that includes the Faces, their roadies, John Peel, Marc Bolan of T-Rex, and others. 

​“Faces At The BBC: Complete BBC Concert & Session Recordings 1970-1973” will be released on 6th September 2024, via Rhino Records.