Sometime around 1967 one Theodore Roosevelt “Hound Dog” Taylor, aged approximately fifty-two, walked into the eight-story Sears and Roebuck Department Store at the intersection of State and Van Buren Streets in Chicago. He passed the tombstones, farm tractors, and ready-made milking stalls, walked beneath the monorail for the kiddies and strolled into the music department. He was there to buy himself an electric guitar.
It didn’t take him long to pick one. He walked over to the small selection of cheap Japanese Teisco guitars, pointed to the cheapest model and said “That one will do.” The salesman, a man of taste, was appalled. “I wouldn’t let my dog play that guitar,” he said, “if my dog was tone deaf.”
“How much?”
“$49.99 and worth I’d say offhand two bucks of it. It’s a dinky piece of cheap-sounding Jap shit. You look like a slick guitarist, and nobody in his right mind would play a Teisco guitar. I’d ask you why you have six digits on your left hand, and why it looks like you cut off the sixth digit on your right hand with a butcher knife, and why your thumbs are the size of baby bananas, but it’s none of my damn business.”
“I cut off the extra nubbin with a straight razor.”
“Why?”
“I suppose I was a mite inebriated.”
“Why didn’t you cut off the other one? For symmetry’s sake?”
“I’ll tell you. I cut off the one and it fell on the floor and a rat the size of Jack Johnson run out and grabbed it.”
“What’s that have to do with not cutting off the other one?”
“That rat snatched up that straight razor too. And I wasn’t about to fight him for it. That rat was the size of two separate pit bulls. Damn thing grinned at me. Maybe if I’d had a gun. A big gun. I had a .25 caliber that might give a person pause, but you shoot a rat like that with a .25 caliber and you’re likely to make him angry. Now if you don’t mind I’ll have that Teisco guitar. Unless you’ve got something cheaper.”
Hound Dog Taylor was born in Natchez, Mississippi, in 1917 or maybe 1920 and suffered from polydactylism and didn’t pick up the guitar until he was twenty. In 1942 he up and moved north to Chicago, but it wasn’t until 1957 that he became a professional musician, playing in clubs in black neighborhoods.
He didn’t sound like anybody else. He sounded rawer. He sounded crazier. He wasn’t out to impress anybody with his slick blues chops because he didn’t have any. What he had was a cheap Japanese guitar and a slide guitar style that was all fuzz and needle-sharp notes and raucous, raw-boned, shake-the-bottles-off-the-back-bar boogie. When a writer asked him how he’d like to be remembered he said, “He couldn’t play shit, but he sure made it sound good.” If that isn’t the greatest thing I’ve ever heard, I don’t know what is.
Because let’s face it, the blues, and by that I mean the kind of mummified blues that white guys like Eric Clapton sat around playing twenty-nine hours a day until they were slick as their black heroes who were too slick by a long shot already, are boring. I don’t know what makes for a truly great blues musician, but I don’t think it’s putting every perfect note in its right place.
That’s hair styling. I listen to Hound Dog Taylor and what I hear is arson. I hear a guy who figures if he can just play fast enough without regard for the pretty and put enough jump in his sound to make the people in the bar burst into flames and die happy, his will have been a job well done.
The HouseRockers were an interesting proposition—just Taylor on guitar and vocals, Brewer Phillips—who learned how to play at the knee of Memphis Minnie—also on electric guitar, and Ted Harvey on drums. Said Bruce Iglauer—who formed Alligator Records in part because he couldn’t find a label that wanted anything to do with Taylor—”Hound Dog was sort of a throwback. He didn’t use a bass because bass players couldn’t keep up with him…there was a drive that you couldn’t get out of a Fender bass. The sounds were so raw and distorted—Hound Dog played on fifty-dollar Japanese guitars through Sears Roebuck amplifiers with cracked speakers. The whole attitude was ‘Who gives a damn?’”
Iglauer’s first experience hearing Taylor at a club jam session was not promising, but it speaks volumes about Taylor’s oddball personality: “They had two rather bad musicians they paid to keep kind of a rhythm section together. It was a disaster. Nobody could follow him, he couldn’t play with any of them. He would start songs for 15-20 seconds, stop and try to start another thing. Then he’d tell these incomprehensible jokes, crack up in the middle of the joke and bury his face in his hands. He’d light a Pall Mall, tell another weird joke, put the Pall Mall on the mike stand, start into another song that would fall apart instantly. But he was so funny looking—a tall, gawky guy, very thin, huge toothy grin. Everybody naturally loved him. I just kind of assumed that he was a clown. I thought nobody took him seriously as a musician but they liked him because he was a cool guy. He was a funny looking, funny acting guy. So I kind of wrote him off in my mind and didn’t think about him again.”
A clown Taylor may have been, but he could also be an ugly piece of work—on one noteworthy occasion he pulled a Jerry Lee Lewis and actually shot Brewer for calling his wife a memorable whore. This may, or may not, have terminated their association. And on-stage the band could make the Brian Jonestown Massacre look tame. Occasionally the musicians would face off with knives. Inglauer explains why this may have been the case: “They didn’t rehearse. That was sort of a rule. They followed that rule very closely. They also followed the rule that you REALLY shouldn’t perform unless you had a reasonable amount of alcohol. He set an example for that. In that regard, he was sort of an exemplary bandleader.”
A primitive fuzz and rumble, songs played at stock car speed—this is what you get on 1971’s Hound Dog Taylor and the HouseRockers. It’s a studio recording but sounds like it was recorded in a bar somewhere on the South Side, and listening to it you get the idea that studio was no temperance meeting. The Village Voice’s Robert Christgau sums it up quite well: “… electronic gutbucket from the Chicago blues bars, the rawest record I’ve heard in years. Taylor makes a neoprimitivist showboat like James Cotton sound like a cross between Don Nix and the Harmonicats, and about time.”
The stinging guitar notes that emerge from the Chicago Transit Authority subway rumble on “She’s Gone” just emphasize the song’s raw power, and make me think of the day my brother and I, on a binge one winter afternoon, walked into a back alley black bar in Philly. It was a rough and tumble kind of place—there was a handwritten sign behind the bar reading “Get The Point—No Smoking Joint,” and in a darkened corner of the bar there was a jumbled pile of broken furniture, busted up chairs and tables just heaped up back there, the junkyard of bar brawls past.
And that’s the kind of music this is—it’s raucous busted furniture Thunderbird wine Saturday night’s alright for fighting but dancing too kind of music, the kind of music where you can practically hear the laughter and shouts and the howls and the sound of a beer bottle shattering against the jukebox. Sometimes the songs have words and sometimes they don’t because they don’t need ‘em—crank up “Walking on the Ceiling” past closing time (there is no closing time) and it needs no words of explanation, cuz everybody’s up there already, some of them passed out in the corners.
Christgau called Hopkins “unselfconsciously inelegant” and that holds true for every song on the LP, from the frenetic “Give Me Back My Wig” (which has to be the coolest blues song title of the decade) to the clamorous (the drum kit sounds cheaper than the guitar!) “44 Blues.” “Taylor’s Rock” is a walk into a dark alley and never has the inarticulate been articulated with such switchblade savagery—this ain’t lo-fi, it’s no-fi, a blown-speaker assault on the dignity of the blues, that codified art form that is well deserving of being knocked off its pedal and given a few kicks to the ribs.
How cheap is priceless? The fifty bucks it cost to buy that cheap Japanese guitar? The cost of the couple of hours of studio time it took (tops!) to record this album? The price of this album itself? When Hound Dog Taylor really gets motorvatin’ on “Phillip’s Theme” the barroom door blows open and electricity swaggers in and buys drinks for the house. It’s waited a long damn time to find out why it was invented, and it intends to bust up some furniture to celebrate.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
