How did Midnight Crossroads Tape Recorder Blues come about? And whats with the blues?
I have very ambivalent feelings about “the” blues. There hasn’t been much listenable blues during the last say 40 or so years, but there have been tons of recordings, concerts and radio shows. During the time of my “musical socialisation” in the early 70s, “blues” seemed to be a synonym for the pale, lifeless, formalised reactionary stuff that went under the flag of “progressive” and “expressive” and “authentic”. Imagine Rory Gallagher and his ilk performing authentic blue-collar tristesse for an audience of thousands of boogie-driven kids in big sports arenas. Not exactly what Robert Johnson dreamt of. Not that the black blues- and jazzmen were any easier to stand, each of them living proof of the “errors” of free-jazzers or other outcasts in the eye of the traditionalists who were in charge. Every music school offered courses on how to learn the “authentic” scheme of 8-and 12 bar blues in three months. Thousands signed up, and as the self-declared heirs of one of the greatest popular
