Urban Blues (Bonus Track Version)

Some of his records are all about the rhythm, some are all about his voice, but John Lee Hooker’s 1967 Bluesway album Urban Blues is all about the guitar. Hooker is featured in tandem with several of Chicago’s toughest slingers, including Eddie Taylor, Wayne Bennett, and Hooker’s partner from the old Detroit days, Eddie Kirkland. The rhythm is tough and lively, but it’s all just stage setting for some gloriously warped guitar explorations. Though it’s nearly impossible to distinguish who is playing what at what time, there is always a guitar writhing and poking at the edges of a song. The sounds are never benign; sometimes the guitar strings reverberate like loose rubber bands, sometimes they squeal like tires against the pavement. Never still, they are always wiggling, always jostling, always whistling, almost in imitation of sidewalk chatter. “The Motor City Is Burning” is the kind of groaning, thrusting blues that belongs wholly to Hooker, but things get really good at the end of the album. At one point the deranged wah-wah slide guitar on “Messin’ Around With the Blues” interlocks with the rhythm in such a way that the whole eerily foretells Stevie Wonder’s “Higher Ground,” almost in its entirety.