Great Moments on Video №9: Willie Dixon - Nervous

(somewhere in Germany, sometime in 1962)

Willie Dixon – Nervous

(Somewhere in Germany, sometime in 1962)

In our days of widescreen TVs with 8K resolutions, 5- and 7-channel sound systems, sky-high levels of mixing and engineering expertise, and, perhaps most importantly, the normalisation of having your every step and cough videographed if you happen to be anybody of note (or even if you merely want it) — in these days it is almost painful to think about how new it all is, and how incredibly lucky we are if some great artist from the previous century has been captured on camera at all, let alone in the best footage quality available at the time. It’s okay, maybe, if you were the Beatles (though even the Beatles, for instance, will never ever be seen by anybody in their allegedly wild and raucous Hamburg days), but what if you were, say, the Stooges? I honestly don’t want to watch (or, at least, re-watch) an old Iggy shaking his ass sometime in the 2000s; I want something more like this, but how could I ever get more than a piss-poor quality 4-minute clip, preserved practically by accident?..

Needless to say, the further we go back in time, the worse it gets, and not just for technical reasons. Most of the pre-war and even most of the 1950s blues giants who gave us a whole new vision of what popular music could be about have their legacy preserved almost exclusively in audio form — very rarely did they ever get on film, heck, some of them even almost never got photographed (cue the same tiny bunch of stock photos of people like Robert Johnson or Blind Lemon Jefferson constantly reused on re-releases of their recorded output). To have something left over from the old days like St. Louis’ Blues, a short movie with the only known footage of Bessie Smith, is nothing short of a miracle — and that’s considering Bessie’s status of the «Empress of the Blues»; what about all the lesser urban blues performers of her day? Tough luck. To see Alberta Hunter in action, you’ll have to wait until she’s 85 years old or something.

Even with the appearance of TV, which certainly presented much more promising opportunities for everybody, you still have problems — there’s definitely more footage from the 1950s than before, but (a) it’s still expensive and exclusive, (b) racism is still not going anywhere, and (c) blues, R&B, and early rock’n’roll are still seen as «non-dignified» types of music whose performers certainly do not deserve as much screen time as, say, Fred Astaire. Every once in a while, you catch a glimpse of something good on the Ed Sullivan show, but for the most part, good popular music on film remains in the hands of a brave director or two shooting some musical special, like The Girl Can’t Help It or High School Confidential — and even those ones are for teen audiences rather than grown-ups.

And thus, thank God at least for the American Folk Blues Festival series, which did a great job in the 1960s to introduce the legends of American blues to European audiences and — more importantly to us, the descendants of those audiences — captured some of those performances in pretty solid quality on film. True, from today’s «progressive» point of view one might feel uncomfortable about that enterprise, improbably engineered by two Germans one of whom was a young half-Jewish jazz and blues lover in the Nazi era (Horst Lippmann) and the other one an ex-Hitlerjugend member (Fritz Rau) — the whole thing had a slightly «exoticized» feel to it, especially when it came to artificially recreating the whole «rural South» aura on stage, with the only thing lacking being a pet alligator or something. Watching this surviving footage closely sometimes does convey the sense of «overacting», as if all those legends felt they had something to prove to their European fans — it goes without saying that they would probably look, sound, and feel far more natural in their hometown environments, or at least in some Chicago blues bar; but then, where are we going to get footage of that?

If you have never seen the American Folk Blues Festival series, presenting footage shot by the Südwestfunk television station from 1962 to 1969, I heartily recommend all three volumes of it, available (or, at least, until recently available) on DVD. But while it is a great chance indeed to see some of the legendary pre-war figures like Lonnie Johnson or Victoria Spivey, the «objectively» best performances out there are given, of course, by the younger generations — all those classic Chicago bluesmen who we so often hear about, so much less often listen to, and absolutely never get to see in their prime. Pretty much every inclusion from Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, or Sonny Boy Williamson is golden on there; yet, for some reason, the one particular performance that somehow managed to really stand out in my mind was this little number performed by Willie Dixon — the mastermind behind so many classics of Chicago blues, yet hardly ever known as a performing artist in his own right.

Although each and every member of this little quartet is a star in his own right (Armand "Jump" Jackson on drums was one of the most prolific session players on the Chicago blues scene, and T-Bone Walker on electric guitar hardly needs an introduction), ‘Nervous’ is essentially a bass-piano duo between Willie and Memphis Slim on piano. There’s nothing particularly interesting about the composition itself — a fairly straightforward piece of Chicago 12-bar blues — but there’s something mesmerizing and mystifying about Dixon’s performance, going way beyond the usual conventions of a standard blues performance.

Starting off from the simple fact that it is actually unusual to hear, let alone see, Willie Dixon in person. Usually, we know of him as the secret ingredient to the unforgettable artistic personalities of Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf — the songs he wrote and arranged for them, from ‘Hoochie Coochie Man’ to ‘Spoonful’, were masterpieces of what might be called «repressed masculinity», creating all that powerful imagery of the Big Sexual Giant to turn the heads of ambitiously horny young English boys across the ocean. But it turns out that Willie Dixon himself, in person, was far more multi-layered than that, and when he sang his own songs (which did not even begin until 1959, with the release of the Willie’s Blues LP), the best results were always with tunes that were quiet, pensive, perhaps even a little philosophical, rather than those he’d penned as self-glorifying anthems for his much better known peers.

Here we have him «mock-bumbling» through the very first song on that LP, with his long-term buddy and partner Memphis Slim essentially playing the part of his erratically functioning brain, while the bass melody obviously tries to convey the confused rhythms of his heart. This is pretty much like an «anti-Muddy», «anti-Wolf» tune — one can hardly imagine either of these two guys playing this particular character, who gets so n-n-n-nervous each time "my baby calls me daddy and she call me real slow". There’s a confident, but also slightly ironic look on Willie’s face each time the camera pans on him (which is most of the time), as if he were somehow giving us a hint here — "yes, all those guys, they act so big but when it really gets down to business, they’re all kinda like this and boy do I ever know it..." — and there’s a certain degree of cool here that might not have anywhere near the same grip that a voodoo-style Muddy or Wolf performance instantaneously has on the audience, but ultimately penetrates deeper in the soul than the theatrical swagger of a ‘Got My Mojo Working’ or a ‘Little Red Rooster’.

Naturally, the song’s most obvious gimmick is Dixon’s stuttering delivery (probably influenced by John Lee Hooker’s ‘Stuttering Blues’ from 1953, and sitting somewhere comfortably between it and the Who’s ‘My Generation’), which might be a little overdone but at least perfectly fits the theme of the song — and forms a hilarious and somewhat provocative contrast between the man’s burly appearance and the overall mood ("can you imagine a guy that big being nervous?" Memphis Slim hits it right on the head in the introduction). Come to think of it, Willie was one of the first blues artists to actually explore the theme of love = fear, with frogs in your stomach rather than butterflies, and if the songs that he wrote for other artists would usually depict them as a species of «demons of love», the songs he left for himself could depict him as a victim of said demons — and nowhere else as efficiently as in this particular performance.

Because of the shortness and relative simplicity of the performance (just the usual three verses and a short piano solo from Memphis), there are no specific individual moments to highlight (other than each time Willie takes that cool «stomping» bass flourish at the end of each verse), but the whole thing, particularly when seen in the smoky darkness of the studio (and you don’t even get to see T-Bone Walker adding his licks), with its slow, unhurried tempo, minimalistic instrumentation, and Willie’s voice sounding all frozen in its mid-range, mid-volume, emotion-stripped coldness, really stands out from the average performances on the show — if only because it feels like these guys don’t have anything to prove to the audiences, they’re just doing it exactly like it is; and «exactly like it is» can make you t-t-t-tremble all in your bones just as efficiently as any hyperbolic pull-all-the-stops delivery from those who feel like they have to work overtime to woo their spectators.

That this was sort of a natural thing for Willie can be easily confirmed by other surviving footage from the same source (here, for instance, is an even more chilling solo performance of the big man doing ‘Weak Brain And A Narrow Mind’), and it is clear from such footage that he never had the slightest chance of becoming a big star on the stage — being the musical, lyrical, and philosophical brain behind the stage shows of his peers — but it is precisely those little bits, I think, that help disclose the true depth of thought and feeling behind any stage antics. Somehow I feel that even today, after all those years and all those chances to re-assess and re-evaluate the legacy we’ve been left, we still tend to underestimate — or cheapen — the real depth of classic blues, reducing it to reasonable, but painfully incomplete stereotypes. And it is precisely these kinds of performances that, to me, stand out as living proof that the blues really can encapsulate just about everything — and, in fact, already did that long before we got spoiled and began whining about how the blues is such a boring, restricted, and generic genre. As usual, you simply have to know where to look.