Review: Freddie King - Let's Hide Away And Dance Away With Freddy King (1961)
Tracks: 1) Hide Away; 2) Butterscotch; 3) Sen-Sa-Shun; 4) Side Tracked; 5) The Stumble; 6) Wash Out; 7) San-Ho-Zay; 8) Just Pickin’; 9) Heads Up; 10) In The Open; 11) Out Front; 12) Swooshy.
REVIEW
Purely instrumental blues music, be it acoustic or electric, was hardly big news back in 1961: almost every singing blues guitarist would have at least a few instrumental tracks under his belt sooner or later in his career. But the usual practice had remained, for decades, to stick those tracks away as «supporting» B-sides or LP-only filler; the regular blues listeners wanted to buy their records so that they could sing along, or at least get a good tragic story for their money. Neither Muddy Waters nor B. B. King, as different as their styles could be, ever dared to put their voices in storage for their A-sides — as much as B. B. adored his Lucille, she sure needed that strong masculine presence next to her side in order to emphasize her «feminine» side. Not that the practice was completely unheard of — virtuoso guitarists such as Blind Blake or Lonnie Johnson did have instrumental records in the pre-war period, and Elmore James had ‘Country Boogie’ and a few others in 1950s’ Chicago — but it was certainly quite rare compared to the jazz genre, where pure showcases of instrumental prowess were the norm.
The most outstanding thing about Freddie King’s instrumental number ‘Hide Away’, though, is not that it was released as a single A-side, but that it actually managed to chart, rising as high as #29 in the general charts — an unprecedented success at the time. Granted, the circumstances were somewhat favorable, and the track, as such, did not fundamentally emphasize its «bluesiness» as much as it flaunted its «playfulness». With surf-rock on the rise, and such performers as Duane Eddy and Link Wray, as well as such bands as The Ventures, already having managed to draw record buyers’ attention to their fun, catchy, energetic instrumental hooks, there was no reason why a quintessential blues artist could not go ahead and try to steal some of that thunder. After all, electric blues was no longer restricted to the slow and moody 12-bar woke-up-this-morning form, and even an Elmore James could always follow up a ‘Dust My Broom’ with something like ‘Shake Your Moneymaker’, to which you could dance your head off just as effectively as to ‘Johnny B. Goode’.
And Freddie King was not the kind of guy who was going to spend all day slowly and tragically wailing out the emotional licks to ‘Have You Ever Loved A Woman’. He was a big, burly Texan who liked to kick ass almost as much, if not more so, than to bare his soul; he might, in fact, have easily switched to pure rock’n’roll, but he probably had his reasons not to do it (for instance, he might not have been the biggest fan of the «showy» vibes of rock’n’roll — and looking over his impressive body type, I do admit that he might have a bit of trouble doing the duck walk on stage). Instead, he preferred to inject some of the sharpness, playfulness, and danceability of rock’n’roll into his blues paradigm — and in the process arguably became one of the principal creators of that somewhat hard-to-define genre that we call blues-rock.
In fact, ‘Hide Away’ is probably the quintessential embodiment of early blues-rock as it is. Listening to it today will surely make most people wonder what the heck was all the fuss about — just a basic piece of blues-boogie, one out of miriads of possible blues-rock instrumentals sharing the same core properties. Freddie did not even create the main theme, borrowing it wholesale from a Hound Dog Taylor composition (you can hear the same theme on Magic Sam’s ‘Do The Camel Walk’ from the same year); and while it’s a nice theme alright, there is hardly anything there that makes it more emotionally resonant than any other blues theme. The one important difference is that this was blues you could dance to — that Magic Sam recording is, by all means, a walk, while Freddie’s is a merry trot, with the drummer reveling in his double beats and Freddie laying on a colorful, friendly tone; the guitar is bluesy in terms of notes, but pop-friendly in terms of the vibe it lays down, not too different from the atmosphere of The Ventures.
‘Hide Away’ was also unusual in that it was essentially three different grooves spliced into one: Freddie took elements from Jimmy McCracklin’s ‘The Walk’, Bert Weedon’s cover of ‘Guitar Boogie Shuffle’, and even the ‘Peter Gunn’ theme, and combined them into something that constantly shifts its shape while retaining the same cocky, taunting attitude. That way, even if the instrumental’s title was rather prosaically derived from Mel’s Hide Away Lounge (a blues club in Chicago), it does feel a little like a tricky game of hide-and-seek. This spirit of playfulness would completely evaporate from the number in its (arguably even more famous) version recorded by Eric Clapton with John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers five years later — like everything else he did, Eric took the message much more seriously than it was ever intended to, and turned it into a fiery anthem of rock’n’roll defiance. Which sounded awesome, no doubt about it, but had about as much to do with the original spirit of ‘Hide Away’ as, for instance, all those Rolling Stones covers of Chuck Berry tunes had to do with their respective sources. Freddie King does not want to blow you away; he just wants you to have fun.
Nobody at King Records probably expected the song to take off in March 1961, and, in fact, less than a month later they followed it up with ‘Lonesome Whistle Blues’, returning to the common vocal blues practice. However, once the song began to be played everywhere and established a firm grip on the charts (19 weeks on the Hot R&B list!), it became apparent that Freddie had unexpectedly struck oil — and from that moment, his own path in life seemed clear. Already the next single, issued in July, would be ‘San-Ho-Zay’ (clearly, it’s just a phonetic representation of ‘San José’, but I am not exactly sure as to what specifically the track has in common with the future Capital of the Silicon Valley), another instrumental that would be just as successful on the R&B charts, but not nearly as efficient on the overall ranking, where it slipped down to #47 from ‘Hide Away’s record-setting #29.
It’s not difficult to see why that is: ‘San-Ho-Zay’ did not attempt to faithfully recreate the formula of ‘Hide Away’, with all that playfulness and all those meandering, shape-shifting sections. It is simpler and more straightforward in nature, riding out a single, focused blues-rock groove from beginning to end — also, Freddie’s guitar is far more brutal and aggressive here, playing sharp and nasty sets of licks in ways you might perhaps expect from rebellious white rockers at the time, like Link Wray, but typically not from crowd-pleasing African-American performers. From a purely melodic standpoint, ‘San-Ho-Zay’ was just a generic piece of fast blues; from a tonal / emotional standpoint, it maybe tried to communicate something that no other black artist in the electric blues or rock’n’roll idiom would have the guts to communicate at the time. And when you think about it that way, you become able to assess those opening bars in a different way — even the rhythm section, with the bass and the drums delivering the goods in a calm, collected, razor-sharp manner that carries the same mix of coolness and subtle threat as Booker T & The MG’s ‘Green Onions’, except it does it one year earlier.
‘San-Ho-Zay’ was followed by ‘Sen-Sa-Shun’, which was, however, only released as the B-side to ‘I’m Tore Down’, and felt like a sort of averaging out the vibes of both ‘Hide Away’ and ‘San-Ho-Zay’ — it rides a mean and lean blues groove like the latter, but tries to make it a little more vivacious and danceable like the former, plus it also switches back and forth between two different sections, one dominated by high-pitched electric lead and the other one delving down into a bass-heavy funky tap-dance. The source of the tune is fairly clear this time — it takes its voice from Muddy Waters’ classic rendition of ‘Got My Mojo Working’, and, to some degree, this is symbolic, given how ‘Mojo’ itself was one of the early precursors to lively, danceable, and ecstatic blues-rock. It’s a pity Freddie and Muddy never got to work together — it would have been quite interesting to see them cross their vibes, even if there’s no guarantee that they wouldn’t simply «cancel out» each other.
By the end of 1961, it must have become clear that carefully planning a commercially successful career based on instrumental blues-rock would be a dead end for Freddie — more precisely, that ‘Hide Away’ was a lucky fluke, and once its surprise aspect had worn out, he would not be able to consciously and deliberately hit even higher heights. Nevertheless, as long as the iron was hot, Freddie and his band had managed to pump out a whole load of instrumentals, and, so as not to let it all go to waste, the label put twelve of the best on an LP that simply had to have both Hide Away (as a blunt reminder to the public) and Dance (as a magic charm word) in the title. Not surprisingly, the album did not sell — but still made history as (probably) the first fully instrumental blues-rock record in the whole wide world.
Discussing all the remaining tracks separately would be overkill, especially since some of them, like ‘Butterscotch’ or ‘Side Tracked’, are similarly-sounding 12-bar grooves that will all be lovely if you love Freddie’s tone and manner of phrasing, but certainly do not inspire creative writing. ‘The Stumble’ is sometimes singled out as a particular highlight, mainly due to its having been later adapted by Jeff Beck, Peter Green, Dave Edmunds, and others; I fail, however, to see how it is any more outstanding than the rest (a couple of chord changes do indeed differ from the typical ways in which other blues guitarists would play it, but the same could probably be spotted on most of the other tracks as well).
If there’s any general praise to be offered for the album, it is how modern it all sounds. Sure, it’s still 1961, and Freddie is not laying on tons of special effects or dazzling listeners with speed tricks or hammer-ons, but it is 1961, and you basically already have all your Eric Claptons, Rory Gallaghers, and Stevie Ray Vaughans (‘Just Pickin’ = ‘Mary Had A Little Lamb’) in this little package. For those reared on and accustomed to the sonic standards of the late 1960s / early 1970s — the days when blues-rock reigned supreme — Let’s Hide Away will, I am afraid, mostly be of historic importance. But if, for some reason, you find yourself in the mood for just the core substance without all the extra juice, flash, complexity, and pomp of what the blues-rock genre would grow into, then early Sixties’ Freddie King is just the man for you.
Fast forward one decade, and Freddie himself would already play the same things in typically early Seventies’ blues-rock fashion — unlike some of his contemporaries, he was happy to beef up and aggrandify his sound to adapt to the spirit of the times, so that loud, sped up and extended jamming arrangements of ‘Hide Away’ (like this one) would become the norm for him. Yet some might argue that the «thinner», more economic sound of the original recordings, with none of that extra fat (and no, I’m not making a subtle reference to Freddie’s body weight here), makes a more precise point and is actually more about making a musical impact than showing off one’s swagger. I think there’s room for both viewpoints in the ballroom of good taste, even if, when it comes to albums rather than individual tracks, I’d still certainly go for Freddie’s Seventies’ output — at this point in history, like almost everybody else, he was still the master of a two-and-a-half-minute burst of inspiration than of filling up two long sides of an LP with music that consistently mattered.
Ironically, two years after the original release of the album, King Records re-released it «for the fans», adding fake crowd noises and retitling it as — don’t laugh, please! — Freddie King Goes Surfin’. Although this is a good candidate for one of those «Top 100 Dumbest Decisions Made By Record Labels» lists, it does to some extent agree with my idea here — namely, that ‘Hide Away’ made it so big not because it was «instrumental blues», but because it was playful and danceable, which did indeed put it in the same vibe-league with The Ventures and Dick Dale. One can even imagine how Freddie’s music could anger some radical blues purists at the time, though, truth be told, «blues purists» had really gone out of style the day the first bluesmen picked up their electric guitars — not to mention that even if we’re talking acoustic blues, that cheerful danceable vibe was at least as old as the ragtime guitars of Blind Blake and Lonnie Johnson. Besides, apparently Eric Clapton had no problem with it — and we all know just how much of a «blues purist» young maximalist Eric was back in 1964-65 (at least, before Jack Bruce, master of all things avantgarde, taught young Eric how to really sell out). So, while it takes a bit of an imaginative stretch to picture Freddie on a surfboard, in a way those King Records were absolutely right. This is precisely that major point in history where electric blues «goes surfing». In the end, want it or not, everybody had that ocean across the U.S.A.
Only Solitaire reviews: Freddie King