Review: Jimmy Reed - At Carnegie Hall (1961)
Tracks: 1) Bright Lights Big City; 2) I’m Mr. Luck; 3) Baby What’s Wrong; 4) Found Joy; 5) Kind Of Lonesome; 6) Aw Shucks, Hush Your Mouth; 7) Tell Me You Love Me; 8) Blue Carnegie; 9) I’m A Love You; 10) Hold Me Close; 11) Blue, Blue Water; 12) Baby What You Want Me To Do; 13) You Don’t Have To Go; 14) Hush-Hush; 15) Found Love; 16) Honest I Do; 17) You Got Me Dizzy; 18) Big Boss Man; 19) Take Out Some Insurance; 20) Boogie In The Dark; 21) Going To New York; 22) Ain't That Lovin’ You, Baby; 23) The Sun Is Shining.
REVIEW
«How does Jimmy Reed get to Carnegie Hall?» – «Riding the coattails of Muddy Waters». I, too, was a little puzzled (surely the limited commercial success of Jimmy Reed alone would not be sufficient reason for him to play at such a prestigious venue) before finding out (by almost accidentally discovering the scan of an old flyer for the event, sold at an online auction!) that Jimmy Reed did, in fact, play Carnegie Hall, but only as part of a larger «Blues at Carnegie» program that also included Big Maybelle, Muddy Waters, Jimmy Witherspoon, and Oscar Brown Jr., all playing on the same evening of May 13, 1961. Arguably, this was the single biggest chunk of recognition he ever got, and Vee-Jay Records quickly decided to capitalize on that — albeit in a rather strange manner, somewhat telling of the crazy record industry practices at the time.
According to the liner notes, "a combination of contractual and technical difficulties unfortunately prevented recording of the actual event", but the ingenious people at Vee-Jay never gave in to despair: instead, they claimed to «recreate» the performances in the studio, putting out a setlist consisting of 11 brand new Jimmy Reed numbers that allegedly reproduced the set he’d actually played at Carnegie Hall. Verifying this in any way is probably impossible, unless we locate some old boomer with a perfect memory who was present at the event and, after all these years, can still tell one Jimmy Reed number from another (yeah, right); the fact that the «setlist» includes an instrumental number called ‘Blue Carnegie’ might, perhaps, indirectly corroborate this statement, but then again, he could have just as easily «written» this after the show (I mean, the fact that Joni Mitchell has a song called ‘Woodstock’ is hardly proof of her actually having played it at the real Woodstock, isn’t it?). Far more suspicious is the fact that all of these eleven numbers are brand new: I seriously doubt that Jimmy Reed, playing at Carnegie Hall, would perform a completely fresh program without playing even one of his popular singles. That’s something more typical of a Bob Dylan, not an old-school Chicago blues veteran.
In fact, it is far more likely that the Carnegie Hall setlist would look something like the second disc of this double album, astutely subtitled The Best Of Jimmy Reed but you can only see that upon cracking open the gatefold sleeve; the customer who’d walked into the record store and decided to inspect the sealed and cellophane-packed front and back sides of the LP would have formed the obvious impression that this was a brand new 23-track live performance from their blues hero, only discovering the truth upon already having paid for the record. The second LP does, in fact, consist of well-known Jimmy Reed classics, but they are not live and they are not even re-recorded; only ‘The Sun Is Shining’ had not previously been released on one of the LPs that I have already reviewed (but it was an actual single from back in 1957).
Consequently, to give things their proper names, Jimmy Reed At Carnegie Hall is the biggest scam in Jimmy Reed history and a solid gold inclusion into the Big Encyclopaedia Of Record Industry Scams — and, like most of such scams, it probably did not even really make Vee-Jay any extra money, given that the album failed to chart like any other Jimmy Reed LP: sure, people might be dumb as a species and everything, but when it comes to counting money in their pockets, they are at least smart enough to realize that there is no point in buying twelve clones of one single, let alone twenty-three.
So they went out and thoughtfully bought the single instead. The single was ‘Bright Lights, Big City’, and indeed it became Jimmy’s last impressive hit and a classic number much coveted by Jimmy’s overseas admirers such as the Rolling Stones and the Animals; Eric Burdon would go on to make the song more interesting, with a suspenseful theatrical mid-section detailing the protagonist’s lover’s head-spinning thrills in the «big city», but Jimmy does lay down the proper foundation by taking the melody of ‘Hush Hush’ and setting it to more interesting lyrics with a little bit of social philosophy behind them (even if he was far from the first blues guy to explore the urban vs. rural contrast on the Chicago blues scene). Honestly, it doesn’t go too far beyond the opening "bright lights, big city gone to my baby’s head" statement, but there was something so powerful about it that the song did go straight to everybody’s head upon release.
Music-wise, though, probably the best recording here is ‘Baby What’s Wrong’, taken at a faster pace than usual and pinned to a classy groove of deep distorted bass, two rhythm guitars, and a minimalistic lead guitar part that have a sort of crunchy, primal magic to them. Once again, it makes me feel sad that Jimmy took so few opportunities to explore faster tempos and different combinations of instrumental tones; this is a rare example when a Jimmy Reed original can actually hold its original ground against a later Animals cover, even if we probably have Willie Dixon to thank for that, holding down that bass like a seasoned machine-gunner in his nest, rather than Jimmy himself.
Alas, besides these two classics, the alleged «Carnegie Hall performance recreation» has fairly little of interest going for it. The aforementioned ‘Blue Carnegie’ is basically just an instrumental re-run of the same ‘Hush Hush / Bright Lights Big City’ pattern, good for those who can’t get enough of Jimmy blowing his harmonica (I am more interested in the brief electric guitar solo at the end, with a few quirky jazz bends and trills, though I have no idea who’s playing: the credits list a whole bunch of guitarists without any specifications). ‘I’m A Love You’, in a rare twist, introduces a bunch of backing vocalists singing "whoah-oh, yeah-yeah" during Jimmy’s harmonica solos — a little reminiscent of Chuck Berry’s style on ‘Back In The USA’, but not really enough to suspect Jimmy Reed of «going pop». And maybe ‘Blue, Blue Water’ is worth admiring from a rigorously minimalistic perspective: "Blue, blue water / Silver moon / Tell me darling, tell me soon / You’re my darling, you’re my sweetheart / My heart desire" does a good job of cutting out all those unnecessary verbs to deliver the relevant message in a telegraphic style. Some other, allegedly more «literate» slob, would probably go all «silver moon shining down, blue water flowing by» on us, but not Jimmy, who simply tells it as it is, going all the way back to the origins of language when verbs were a rarity and abstract notions mostly took on concrete forms... oh, never mind.
Anyway, the lesson to take home here is that yes, Jimmy Reed did play Carnegie Hall, and no, the existence of this album by itself does not prove that he ever did. Do not bother paying an insane amount of money on Ebay for an old copy unless you have a gatefold fetish, and do not bother downloading the second half of it even if you are a completionist — and if you are not, ‘Bright Lights Big City’ and ‘Baby What’s Wrong’ are the only two tracks here worth any serious bother; if you don’t believe me, just ask Eric Burdon.
Only Solitaire reviews: Jimmy Reed