Review: Jimmy Reed - Found Love (1960)
Tracks: 1) Baby What You Want Me To Do; 2) Found Love; 3) Meet Me; 4) I Was So Wrong; 5) Going By The River (Part 2); 6) Big Boss Man; 7) Hush-Hush; 8) Where Can You Be; 9) I’m Nervous; 10) Going By The River (Part 1); 11) I Ain’t Got You; 12) Come Love.
REVIEW
"There isn’t a bad track on Found Love", so starts out the short assessment of this album by Al Campbell on the All-Music Guide — presumably, to help all of us lowly plebs who have just finished putting together the impression that this album sucks quickly and efficiently shatter our auditory illusions. Perhaps the most appropriate answer to this loud and proud statement of the century, however, would be "Why sure, because there’s only one track on it anyway!" More specifically, a track originally called ‘That One Jimmy Reed Song’ and then re-recorded under a miriad of names to make the universe seem so much more diverse than it really is when it’s really the same old types of protons, neutrons, and electrons all over again. From that point of view, Found Love is downright immaculate.
It does contain three tracks that will be fairly familiar to any serious fan of Sixties’ rock who may not ever have heard even one Jimmy Reed original: the singles ‘Baby What You Want Me To Do’ and ‘Big Boss Man’ have been covered by just about everybody, and so was the non-single ‘I Ain’t Got You’, extracted here from a much earlier session in 1955 to fill up empty space on the LP and somehow catching the eye of both The Animals and The Yardbirds (and then, later, Aerosmith). The song, by the way, was not written by Jimmy, but rather by Vee-Jay’s producer Calvin Carter, which might explain why it is the only song here that does not quite sound the same way as ‘That One Jimmy Reed Song’ — amusingly, the first commercial release of the song by Billy Boy Arnold actually sounds more like generic Jimmy Reed than Jimmy’s own recording, which unexplainably remained in the vaults for five long years. You can easily see the UK kids falling under its spell — the weird time signature, the threatening stops-and-starts, the ominous harmonica howls after each repetition of the title (usually converted to guitar howls in those UK versions), and, of course, the delectable mystery of this whole situation. "I got women to the right of me, I got women to the left of me, I got womens all around me... but I ain’t got you!" What is it, exactly, that makes the «you» in question so damn special? It’s a cool, swaggery celebration of life’s luxuries, each line of which is undercut by the double bang-bang! of realization that there’s actually more to life than "Eldorado Cadillacs" and "charge accounts at Goldblatt", though the protagonist cannot quite figure out what and why.
It’s a cool song, but one might also add that it is not very much in line with Jimmy Reed’s essence. Jimmy Reed might have been reasonably well off with all of his sales in the Fifties (although I guess he must have squandered all his earnings on booze anyway), but his artistic persona is not fairly well associable with life’s luxuries — his is the role of the little man, the simple man quietly nibbling away at life’s simple pleasures and swatting away life’s minor troubles. The quiet worker ’round the clock whose "big boss man" certainly can’t hear him when he calls, because he’s too afraid to call him in any voice louder than a toothless whisper. For the sake of accuracy, ‘Big Boss Man’ was not written by Jimmy either (it is credited to another of his producers and Luther Dixon, the professional songwriter responsible for the breakthrough of The Shirelles), but unlike ‘I Ain’t Got You’, this is a song tailor-made for him, and it’s refreshing to hear him borrow the rhythm of Chuck Berry’s ‘Memphis, Tennessee’ for it, rather than reuse the same mid-tempo ka-CHUNK-ka-CHUNK 12-bar blues beat that crops up pretty much everywhere else.
The funny thing about ‘Big Boss Man’ is that almost everybody who covered it actually treated the song as a rebellious anthem — Elvis, in particular, sounded and looked like he was really going to tear his own "big boss man" a new one; here, though, it is crystal clear that Mr. Reed is just grumbling "you ain’t so big, you’re just tall, that’s all" under his breath, scared to death to throw it in the man’s face, which, alas, is usually a much more gritty reality for us than the opposite. If you listen real hard, you can hear Mary "Mama" Reed faintly echo Jimmy’s lyrics in the background — she was, perhaps, just cueing him in, but she ends up putting a sort of «family touch» on this intimate protest song, the loyal partner supporting her struggling proletarian working man from afar but just as helpless to remedy the situation. In this particular case, I might dare to suggest that nobody ever truly improved on the original ‘Big Boss Man’ (although I’m becoming pervertedly partial to the ridiculous 1985 cover by B. B. King which pretty much sets the original lyrics to the melody of ‘Billie Jean’!! — really, no other decade excelled as much at trying to turn Dumb and Absurd into Cool and Stylish for subsequent generations to hypothesize about potential alien infiltrations or undetected viruses... but we’re getting off topic). At least when it comes to brutal cowardly honesty, Jimmy here is our fellow man.
As for the mid-tempo ka-chunk, ka-chunk, it, of course, opens the record with what has arguably become the most widely covered Jimmy Reed song of all time — ‘Baby What You Want Me To Do’. Here’s a funny bit of trivia: everybody always sings "you got me doin’ what you want me, baby what you want me to do", while in fact the original lines make a little more sense as Jimmy goes "you got me doin’ what you want me, baby why you want to let go?", indicating a little more agency on the part of Jimmy’s dissatisfied sweetheart. But, of course, there’s no getting away from the fact that the title of the song has never been ‘Baby Why You Want To Let Go’, so the source of the confusion is clear, as is the natural attraction of the interrogative phrase to its affirmative counterpart.
And the phrasing does matter here. There are literally dozens of Jimmy Reed songs that all sound exactly like ‘Baby What You Want Me To Do’ – at least three or four of them on this very album — but instead of getting randomly and evenly covered by subsequent generations of admirers, they are all forgotten while ‘Baby What You Want Me To Do’ trudges on and on and on. Even The Everly Brothers, who by 1960 must probably have realized that blues-rock would never become their forte, rushed out to produce their own version of the song as soon as they heard it. Apparently, all it takes is a little fiddling with the generic structure of the AAB pattern to get a specifically «nagging» feeling — got me running, got me hiding, got me run, hide, hide, run, anyway you want to... — and somehow the song grows itself an extra claw and turns from instantly forgettable to permanently memorable. For Jimmy, it was really a lucky fluke; for the world, it was the arisal of a new standard, which, unfortunately, then went on to sprout like a weed. Maybe ‘Stairway To Heaven’ is the most overplayed song in the world — who knows — but I know for sure that I have never had to suffer through as many totally unnecessary and superfluous covers of ‘Stairway To Heaven’ than I did of ‘Baby What You Want Me To Do’. Ironically, not a single of these covers ever managed to improve on the original, either.
That said, the bulk of Found Love is more akin to the title track of Found Love — which has the exact same melody as ‘Baby What You Want Me To Do’, only a tad sped up and, this time, following the conventional AAB pattern to a tee. It is true that a bit of effort, if you decide to delve deeper into the lyrics, may be rewarding here. The already quoted Al Campbell from the AMG states that "the title track is particularly notable, as it contains a one-note harp wail that proves to be vibrant, heartfelt, and timeless" — indeed, it is very vibrant, though I’m not so sure about ‘timeless’ (well, since I am still listening to it today, maybe it is timeless); but as for ‘heartfelt’, I would guess this word should decode as «imbued with sincere positive emotion», which would agree rather well with the first line of the song ("I found true love, one worth waitin’ for") but only if you prefer to totally ignore the second — "I’m gonna sign it to a contract, you won’t find one little flaw". That’s right, Jimmy Reed did have a cynical sort of humor, well confirmed in the second and last verse of the song: "It’s hard to believe the condition the world is in / You can’t trust nobody and girl you know it’s a sin".
Indeed, the entire album sort of implies that even if Jimmy Reed did find love, he sure as hell ain’t got no idea what to do with it, or even how to keep it — all of those songs are about family quarrels, adultery, eloping, begging for forgiveness, and other things typical of the dysfunctional mind. Ten of them — everything, that is, except for ‘Big Boss Man’ and ‘I Ain’t Got You’ — also have the exact same ka-chunk ka-chunk melody, the subtle differences provided by speedier or sluggier tempos and by whether the bass player wants to get a little more creative or just get paid by the minute. I won’t deny that there may be a certain therapeutic effect here — some people who feel like shit and need to get their rocks off without being tainted by pathos or pretense might find this particular way to waste thirty minutes to be their personal path to healing. But generally, all you need from Found Love are three songs — well, four if you throw on the title track as a representative of Reed’s ironic attitude to life.
Only Solitaire reviews: Jimmy Reed
I read that his wife wrote his songs.