Review: Jimmy Reed - I'm Jimmy Reed (1958)

Tracks: 1) Honest I Do; 2) Go On To School; 3) My First Plea; 4) Boogie In The Dark; 5) You Got Me Crying; 6) Ain’t That Lovin’ You Baby; 7) You Got Me Dizzy; 8) Little Rain; 9) Can’t Stand To See You Go; 10) Roll & Rhumba; 11) You’re Something Else; 12) You Don’t Have To Go.

REVIEW

Thank God for Jimmy Reed. To put it simple: if not for Jimmy Reed, the British Invasion as we know it — or, at least, the bluesier, darker, more aggressive side of the British Invasion as we know it — would never have happened. In those young and innocent days of the early Sixties, young guys all across the UK avidly imbibed and digested as much of the greatness of Chicago legends as could be imported into the country across radio waves and vinyl records, but when it came to actually performing and imitating the music of these legends, said young guys could not help but feel stinted, hindered, stumped, and overwhelmed. How could a young English teenager convincingly reproduce the dark pagan magic of a Muddy Waters? the glass-shredding animalistic vocal energy of a Howlin’ Wolf? the insane African tribal power of a Bo Diddley? the shrill, sleazy, swampy vibe of Sonny Boy Williamson’s harmonica? Some of the really brave ones did go ahead and try, but unless they had the talent to completely reinvent and readapt these tunes to the differing realities of their home towns, the results would be ridiculous — even more so to their own eyes and ears rather than those of their audiences, hungry for that weird music from across the Atlantic and quite ready to settle for even a mediocre approximation. The audiences might simply be wanting to have a pretext to dance the night away; the musicians, however, needed self-confidence, and how the heck do you earn self-confidence when you’re stuck out there on stage trying to compete with Muddy Waters on ‘Got My Mojo Working’?

The answer is simple: do not compete with Muddy Waters — compete with Jimmy Reed. I am almost sorry to have to reproduce the truism about Jimmy Reed being the epitome of mediocrity in the American electric blues-rock life of the 1950s; presumably, he was a nice guy (at least when he wasn’t stone cold drunk, which was most of the time), and some of his charisma manages to creep in onto his records, otherwise he wouldn’t have had 18 Top 20 hits on the US R&B charts from 1955 to 1961. But there is pretty much nothing specific, no particularly memorable or outstanding feature in Jimmy’s «classic» output. He was a competent, but not an outstanding singer; a tolerable, but not a technically skilled or a musically inventive guitar or harmonica player; an okay songwriter who did everything within the same 12-bar blues scale and rewrote each of his songs (with new lyrics) at least three or four times; a pleasant stage presence who did not have any tricks up his sleeve to make his shows stand out from the rest.

In short, Jimmy Reed was as average as can be — which is probably why, despite eventually settling in Chicago, he was never able to secure a contract with Chess Records, and had to satisfy himself with the much lesser label of Vee-Jay, which, I believe, is mostly known for two things: being the first ever distributor of Beatles material in the US, and producing all of Jimmy Reed’s classic records. (They also had John Lee Hooker and Memphis Slim for a while, but they weren’t nearly as fully associated with the label as Jimmy). Even Vee-Jay did not agree to letting him put out a full-fledged LP until 1958, by which time he’d been cutting singles for five years; and even then, the LP in question was just a hodge-podge of A- and B-sides, covering all of that five-year period. You can listen to the album on its own, or you can embellish it with bonus songs that did not make the grade, or you can just cut the bullshit and get yourself a compilation — it doesn’t really matter. Once you’ve heard two or three Jimmy Reed songs, you pretty much heard them all.

Listening right now to the last track on the LP, which was his first big hit in 1955 — ‘You Don’t Have To Go’ — I just keep thinking and thinking about what it was that made this kind of record so popular. It is as utterly generic as can be, not to mention lazy and relaxed, as compared to, say, Sonny Boy Williamson: Jimmy and his backing band slowly and very nonchalantly drift through the aether, beat after beat after beat, then Jimmy takes a short, equally lazy, harmonica break, then another verse and off to sleep we go. How could anybody like this enough to buy, let alone cover, this limp clone of ‘Sweet Home Chicago’? Yet bought, and covered, it was, although even its instrumental B-side, ‘Boogie In The Dark’, is marginally more interesting (at least he tries to go in several different directions on the harmonica there).

‘Ain’t That Lovin’ You Baby’ was an even bigger hit next year, hitting #3... and then he simply re-recorded it with new lyrics as ‘You Got Me Dizzy’ and it also hit #3. I suppose that Jimmy’s colleagues over at Chess must have been astounded — here they all were, practicing, working at establishing their own styles and identities, spending time to come up with new songwriting ideas, and here was this odd booze-drenched guy next door with his totally trivial output and he somehow managed to outsell them all, from time to time at least. What the heck was this guy’s secret weapon?

"Simplicity and honesty", perhaps, as explained by producer Scott Billington in his notes on the recent 3-CD compilation of Jimmy’s Complete Vee-Jay Singles. Even some of Jimmy’s fellow African-Americans may have been spooked away by the intensity of the great Chess artists — whereas on none of Jimmy’s singles is there anything even remotely fearsome. Even though, like most of Chicago’s bluesmen, Reed, too, came from the South (Dunleith, Mississippi), his music is 100% urbanized — without any traces of the Delta’s toil and trouble, or of centuries-old pagan African practices taking roots in American soil. It can be a little sad, a little angry, or a tad romantic, just enough for the average listener to sympathize and never once going deeper than the most simple, common, universal emotions. What, oh I dunno, what a band like Bad Company does for the universe of classic rock, Jimmy Reed did for the universe of electric blues. I do not love or hate Bad Company (at least, not until they started sucking really hard in the Eighties), and I do not love or hate Jimmy Reed — I just feel mighty indifferent to all these songs, and I suppose it’s a fairly normal reaction.

Every once in a while (very rarely, though), a tiny non-trivial idea wiggles its way into one of Jimmy’s tunes, making it stand out from the rest. ‘Honest I Do’, another big hit for the man which Vee-Jay put up as the opening track on this album, is a little bit more poppy than his standard 12-bar formula, and is graced by an elegantly woven descending riff, played by Jimmy’s faithful sidekick Eddie Taylor. The Rolling Stones later picked up the song and recorded it in a highly inventive manner (loyally preserving that riff but also embellishing the song with creative uses of the stop-and-start mechanics, echoes, and «drum explosions» from Charlie), but even here it is hard to deny that the tune is a stand-out. Lyrics-wise, ‘Little Rain’ is a relative highlight, somewhat unusual in its depiction of a simple romantic situation set to a 12-bar blues melody which typically implies negative rather than positive emotions. (Most of Reed’s lyrics were written by or co-written with his wife, Mary, which might explain all that extra romanticism). And ‘Roll And Rhumba’, an instrumental that was originally released as the B-side to his very first single, is at least an honest attempt at genre-mixing, though I cannot define it as a highly successful one. And that’s pretty much all I can say about this stuff.

Having said all that, though, I return to my original point: God bless Jimmy Reed for providing those British boys with so much raw material which they could cut their teeth on. ‘Honest I Do’, ‘Ain’t That Lovin’ You Baby’, ‘You Don’t Have To Go’, ‘I Ain’t Got You’ — all those songs from 1954-58 and more were exploited by the Stones, the Animals, the Yardbirds, and dozens of other, lesser acts until they could be sure that they got that kind of mechanics down and could build their own houses upon that firm foundation. I have no idea if anybody could really enjoy a full CD of Jimmy Reed tracks all the way through in this day and age — he just seems to be the quintessential «you had to be there» type of guy — but I think that neither today nor back in his own time were you really supposed to enjoy more than one or two Jimmy Reed tracks in one sitting anyway. And for the Stones and the Animals, one Jimmy Reed track a day gave them something to play.

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