Review: Jimmy Reed - Now Appearing (1961)
Tracks: 1) Close Together; 2) Got Me Chasing You; 3) Wanta Be With You; 4) Jimmy’s Rock; 5) Tell The World I Do; 6) You Know You’re Looking Good; 7) I’ve Got The Blues; 8) Laughing At The Blues; 9) Down The Road; 10) Ain’t Gonna Cry No More; 11) You’re My Baby.
REVIEW
I seriously pity the poor engineers and market department workers at Vee-Jay Records who had to put up with their superiors’ unexplainable desire to keep on allowing Jimmy Reed to bake new LPs — without the slightest desire to come up with at least one new melody. Now Appearing, released in early 1961, bears the dubious distinction of being the first Reed album where almost every song sounds the same (I’ll get to the exceptions in a jiffy) — and that «same» is something we’d been hearing from him since the mid-Fifties. Ominously, even the liner notes to the album, commissionned from French blues experts Marcel Chauvard and Jacques Demêtre (who were conducting a quasi-ethnographic scientific study of Chicago blues at the time), begin with the following statement: "A lot has been written about the Blues; so it may seem preposterous, trying to add anything new and original". Well — for Jimmy, it probably seemed preposterous to add anything new and original to the kind of blues he had whittled out for himself ten years ago. Admittedly, for those French gentlemen who came to visit the Chicago club scene in 1959 this formula probably sounded fresh and vital, just as it would feel for Martians, had they decided to land their ship on the roof of a Chicago recording studio right at the very moment when Jimmy Reed started up his three hundred and fifty-second variation on the exact same chords.
The only single taken off the album — and, consequently, the only song off it that is occasionally found on basic Jimmy Reed compilations — is ‘Close Together’, whose melody is exactly the same as ‘Going To New York’ and a dozen other songs. This time around, though, its relaxing mid-tempo stride is accompanied with a bit of creative sloganeering: "We gotta stay close together / If we don’t somebody could get ahead of us". These words of unparalleled wisdom and incomparable depth were repeated sufficiently enough to soak deep into the minds of the American public and make the single rise all the way to #12 on the R&B charts (and even #68 on the general pop charts!), proving that Jimmy’s magical-minimalistical hold on the people was far from over.
Of the remaning ten songs on the LP, eight differ only in terms of tempos (‘Tell The World I Do’ is taken at a torturously slow one, bringing the song’s lenth up to four minutes just because Jimmy was probably suffering from a hangover or something) and lyrics (which I have not analyzed, but strongly suspect that there’s not much to analyze). Nothing by way of interesting guitar or harmonica solos, either, just the usual slog to go along with. In addition, Jimmy’s diction problems are getting worse than ever, so much so that it is fairly hard to find a decent transcription (available web versions are full of question marks — perhaps a well-trained AI could help, but apparently training AI on samples of Jimmy Reed’s singing is not a priority task next to Freddie Mercury and Kurt Cobain).
In the end, the only thing of minor interest on the record are its two instrumental tracks. Not only do they alleviate the boredom a little bit, but they are actually the only spots where Jimmy’s backing band is allowed to at least try something interesting. On ‘Jimmy’s Rock’, Eddie Taylor (I’m assuming it’s him) shows us the wonders of syncopated guitar boogie, sometimes sounding a bit like John Lee Hooker and sometimes like a parsimonious Chuck Berry (Jimmy’s own harmonica solo is quite bland in comparison). ‘Laughing At The Blues’, probably named that way because of an accidental bit of ad-libbed laughter at the beginning, is not as quirky, but still I’d rather listen to that kind of playful-if-unassuming guitar sloing all day long than sit through yet another of Jimmy’s mid-tempo bores.
Only Solitaire reviews: Jimmy Reed