Tracks: 1) Going To New York; 2) A String To Your Heart; 3) Ends & Odds; 4) Caress Me Baby; 5) Take Out Some Insurance; 6) The Moon Is Rising; 7) Down In Virginia; 8) I Know It’s A Sin; 9) Wanna Be Loved; 10) Baby, What’s On Your Mind; 11) My Bitter Seed; 12) Rockin’ With Reed.
REVIEW
Vee-Jay’s second LP of Jimmy Reed material predictably follows the rigid formula of the first — a chaotic selection of A- and B-sides, some of which came out in the year-long interim between I’m Jimmy Reed and this album, others were culled from even earlier singles. For some strange reason, the one song they did not include was his highest charting record from 1958 — ‘I’m Gonna Get My Baby’, only available on various later compilations. Precisely why it was his highest charting record of the year sort of escapes me, since it sounds exactly like every other mid-tempo piece of generic 12-bar blues he ever cut. Perhaps it’s the lyrics: phonetically entangled sequences such as "well she’s my mama loochy-hoochy goo-dee hoochy-goochy" can have their own odd voodoo magic, particularly when delivered through Jimmy’s fabulous Slur Filter. On a related weird note, most lyric sites transcribe the words in Jimmy’s first verse as "Gonna find my baby boomer / Built to start a-rockin’", which, if true, means that this is officially the very first appearance of baby boomer in art, about four years prior to the term appearing in printed form in its common meaning. I have absolutely no idea what it means here, though — and for all I know, Jimmy might be singing "baby bomber" or "baby boner", because who can really tell, coming from a man who absolutely refuses to use his teeth while enunciating?
What is actually here sounds more or less the same as the stuff on I’m Jimmy Reed (no big surprise about that), but with even fewer standout tracks and without the excitement of discovery, if you happened (or happen) to follow Reed’s career in an approximately chronological order. The oldest track is the one which lent its title to the entire album — an instrumental B-side to ‘Can’t Stand To Let You Go’, a fast and energetic boogie romp on which Reed’s harmonica vivaciously duets with (probably) Eddie Taylor’s slide guitar. When they match in unison, the resulting sound promises excitement; when they solo on their own, the level of excitement drastically drops down. I’d certainly prefer to rock with Chuck Berry or Bo Diddley, but if you need a rigorous bass line for pure, unencumbered headbanging, ‘Rockin’ With Reed’ is like your proto-Ramones kick in the Chicago area circa ’56.
From 1958, the biggest of the included singles (which didn’t really get anywhere serious on the charts) is ‘Down In Virginia’, another utterly stereotypical 12-bar thing which, if I am not mistaken, tells the short story of Jimmy trying to drag his girlfriend out of the country, "where the green grass grows", and failing. This theme of escaping the country for the big city actually runs through Reed’s entire career — unlike Muddy Waters, whose deep love for the Delta and them old cotton fields had stayed with him through all of his urban life, Reed (in his songs, at least) always comes across as an extremely lucky guy to have been able to escape the boring dreariness of rural provincial life (carefully avoiding any racial topics, though). Just a little later, we get ‘Going To New York’, set to the exact same melody as always and promising us that he’s "not gonna rest ’til I get to New York / I’m goin’ to New York / I’m goin’ if I have to walk". Sharp and nasty tongues would have added that only in the overpopulated urban sprawls of the North a guy like Jimmy Reed could find a suitable audience for his kind of playing — but we don’t really want to stir up social trouble.
Instead, let us just go on and mention that the first single from 1959 to be included on the album is ‘Take Out Some Insurance (On Me Baby)’, a song that failed to chart but still has its own Wikipedia page because a couple of years later it was recorded (with entirely new lyrics) by Tony Sheridan and the Beatles, to be released as its own single in 1964, upon the arrival of Beatlemania when Polydor Records, like everybody else with an opportunity, decided to capitalize on the hype. The Sheridan track is just a historical curio; the Jimmy Reed original is at least notable for being one of Jimmy’s totally most minimalistic recordings ever — he doesn’t even blow his harmonica on this one, it’s just steady drums and bass, with laconic, barely heard guitar licks from either Reed himself or Taylor peeping from behind the rhythm section. In this way, it might be the quintessential, if far from the most musically inventive, Jimmy Reed track.
The honor of the most inventive track, then, should probably go to ‘Ends & Odds’, an instrumental that was also recorded as ‘Odds & Ends’ (!) and, I believe, released twice as a B-side: predictably, some sources and digital versions on the Web confuse the two, but the important thing is that one version is just a 12-bar blues with harmonica, and the other one is a 12-bar blues with harmonica and violin, presumably played by the jazz musician Remo Biondi. Obviously, it is not every day that a professional jazz player decides to guest on a Jimmy Reed track, of all places (think Stephane Grappelli adding a violin solo to a Ramones track), which makes things interesting by definition; besides, Biondi takes the opportunity to «adapt» to his odd companion’s style, preferring to play in an equally minimalistic style, with pizzicatos all over the place, then making his instrument explode in a series of beehive-influenced stings to bring the tune down in style.
There are, I think, maybe one or two LP-only songs here, culled by Vee-Jay from outtakes — at least I cannot verify that they were ever released as singles. One is ‘My Bitter Seed’, a song with a dirty-sounding title and really odd lyrics; the other is ‘Moon Is Rising’, an unashamed note-for-note, if not word-for-word, rewrite of ‘Honest I Do’ that was probably not even seen fit for single release because it so blatantly repeated the original’s musical hook. Neither of the two is really worth serious attention — and both simply confirm the overall judgement on Rockin’ With Reed: listenable, but brain-numbing filler city from a guy who never claimed to write anything other than filler city and still found a grateful audience.
“Precisely why it was his highest charting record of the year sort of escapes me”
It escapes me why people even bought Jimmy Reed records to begin with, seeing how boring his music generally is. I can understand maybe that Jimmy Reed was easy to cover by British Invasion artists, but not sure what made him such a commercial success. It’s nice background listening maybe, but do people actually pay for stuff to listen merely as background noise? I dunno, never got the appeal of Jimmy Reed. Maybe they’re some magic that makes the few people that still remember him listen his singles fondly.