Big Head Blues Club
100 Years of Robert Johnson
Featuring Big Head Todd and The Monsters, B.B. King, Hubert Sumlin, Honeyboy Edwards, Charlie Musselwhite, Ruthie Foster, Cedric Burnside and Lightnin’ Malcolm
How do you throw a 100th birthday bash for the most influential bluesman that ever lived? If you’re Big Head Todd and The Monsters, you gather some of the greatest living blues musicians and record 100 Years of Robert Johnson (Ryko/Big Records), a stirring new tribute album featuring 10 potent interpretations of some of the most vital and durable music of the past century.
Big Head Blues Club, as the ad hoc ensemble is calling itself, features, in addition to the Colorado-based quartet—guitarist and vocalist Todd Park Mohr, bassist Rob Squires, drummer Brian Nevin and keyboardist Jeremy Lawton—special guests, blues legends B.B. King, Hubert Sumlin, Honeyboy Edwards and Charlie Musselwhite, as well as keepers of the blues flame Ruthie Foster, Cedric Burnside and Lightnin’ Malcolm.
Recorded at the legendary Ardent Studios in Memphis, and produced by Grammy award winning blues producer Chris Goldsmith (Blind Boys of Alabama), 100 Years of Robert Johnson will be released on March 1, 2011 (Ryko/Big Records), and supported by a national tour (“Blues at the Crossroads: The Robert Johnson Centennial Concerts”) featuring many of the participants in the sessions.
For Todd Park Mohr, who founded Big Head Todd and The Monsters with Squires and Nevin nearly a quarter-century ago, the project has served to re-introduce him to the iconic music of Johnson, whose songs provided many of the pioneering blues-rock bands—Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, The Grateful Dead, Cream, Canned Heat, etc.—with some of their most popular material.
“I’d always heard the more aggressive versions of Robert’s more popular songs,” says Mohr. “But in studying his singing, guitar playing, and the songs themselves, I experienced a blues enlightenment. There is a rich complexity, a vulnerability and humanness throughout the Delta blues traditions that is often overlooked. In a way the Delta blues that Johnson represented is really the blood and guts of everything else that followed. So for me it’s kind of getting back to that marrow, and luckily we had a producer who really understood blues music.”
100 Years of Robert Johnson features several inspired takes on Johnson’s best known compositions, including “Come On In My Kitchen” and “Last Fair Deal Gone Done” (both featuring blues harp master Musselwhite), “Kind Hearted Woman” (with Foster), “If I had Possession Over Judgement Day” (spotlighting the 95-year-old Edwards), “Cross Road Blues,” also known as “Crossroads” (with the legendary B.B. King), and “When You Got a Good Friend” (featuring Foster and Sumlin, best known as the guitarist for the late Howlin’ Wolf). The album is filled out with rousing, gutsy workouts on “Ramblin’ On My Mind,” “Preachin’ Blues,” “All My Love Is Love In Vain” (performed solo by Mohr on vocal and acoustic guitar) and a bonus track of “Sweet Home Chicago, ” performed by Edwards and Musselwhite sans additional accompaniment. Cedric Burnside (grandson of the great bluesman R.L. Burnside) plays drums on “If I had Possession Over Judgement Day” and “Preachin’ Blues,” and acoustic guitar on “Ramblin’ On My Mind.” Lightnin’ Malcolm plays electric guitar on “Ramblin’ On My Mind,” “When You Got a Good Friend” and “If I had Possession Over Judgement Day,” plus acoustic guitar on “Preachin’ Blues” and “Kind Hearted Woman.”
Robert Johnson’s story is the stuff of myth and legend alike, and his music has fascinated blues fans and musicians for more than seven decades. Born in Mississippi in 1911, Johnson recorded only 29 songs, all during the years 1936 and ’37. His unique guitar style and haunting vocal phrasing, and the evocative, often mysterious nature of his lyrics, made him a popular artist during his short time in the spotlight and has continued to intrigue since. A persistent tale that, as a young man, Johnson sold his soul to the Devil in order to become a more proficient musician has been attached to his biography since his untimely death at age 27—the alleged victim of a poisoning incident at the hands of the jealous husband of a woman with whom Johnson had been flirting.
For Mohr and Goldsmith, the challenge in recording the tribute was to give new voice to Johnson’s music, to avoid copying the countless cover versions already extant. “In so many of the takes on Robert’s stuff, you don’t get the depth of emotion that’s in the lyrics and in Robert’s voice. That’s one thing that Chris and the band and my voice were able to bring to it. Chris had great ideas about how to represent the stuff, and all the musicians were just so good at what they did, the unique arrangements just came naturally.”
Mohr says that Johnson’s lyrics are especially inspirational to him. “There’s something about the honesty of it that’s really powerful,” he says. “You don’t get that feeling from commercial culture—what it’s like to be a human being both good and bad. Its candor is very appealing and refreshing because it speaks to the human condition. The language that Robert used to express it was really poetic and well crafted.”
Mohr also rediscovered the complexity of Johnson’s guitar work while making the recording. “It is astounding; his playing really is incredible,” he says. “When you try to play his stuff you realize how involved it really is. The compositions feature many skipped beats and bars along with other extra twists that make it really special.”
Recording at Ardent also helped shape the music. Having been used by a wide range of artists from Led Zeppelin to the Staple Singers, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Bob Dylan and The White Stripes, Ardent is favored by artists seeking a natural, unadorned sound in their recordings. “It’s a magical place to work,” says Mohr, “a classic vintage studio. The rooms are beautiful and beautifully equipped, with every vintage piece you can imagine.”
When it came time to record, says Mohr, producer Goldsmith “asked all of the artists to pick out five Robert Johnson favorites. We didn’t know who was going to sing what; he just wanted to get a vibe for what people were interested in. It turns out we were all centering around the same songs. We didn’t really do much experimenting after that. For me personally, how I ended up choosing was mainly on the basis of which lyrics were more penetrating.”
Having now completed the project, Mohr—who lives part-time in one of the blues capitals of the world, Chicago—insists that the experience has changed the way he thinks about music. “I can guarantee it’s something we’re going to be doing after this tour,” he says. “It’s just so fresh and exciting for all of us, unexpectedly so. I know that we’re going to be having a lot of blues in our future.”
He hopes that 100 Years of Robert Johnson will also spark a renewed interest in classic blues overall. “When you’re playing within a tradition like the blues you’re not pretending to have an original idea; you’re not a songwriter pushing your strange new inventions, and people don’t have to learn a new song to get to the emotion of it,” he says. “But there’s something in this music that I’ve discovered to be really fresh and unexplored. It’s the same stuff that’s spawned The White Stripes and The Black Keys and the younger movements in blues. A lot of these songs have been covered a zillion times perhaps,” he concludes, “but there are so many exciting and unexplored branches of such an old tree.”
A hundred years after the birth of its greatest artist, it looks like the blues itself is about to be reborn.
