Blues ain't white

Most rock fans of a certain age remember "The White Album" with great fondness (its actual title was The Beatles, but The White Album it was known as immediately, and "The White Album" it has remained). But its 1968 release marked the beginning of the end for this irreplaceable band. The double album was not so much a continuation of the almost seamless wholes of the wondrous likes of Rubber Soul and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band as it was an exercise in individuation, a harbinger of dissolution. The rifts on the album were a result and a reflection of the Beatles’s diverging directions, in life as well as music. John Lennon, having met and been conquered by the assertive Yoko Ono (so different from his proper first wife, Cynthia) launched off into the gut-spilling confessional mode. Indeed, John and Yoko’s album, Two Virgins, with its famously full-frontal nudie cover shots, was released in the same month as "The White Album." Paul McCartney was working on the pop melodies that had begun to dominate his career (Hey Jude being the best of them) and George Harrison was exploring the Indian spirituality that the others had shucked and which was to issue in "All Things Must Pass." Ringo Starr, the most accommodating Beatle, was somewhat lost in the shuffle of musical egos and felt betrayals. Though "The White Album" is a hodgepodge of musical styles, tastes and influences, it’s full of great moments, both lyrical and intrumental, such as Harrison’s solo on "While My Guitar Gently Weeps," the driving metal of Revolution, the wacky magical mysteries of Glass Onion. Still, as Lennon once remarked: “There isn’t any Beatles music on it. It was John and the band, Paul and the band, George and the band, like that.” I wish I could report that "The Blues White Album," a tribute to the album by a variety of contemporary bluesmen (and one woman) is a rousing success. The idea sounds good. "The White Album" is full of blues-based tunes whose promise could easily have been wrung out here in a variety of interesting ways. But there’s a slackness and lack of, call it imagination, on some of these 10 tracks. There are exceptions. Though Maria Muldaur’s "Ob-la-di, ob-la-da" is a risk-free reading, I liked it anyway. Muldaur’s cracked "Midnight at the Oasis" voice has deepened and here she turns the song’s music-hall roots into something vaguely fusing Appalchian and Memphis sounds. Jimmy Thackery leads off the album with a pulsing, guitar-driven version of "Why Don’t We Do it in the Road?", with some seething sax work by Jimmy Carpenter that fully exploits the song’s sexual energy. And Colin Linden does some nice guitar work on a version of "Blackbird" that is more bluegrass than blues. (I would have liked to see someone take on Glass Onion or Rocky Raccoon.) By far the best thing on the album, and almost worth the price of admission itself, is Joe Louis Walker’s eight-minute workout on "While My Guitar Gently Weeps." It is slow, soulful and squeezes every last bit of mournful pain out of both voice and guitar. Would that the whole album had maintained this level.

Photo Credit: Dezo Hoffmann- thebeatles.com