THE MAN WHO W/S/COULD BE KiNG or HOW YOU CAN STOP WORRYiNG and LEARN TO LOVE CHRiS COTTON

photo courtesy of tiina liimu
CHRiS COTTON plays THE DEEP BLUES FESTiVAL

First of all let's get this straight: You can call Chris Cotton a lot of names. Call him Cotton, Slappy, Wingnut McSpazz-O-Tron, yr daddy, or Mr. Cotton, Sir. But don't call him a bluesman. And don't call his music blues, either. Gatemouth Brown suffered the same curse and carried a similar cross. What Mr. Brown played wasn't really blues either but to a lot of ears it might have sounded like it. I won't bother to go into that whole "black man playing guitar it must be blues" thing. You are smart enough to figure that out. Chris Cotton doesn't hardly sound a thing like Mr.Gatemouth Brown but both do (or in the case of Mr. Brown "did") excel at spreading their sound across a rich loamy rock-free field of music while still sounding completely themselves. Both have done all they can to dig themselves out of that shiny Tommy Bahama shirt laden blues ghetto. Here's the thing about Cotton's music. The more you hear it and the more intently you listen to it, the more you find is revealed. Cotton plays with a deceptive ease. Not a laid back hippie ease but rather that of one comfortable with himself and his instrument, his fellow players, and his skills. Skills which you'll find are utterly formidable. The comfort and ease with which Cotton's singing and playing come across makes his music feel like you're wearing all your favorite clothes at the same time. Maybe your worn old punk rock boots with your coolest dark blue country cowboy shirt with bright Pearline buttons and cigarette burns, soft old jeans you stole from your dad with the patches and holes that mark and reveal where they've been and that dirty old slouch hat with the sweat stained band you picked up in Memphis. But when you start to peel off all the layers it's still the original thing underneath. Cotton's music is organic. It's who he is. It's what he does. Without creepy wispy adaptation or precious faux affectation or special outfits or any other extemporaneous B.S.

Chris Cotton is a songster. I don't think he'll mind me calling him that. What the hell is a songster? Leadbelly was a songster. He knew all the hits of the day. Mississippi John Hurt and Furry Lewis too. They made those songs theirs. They knew blues, too, but it wasnt' all they knew. Same with Cotton's special rider man Blind Willie McTell. And just like them, Cotton plays pop music. You just don't recognize it that way. The difference is history. Cotton's musical forefathers were usually one man operations that played what was happening then and not often for a socially mixed audience, if you know what I mean. Cotton, too, is playing what's happening then. The difference is a couple hundred years of musical history. It's as if Cotton has somehow absorbed the ink from a two-hundred year long songbook and he uses that songbook for watercolor paper covering it with his own original washes and colors mixed with the original ancient ink to paint textures both coarse and fine. Textures like the sitar in the third track of the three track suite that holds the belly of the album, and the deft vocal exchanges with friend and neighbor John Henry on I'm Going Home (one of two Cotton co-writes on this ten piece album) as well as the duets with fellow west coaster(and fine artist in her own right)Paige. It's the HERE and NOW that Cotton filters the music of THEN through.
The unfortunate thing for Chris Cotton is that people rarely LiSTEN to music anymore. When was the last time you put on an album and sat down on the couch and actually listened to it without some sort of multi-tasking? And LISTENiNG is what has to happen for Cotton to escape that blues ghetto and the clutch of The Dudes who care more about what gauge of strings their god Robert Johnson used on Terraplane than they do about being moved. Taken at face value Cotton will be accepted or dismissed based on blues taste makers. Just as Gatemouth Brown was. Unfortunately for Chris Cotton most of the taste the bald headed pony tailed panama hatted bluesers (or the spelling they would probably prefer "Bluezers") have is in their mouth. Blanket indictment? Damn Straight. Chris Cotton and I would be more than happy for you to prove us wrong. Cotton has assembled a dynamite album that is akin to his previous releases but a couple years stronger and deeper. An album that rewards the listener who pays attention with each subsequent play. An album that, once you hear it will cause your jaw to drop and your eyes to bug out when you find out it was recorded completely live with no overdubs. Do any of your wankin' souless bluezerstars do that? Cotton would, should, could be king. His coronation is up to you.

FUN FACTS!
Actually The Big Sea contains eleven pieces including the Cotton style hill-country hidden track Farm Jam which drops at three minutes in. This track features Cotton on guitar as well as John Henry on bass and Dirty Simonson on drums. This combo does not appear elsewhere on the CD.
Cotton briefly went to college where I grew up but we never met. Countless years later I got to back him up on drums at Deep Blues Festival number one.

Chris Cotton on MySpace
Cotton's gorgeous website

BUY!
You can get yr grubby little paws on The Big Sea
directly from mr.Cotton via MySpace


LiSTEN!
Three tracks from The Big Sea
BLUES and SADNESS MP3
.44 PiSTOL WOMAN MP3
WHAT WOULD YOU DO MP3

CHECK OUT the post on Cotton by our pal at NiNEBULLETS.NET!

WATCH COTTON!

That Deep Blues Sound

“As soon as the needle hit the groove I felt a chill run down my spine.
It was the blues, no question about that. The ferocious clawing at the steel strings, the .44-caliber slide guitar, the voice a cross between the howl of Tommy Johnson and the otherworldly whine of Skip James. The ancient apostolic voice of the blues that could raise up Lazarus one more time, but sing in a way I’d never heard before.”
Excerpt from Been Here and Gone A Memoir of the Blues by David Dalton

Chris Johnson, influenced in part by the info he found on my Deep Blues web page and elsewhere has founded and curated The Deep Blues Festival to be held in River Falls Wisconsin on August 18th. The DBF, the first of its kind in this country, will present nearly a who's who of bands and artists that fall under my vision of the Deep Blues sound. What the heck is the Deep Blues sound? The easy answer is check my web page. The harder answer is to say that it's music that has been influenced by Robert Mugge's documentary film Deep Blues which was hosted by Robert Palmer who wrote the book Deep Blues. It's artists whose lives were changed when they heard the groundbreaking R.L. Burnside/Jon Spencer Blues Explosion recording Ass Pocket of Whiskey and/or the first Gun Club album Fire of Love. It's bands who wallowed in and had their little punk rock minds blown by the hardass dirty raw hill country blues presented by Mississippi's Fat Possum Records. 

Ask any of the artists that will appear at this fest who their main influences are and from each you'll hear names like Junior Kimbrough, T-Model Ford, R.L. Burnside, Robert Cage, Johnny Farmer,and Robert Belfour. -all of them Fat Possum artists. And let us not forget the power of artists like Son House, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Charley Patton, Tommy Johnson, Ishman Bracey, Memphis Minnie and countless others known and unknown. Another name you'll hear from many of these artists is The Black Keys. This is interesting because while The BKs were a Fat Possum band they themselves were heavily influenced by the same Fat Possum artists that many of the folks playing the Deep Blues Festival were. And while we're gettin' all incestuous you should know that the BKs were originally on the Alive-Total Energy label which is now home to some of the artists playing the fest as well.

There are several long running sites that are geared towards this music. These are: Too Bad Jim, a Yahoo group now known as Real Punk Blues and my own Rick Saunders World group as well as Chris Johnson's RSW Vines (a live show traders site), Tweeds Blues, and My Space. Many of the artists playing the festival have frequented these sites for years as members and plain ol' fans before they came out of the blues closet as artists in their own right. As an example Dan Auerbach of The Black Keys was just a kid who had his life changed by listening to Junior Kimbrough. He discovered the Too Bad Jim site and, like many of us, found he was not alone in his love of this music. Through these on-line communities strong friendships have developed. It's through the Too Bad Jim site that I became friends with Chris Johnson and many others and we've been able to watch as artists like Dan Auerbach and others have grown from the basement to the international stage. 

Fans and artists around the world have been able to gain access to and share information and insight about real, raw, hard blues and punk blues bands through these sites which has, at least in my case, made the world much smaller. I now have in my collection as a result music from artists throughout the U.K. as well as rural parts of Norway, Hungary, Sweden and elsewhere. And don't get me started on the debt owed to our friends in the U.K. coalition Not The Same Old Blues Crap which is bringing punk blues to England and beyond. Thanks for selling the Deep Blues back to us.

Which brings us back to the question, "Just what the heck is The Deep Blues?"

Let's see if we can't suss that out. For me it’s a feeling. A vibe as opposed to merely a label or some sort of sub-genre. So what it means is whatever I want it to mean. Like some sort of shade-tree cultural imperialist I’m co-opting the term and using it to describe the indescribable. An umbrella term I like to use to attempt to understand what My Blues and My Soul music are. Hellfire, you can even apply it to country music. (But then we’d have to go into a big thing about country music not being country music and how music called alt-country is closer to being country than music which is lazily called country and which is really Nashville pop in most cases and that’d just be a big headache. But the same argument over country music can be applied to the blues in this sense. Tired of what many blues fans saw as an evil bastardizing of the blues - represented well by the film Ghost World's souless white boy blues band Blues Hammer. The image of the conch-belted, bolero-hatted, bottom-lip-biting, eyes to the sky, cigar and fern bar white boy wanksta doing another gutless version of Robert Johnson's Sweet Home Chicago or ripping off another tired attempt at Stormy Monday and acting as if that represented The Blues. Oh Hell No!) As Stephen Davidson has written "...the epitome of deep blues for me is the legendary 'unknown convict'. It's all about the feeling...an open doorway to the soul...it's not polished and clean...it's dirty and raw...an open wound covered with wagon wheel grease...it's pain and ecstasy, it sounds like a tornado, the rainbow after the storm... ". The Deep Blues in the context of The Deep Blues Festival is, just like punk rock, about realness, rawness, soul, and true emotion. Oh indeed there will be what most would call traditional blues artists performing. But there will also be artists there that would not call themselves blues artists but would certainly admit to the deep influence their search for true blues has had on them and their music. And there will be artists there that are deeply moved by their love of old timey country and rural country blues but would not hold either title out of respect. Some more punk than blues. Others more blues than punk. Others just some sort of plain ol' punk blues hybrid. But what unites the whole thing for every artist playing this festival is a soul felt passion for a kind of music that moves them deeply. Music that makes them, like the artists that came before them, have to play this music as if their lives depended on it- and for most of them it does. And it's that same insatiable passion to hear real true honest soulful expression that unites fans of this music to support these artists.

(Tons o' Thanks to my Wife and Editor Leslie Robison!)
(Tip o'the hat to David A. Stewart without whom the film Deep Blues would not have been possible. Thanx Dave!)

The Deep Blues Festival

The Deep Blues

Real Punk Blues aka Too Bad Jim Yahoo Group

Rick Saunders World Yahoo Group

Tweeds Blues

Not The Same Old Blues Crap

LiSTEN TO THE DEEP BLUES FESTiVAL LiNE-UP!
(these posts will be up for one week ONLY suckas!):

SCOTT H BiRAM 

MR. ROBERT BELFOUR 

BLACK DiAMOND HEAViES 

ELAM McKNiGHT 

SWEET VELVET C (aka Chet frm Immortal Lee County Killers!)

MARK "PORKCHOP" HOLDER 

LEFT LANE CRUiSER 

MORELAND and ARBUCKLE 

HiLLSTOMP 

WiLLIAM ELLiOTT WHiTMORE 

RADiO MOSCOW 

CHRiS COTTON 

BRiMSTONE HOWL 

JOHN SCHOOLEY 

THE BiRDDOGS 

K.M. WiLLiAMS THE TEXAS COUNTRY BLUES PREACHER

JOHNNY LOWEBOW