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WHEN Sunnyland
Slim, "Mr.Blues
Piano," parked his rough blue Dodge wagon in front
of my house one Boston evening, 1978, it was a chance
stop on a long road. My friend, Paul DeMark, was his
drummer and accompanist, Paul had called from Montreal;
they were touring with surrealist Capt. Beefheart --
could they stay with me when they hit Boston? I said yes
and eventually on my door step came a fantastic
hurricane. Insight was secondary. Sunnyland was a poetic
life force with spiritual antecedents trailing back to
Gilgamesh, the great Tang poets, English Romanticists,
the doomed French Symbolists, Bop Beat Poets, Atlantis
... We would sit with Slim late in the kitchen, and we
felt we were sitting with a great traveler that had come
down the dusty road of poets of golden song. Rock and
roll had had its moment as the poetry of the age but the
age was over. We had basically left rock and roll and
centered our interests on blues, which was rock and
roll's deepest root as far as we cared; it was Elmore
James invented musical electricity! What the Howlin Wolf
and Muddy Waters did with it, froze us in the tracks laid
for us. |
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