Rock history isn’t linear but cyclical, with styles and sounds re-emerging every decade or so to be reshaped by a new generation of bands. Such is the case with the blues, which is undergoing a renaissance in the rock underground.
Bands such as the Laughing Hyenas, Royal Trux, the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Come, and the Grifters are culturally far removed from the blues’ origins in the Mississippi Delta, and they have little use for its stylistic conventions. What matters to these bands and countless others is not the 12-bar song form employed by Robert Johnson or Howlin’ Wolf on decades-old records, but the feeling they evinced.
“I believe rock ‘n’ roll is indigenous to America,” says guitarist Larissa Strickland of the Ann Arbor, Mich.-based Laughing Hyenas. “And it comes down to the American myth of Robert Johnson selling his soul at the crossroads-that’s right out of Greek mythology, but it happened only 50 years ago.”
“It’s about respecting the old stuff-Charlie Feathers, Sun Records, Stax, even Tony Joe White-for what it’s done and for how it’s remained intact,” says guitarist Dave Shouse of the Memphis-based Grifters.
Of course, blues has been a cornerstone of rock since the ’50s. But a crucial turning point came when the Rolling Stones evolved into the first postmodern blues band in the early ’70s. The group abandoned the straight-ahead blues feel of its earliest albums and, in discs such as “Sticky Fingers” and “Exile on Main Street,” began twisting their influences into some of the century’s most sinister music.
Like the Stones, the new breed of blues-influenced bands isn’t interested in replicating its heroes. These bands are inspired by the raw, truth-telling power and all-consuming delivery of the bluesmen, but also fascinated by the pain, dysfunction and sexual need that underpin their music-the “otherness” it communicated.
By accentuating this quality, the bands are in a way even more outside the artistic mainstream than their long-ago inspirations were. “We have given up on fitting in,” says Laughing Hyenas singer John Brannon.
Nowhere is this sense of otherworldly dislocation more evident than in the Grifters’ brilliant 1994 album, “Crappin’ You Negative” (Shangri-La), which creates an eerie world of junkies, loners, outer-space visitors and, in the outrageous “Skin Man Palace,” a character who wails, “I am the mambo king!”
A similar sense of hellbent satire pervades the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion’s “Orange” (Matador), with Spencer howling like a madcap blues emcee-“I need a man, a man, a man . . . a blues explosion man!” and “That’s the sweat of the blues explosion!”-over a rampaging two-guitar-and-drums attack modeled after Hound Dog Taylor’s legendary bass-less trios.
Whereas the Grifters dig beyond the “Skin Man Palace” persona for more deeply etched emotions on the rest of their latest album, the Blues Explosion’s manic showmanship is unrelenting, and it’s difficult to determine whether “Orange” is more a case of being put-on than of a band putting out.
One fan of the Spencer band is the Jesus Lizard’s Duane Denison, who nonetheless offers a telling comment on much of the third- and fourth-hand blues derivations of the underground scene. “It’s blue-collar rock for a white-collar audience played by people with undergraduate degrees,” the college-educated guitarist says.
Playing straight blues is passe in the underground. It’s the mutation-the wilder the better-that counts. From the Elvis-like quiver in his voice to his spastic dancing onstage, Jon Spencer is an animated, alien presence.
While attending Brown University in the mid-’80s, he formed Pussy Galore. The band quickly won a following on New York’s Lower East Side with its clangorous, confrontational style, and made waves by recording its own widely bootlegged version of the Rolling Stones’ “Exile on Main Street,” itself a twisted take on the blues tradition.
Pussy Galore also included guitarist Neil Hagerty, who resumed his collaboration with Jennifer Herrema in Royal Trux after Pussy Galore broke up in 1990. In contrast to the Blues Explosion’s hopped-up frenzy, Royal Trux oozes menace. The band’s involving 1993 album, “Cats and Dogs” (Drag City), hints at the heavy-lidded dread of the Stones, even as it ventures in more abstract, experimental directions.
“The blues influence can’t be denied,” Herrema says. “The truth of recordmaking is pulling out what’s buried in our subconscious, and those things are there. Bands like the Stones, Blue Oyster Cult and the blues are definitely part of what we do.”
The band’s new album, its first for a major label, is “Thank You” (Virgin). Due out Tuesday, it’s a much more straight-ahead reinterpretation of the blues-rock tradition than any previous Trux album. Still, it won’t be mistaken for a Black Crowes-style homage to a bygone era. Hagerty’s slash-and-scrape guitar and Herrema’s strangulated growl exert an unearthly power, even as the coarse melodies of tracks such as “Ray O Vac” and “You’re Gonna Lose” offer unexpected pop enticements.
The Boston quartet Come recorded the Stones’ “I Got the Blues” on its 1992 debut album, but the recent “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (Matador) is a far less transparent reinterpretation of the past. Guitars twist together like strands of barbed wire, while Thalia Zedek’s throaty rasp creates an atmosphere of ghostly introspection.
As claustrophobic as Come can sound, there’s also a sense of exploration, with Zedek navigating a path through the darker corners of her psyche, uncertain of what she’ll find but determined to document all of it. In contrast to Zedek’s wrenching slow burn, the bawl of the Laughing Hyenas’ John Brannon is like a two-by-four to the jaw. He shouts his alienation in a voice every bit as big and consuming as some of his blues and soul heroes.
On the Hyenas’ new “Hard Times” (Touch & Go), the quartet attacks its demons with undeniable ferocity. Even in covering Johnny Cash’s “Home of the Blues,” the band makes its concerns wholly contemporary.
“What’s lacking in so much American music now is it’s pasty white and has no soul,” guitarist Strickland says. The Hyenas almost overcompensate; as Brannon says, “I have to pour my heart out-it’s kind of like an exorcism.”
The Hyenas traveled to Memphis to find a recording studio and engineer suited to their idiosyncratic style. Songs evolved into long, groove-oriented jams well beyond the radio-friendly three-minute limit, and sessions were recorded with several open microphones to capture the ambience of musicians playing together in a room. Normally this practice is frowned upon by recording engineers because sounds tend to “bleed” together, but for the Hyenas, making the grit audible is the essence of musicmaking.
“We’re not interested in being clinical, precise,” Strickland says. “We want a certain error to go through the record. We want it to be human.”
All of these records exaggerate the real, push their “otherness” in the listener’s face, whether in a song about a junkie dying for a fix or a blues explosion man dying to entertain. The blues singers of old sing about “hard times” because they are desperate to transcend them. These bands sing about hard times because they are desperate to simply feel.
