Day Seven - Music!!!!

Today has been an exceedingly good music day - and the speakers on the Mustang are now resting after a hard day's work which began with the Blues leaving Houston.

Bluesmen have great names and this morning's selection included some of the most varied and interesting:

Roosevelt Sykes
Sunnyland Slim
T-Bone Walker
Floyd Dixon
Otis Spann
Lightnin' Hopkins
Sonny Terry
Memphis Slim
Little Milton
Big Joe Williams

And my favourite (at least as names go)..... Furry Lewis....

I was wondering what name I would take if I were a proper Bluesman..... Would I be in the Blind Lemon school or the Town + Slim.... Or maybe I could be a Screamin' / Howlin' / Bawlin' / Crawlin' kind of Bluesman?

My choice was between Crawlin' Blind Pig Surname and Big Detroit First Name - but I'll need to work on the guitar and the voice before I earn my spurs...

After a good burst of the Blues from the US, it was then time for Nine Below Zero - the all British Blues Band. Their all time classic album - Live From The Marquee (their first professional album) is full of high energy, adrenalin pumped electric blues and includes the Nine's versions of some classics such as Sugar Pie Honeybunch, Woolly Bully and Got My Mojo Workin'. An amazing sound and up tempo as I headed up I-45 and then through Dallas. (Great skyline in Dallas)

Then one of my favourite guitar men - Mark Knopfler (formerly of Dire Straits) - whose solo work just keeps on getting better and better. Today I listened to Sailing From Philadelphia - which includes duets with Van Morrison and James Taylor. A mixture of rock, blues and country it is a great album with excellent lyric writing from Knopfler matched by his uniquely subtle and impressive guitar sound. Great stuff. I'm saving his more recent solo album - Shangri La - for the last leg in California as some of the songs were inspired by places there, as well as being recorded in the original Sixties Shangri La Studio in Malibu - and on original equipment as well!

Then a flashback to the end of the 90's and the album that summed up that decade - Urban Hymns by The Verve. Apart from the well known tracks like Bittersweet Symphony, The Drugs Don't Work and Lucky Man, there are several other blinding songs which are really powerful from the ballad Sonnet to the more abstracted Catching a Butterfly and Space & Time. Out of context with the rest of the day's music but totally appropriate to that particular section of the road and to my mood.

And then on to two hours of the Rolling Stones - who have a strange connection with The Verve. [I warn you in advance - this is the province of music nerds - but the violin part of Bittersweet Symphony by The Verve was actually "borrowed" from a riff written by Jagger and Richards in the 60's. The Stones' manager, Andrew Loog Oldham sued The Verve and won all the royalties from Bittersweet Symphony for The Stones. The Verve didn't make a penny from that song....]

Anyway! All the Stones classics right through the sixties and into the seventies. Speakers nearly blew up in the car and Mick, Keith and the band saw me through to Oklahoma and into the wide open plains again. Probably the greatest rock and roll band in the world today and after 40 years in the business.

It had to happen on this trip at some point. The Poet from Minnesota - Bob Dylan. I began with his best album - Blood On The Tracks. Written just after his divorce from his first wife Sara. A tremendous album. Full stop. So much range and variety and so many emotions - not to mention musical styles from ultra folk (Tangled Up In Blue) to hard core Blues (Meet Me In The Morning). I'll never get bored of this album.

The only thing to follow Dylan's best album is his second best - which used to be Desire - but since last year is perhaps his latest album - Modern Times. Bluesy, jazzy, splash of country and a new Dylan sound with a rougher voice, plenty of piano and a firm rhythm section make this a real treat. While it is something of a departure from what one would expect from Dylan, his trademarks are there in terms of social comment (Working Man's Blues) and the quirky poetic style of the lyrics.

Tomorrow's music is going to start with Tom Waits (who I was saving for California - but who I cannot resist listening to as I head off on Route 66 in the morning). It'll be his first album - Closing Time - from 1972. Still one of his finest records and that voice.....

The best description of Tom Wait's voice was from an American music critic who said that Wait's voice sounded "like it was soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months and then taken outside and run over with a car."

I'm looking forward to it already!