MY CASINO CAPER by Edd Byrnes (2014 audiobook)

    Here’s something I didn’t know existed until earlier today….evidently, some time around 1980 actor Edd “Kookie” Byrnes, of 77 Sunset Strip fame, won three million dollars on a slot machine in a Vegas casino, and the whole experience developed into a nightmare for him, sounding like something from a B-movie or a crime TV show in which Byrnes himself could have appeared.

    I’m not sure if this yarn actually happened, or if it is one of those fictional memoirs like Chuck Barris’s CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND, but it plays well, and Byrnes is a natural storyteller. Of course, if the story is really true, it’s wild enough to be incredibly entertaining, but it does take a good storyteller to  make it come alive, and a charismatic actor to get us believing in the character and rooting for him. Byrnes has those qualities, so that as he’s dropping his career highlights into conversations or mentioning his sexual prowess in passing or talking about being mobbed by teenage girls and the amount of fan mail he once received, he does it with such a self-deprecating charm that you want to pat him on the back, congratulate him on his success, and tell him he truly deserves to be a star. THAT is quite an accomplishment.

    The format of MY CASINO CAPER is a dramatized audiobook, running about 75 minutes. The frame narrative has Byrnes telling the story to his friend Alan Young (yes, the real Alan Young, of Mr. Ed and The Time Machine fame, who sounds great here and still retains his quick wit and boyish charm, and even re-enacts Byrnes’ favorite scene from The Time Machine for him, in character with a Scottish accent!), and then we are swept away into a well-produced dramatization of the whole affair, acted out for us with sound effects, etc.

    Out of the blue, Byrnes gets a phone call from an old girlfriend he’d dated a decade or two previous, and she suggests the two of them go to Las Vegas for the weekend. He gladly accepts, and while there, she tells him about a particular machine (he’s not much of a gambler himself) that has a potential mega-payout but only when you bet more than the minimum, and he might want to try it. While she plays another machine, he does give it a shot, and he wins the big jackpot of $3 million ($1.8 million after taxes). Rather than be happy for his good luck and perhaps taking advantage of his generosity while he’s in a good mood, she immediately demands half….and then a threatening thug-like figure (well-played by Michael Callan) starts making demands, and claims that he’d rigged the machine with an insider partner and had just gone to the bathroom when Byrnes took over ‘his” machine, and thus the money is his and he wants it all. He threatens and intimidates Byrnes in a number of ways. Byrnes along the way turns to two actor friends—David Hedison (The Fly, Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea) and Henry Silva (Rat Pack member and star of many great Italian crime films, the ultimate tough guy)—to play ‘roles’ (one a police detective, the other a mobster) to scare off Callan’s character. There’s another mysterious woman who appears out of the blue—or is it really out of the blue? Various other complications get in the way, and before you know it, the 75 minutes are over, and you’ve had an exciting and fun roller-coaster ride…and realize again what an entertaining and talented man Edd Byrnes is.

    There are enough show-biz anecdotes to satisfy the lover of vintage films and TV. Want to know about the making of Roger Corman’s 1964 Yugoslavian war film THE SECRET INVASION, in which Byrnes co-starred with Silva? Here’s your chance to learn. Wonder what it was like on the Warner Brothers lot during the shooting of 77 Sunset Strip? Get some choice morsels on that here. Of course, with each passing year, the number pf people impressed by name-dropping anecdotes involving Connie Stevens goes down, but if you do still care, as I do, you can get a few vicarious encounters with Ms. Stevens here.

    Alas, Byrnes does not mention the classic 1973 slasher film WICKED, WICKED which was released by MGM and was shot by Richard L. Bare (Green Acres) in a split-screen technique (and thus was not able to get into TV circulation back in the day, so it’s not that well known….I managed to catch it on 50 cent night at the Lakeridge Theater in Wheat Ridge, Colorado,, and loved seeing Byrnes again), but there’s only so much time here, and if TOO MUCH time had been spent with anecdotes about his films and TV appearances, the excitement of the plot would get interrupted and it would come off as more of an ego-boosting memoir than an exciting “caper,” as the title promises  Fortunately, the audiobook gets the mix just right between show-biz and mystery plot. All the celebrities who appear as guests—Alan Young, David Hedison, Henry Silva—come across as excellent actors but also as fun people you’d like to have a beer with.

    The best news of all is that this audiobook, though only a few years old, is presently available for FREE on You Tube, posted by its producer just three months ago. Just search for “My Casino Caper – Audio-Book with Movie Stars,” pour yourself a cup of coffee, and settle back and be entertained by the great Edd Kookie Byrnes. And after that, make a point to search for his three Italian westerns from the 67-68 period, all of which are first-rate and he is great in them. Oh, 77 Sunset Strip IS presently playing on ME-TV in the middle of the night, and I catch an episode or two a month, still finding ones I never saw initially, and Byrnes can be happy in the knowledge that even though he is surrounded by great talent on the show (Efrem Zimbalist Jr., Roger Smith, Connie Stevens, etc.), it’s HIS segment that many of us most look forward to, still, after all these years.

BILL SHUTE, originally published elsewhere online in 2018

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My newest poetry book for 2023…only $6.95 and available internationally at your local Amazon platform

NEUTRAL by Bill Shute

KSE #420, 125 pages, 6″ x 9″ perfect bound, softcover

published 2 January 2023

available for immediate order from https://amzn.to/3IFS5Vs

A new book-length poem for 2023, and in some ways it is my most ambitious work (IMHO) since POINT LOMA PURPLE (2007).

And coming in 2024 will be a new book-length poem, STATIC STRUT (KSE #421)….keep an eye out for it!

RUBBER RACKETEERS (1942), starring RICARDO CORTEZ

Re-watching this film (I’ve seen it 3-4 times over the last 20 years), I’m reminded about the things an hour-long B-crime/action programmer has in common with a rock’n’roll 45—it’s all about the spirit, the tone of the performance, the pace, the mood, the overall effect. Nail those elements, and any number of defects can be forgiven….or actually become irrelevant. The piece itself carries you along….for 2 minutes 30 seconds on a 45 rpm singles, or for 56 minutes with a film like RUBBER RACKETEERS. And like some grungy 1962 R&B cover by a frat-rock band from Washington state, this film delivers the goods (Monogram films usually do) you paid for when you bought a ticket.

This was an early production by the King Brothers, whose story sounds like it came out of the kind of film they would produce. Evidently, they began selling newspapers and shining shoes, and then branched into slot machines and horse racing. They loved movies, though, and knew a number of producers and directors from the racetrack! They had the genius idea to try and make films to be shown on their slot machines, and actually attempted to contact Cecil B. DeMille to see if he’d like to produce a film for their slot machines!!!! Not surprisingly, that did not work out.

They did manage to make a low-budget film for PRC called PAPER BULLETS, famous for being a pre-stardom role for Alan Ladd. The great B-movie gangster actor JACK LA RUE starred in that, as they knew him from the racetrack and he was happy to do “the boys” a favor. They did wind up later making some crime classics, including DILLINGER, GUN CRAZY, SOUTHSIDE 1-1000, and THE GANGSTER.

RUBBER RACKETEERS was released in June 1942, just six months after the beginning of WWII, and the first scene sets the over-the-top wartime tone….we see star BILL HENRY shooting a machine gun into targets with the faces of Mussolini, Hitler, and Tojo (can you imagine how well that would have gone over with audiences in mid-1942….these King Brothers knew what they were doing!). Henry, in case you’ve forgotten, later starred in the 1953 Republic serial CANADIAN MOUNTIES VS ATOMIC INVADERS, and he was also the comedic heavy in the post-Gorcey Bowery Boys film SPOOK CHASERS, where the Huntz Hall/Stanley Clements version of the Boys help their older pal Mike Clancy (who is filling the slot that would have been filled by Bernard Gorcey as Louie Dumbrowski of Louie’s Sweet Shop fame) when seedy real estate agent Henry sells Mike a “haunted” house that’s actually full of cash from a missing gangster. Henry’s character in RR, a young defense worker devoted to the patriotic cause, has just the right combination of boyish charm and naïve toughness, but the real star here—as happens so often in B-movies and serials—is the villain, a gangster named Tony Gilin, played by the great RICARDO CORTEZ, just out of jail, and now head of a tire-bootlegging operation. What’s that, you might ask? During WWII, rubber was needed for the war effort, so new tires could not be had easily, and even retreads became a scarce commodity. People would even buy a cheap used car just to get the tires (there’s a scene with just that happening here). What Cortez’s crooked crew would do is take bald tires, put a kind of ribbed wrap around them, and cover them with a new black sealant. They looked shiny and new from a distance, but were dangerous to drive on, which unfortunately is proven when Bill Henry’s girlfriend’s brother is killed in an accident due to the bad tires blowing out. This gets Henry and his gal (played by Rochelle Hudson) on the warpath, and they decide to track down who was responsible for making these tires, and the plot follows their steps in the investigation, eventually narrowing down to seedy used car lots owned by Gilin.

It’s a joy to watch Ricardo Cortez in action. A major star during the silent era (he was impressive in D.W. Griffith’s 1926 THE SORROWS OF SATAN), he continued as a leading man in the early sound era, and was Sam Spade in the original 1931 version of THE MALTESE FALCON. In the late 1930’s he directed a number of programmers, and then, as a number of silent leading men had done before him, re-invented himself as a character actor, specializing in heels and crooks (be sure to watch the1950 BUNCO SQUAD, where he shines as the murderous head of a phony psychic racket, conning rich widows out of their money). As an ex-boxer, Cortez never lost his tough-guy edge, though as he’d also worked as a stockbroker before his acting career (and he eventually returned to Wall Street after retiring from acting), he knew how to project a classy image. That combination served him well in his post-leading man period as a villain.

The writer of RUBBER RACKETEERS certainly knew what gold he had in Cortez, and thus gives him many great lines and set-ups which surely would have gotten a laugh out of the wartime audiences. For instance, in the first part of the film, where Cortez’s Asian-American butler announces that he is enlisting in the Army, Cortez flashes an oily smile, congratulates him, slaps him on the back, and says, “everybody’s got to do their bit….and you’ll do mine!” The film is full of that kind of thing, as it should be when the top-billed actor is the bad guy….it’s Cortez people were paying to see. The skimpy Monogram Pictures sets usually work to the films’ advantage in crime films and mysteries, as they have a lived-in look to them, and that’s true here, as Cortez barks orders and makes under-handed deals all the while wearing a tailored suit in a way that makes me green with envy (when I wear a suit, it’s either too baggy, or too tight a la Oliver Hardy) and smokes cigarettes in a classy way, with curling smoke trails, that makes me want to go out and buy a pack of Camels and start the habit again (almost). Although Cortez’s demise near the film’s climax happens quickly, it echoes the way he killed someone else about 30 seconds before, and was surely satisfying to audiences. The film ends with the young couple on the front page of the newspaper after Cortez is killed, and we see a munitions factory with its smokestacks belching, no doubt working three shifts a day toward the war effort.

RUBBER RACKETEERS is in the public domain and can be found easily online. Like a great rock and roll record or crime comic book or YOURS TRULY, JOHNNY DOLLAR radio show, it hits all the right bases, has exactly the right tone and attitude, gets done quickly and efficiently what it needs to do, and leaves you wanting more.

BILL SHUTE, originally published elsewhere online in 2019

LAY THAT RIFLE DOWN (1955), starring JUDY CANOVA

From the 30’s through the 50’s, JUDY CANOVA was the queen of country entertainment. Radio, films, records, TV, nightclub appearances, Broadway (she was in Ziegfeld Follies of 1936!), she conquered them all with her brash and outrageous over-the-top cornpone comedy (and her novelty singing, including first-rate yodeling). Her comedy persona was the kind of thing that would later have fit well in something like HEE HAW, and I’m surprised that she never did a guest shot on THE BEVERLY HILLBILLIES (though according to the IMDB, she did play Mammy Yokum in a 1967 unsold TV pilot of LI’L ABNER, something that would have been right up her alley). She could probably be described as a country version of Martha Raye or Vera Vague, though she looked like neither, being dark-haired, almond-eyed, with sharp features, and sporting the downhome pig-tails and calico look. Look at her picture and imagine the exaggerated “howwww-DEE” greeting, as said by Minnie Pearl.

LAY THAT RIFLE DOWN was the final starring vehicle for her at Republic Pictures, with a run that lasted for 13 films over 15 years. As with her fellow Republic stars Roy Rogers and Gene Autry, after an initial period playing characters with other names, she finally played herself (or her public persona) in the last few vehicles, such as this one.

Republic’s distribution in its waning days was especially strong in moderate-sized towns in the Midwest and the South, and I’d imagine that this film would have gone over well with those audiences. Canova was a known quantity, and she was teamed up with director Charles Lamont, who started off in the silent era doing Big Boy comedy shorts at Educational Pictures (that alone would get him in my Hall Of Fame!), then in the sound era did the majority of Buster Keaton’s fine shorts at Educational, and wound up at Universal doing many comedy classics with Abbott & Costello and with Ma and Pa Kettle. Since Canova’s comedy is very similar to the Kettles, the pairing of star Canova and director Lamont was a match made in country-comedy heaven. Interestingly, the two films Lamont made after this were both entries in successful series that replaced one of the main stars with someone else: THE KETTLES IN THE OZARKS, where Percy Kilbride was replaced by Arthur Hunnicutt, and FRANCIS IN THE HAUNTED HOUSE, where longtime companion to Francis The Talking Mule Donald O’Connor was replaced by Mickey Rooney. Also, to add insult to injury, Francis The Mule was not even voiced by Chill Wills in this film—Paul Frees was “doing” a Chill Wills imitation. I remember seeing that film as a child on TV and enjoying it since Mickey Rooney’s hamminess can take over the screen and make you forget everything else that’s happening other than The Mick and his antics.

The plot here—which on some level doesn’t even matter, since the film is just a vehicle for Canova’s comedy—is a kind of cross between Cinderella and a mystery-crime story. In an early scene, Canova gets in the mail the newest lesson from a correspondence-course charm school, and we see the bumbling Canova character in her room trying to practice the “elegant” prancing and posing described in the lesson. I can hear the audience in, say, Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, howling at her antics, and I would have been hooting and stamping right along with them. This scene also reminds me of the late great Jim Varney in his Ernest persona—-one wonders if Varney as a child watched some Canova films on the local Tennessee UHF station. And just in case your heart-strings have not already been pulled by Judy’s working for the mean people at the hotel in a menial position, we find out that she takes the little money she does earn and uses it to keep up an old farm where an older man who drives a beat-up country taxi helps raise some orphan children, and of course the kids provide some country-style Our Gang-ish hijinks themselves. And if that’s not enough, when the kids throw a surprise birthday party for her, on a day that isn’t her birthday, Judy warbles a cute song about how “my birthday is my favorite day of the year,” with glockenspiel as a lead instrument in the orchestral backing. The only thing missing was Captain Kangaroo himself!

The Cinderella aspect of the story kicks in when Judy, who has led the mean-spirited people she lives and works with at the hotel to believe that a “feller” has been writing her, has her bluff called, and she winds up asking the first adult male to get off the bus in downtown “Greebville” to pretend to know her and be her boyfriend so as to shut up the hotel people who don’t believe her. And that “feller” is none other than ROBERT LOWERY! Yes, Batman from the 1949 Batman and Robin serial (my favorite Batman), who was recently championed here in the review of the 1962 Craig Hill film DEADLY DUO. For Judy, Lowery (who has always been good at comedy—his stuffy and bored performance as Bruce Wayne in the Batman serial is a hoot) is the dream date. Posing as Poindexter March III (!!!!), he charms everyone in town and has the meanies at the hotel now treating Judy like a queen, so they can win the favor of March/Lowery.

As you might expect, Judy’s farm isn’t exactly what it’s believed to be, and Robert Lowery had a specific reason to come to Greebville on the bus that magical day, and these elements keep the wheels rolling until Judy manages to put the meanies in their place, get rewarded out of the blue, and in the film’s climax, be toting that rifle referred to in the title. Also, even though Robert Lowery is essentially a swindler, he’s a charming swindler with a heart of gold, or so he shows himself to be as he’s taken away by the police. In the film’s final seconds, when banker Richard Deacon (!!!!) returns the deed to the farm to Judy AND we discover it’s got oil, she passes out, reminding us once again what a fine physical comedian Judy Canova is. She was 42 when the film was made, and her pigtails and girlish “aw shucks” mannerisms remind me of the scenes in the later Bowery Boys movies where the 40 year old Huntz Hall is dressed in a Little Lord Fauntleroy outfit. This kind of thing exists in some alternate universe….a universe where I want to be!

Judy Canova’s radio show went off the air, after more than a decade, in 1955, the year she appeared in this, her last starring film vehicle. She then moved on to television guest appearances (she was even on an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents) and went back to live performances in Vegas and in nightclubs across North America. It’s a shame she’s not remembered that much today. She carved out her own niche in the entertainment world of the 1930’s-1960’s, and she is able to carry this feature film effortlessly. She’s in virtually every scene, and though her persona is brash, she’s also shy and a wallflower, so the audience is not just laughing at her antics, they are rooting for her as an underdog. 65 years after this film was released, and 85 years after she exploded onto popular culture, Judy Canova is still working her magic on viewers like me!

BILL SHUTE, originally published elsewhere online in 2020

great new album from THE GARMENT DISTRICT, ‘Flowers Telegraphed to All Parts of the World’

Left On Coast
A Street Called Finland
Following Me
Seldom Search Arch
The Starfish Song
The Island of Stability
Moon Pale and Moon Gold
Cooling Station
The Instrument That Plays Itself

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Pittsburgh’s own THE GARMENT DISTRICT

Jennifer Baron: guitar, organ, electric piano, tambourine, vocals
Lucy Blehar: vocals
Alex Korshin: vocals
Dan Koshuter: guitar, vocals
Corry Drake: bass
Greg Langel: synthesizer, guitar
Shivika Asthana: drums
Sean Finn: drums

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Beautiful orange vinyl LP (500 copies) available from Happy Happy Birthday to Me Records:

https://www.hhbtm.com/product/flowers-telegraphed-to-all-parts-of-the-world/

Digital version: https://hhbtm.bandcamp.com/album/flowers-telegraphed-to-all-parts-of-the-world

The album is also available for immediate streaming on You Tube Music and other popular services

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My life has certainly been elevated to a higher key in the last few weeks with a new album from Pittsburgh’s THE GARMENT DISTRICT, featuring Jennifer Baron. KSE was honored to have released an earlier Garment District album in 2016, LUMINOUS TOXIN (KSE #296), which was one of our most well-received releases ever (generating many rapturous e-mails from listeners wanting another dose of Garment District magic). That release is long out of print–although you can, and should, get a digital version on the Garment District Bandcamp page: https://thegarmentdistrict.bandcamp.com/album/luminous-toxin

Music is a wonderful vehicle for transmitting a transcendent psychedelic experience to listeners, elevating them to a higher-key sacred space. Much music labelled “psychedelic” does not do that at all–and much music not labelled “psychedelic” (an extended raga performance by Ali Akbar Khan, a solo piano performance by Paul Bley, the chamber music of Morton Feldman, the otherworldly sacred music of Washington Phillips) can take one on a trip somewhere beyond, yet within.

The music of The Garment District is pure, it is timeless, it is elegant, it is playful, it has a watercolor-like delicious cloudiness, not unlike in effect the 1950s blotted-line artwork of Jennifer Baron’s fellow Pittsburgh person, Andy Warhol. Like the flowers in the title of the album, from the first note of the first song, this music opens up gradually, seductively, like the petals of a rose, bringing the listener into a kaleidoscopic wonder-world of sound.

Jennifer Baron has the rare ability to create via music a trippy and deep alternative universe that I want to exist within, and her music contains a door of entry for listeners who are willing to let go and fall inside….similar to the effect of the music of, say, Faine Jade, or Kendra Smith, or Tyrannosaurus Rex-era Marc Bolan, or “Kingdom of Heaven”-era Roky Erickson.

Ms. Baron is also a fantastic lyricist, her words embodying the perfect combination of shimmering beauty, trippy ambiguity (so that the listener can keep going back to the same well and tasting different flavors, never tiring of it), and piquant imagery that helps create mind-pictures which complement the higher-key experience. Her lyrics provide just enough pieces of a puzzle to create a scenario from, but with the next listen, you can construct a different scenario from the segments, so thus the songs never get old I also like the fact that The Garment District put some instrumentals on the album as it gives the vocal pieces room to breathe.

There are some vintage instruments and electronics used on the album, but frankly, I couldn’t put a date on this music. It has the feel of something that could have come out on Resonance or 4 A.D. or New Rose in the 1980s, but it also incorporates 21st century moves, and the mixture of elements within the sound-picture is always fresh and exciting–for instance, the instrumental “Cooling Station” starts of with an Eastern European flavor, gets hitched up to a vaguely hiphop-ish rhythm, uses vintage electronics in a way that evokes “Another Green World”-period Eno, and uses whistles in a way that suggests a Brazilian carnival, yet it all mixes together into an atmospheric otherworldly stew that is completely Garment District. There are so many great and haunting riffs throughout the album that I find myself humming and tapping my foot to hours after last playing the songs.

And the album closer, “The Instrument That Plays Itself,” is a languid but insistent musical knot that a million listens could never unravel, and it can’t help but make me want to flip the album over and put the needle at the start of side one once again….the same way I want to listen to Pink Floyd’s ATOM HEART MOTHER again immediately after fading out with the final section of “Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast.”

Be sure to go to Bandcamp ASAP and listen to and then purchase your own copy of The Garment District’s ‘Flowers Telegraphed to All Parts of the World’. It’s exactly the kind of soothing but uplifting tonic we need now during these difficult times. The message here is that magic and majesty can be found everywhere, wherever you are.

THE GARMENT DISTRICT, ‘Flowers Telegraphed to All Parts of the World’

https://hhbtm.bandcamp.com/album/flowers-telegraphed-to-all-parts-of-the-world

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As I publish this post, Jennifer Baron’s earlier band from the 90s and 00s, the wonderful LADYBUG TRANSISTOR (who had many of the same qualities which make The Garment District so special), are reuniting for for their most extensive tour in 15 years. The lineup for this tour will be Jeff Baron, Sasha Bell, Jennifer Baron, Gary Olson and Julia Rydholm, and they’ll be playing sets highlighting songs from The Albemarle Sound, Argyle Heir, and their 2003 self-titled album.

The tour kicks off in Brooklyn on November 8 and from there heads to Pittsburgh (playing at the Warhol!), Cincinnati, Kalamazoo, and Chicago.

from “The Starfish Song,” lyrics by Jennifer Baron

You held a golden starfish in your hands
Five long arms each one a distant land to where
The sun’s warm rays the ether deep and free
The waves below where we would dive for dreams

Above the sea the sun flashed bright, the world kept pace
You turned to the pier across an intricate maze
The years are shapes in time, in disguise too late
Into the silver dawn, the leaping white clouds sail on

ALEXIS KORNER—The Complete Warner Bros. Recordings (Wounded Bird), 2-CD

TRACK LISTING

• Disc 1 –
  1 She Fooled Me (2:21)
  2 I’m a Hoochie Coochie Man (3:28)
  3 Yellow Dog Blues (4:11)
  4 I Wonder Who (6:24)
  5 Dee (3:46)
  6 Oh Lord Don’t Let Them Drop That Atomic Bomb on Me (3:25)
  7 Rockin (2:47)
  8 Honesty (9:05)
  9 I Got a Woman (3:37)
  10 Mighty-Mighty Spade and Whitey (4:05)
  11 Corina – Corina (3:08)
  12 Operator (4:38)
  13 The Love You Save (5:40)
  14 Jesus Is Just Alright (3:00)
  15 That’s All (3:20)
  16 Evil Hearted Woman (3:57)
  17 Clay House Inn (2:50)
  18 Love Is Gonna Go (3:52)
• Disc 2 –
  1 Sunrise (4:59)
  2 Hellhound on My Trail (3:16)
  3 Gospel Ship (3:35)
  4 One Scotch, One Bourbon, One Beer (3:03)
  5 Sweet Sympathy (3:52)
  6 Rock Me (6:30)
  7 Don’t Change on Me (3:46)
  8 You Got the Power (To Turn Me on) (4:44)
  9 Lo and Behold (6:56)
  10 Country Shoes (4:11)

ALEXIS KORNER—The Complete Warner Bros. Recordings (Wounded Bird), 2-CD

Alexis Korner had been playing and promoting the blues in Britain since 1949, and through the 1950’s, with his harmonica-playing colleague Cyril Davies, he managed to smuggle the blues out to listeners as a kind of Trojan Horse, working inside movements like trad-jazz and skiffle. With his Blues Incorporated in 1961-62, he became the standard-bearer for everything blues-related in Britain. Korner always put much of his efforts behind supporting other artists, including visiting American blues artists (who often stayed at his home while in the UK) and those such as Herbie Goins or Duffy Power who would sing in versions of Blues Incorporated. Korner eventually did a lot of live work as a duo with Danish guitarist Peter Thorup in the 70’s and 80’s, long, deep, idiosyncratic acoustic blues performances, largely on the continent, until his death in 1984. Korner’s ragged, chain-smoker’s voice is not to everyone’s taste, but neither are oysters or caviar. If authenticity and purity are key elements to any kind of blues music, Korner always had that—he never tried to sound American, and at his best, he is totally engaged in the music, often with an agonized intensity, but one that’s smoldering and understated.

     When Warner Brothers signed Korner in the early 70’s, his actual work was little known in the USA. Because the Rolling Stones were essentially an offshoot of Korner’s band, his name was always dropped here in reverent tones among Stones fans and aficionados of British R&B, but beyond that, his music was talked about rather than heard. Wisely, his debut for Warners, Bootleg Him! , was a career-spanning collection, first-rate blues performances that got freer and jazzier as the 60’s progressed. Everyone from Graham Bond to Charlie Watts to Robert Plant to Dave Holland appears on a track or two, and I vividly remember this album getting a lot of respect upon its release.

     The second album here, Accidentally Borne In New Orleans (issued in Germany on Metronome/Brain and in the UK on Transatlantic), recorded with Thorup and ex-members of King Crimson, is in more of a party-R&B vein with a tinge of gospel—it’s as if Korner were fronting Canada’s Downchild Blues Band after they’d been locked in Allen Toussaint’s studio for a week.

     If you only want to own one Korner album, Bootleg Him! would be a good choice as it’s wall-to-wall amazing. The New Orleans album is an interesting complement, though not the kind of thing that would create a lot of new Korner fans.

BILL SHUTE, originally published in Ugly Things magazine in 2020