Song #113: "Love in Vain"
1000 Songs in 1000 Days
April 4, 2008
Song #113: "Love in Vain." The Rolling Stones, Let it Bleed, 1969.
Thanks for all the great comments on the Stones after my “Dead Flowers” posting.
Well, the Stones sure aren’t MC5. Whereas MC5 have probably had their only 1/1000, the Stones have had 2/1000 (and the first, “Imagination”, is a cover) and there will be many to follow.
I’ll admit to being pretty mainstream at the end of the day, despite years of trying to hitch my wagons to various vanguards in music, film, literature, and art. So I made films about Stan Brakhage and Michael Snow, but my favorite films are actually Rio Bravo and Singin’ in the Rain. I like painting, you know, like Cezanne and Monet. I’m working with a friend on a film about the late composer James Tenney, an avant-garde composer’s composer, heir to John Cage, and all that. But my desert island music artists would be the Beatles, first and foremost, then Dylan, Sinatra, the Stones, Miles, Coltrane, and maybe Johnny Cash. If I got to take some classical music, I’d be happy with Glenn Gould, Yo Yo Ma and Herbert Von Karajan. And everyone knows that I love “Sultans of Swing.”
So I’ve been mostly saving the heavy hitters till the back 500 for the most part. That would give me a better chance to more thoughtfully reflect on the music the less obvious music that matters to me. So I haven’t even been thinking about some stuff. Like, how can I even begin talking about Elvis (P)? I’m not worried: I have a few years to figure that out.
But now I’ve let the Stones genie out of the bottle and I have to deal with a couple of more cuts before I return to thoughtful considerations of “Popcorn” and “Bongo Rock”.
Since we’re letting genies out of bottles, let me turn to “Love in Vain,” the great Robert Johnson song and even better Rolling Stones song. Let’s start with Robert Johnson, but just briefly. There are 24 recorded Johnson cuts so we have that many times to return to the scene, though I imagine we’ll probably just come back for a few, maybe including “Kind Hearted Woman,” “I Believe I’ll Dust My Broom,” “Sweet Home Chicago,” “They’re Red Hot,” “I’m A Steady Rollin’”, “Little Queen of Spades,” “Preaching Blues,” “Drunken Hearted Blues,” maybe a couple of more.
My introduction to the blues went like this:
Vague awareness of the genre and history and hearing its remnants in rock and roll;
Introduction, in a big way, by my co-workers at Mother’s Pizza, at the same time I was being introduced to punk, new wave, Zappa, and what-not, including the Allman Brothers, Johnny Winters;
At the same time (1977-1979) seeing many live concerts including Muddy Waters, B.B. King and others (Ontario Place Forum anyone?);
Forgetting about the blues per se for about a decade;
Spending the next decade, 1989-1999, listening to every blues recording I could, reading every book on the blues I could, spending hundreds and hundreds of nights at bars listening to local and traveling bands, going to larger concerts, traveling to Chicago to attend the (incredible) Chicago Blues Festival and getting out to lots of the legendary clubs including the Checkerboard Lounge (R.I.P.) on the South Side, joining and participating in the Toronto Blues Society… Well you get the picture;
1999-2007: lost any real interest, couldn’t hear the difference from cut to cut, artist to artist anymore, renewed interest in jazz, instead;
2008: return to Moderate Blues Use?
So I overdosed on the blues the way I overdosed on Hot Rocks. But it’s in my heart and soul in a big way. And now I love it when I hear it.
Most of us know the Robert Johnson legend: Robert Johnson was a young black man living on a plantation in rural Mississippi. Branded with a burning desire to become a great blues musician, he was instructed to take his guitar to a crossroad near Dockery’s plantation at midnight. There he was met by a large black man (the Devil) who took the guitar from Johnson, tuned the guitar so that he could play anything that he wanted, and handed it back to him in return for his soul. Within less than a year’s time, in exchange for his everlasting soul, Robert Johnson became the king of the Delta blues singers, able to play, sing, and create the greatest blues anyone had ever heard.
During the height of my addiction, though, I did all the things a blues addict does. I drove with friends to those crossroads outside Clarksdale, Mississippi. Back in 1992 when I did that, there was nothing to see. There wasn’t much in Clarksdale except a kind of sad Delta Blues Museum that ZZ Top had put up some money for (and which I imagine is much more robust these days), but there was certainly nothing to see at the crossroads. But we had to do it.
And why not? Even if the blues per se aren’t your thing, consider Robert Plant’s comment, “Robert Johnson, to whom we all owed our existence, in a way.” For some time, I suspect the influence was usually indirect. That is, we knew about Johnson because Clapton was into him, and had a collection of scratchy 78s that influenced HIS music. In fact, the musician and music historian Elijah Wald has argued that Johnson’s main influence is on rock music. This isn’t a mainstream opinion but it’s pretty convincing: "As far as the evolution of black music goes, Robert Johnson was an extremely minor figure, and very little that happened in the decades following his death would have been affected if he had never played a note." Wald responded to Clapton’s assessment that Johnson was "the most important blues musician who ever lived," by arguing that this reputation only began to emerge in 1961 after the appearance the first 33 1/3 LIP of his work. He was not known as a giant among even blues artists for most of the 20th century.
But, among rock artists (and blues rockers), Johnson has been a (and sometimes THE) major influence on:
Clapton (of course)
Johnny Winter
The Grateful Dead
Jimi Hendrix
John Hammond
Led Zeppelin
The Blues Brothers
Rory Block
Bob Dylan
Fleetwood Mac
Peter Green (post FM)
Hot Tuna
Phish
Rory Gallagher
The White Stripes
Lucinda Williams
Red Hot Chili Peppers
The Gun Club (more on that later)
John Mellencamp
ZZ Top
Lynyrd Skynyrd all-covers studio album, "Trouble No More."
…and the Rolling Stones
When Brian Jones first heard Johnson, he wondered who the “other guitarist” was, not realizing that Johnson was getting all that music out of one acoustic guitar.
So I heard all these Johnson recordings at some point but it was on a cassette of a tape-reel of a scratchy 78 or something worse. They were cool, but I didn’t really sit with them. And then I seem to remember picking up successive remasterings, all of them quite affordable because they were public domain. The stuff I have now on my computer is finally compelling but, for many years, I would hear Johnson covers and never really realize it. For example, after hearing every touring blues band play “Sweet Home Chicago” at the Silver Dollar and elsewhere, it still didn’t occur to me that it was a Johnson song. Ditto when I first heard the Stones “Love in Vain” on Let it Bleed. It sounds so quintessentially Stonesian, then I just assumed it was Jagger/Richards. When I looked at the album one day and realized that it was Johnson I was surprised because I didn’t have it and I thought I had all of Johnson’s oeuvre. But when I went back to his stuff I realized that I did have it after all.
Let it Bleed is one of those near-perfect Stones albums, despite all the chaos that surrounded its making. Notably, this is the end of the Brian Jones Stones. He only plays autoharp on “You Got the Silver” and percussion on “Midnight Rambler”. But Mick Taylor is also only on two cuts, “Country Honk” and “Live with Me”. It’s the first album where Richards sings solo lead (“You Got the Silver”). I love every song on the album.
This is the first album where we hear the Stones “go country”, thanks to the influence of Gram Parsons, who was hanging out with Richards. This flirtation on their part would last, on and off, until Some Girls and then, as far as I know, it would go dormant. The most obvious manifestation of this would be on “Country Honk”, but can also be heard on other cuts like “Love in Vain”. Keith has said: "For a time we thought the songs that were on that first album were the only recordings (Robert Johnson had) made, and then suddenly around '67 or '68 up comes this second (bootleg) collection that included Love in Vain. Love in Vain was such a beautiful song. Mick and I both loved it, and at the time I was working and playing around with Gram Parsons, and I started searching around for a different way to present it, because if we were going to record it there was no point in trying to copy the Robert Johnson style or ways and styles. We took it a little bit more country, a little bit more formalized, and Mick felt comfortable with that."
Mick’s take: "We changed the arrangement quite a lot from Robert Johnson's. We put in extra chords that aren't there on the Robert Johnson version. Made it more country. And that's another strange song, because it's very poignant. Robert Johnson was a wonderful lyric writer, and his songs are quite often about love, but they're desolate."
The result is just stunning and, as I said, Perfect Stones. The opening acoustic guitar can only be the Stones. And then hearing the acoustic guitar meet the slide guitar meet the electric guitar (all played by Keith) – ah! The minimal use of bass is almost poetic. Ry Cooder’s mandolin playing IS poetic (and we haven’t heard much about him on this group yet, but it’s coming soon). Mick’s vocals are as good as they get. The drumming is very restrained but, when it happens, could only be Charlie Watts and turns the whole thing into a completely-together Stones song. When Alan (and then others) talked about the Faces not really coming together, I have this song and others on this album in mind as counterpoints. And the Stones had no reason to sound so together.
Keith again: "Sometimes I wonder... myself (about how we developed that arrangement). I don't know! (laughs) We only knew the Robert Johnson version. At the time we were kicking it around, I was into country music - old white country music, '20s and '30s stuff, and white gospel. Somewhere I crossed over into this more classical mode. Sometimes things just happen. We were sitting in the studio, saying, Let's do "Love in Vain" by Robert Johnson. Then I'm trying to figure out some nuances and chords, and I start to play it in a totally different fashion. Everybody joins in and goes, Yeah, and suddenly you've got your own stamp on it. I certainly wasn't going to be able to top Robert Johnson's guitar playing.”
Now, if you want a version of the song that is more reverentially like Robert Johnson but still very original, Eric Clapton plays it beautifully on his 2004 album, Me and Mr. Johnson, along with a number of other great Johnson classics. While reverential, Eric lets the “guitar god” that he came to loathe re-emerge. It’s beautiful stuff and deserves its own consideration some time.
There are a number of other lovely covers, but on an entirely different order than the Stones. These include Keb Mo, Mason Jennings and John Hammond Jr. (In The Search for Robert Johnson, the film).
COMMENTS
I don't like Robert Johnson.
And I don't really accept Robert Plant saying they owe it all to him. If Robert Johnson's blues records were the first ones that Plant heard, then I guess I can see it. For him. And I think that Johnson's songs were the ones that Zeppelin most often ripped off, weren't they?
(I'm not a big Zeppelin fan either.)
It's that "great man theory" of history and it seems to bug me even more when it's applied to music.
Robert Johnson didn't invent the blues.
My problem is I know enough to get myself in trouble but not enough to back it up. Still, I stand by my statement. If you google around the question, you find reviews and books to back up my point of view and lots to support the opposite one.
I'm skimming one article now. He's arguing against a book that tries to minimize Johnson's influence. The writer names other musicians recording at the time - Charley Patton, The Mississippi Sheiks - and basically keeps saying that Johnson's records blew them away.
Not for me I guess. I prefer the Sheiks.
You know, when you gave your history with the blues, you didn't differentiate between Chicago blues - or electric blues - and acoustic or pre-war blues.
I'm listening to Johnson now. Dust my broom. Sweet Home Chicago. Come on in my kitchen.
I guess it's true, on the surface anyway, if you just look at the songs that he wrote, that the sixties generation of blues rockers, most of whom were English, were very influenced by Johnson.
Then again if you just look at the songs, where do you put Willie Dixon?
I'm all over the place. Sorry.
I was a big fan of English blues bands in the sixties. You name it. I had them all. From the less authentic ones like Savoy Brown to the more authentic like John Mayall. And in the U.S., Canned Heat, Blues Project, Paul Buterfield. Even Siegel Schwall, John Hammond Jr.
That was my bread and butter.
And in the seventies, I bounced back and forth every night between the El Mocambo and Grossman's, saw all the local blues bar bands - and Toronto had a lot - like Whiskey Howl and countless ones I can't remember. As well as slightly more famous ones like Hound Dog Taylor who I must have seen a dozen times.
And blues festivals. I remember one on the Toronto Island with Luther Allison among others. And bigger acts like Buddy Guy, I think, at the Colonade and other clubs.
Then I OD'ed on it.
And I was blues-free for decades. Lived in abject fear that someone, even in casual conversation, might tell me that their mojo was working and I'd have to kill them.
Then I heard, I think, Lightning Hopkins, who I still absolutely love. And some of the more "mellow" prewar guys like Furry Lewis. And then Blind Willie Johnson. And Skip James and other things that were introduced to me by Cartmell. And in the meantime, all kinds of stuff was being reissued on CD.
Somehow Robert Johnson had actually turned me off pre-war blues and I had to find out what a range of stuff there was back then in order to become a fan.
So I guess it's not saying a lot at this point if I "admit" that I way prefer the Stones version to the original.
Yeah this is a great cut. I think I've heard it way too much but it's still great to hear it again.
The funny thing is, back in the sixties, when I loved the Rolling Stones, I really didn't relate to them as an English blues band. Not at all actually. They were a rock band. They were very distinct from the other English bands - I'm trying to think of some I didn't mention already - who were definitely playing an electric version of the blues.
Ten Years After. Chicken Shack.
I think I knew that they were very influenced by blues and they played on whose record - Muddy Water? Howlin Wolf?, both? - but It wasn't until they kind of loosened up their sound on Beggar's Banquet I guess, that I think I could start to hear a more "bluesy" feel happening.
Maybe it was, in '68, the rock world was going away from singles and more to albums. Maybe they got a bit less commercial, less of a "pop" band". Maybe that brought out their influences more clearly. Or maybe it had something to do with the changing dynamics in the band as Brian Jones was sort of on his way out.
I don't know. But I can see how you'd end up concentrating on this period of Stones as opposed to the earlier "hit single" era.
So is Robert Johnson your favorite pre-war blues guy too or do you just think he might be the best?
“I don't like Robert Johnson,” says Alan. I guess it’s balls-y admission week, but this beats my “I prefer Dire Straits to the MC5” confession. But now I really have to respond to Alan seriously because he raises all kinds of questions about m own love/indifference affair with the blues (never hate).
Well it serves me right for making my third Stones entry yet another cover. “Imagination”, this and I think we all agreed that “Dead Flowers” sounds like it should be a cover. Maybe the Stones were really covering Townes Van Zandt?
“It's that ‘great man theory’ of history and it seems to bug me even more when it's applied to music.” I agree wholeheartedly. Elvis Presley didn’t invent rock and roll, and was usually embarrassed when credited as such; and Louis Armstrong didn’t invent jazz (nor Scott Joplin, nor Jelly Roll Morton etc.). And if that’s true, then Robert Johnson definitely didn’t invent the blues. Nor did W.C. Handy, Mamie Smith or Ma Rainey (she claims to have invented the term “the blues” but even that’s easily disputed apparently).
That doesn’t mean that, like you, I don’t like Robert Johnson. I do, but not religiously. I don’t like his music any more or less than Charley Patton’s or a number of other artists from that time. And I suspect if and when I select more of his songs for this discussion group, they will usually be channeled by another artist or two, like the Stones here, and maybe the Gun Club’s “Preachin’ the Blues.” I guess I would say of Johnson that he’s not one of my favorite artists, but I’m obliged to reserve judgment given that some of my favorite blues and rock and roll artists – Elmore James, the Stones, Zeppelin, etc. - hear something extraordinary. And when I listen to those artists, like when I listen to Eric Clapton’s RJ cover album, that’s when I get a better glimpse of his greatness.
But now that you mention it, I’d much rather listen to the Mississippi Sheiks. Or Big Bill Broonzy. Or Sleepy John Estes (not as a guitarist, but as an important singer who influenced Dylan, for example). By the way, Johnson influenced the Sheiks but they also influenced him, at least according to what I remember reading (and could probably substantiate on-line right now).
“You know, when you gave your history with the blues, you didn't differentiate between Chicago blues - or electric blues - and acoustic or pre-war blues.” My history with the blues was pretty much all electric, and often blues-rock. In the 1990s, when I was in my bluesmania phase, it was everything. Now I’m most likely to play some early Muddy Waters (acoustic), John Lee Hooker (electric), old country blues (acoustic), Paul Butterfield (electric), but that’ll all change.
“Then again if you just look at the songs, where do you put Willie Dixon?” My take is that Dixon was a bigger direct influence, at least on the surface. I mean, his music’s practically rock and roll: “Little Red Rooster", "Hoochie Coochie Man", "Evil", "Spoonful", "Back Door Man", "I Just Want to Make Love to You", "I Ain't Superstitious", "My Babe", "Wang Dang Doodle", "Bring It on Home"…? I associate him very closely with Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, of course, but also Cream, Zeppelin, the Stones, the Doors, the Grateful Dead, the Allman Brothers Band, and about a blues-rock bands I saw in bars over the years. The Phantoms anyone?
I spend a lot of time in Chicago and, although I’m not currently going out bars, when I can safely say that Willie Dixon influence was still going strong.
(I visited his birthplace in Vicksburg, Mississippi, but wasn’t able to find any significant memorial then, but this was back in 1994 not too longer after he died.)
“I'm all over the place. Sorry.” YOU’RE all over the place? I’m the one who should be apologizing.
“Then I OD'ed on it.” Well, I know the feeling. I look back on my OD with gratitude, though, because it allowed me to spend more time listening to jazz. This is simplistic, and actually outrageous from someone who’s such a fan of the 3-minute pop song and rock and roll, but I got tired of the predictability of blues. For a while anyhow.
“Then I heard, I think, Lightning Hopkins, who I still absolutely love.” Me too. And I have my film background to thank because it was the Les Blank film The Blues According to Lightning Hopkins where I first heard his music.
“And some of the more ‘mellow’ prewar guys like Furry Lewis.” Note to self: do an entry on “Casey Jones”, more than deserving a place in the 1000.
“And then Blind Willie Johnson.” More fantastic 1000 fodder! When I reviewed his songs, it puts the Robert Johnson influence in perspective. For Blind Willie influenced tons of people, and was covered by Fairport Convention, Ry Cooder, Dylan, Beck, the Grateful Dead, Johnny Cash, Springsteen – many of my favorites. And his “Dark Was The Night, Cold Was the Ground” was the foundation of the whole Paris, Texas soundtrack, and is incorporated it into many films and television programs, even Pasolini’s The Gospel According to Saint Matthew.
“Maybe it was, in '68, the rock world was going away from singles and more to albums. Maybe they got a bit less commercial, less of a ‘pop" band’. Maybe that brought out their influences more clearly. Or maybe it had something to do with the changing dynamics in the band as Brian Jones was sort of on his way out.” Probably all of the above. I don’t think of the Stones as a blues-rock band the way I do of, say, the Allman Brothers. But, for me, when they play the blues, the really “get it” without losing their identity unnecessarily.
“So is Robert Johnson your favorite pre-war blues guy too or do you just think he might be the best?” I hope I’ve qualified my enthusiasm for Robert Johnson above.
Thanks.
If I knew you were going to answer me point by point, I would have tried to write fewer points.
I guess this discussion sort of points out how impossible it is to do something like you're trying to do and come close to any kind of appropriate balance.
You'd want to have this much of that artist or that genre to match the degree of importance that artist or that genre played in your life. But then you also want to pay tribute to certain artists, whose records you might have played less often but who nonetheless seem to be an important part of the story. That's probably where you start to get f**ked up.
(You notice I do that? I guess that's because i know you guys have kids.)
(Speaking of which, I just ran into Rick M's daughters on the street. His older one hid behind her mother. His younger one stepped forward, said she wasn't scared of me and even went further, declaring that she knows that Alan "is a very nice man". I'm torn as to which reaction I prefer but I think I'm finally mature enough to embrace the latter one.)
Anyway yeah, I guess it's no revelation that there are artists or even whole genres of music where I would never say "This sucks" but only that it's not to my taste. And then there's probably music which I would thoroughly and gleefully trash.
(When it comes to film, I'm probably less open. There's not much that I'd say "that's good but it's not to my taste". Most films that I don't like, it's exactly because I think they're crap.)
I accept that Robert Johnson was a huge influence to the English and American blues rockers of the sixties. I've read that he was much much more influential to those musicians than he was to his contemporaries but that was probably also a factor of record distribution.
But for some reason, the urgency, I guess you could call it, of Johnson's music doesn't work for me in the original version. It's a little too intense, like he's strangling the guitar to squeeze out those notes.
Then again, the heart wants what the heart wants, right?
It doesn't move me. My appreciation is all cerebral (if you believe in that dichotomy, which I'm not sure I do.)
I'm taking the Switzerland position on this one - I'm a Son House man, myself.
I don't know if I'd say I don't like Robert Johnson - there are certainly a lot of acoustic blues artists I play more (Skip James, Blind Willie Johnson) but I can sort of sympathize with Alan's impatience with the cult of Johnson, and/or the weight of everyone from John Hammond Sr. on down perhaps overstating his centrality in the whole blues thingamie.
But I love Led Zeppelin.
I don't think the two feelings are mutually exclusive. Led Zeppelin is to the blues what Norwegian black metal is to Edgar Allan Poe.
I guess I'm lukewarm enough about Johnson that I don't feel I need to lessen his role, mostly because I never gave much thought to it after I did my dutiful taping of the two Columbia records, then replaced them with the CD box set, which I never played again. Which is probably as damning as saying I don't like him, I guess.
And Alan - do embrace Cece's assessement of you as "a very nice man." Feel flattered. She told my brother - her godfather - that she hated him the other day, and that she didn't like all "mans." She's three - I haven't a clue what's going on in her little mind, but it has its own logic.
By the way, I think my brother managed Whiskey Howl for a while in the '70s, Alan, which means that you were probably in the same club with him at some point. Maybe standing at the bar together.
And 30 years later, the same little girl passed judgement on both of you. I don't know why I love the thought of that so much.
Truth be told, I gave my copy of the CD box away to my father-in-law after playing it once. I'm not sure that he's played it. As I said, for me the Johnson magic for me is in how other artists have channeled him.
I do have a bunch of those Johnson cuts as mp3s now but they're hardly in frequent rotation.
Oh, and let me clarify that the "Robert Johnson Legend" isn't my take on him. It's the legend.
I have tried twice in the last four days to write on this song and the blues only to have the thing 86 all my work. I can't do it again. It just kills me. Maybe I'll write about my experience elsewhere. So I'll keep it a lot shorter.
I wrote about how I was 20-21 when I went through my blues phase and it included both British and the old guys plus many modern (in 1976) blues guys too, particularly Roy Buchanan, Dutch Mason, and Rory Gallagher. Muddy Waters was my big favorite and I suppose it was his Hard Again album that did it for me---got me deep into the blues. I also got into Johnny Shines. And Ellen McIllwaine too whose first album is simply amazing. I went to the Albert Hall here in TO above the Brunswick house a fair bit where I saw Otis Rush and Koko Taylor among others. I also used to go see David Essig a lot and he always played a blues set in the course of a night. He was a brilliant National Steel player and great with a bottleneck. It was he that introduced me to Mississippi John Hurt, my current fave. I should mention that when Jeff Healy was playing around at the Clinton Tavern and the Bruns that I checked him out a lot but that was much later. Good old Michael Blitz used to play me some good blues too even though I was scarcely interested at the time and I have some Elmore James he gave me.
I left the music behind except as it related to rock music (Hendrix in particular) for many years until I worked for Sam's in 94-95 in the jazz/blues/world music/reggae/Quebec/country/pop vocal/new age/instrumental dept. (only in Vancouver eh?). Then with all the amazing stuff that had come out on CD I totally got into it again and explored Hopkins, Estes, Slim Harpo, Willie Dixon, and Fred McDowell (notice the Stones connection?) . I also collected a great deal of the Rhino label's Blues Masters series and discovered my real affinity was with Mississippi Delta and country blues. I have a great recording of McDowell with a gospel group that should be heard by all.
My experience of Johnson comes through other artists too but his songs mean a great deal to me. Dutch Mason's version of Walkin' Blues should be heard by all. In fact I have very little actual Johnson in the house. But lots of brilliant covers. Love in Vain itself means a great deal to me; first as I used to sing and play it a great deal in my busking and folk club days, and later in the wake of a terrible romantic disaster, it came to have even greater resonance for me. I had my own train station moment once in Germany that damn near killed me. I understood. it's powerful.
My favorite version is the Stones live in NYC in 1972. They played a number of nights and I don't have it in front of me so I can't tell you which night but it's the one. I now have it on disc and if anyone wants it we could meet up---or you can wait until I can send it as a file (in about a hundred years at this rate). There is something about Watts drumming, Nicky Hopkins' amazing piano, Mick Taylor's remarkable bottleneck slide work, and Jagger's stunning vocal that puts it in a class of its own. The version on Ya-Ya's is okay. It's the same one as in the film Gimme Shelter but the film version has been severely edited. I've seen them play this song twice.
Lastly, I was having a discussion with some guys about blues and Led Zeppelin and made the remark about how Zep stole blues artists' stuff and eventually had to pay people like Willie Dixon some money. One guy said, "That's rich, considering how many artists Dixon ripped off for songs himself." Now that's a new one on me! The accusation is that Dixon had a record label, signed people and stole their songs for his own use, didn't pay them proper royalties and didn't give them proper credit. I didn't pursue it so I can't give more info about this.
My favorite version of "Evil" is on the Roy Buchanan live album (Live Stock?).
My not mentioning the importance of the Allman Brothers in my own blues education was a major faux pas. I still love them too.
"Led Zeppelin is to the blues what Norwegian black metal is to Edgar Allan Poe" may be the best thing that I have read on this site. More from Rick M please!
John Lennon said "Blues is the chair on which all rock music sits" (or something like that) and that kind of sums up for me the whole no rock and roll without blues thing.
Johnson is important because his influence is immense and I don't really think that's a great man of the blues thing; its just what has happened and I would guess that if enough people that I think are amazing say that Johnson is a big influence, then that's good enough for me.
I think the Stones live in New York '72 that Rick C mentions is 26/7/72 or 7/26/72 as you North Americans would have it.