Running with the Blues

JOHN MAYALL & WHY HE PLAYS THE BLUES: The elder statesman of British blues, throughout the 60s, his band, the Bluesbreakers, acted as a finishing school for the leading British blues-rock musicians of the era. Guitarists Eric Clapton, Peter Green, and Mick Taylor joined his band in a remarkable succession in the mid- 60s, honing their chops with Mayall before going on to join Cream, Fleetwood Mac, and the Rolling Stones, respectively. John McVie and Mick Fleetwood, Jack Bruce, Aynsley Dunbar, Dick Heckstall-Smith, Andy Fraser (of Free), John Almond, and Jon Mark also played and recorded with Mayall for varying lengths of times in the 60s. Running with the Blues chronicles seven John Mayall concerts played between 1972 and 1982. Mayall had given up trying to maintain and support a regular backing group by the early 70s, and was instead working with different configurations for specific gigs. For the 1972 Frankfurt show that opens this set, Mayall works with a lineup of Keef Hartley on drums, Blue Mitchell on trumpet, Clifford Solomon on sax, Freddy Robinson on guitar, and Victor Gaskin on upright bass. Red Holloway replaces Solomon on sax for a second show in Frankfurt a year later in 1973. A 1980 show in Huntington Beach, CA, finds James Quill Smith on guitar. Two 1982 concerts, one in Minneapolis and one in Chicago, feature John McVie on bass, while two shows in Italy later in the year, one in Rome and one in Lugo, sport a stripped-down lineup of Mick Taylor, Steve Thompson, and Colin Allen. Among the highlights are a scuffling No Holds Barred from the 1972 Frankfurt show and an appropriately ragged John Lee Hooker homage, John Lee Boogie, from the 1980 Huntington Beach performance.

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