LUCKY STRIKES!
Like most stereotypes, this one is based in some truth but is vastly overdrawn. Traditional southern blues musicians often incorporated vaudeville novelty numbers and hillbilly music into their acts, both to please diverse audiences and to satisfy their own desire for artistic exploration and growth. Plenty of contemporary artists, as well, remain firmly rooted in the blues heritage even as they embellish their music with the inevitable modern influences with which they’ve grown up. To expect a musician who came of age in the 60s or 70s to ignore Motown, Jimi Hendrix, funk, or even such second-generation blues pretenders as Clapton and Beck is to deny him the right to play music that reflects the mood and artistic temperament of his times. Neither music nor musicians can grow in such a restricted atmosphere.
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Guitarist Judge “Lucky” Peterson was born in Buffalo, New York, and was something of a child prodigy, appearing on Ed Sullivan and other TV variety shows before the age of six. Before his 18th birthday he was an accomplished multiinstrumentalist–guitar, keyboards, bass, and trumpet–and had sat in at his father’s Buffalo nightclub with the likes of Koko Taylor, Lightnin’ Hopkins, and Jimmy Reed. At 17, Peterson secured a gig with Little Milton’s band that lasted three years, after which followed another three-year road job, this one with Bobby “Blue” Bland. Both Milton and Bland have remained successful through long careers largely because of their ability to stay true to the spirit of blues tradition while pleasing contemporary audiences.
“Pounding of My Heart” unleashes a bit more fire. The pounding here is the chunky, in-the-pocket symbiosis of the rhythm section (bassist/producer Bob Greenlee, rhythm guitarist Ernie Lancaster, drummer Scott Corwin), giving the cut some welcome good-time exuberance. Peterson seems most at home in this context, letting the good times roll and tossing off lyrics as low-priority accoutrements to his funky partying.
The only time Peterson falls into the dreaded technical-proficiency-at-the-expense-of-meaning trap is on side two’s “Bad Feeling.” It’s a rather standard “my baby don’t love me no more” blues, which may explain Peterson’s decision to try to goose it up with some guitar pyrotechnics toward the end. His musicianship is unassailable–he never misses a note–but there are simply too many hot young guitarists out there capable of this kind of thing, and among them they’ve pretty much played to death all the killer licks that can be played. The daunting challenge facing a young musician is to forge a distinctive style from the nuances of tone, phrasing, and improvisational imagination; technical mastery, these days, is assumed. Much of this LP shows that Peterson is well on his way to realizing that kind of tasteful personal style; here, though, he’s playing to the audience instead of his muse.
