LONESOME IN MY BEDROOM
Lonnie Brooks
That slow groove stays around for a while. Muddy Waters’s “Honey Bee” was one of his most beautiful and fully realized creations, originally sung as a blues of tender resignation. But Johnson interprets it as an aggressive challenge (“Sail on, sail on, my little honey bee, sail on . . . Gonna keep on sailin’, but please don’t sail too long”). His guitar solo stays mostly within the harmonic restrictions of a single chord, but within that limited range he explores depths of emotion and musical expression that more frenetic fretmen can’t approach. Chicago harpist Little Mac Simmons warbles behind as Johnson builds into an almost hornlike fullness.
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The balance of the disc doesn’t quite match up to the rocking exuberance of “Rock Me Slow and Easy” and “Hush, Hush” or the throbbing emotiveness of the Muddy Waters tunes and “Lonesome in My Bedroom” and “Please Don’t Take My Baby Nowhere.” But it may be Johnson’s greatest attribute that even most of his less stellar performances manage to impress. Chuck Berry’s “Little Queenie” again finds Johnson straining to fit into a style that’s not his own–his down-home vocal phrasing can’t approximate Berry’s oily, urbane macho, and he can’t seem to find the right combination of aggression and fleetness to make this tune rock instead of pound–but the overall exuberance of the participants again redeems the tune.
There’s a muted quality to most of the music on this disc that’s probably due as much to production as it is to the musicians. This results in a strange feel of dispassionate distance. For example, the anthemic title tune, exhilarating when Brooks plays it in live performance, sounds almost as if it’s being phoned in. Brooks’s leads weave through the changes with passion that’s more implied than exuded, and there’s an almost clinical precision to his playing.
Likewise “Big Leg Woman,” which one might think would lend itself naturally to Brooks’s exuberant sense of fun, limps along in a quirky stop-and-go rhythm. It’s hard to tell whether Brooks was trying to disguise the lasciviousness of the piece with a novelty setting, or whether it’s just an attempt to graft some creative elaborations onto the blues changes. Either way, it’s more intrusive than successful: there’s so much herky-jerky strangeness going on that no one has time to think straight long enough to put together a coherent solo.
