► The album
Tormented soul
I've had this album for a good while, but I listened back to it for this occasion and I confess I had forgotten that it was so good. King's tortured guitar is a serious delight. King belongs to this post-Hendrix generation of bluesmen who emerged in the footsteps Robert Cray, Joe Louis Walker or the late Lucky Peterson, reviving electric blues in the late 1980s and the 1990s by incorporating some rock elements. People like Bernard Allison (Luther's son), Eddie Vaan Shaw Jr., Guitar Slim Jr., Ike Cosse, James Armstrong, Jimmy D. Lane, Sherman Robertson, Tab Benoit or Troy Turner (whose promising career was brought down by drug addiction, according to my excellent informant Lou Cypher from Blue Dragon)…
Emmanuel Lynn Gales aka LJK was born in 1964 (or 1968 according to some information channels) in Memphis and died of a heart attack in 2002. His twin Danuel Gales and his elder brothers Eric and Eugene are all blues guitarists. He chose his stage name in homage to his two heroes Jimi Hendrix (left-handed as himself) and Albert King, and actually joined Albert King's band as second guitarist in 1988. In 1991, he left his mentor to start a career of his own with his own band, The Memphis Soul Survivors, and recorded a first album. "Something Inside Of Me" is his second one.
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| T. Shannon (l) & C. Layton |
Judging by his tortured guitar style, the "something inside" is certainly a tortured soul, or at least a tormented broken heart : "There's something inside me that just won't let me be / My baby's gone and left me, and my heart's in misery..." Backed by Stevie Ray Vaughan’s rhythm section, drummer Chris Layton and bassist Tommy Shannon, by veteran Ron Levy on B3 organ (who also produced the album) and the Midtown Horns, King lets his torments pour out of his six-string. The sound of his guitar, totally up-front, is aggressively distorted and often using the wah-wah effect.
This re-appropriation of rock elements, a fair payback as rock did originally borrow a lot from the blues, is particularly evident on this album, and in this sense it's as much a kind of blues-rock album as an urban electric blues one. The influence of Hendrix bursts out from the opening barn-burner track "Under Pressure" throughout the whole record, unto the instrumental apotheosis of "Resolution #1" : though its title seems to be a wink to John Lennon's song "Revolution 1" on the Beatles' White Album, it is in fact much closer to the psychedelic universe of Hendrix.
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Albert King
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A more classic Chicago style blues like Albert King's "Can't You See What You're Doin' To Me" is given the same kind of rock treatment. The choice to cover Cream's song "Strange Brew" is equallyrevealing of this will to cross styles over. Still, songs like "Something Inside Of Me" and "Blues Been Good To Me" demonstrate that it is a real blues album in spirit. Three successive rhythm'n'blues numbers, "Baby, Baby", "Shouldn't Have Left Me" and "Unlovable", have a definite Memphis sound, due to the front presence of the horns and B3 organ. The final instrumental "Upside Down & Backwards", co-written with his brother Eugene, closes the album with a last demonstration of King's feverish guitar style.
As a matter of fact, by many aspects, in spirit if not in form, this album reminds me of Troy Turner's "Handful Of Aces" released two years earlier, this being obvious on a track like "Win, Lose Or Draw".
Classical orthodox blues aficionados might not like such an album. Too bad… I like it and I'm glad with that. ■
Info
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L. to r. : Eric, LJK, Eugene
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Audio
"Left Hand Brand", The Gales Brothers' 1996 album
featuring Eric Gales, Eugene Gales & Manuel Gales aka LJK
(full credits below the video) :
https://youtu.be/1ZOA9t8HVKo
Videos
● With the Memphis Soul Survivors (Michael Allen : Hammond B3 organ - Dywane Thomas : bass - Lannie McMillan : sax - Andrea Pizzuti : drums - Luca Marianini : trumpet), Porretta Soul Festival, Italy, 2000 : https://youtu.be/-IUKa23pd_4
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