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Otis Rush, the cursed guitar giant
When most people think about Chicago blues, the first names that will probably come to their mind are Muddy Waters, Magic Sam, Earl Hooker or Buddy Guy… They will rarely cite Otis Rush. This is a major mistake ! With Magic Sam and Buddy Guy, he his the third part of the "holy trinity" that durably forged the post-Waters Chicago blues, the famous West Side Sound.
Like many Chicago bluesmen, he came from Mississippi where he was born in 1935 around the very segregated town of Philadelphia. The first show he saw in the Windy city was Muddy Waters. A revelation for the country boy ! From that moment he knew what he wanted to do : play the blues. And bring it further than Muddy, just like his fellow "beginners" Magic Sam and Buddy Guy. The West Side Sound then appeared as the new way for electric blues.
Famous for his Stetson hats, but above all for his innovative guitar style, Rush was left-handed but played a regular guitar (right-handed) upside-down (high-pitched strings above, low strings at the bottom). Though he's far from being the only left-handed guitar player, he built from this singularity a great vibrato technique that distinguishes his harsh tortured solos. In an interview given to Vintage Guitar Magazine in July 1998 (link below) he explained his style : “When I started out, I loved Earl Hooker, he was my man and he played slide. I wasn’t comfortable with that bit of pipe on my finger, and I also really liked B.B. King. His sound is so articulate and defined. So I tried to combine that slidin’ sound, which is harsh and heavy, with B.B.’s style of vibrato.”
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< Buddy Guy congratulates Rush during a Tribute to Otis Rush at the Chicago Blues Fest. 2016. © D.R.
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With such a rich guitar style combined to solid soulful vocal qualities, Rush should have been the best of the new post-War generation bluesmen, but a conjunction of difficulties made him one of these "cursed artists". Bad luck, a tormented personality and his refusal to make any musical compromise, led him to a chaotic recording career due to wrong personal choices, passing from one recording company to the other, often not for the better. He lived for his music and didn't want to bother with the rules of the music industry. "It’s just a thing with me, I do what I do as best as I can, but I don’t stump around arguing with label owners. If they don’t like what I put out, I guess I just sit back and wait to see what happens”, he confessed to Vintage Guitar. Perpetually dogged by label issues, he became so disheartened that in the late 1970s he stopped performing and recording for a few years.
Rush came back in the middle of the 1980s with a series of live albums, before recording "Ain't Enough Comin' In" in 1994, his first studio album in 16 years ! "Any Place I'm Goin'" was his last studio album in 1998 but he continued to tour and perform until 2003, when he suffered a stroke.
Rightfully considered as a real gem, "Right Place, Wrong Time" illustrates his tribulations in the music business. Recorded in 1971 in San Francisco with very good musicians, the tapes were inexplicably dumped in the vault by Capitol Records, blunting Rush's momentum once again. It took five years for the album to finally reach the public in 1976 on the obscure Bullfrog label, later reissued by HighTone. It is said that Rush himself bought back the master tapes from Capitol. It opens with the muscular "Tore Up", co-written by Ike Turner & Ralph Bass, followed by a series of three self-written titles where Rush's voice and vibrating guitar appear in all their splendor : "Right Place, Wrong Time", the instrumental West Side guitar lesson "Easy Go", and "Three Times A Fool". Then Rush apparently moves away from the blues with a great version of the beautiful Tony Joe White's swamp country music ballad "Rainy Night In Georgia" before returning to straight solid Chicago blues on the rocking Albert King's "Natural Ball". The next track, "I Wonder Why", sounds so Earl Hooker that it has to be a tribute from Rush to his early idol through a great demonstration of his (Rush) famous subtle bending and vibrato work. Finally, the raging and jumping "Lonely Man" is flanked by "Your Turn To Cry" and the self-written "Take A Look Behind", two titles where tormented soulful vocal and cutting guitar are at work.
