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From the New York Times It felt like the early-60's blues revival all over again at Wetlands on Thursday night, except this time the young idolaters wore bell-bottoms and baby T-shirts instead of corduroy jackets and desert boots. They were there to see R. L. Burnside, a 70-year-old northern Mississippi blues singer and guitarist whose one-chord style is the antithesis of shiny Chicago blues; his new fans are the fallout from his recent collaborative album with the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, and now his own records are distributed by Epitaph, a West Coast punk label. Mr. Burnside began by telling long, roundabout jokes. He told about performing monkeys, dog food, stuttering children, his parents' cheapness. They came in sections, involving trips to the post office and the butcher and the courtroom. The punch lines were only extensions of the story, not really endings. In the same way, Mr. Burnside's music stays on the tonic chord but implies much more: while his band holds down a pattern, he is free to go into guitar dissonances and vocal improvisations with indeterminate blue notes. His band includes three guitarists and no bass player, so the string sound grew rich and slithery with constant reinventions of the basic idea. His grandson, Cedric Burnside, kept off-center boogie rhythms going for 10 minutes at a time; each tune was motored by one crushing, time-tested guitar riff and embellished with Kenny Brown's slide-guitar lines. In his first set he played old Delta blues numbers, including ''Poor Boy Long Ways From Home,'' a century-old song originating with the first slide-guitar players in the Delta; they were recitations. But in the second set he started to inhabit the songs. He stretched out two trickling, lustful numbers, total performances in which no gesture was wasted; his voice trailed through microtonal shadings, and shouts, spoken lines and exclamations were all part of the music. |