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Topic: John Hammond Return to archive
January 17th, 2005 11:46 AM
Ten Thousand Motels Invitation to the blues
Singer-guitarist John Hammond has American music in his blood

Sunday, January 16, 2005
BY BRADLEY BAMBARGER
Star-Ledger Staff

There are few arts that prize authenticity more than the blues, and yet there's more to keeping it real than technique. A blues singer-guitarist of rare pedigree and rarer application, John Hammond, 62, has retained his dignity and empathy on a long quest for the soul of a music that has always presented its practitioners with an array of devil's bargains.

"There's not a bit of jive in John Hammond," says harmonica ace Charlie Musselwhite, who has known the darker side of the blues life. He played one of his first recording sessions for one of Hammond's early albums, 1965's "So Many Roads." Of his exemplary peer, he adds, "Musically, John is a master, having learned from the masters; more than that, he's a real gentleman."

A visit to Hammond's Jersey City home of a decade underlines that characteristic mix of humility and mastery. He talks with youthful ardor about legendary bluesman Robert Johnson, whose records "changed" him as a teenager, and he shows undimmed veneration in recollections of John Lee Hooker, who relayed hard-won lessons to Hammond first-hand.

With casual virility, he also fingers a National steel guitar to highlight motifs from his new album, "In Your Arms Again" (in stores Jan. 25), which he'll feature with his trio at B.B. King's Blues Club in New York on Jan. 24.

As his recent album titles indicate -- the word "love" and such figures regularly -- Hammond is a romantic. "Love's done all right by me," he says, lifting his eyes upstairs to where Marla, his Brooklyn-bred wife of 15 years, prepares 2004 tour receipts for their accountant. While he never succumbed to a troubadour's worst temptations and had work even in the dog days of disco, Hammond has known what it's like to trod the lonely avenue, if no more.

Hammond and his wife are travel buddies and work mates (she co-produced his new album) -- "everything partners," he insists. "Life on the road is much more satisfying now. She shares the experiences with me, so I don't have to try to explain them once I come home."

Their immaculately kept, two-floor condo is the first abode Hammond has owned in a peripatetic existence. "I never thought I'd ever live in New Jersey," he says. "I grew up just across the river in downtown Manhattan, but never came over here except to get on the Turnpike. But, man, Jersey City rocks. We love the neighborhood's multi-ethnic quality, and we love our place. We have two bathrooms and a big closet for my guitars -- I mean, I miss New York sometimes, but the hell with trying to live there."

The Hammonds travel about 250 days a year for 100 shows, with a solo tour to Europe, South America and Japan following the 10-date U.S. trek with his trio. It was the road that led by chance to Blue Heaven Studios, a deconsecrated church in Salina, Kansas, that also hosts a blues festival. There, Hammond, bassist Marty Ballou and drummer Stephen Hodges cut his second disc for Milwaukee's Back Porch Records. It's the most rural-sounding of his recent output, showcasing a voice that has aged like the best bourbon; there's more flavor and kick to Hammond's singing these days, even as it goes down smoother than ever.

In an epigraph for "In Your Arms Again," singer-guitarist Bonnie Raitt marvels at Hammond "continuing to stretch and dig deep." Among the album's joys is hearing Hammond's peerless ability to tap into the lupine essence of Howlin' Wolf's songs, as his voice imparts the Doppler effect of desperation to the wordless refrain of "Moanin' for My Baby." Then there are Hammond's fresh, individual arrangements of Ray Charles' "I've Got a Woman" and "A Fool for You," as well as his definitively rustic take on Bob Dylan's "I'll Be Your Baby Tonight."

With his "Ready for Love" album of 2003, Hammond broke from his strictly interpretive stance to compose his first original song: the coolly autobiographical "Slick Crown Vic." On a roll, Hammond added to his canon on the new album with two tunes composed in the time-honored blues tradition of mixing and matching riffs from historical stock. The woodsy, warm-hearted title track derives from Blind Willie Johnson and "the sound of playing slide in the key of E." The spirit of Lil' Son Jackson led to the rueful, beautiful "Come to Find Out."

Even after some 30 albums and thousands of shows in 42 years, Hammond keeps intensifying his response to that 12-bar river from which American popular music flows. Maintaining the richest, most innovative streak of Hammond's recording career, the new disc follows the country-accented "Ready for Love" (produced by Los Lobos' David Hidalgo) and 2001's "Wicked Grin." The latter album saw Hammond engaging with the retro-modernist carnival of the Tom Waits songbook so fully that it probably even surprised the songwriter, a longtime pal.

Reportedly selling some 100,000 copies -- "virtually a platinum album in the blues," Hammond notes wryly -- "Wicked Grin" is by far his most successful release. Produced by Waits (but instigated by Marla and Waits' wife, Kathleen Brennan), the disc even earned gushing calls from the likes of ZZ Top's Billy Gibbons and guitar-playing actor Johnny Depp. At Hammond's upcoming New York show, Waits' songs will rub up against tunes from the new album.

Music runs in John Paul Hammond's veins. He is the son of the late John Henry Hammond, one of American musical culture's prime movers, having scouted Billie Holiday, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and Stevie Ray Vaughan for Columbia Records. After his father and mother split up, Hammond's mother raised him in Greenwich Village. His father, though, treated the boy to such formative experiences as a Big Bill Broonzy show.

As a teen, Hammond thrilled to early rock 'n' rollers Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, eventually picking up on rock's antecedent, the primal electric blues of Howlin' Wolf and Muddy Waters. Yet it was, as with many nascent '60s bluesmen, an encounter with those Columbia discs of Robert Johnson that spurred him to teach himself guitar. If Hammond felt any self-consciousness at the lack of formal training, Hooker later reinforced what he knew deep inside: "You don't have to know what you're doing to do it."

Within a few years, Hammond was a regular in the Greenwich Village folk revival, "a heady time," he says. "You had Dylan and great bands like the Weavers on the scene, but the Village also drew Son House, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, Skip James, all the bluesmen being rediscovered."

In his book "Chronicles," Dylan recalls going over to Hammond's MacDougal Street home to dig into "an amazing record collection." But it wasn't until Dylan saw his friend's picture in John Henry Hammond's Columbia office that he knew of any connection, as his fellow busker "never talked about it."

In 1967, Hammond would have not only friend Jimi Hendrix backing him up during a week's stand at the Gaslight club, but fellow Robert Johnson aficionado Eric Clapton. Signed early on to Vanguard, Hammond's recordings ranged from solo acoustic Delta blues to the electrified Chicago style of "So Many Roads," featuring the Hawks (later the Band).

In 2003, Vanguard released a compilation of Hammond's covers of Johnson songs. The artist didn't know about the reissue until he saw the CD in the store and "cringed." But once he listened, Hammond "didn't think it was too bad," he says. "Sure, I perform those songs much better now, but the passion I had for the music comes through."

In between his tenures on Vanguard in the '60s and mid-'70s, Hammond made high-profile records for Atlantic (such as "Southern Fried," recorded in Alabama with the Muscle Shoals house band and Duane Allman) and Columbia ("Triumvirate," with Dr. John and Mike Bloomfield). Later, in more modest days, he recorded for Rounder (including "Live," recorded solo at McCabe's Guitar Shop in Los Angeles). Then came his Grammy-dotted renaissance with Pointblank/Virgin, including two discs helmed by J.J. Cale, "Got Love If You Want It" and "Trouble No More."

Veteran roots guitar slinger Duke Robillard, who co-produced Hammond's 1995 album "Found True Love," profited from Hammond's example as a white man excelling in a historically black idiom. Along with pointing out that the blues greats considered "music as color-blind," Robillard insists that the pats on the back Hammond received from the likes of Hooker, Waters, Howlin' Wolf and B.B. King are all the bona fides any bluesman would need.

Marla breaks out snapshots of Hammond grinning wickedly with Hooker, Waits and Cale, with the images depicting a persuasive chain of American music. In the evocative words of producer and performer T-Bone Burnett, what Hammond shares with these artists is that he "plays the notes that machines can't read." Whether on record or in the flesh, Hammond's voice, guitar and harmonica make for an organic orchestra wailing something both ancient and evergreen -- something that will sound like the news decades from now.
January 17th, 2005 11:50 AM
jb Thanks TTM...
January 17th, 2005 02:18 PM
Sir Stonesalot John Hammond Jr. signed my acoustic.

He's one of the very few white guys who plays the blues guitar properly.
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