Tom Wanderer’s Rolling Stones Blues POSTED:: November 19, 2009
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General
FILED UNDER:: General
The Blues Drive on WMSE features the best of the new and the cream of the crop of the old-school blues every weekday on WMSE. Some blues DJs choose to pick through the new stacks. Some find revisiting the past the best place to share the artists that turned them onto the genre years ago. Cosmo Cruz devotes much of his three hours on Tuesday to rare soul and funk and Thursday’s Tom Wanderer feeds off of that vibe.
Where better to find hidden gems of blues influence than classic rock and roll? One of the biggest contenders by far, are The Rolling Stones. Formed in 1962, the Stones are today, considered more of a rock band in the grand scheme of things, but tracing back to their roots finds that the blues are at the forefront of their style, their shows and recordings populated by classic covers and their trademark grittiness that the genre certainly inspired.
According to the almighty Wikipedia, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards penned their earliest songs at a time when blues was encountering a renaissance in England. “Jagger and Richards shared an admiration of Jimmy Reed, Muddy Waters and Little Walter, and their interest influenced Brian Jones, of whom Richards says, ‘He was more into T-Bone Walker and jazz-blues stuff. We’d turn him onto Chuck Berry and say, ‘Loook, it’s all the same s***, man, and you can do it”…Jagger, recalling when he first heard the likes of Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Muddy Waters, Fats Domino and other major American R&B artists, said it ‘seemed the most real thing’ he had heard up to that point. Similary Keith Richards, describing the first the time he listened Muddy Waters, said it was the ‘most powerful music [he had] ever heard…the most expressive”.”
Today, the Tom Wanderer show kicked off with a classic Stones release, “She’s a Rainbow”, released in 1967 on Their Satanic Majesties Request — not the Stones’ bluesiest recording to date, but it’s demonstrative of how transitional the blues genre is with the Stones’ blues-inspired rock capably holding its place and not sounding out of place. This crossover appeal has the Stones as an even-keeled contender on the airwaves of WMSE’s Blues Drive; both cross-generational and cross-genre-ational.