Nitty-Gritty Music Radio

23/10/2025

Jeff Beck: “I think it was when we did the [1969] Beck-Ola album that I got fed up with the sound of the Les Paul. In the studio, the Les Paul didn’t sound a lot different from the John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers. Lovely sound, but every track ends up sounding very similar. The Strat seemed to respond more to my aggressive playing than the Les Paul, which just sounds dreadful if you start hitting it.”

The Les Paul is heavier, but because of that bulk you can do bends on it more easily. Also, the Les Paul’s lack of a vibrato arm means you’re not wrestling against the spring-loaded bridge all the time.

The Strat is the ultimate because it’s like having a miniature pedal steel within it. Once you get familiar with where the bends are and where they meld down into a fourth or whatever, you can do all kinds of pedal-steel-like things, which I think are cool. Some of the things that sound the most difficult are the easiest for me.“

Photo: Robert Knight Archive/Redferns

22/10/2025

Through the Seventies and Eighties, when blues went into decline in the public perception, Buddy Guy just kept doing it, through Europe, the festival circuits, with Junior Wells . . . anywhere he could get a gig.

“I never said no to playing because that is what I just love to do. And there’s not many of us left now, so there’s pressure on me because people say, ‘Who's going to do it if you don’t?’

"But all through those years when I wasn’t recording I figured if I travelled and played it would happen for me again. I was there and available but those record companies weren’t interested."

“It’s thanks to the late Stevie Ray Vaughan, Beck, Clapton, and Bonnie Raitt this music is getting heard again. When they speak, people in record companies listen, and when John Lee Ho**er got those Grammys they recognised this stuff could sell and they had been overlooking it.

And most blues people aren’t expensive to record. We love the music and just want to get it out there. It don’t cost $20 million to record and promote a blues album, we do it cheap and it sells itself.

"Although I did learn in my early days that record companies might not pay you!"

“I have a couple of shots of cognac before I go on but don't party anymore, I have to be in good shape to give everything to my next show. I try to do a job that won’t be forgotten.

“My motto now is: if you don’t know what the blues is or don’t like it, then don’t come and see me . . . I'll convince you.”

Graham Reid Interview 1992

Photo by Jim Marshall

17/10/2025

In a 2009 Rolling Stone interview, Bob Dylan remembered Mike Bloomfield as “the guy that I always miss. . . . He had so much soul. And he knew all the styles.” From His Head opens with proof: tracks from Bloomfield’s early-1964 audition for Dylan’s original producer, John Hammond, a display of roots, speed and tonal grip that draws from country and rockabilly as much as Robert Johnson.

“Michael was organic – he played directly from his heart into an amp,” says keyboard player Barry Goldberg, who met the guitarist in high school in Chicago and was in Bloomfield’s psychedelic-R&B big band the Electric Flag. “When he shook a string, it was like Otis Rush. He had the intensity in his soul. He didn’t need anything else.”

Bloomfield “was charismatic – people wanted to be around him, touch the hem of his garment,” says Electric Flag singer Nick Gravenites, another lifelong friend from Chicago. “He liked the attention. But he didn’t like idolatry. He was looking for a happy medium of people who liked good music and enjoyed listening to him.”

David Fricke / Rolling Stone

Photo: Mike Bloomfield, Photo Credit Sandy Speiser; Sony Music Entertainment

17/10/2025

...Like a true nature's child we were born, born to be wild,
we can climb so high, I never wanna die...

11/10/2025

Joni Mitchell: “I was always interested in rhythm, so I had a lot of ethnic records. I've always thought about the spirits of music, you know. Like rock 'n' roll: people keep writing songs about how rock 'n' roll will never die. Well, rock 'n' roll died a long time ago. It never even made it into the '60s. The roll went out of it. What died was the push beat, the remnant from swing and boogie-woogie. And when it died what was left was just rock, a more vertical beat. A certain joy went out of rock 'n' roll, and what was left was a militancy—which I guess makes sense because of the times.

You once said you didn't like playing to large crowds because you thought that the masses of people were buying your records based on illusory ideas of you.

Well, I had enough of the ham in me to enjoy being the center of attention of a small group. But on the big stage, there's a bigger pressure. The bulk of people are manipulated by the industry, because they're so uncertain of their own taste. Many of them are sheep and have to be told what to like. That keeps the mercantile coffers full.

Are you saying that you don't like fan worship because it's not honest, like they're not really digging you for what you are?

Some are and some aren't. How do you separate them? Basically I couldn't buy that overnight there suddenly was this kind of mass adoration coming at me. It didn't seem real. And, of course, it wasn't. Some of them stay with you; you're drawn together like friends through a genuine affinity. And the others are kind of phenomenon seekers. They see a little action, but they don't really know what's going on.

by Dimitri Ehrlich
Interview Magazine
April 1991

Joni Mitchell, 1975. Photo by Norman Seeff

11/10/2025

Samantha Fish Announces Deluxe Edition of ‘Paper Doll’ Feat. New Songs, including a Neil Young Classic. Listen here. Link below.

11/10/2025

Listen what the dormouse said
Feed your head
Feed your head

Provided to YouTube by Columbia SoundtraxWhite Rabbit · Grace Slick · The Great SocietyGrace Slick & The Great Society℗ Originally released 1968. All rights ...

28/07/2025

Buddy Guy: "I moved to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to go to high school," he recalled to Guitar Player in our January 1999 issue. "And they had a music teacher there, and I thought, 'My God, I've got what I've always wanted. I'm gonna let this guy teach me how to play the guitar.'

"I went in, and the teacher showed me some scales, and I said, 'I don't wanna play that; I wanna play like this' — I had a Muddy Waters record and a John Lee Ho**er record at the time. He looked at me and said, 'I can't teach you that.'

“So I said, 'Well, then I can't take a music class!'

“I was so excited by the way Muddy played the slide, how B.B. King squeezed the strings, and how Lightnin' Hopkins and T-Bone Walker played their things. I said, 'If they don't teach this in school, I've got to find it myself.'

"If you love the blues, you can play it. Every interview I've ever had, I get asked 'Can a white man play the blues?' I hate that question! It's a human being, man. If I had eight fingers on my left hand, then! would say, 'No, a white man probably can't play like me.'

“But these guys, man—the late Stevie Ray Vaughan, this young Jonny Lang, Eric Clapton, and Jeff Beck, to name a few — there's some things they do that I wish I had known.

"Look at athletes — boxers, football players, baseball players—they come in all sizes and all colors, and all those guys are great. Music is the same way. There's no advantage or disadvantage. If you want to learn this thing, man, and you love it the way I love it, you can do it."
Interview by By Adam Levy / Guitar Player
Photo: (Lyndon French)

11/05/2025

Jimi Hendrix’s 1967 classic “The Wind Cries Mary” holds a secret. Buried within the song’s whimsical images of jacks, clowns, kings, and queens, beneath its stirring blues textures and head-swimming guitar solo, lies an apology.

It’s not so much about the song’s meaning – each verse dissected and lyric prodded – but rather what it meant to the artist. The tune, with its dreamy narrative spun from arresting vocals, was the guitar god’s real-life attempt to make amends.

“The Wind Cries Mary” was inspired by Hendrix’s then-girlfriend Kathy Etchingham, who is also thought to have been the muse for the guitarist’s acclaimed “Foxy Lady.” However, “The Wind Cries Mary” wasn’t born from Etchingham simply being “foxy,” it came from her deserving an apology.

In her account to the BBC, their relationship was beautiful, but at times turbulent, turning ugly with vicious arguments occasionally breaking out. One such row led to a hit song. Etchingham recalled trying to make mashed potatoes one night, but they apparently weren’t up to the musician’s specs.

“He comes along and tastes them with a fork and says they’re all lumpy,” she told the outlet. “I knew he couldn’t cook himself and that’s how the argument started. It ended with my screaming and shouting, throwing the plates on the floor, and marching out.”

That night she slept at a friend’s house. While she was away, Hendrix sat down and wrote her what would be “The Wind Cries Mary.” Mary, Etchingham’s middle name, was something Hendrix apparently called her from time to time as a way of pushing her buttons.

When he first played the song for her, she described not knowing what to think. “It was just the twanging of an electric guitar disconnected,” she said. “It was only when it was recorded that I realized it was a nice, sad song – he was obviously a bit upset.”

“The Wind Cries Mary” was released on the U.S. version of Hendrix’s 1967 debut album Are You Experienced and would be one of the songs that secured his place at the top.

By Alli Patton / American Songwriter
Photo: Mirrorpix

11/05/2025

Mississippi, roll on in my brainnd keep me sheltered
In the summer rain.
I could never stay here too many nights too long...

https://youtu.be/zqMLvgubybs

📷 Tom Fisk | Pexels

06/04/2025

Grace Slick with her husband Jerry Slick, a drummer turned cinematographer whose mid-'60s San Francisco band The Great Society featured his then-wife on vocals

06/04/2025

Robin Trower Reveals Blues Single ‘One Go Round’ from his forthcoming album 'Come and Find Me' out May 16th via Provogue. Check it out.
https://www.rockandbluesmuse.com/2025/04/04/robin-trower-reveals-blues-single-one-go-round/