Howlin' Wolf - Howlin' Wolf

Released - January 1962

Genre - Blues

Producer - Ralph Bass

Selected Personnel - Howlin' Wolf (Vocals/Guitar/Harmonica); Otis Spann (Piano); Willy Dixon (Bass); Buddy Guy (Bass); Fred Below (Drums); J.T. Brown (Saxophone)

Standout Track - Who's Been Talkin'?

It's possible that I'm breaking my own rules here again, depending on how you judge this one. It's possible to consider Howlin' Wolf's 1962 self-titled release as a compilation album, consisting as it does of six singles and B-sides Wolf had previously issued on the Chess label. Personally, I'm willing to cut it some slack given that at this early stage, the notion of "the album" as a conceptual idea was still yet to really take hold, and a huge number of things we'd now definitively identify as studio albums were actually made up of collections of previously recorded and released material collected into one big box - this is the case for every Beatles album up until Rubber Soul, and the idea of recording a bunch of songs in one go for one specific release was yet to become the primary mode of working for artists. So, let's let this one slide (I don't think anyone really cares as much as I do about these distinctions anyway).

I started listening to Howlin' Wolf in around 2009 in order to try and better understand Tom Waits, who at that time, as anyone who spent any amount of time with me back then can testify, had become an obsession of mine in more or less every waking moment. In the 1980s Waits was to take the Chicago blues template immortalised by the likes of Wolf and Muddy Waters (as well as taking inspiration from a number of other genres) and inject enough madness into it that it twisted until it screamed. Listening to Wolf, then, I expected to hear a much tamer, safer version of a kind of music I felt I already knew. Contrary to my expectations, listening to Howlin' Wolf still feels fresh and exciting even after the countless bluesmen he's influenced over the years. The blues was a genre I knew overtly by reputation but had never gone to great effort to actually listen to, and one that I assumed would bore me if I ever actually bothered to listen to it. As it turns out, while uninspired and tedious blues-influenced singers are ten-a-penny, listening to Howlin' Wolf is listening to a time when this music was surprising and new, and when the music itself could be injected with enough energy and passion and rawness to make it genuinely compelling. Anybody who imagines the blues as little more than a mumbling twelve-bar lament over an unimaginative series of predictable chord progressions will be shocked into paying closer attention by the raucous and upbeat opener, "Shake For Me," where Wolf's band manages to take a genre that even then had been done to death and manages to turn it into an upbeat party number. Even better is Wolf's own composition, "Who's Been Talkin'?", a simple number elevated to brilliance simply by Wolf's bellowing delivery. The harmonica riff of the song is an early influence on Led Zeppelin's celebrated "Whole Lotta Love," the similarity made all the clearer by Joe Bonamassa's 2012 cover of the blues classic.

It wasn't the only song to go on to have a profound influence on popular music - a number of the songs that first appeared here went on to become standards of both British and American blues artists, perhaps one of the most notable being "Spoonful" which would go on to be a hit for both Cream and Etta James. What strikes most about this album is the musicianship, which elevates such musically simple numbers to a higher level. Wolf's voice was, and remains to this day, simply astounding, a raw, savage bellow that had an obvious influence on Waits among others, and the whole band manages to remain enviably clear of making everything sound exactly right - there's a rawness and a weariness to the performances that never goes so far as to make them sound wrong, but always keep things consistently surprising and unusual, never sinking to the level of just playing through these songs purely by the book. I confess that, much as I loved exploring the music of Howlin' Wolf, it hasn't yet compelled me to dig further into the history of classic Chicago and Delta blues as purveyed by the likes of Muddy Waters or Sonny Boy Williamson, but perhaps that's an obsession that's still to come one day. As for Wolf, he went on to become one of the few classic bluesmen to actually achieve financial stability and genuine success, avoiding the pitfalls of gambling and alcoholism that his peers succumbed to, and being able to manage his business and his work far more professionally than any of the other bluesmen who rose to prominence in the 1950s. A towering figure in the history of popular music, and one who shouldn't be ignored.

Track Listing:

1. Shake For Me (Willie Dixon)

2. The Red Rooster (Willie Dixon)

3. You'll Be Mine (Willie Dixon)

4. Who's Been Talkin'? (Howlin' Wolf)

5. Wang Dang Doodle (Willie Dixon)

6. Little Baby (Willie Dixon)

7. Spoonful (Willie Dixon)

8. Going Down Slow (St. Louis Jimmy Ogden)

9. Down in the Bottom (Willie Dixon)

10. Back Door Man (Willie Dixon)

11. Howlin' For My Baby (Willie Dixon)

12. Tell Me (Howlin' Wolf)