In the meantime, the reviews have been fantastic! Here's a few:
The best piece of professional advice I
ever received was from a famous comedian whom I had been given the
pleasure of driving around for a few days while he was visiting my
city. I had only been performing for maybe three or four years, and
after watching my performance from the back of the room, this
comedian proceeded to blow the roof off the joint for over an hour.
On the way back to the comedy condo, he
leaned over to me and say the words I’ll never forget, “You know,
once you find something you really care about, you’re going to be
great. Now let’s go get some waffles…”
I think about that night from time to
time and often apply it not only to my life, but also to other
artists and of course many of my (now) former students.
What’s that got to do with this
review? Well, I first heard Lew Jetton & 61 South a couple of
years ago when they released a very cool album called Rain. I liked
that album and we played a few cuts from it on the show, but I sensed
that there was greatness beneath the surface.
That greatness has been realized with
their new Coffee Street Records release, Palestine Blues. Jetton
describes the album this way, “Palestine is the community in which
I live but it’s also a place of historic significance for being
sacred, while at the same time, a place of conflict. That’s kind of
where I have been for years. I know a lot of blues is happy and
uplifting. This is not. I’m OK with that. I wanted it to be real
blues, in the emotional sense…”
The album is stripped down to its
barest essentials. Jetton handles the vocals and plays guitar and the
other two musicians on all the tracks are Erik Eicholtz on drums and
Otis Walker on bass. JD Wilkes plays harp on two tracks. Jetton wrote
all of the tracks as he exorcizes the demons of alcohol, drugs,
depression, joblessness, frustration, and the spiritual tug of war
that has followed him.
The album starts out on a dark note
with the burning question, Will I Go To Hell. Jetton’s vocals sound
like an old-time country man asking the question of preachers and
anyone else who might listen. Wilkes’ harp cuts through the song
and it’s a powerful four minutes that makes the listener sit up and
pay close attention to the album.
Next up is Oh My My, which has more of
a rocking edge than the previous song. Jetton’s vocals still convey
weight and pain, but the song is heavier on the rhythm section. The
song is a litany of ills and consequence as the man searches for
something better, but just isn’t sure he’ll find it.
The slow languid For The Pain follows
and while it deals with the darkest subjects, Jetton’s countrified
voice offers just a sliver of hope. Musically it has one of the
sweetest sounds on the record and it’s easily one of the most
powerful. Only three songs in and Jetton is delivering a stellar
album of some of the purest blues I’ve heard in a while.
After that is another rocking number,
Mexico. At just a shade over five minutes, it’s the longest track
on the album. While it’s a good song, coming off of the previous
numbers, it just didn’t seem to have the same punch. Of course,
dealing with the loss of employment as jobs head overseas and
stripping people of hope is pretty powerful in itself.
Jetton follows up on that theme with
Sold Us Out, the story of politicians and others who have taken all
they can and in return deliver broken dreams. This is the essence of
blues, an exploited class who can’t get the proper rewards for
their labor. Great song.
A lush song, Drinking Again, is next,
and even though this is a trio playing, it sounds like a larger
group. Jetton sounds a little like Willie Nelson singing the song, in
the best way. It’s a late-night song with him recreating a country
Sinatra flavor of a man at closing time. Beautiful guitar break.
Another powerful song, Don’t Need No
Devil, follows. This is a perfect blues tune – strong imagery,
simple delivery, and it uses the most basic musical format. I’ve
already scheduled this one (and a couple of others) for an upcoming
show of Time For The Blues. If the album only had this one song on
it, and not the other nine, I would still call it a success.
He delivers a powerful intro from the
rhythm section on Christ Have Mercy. Just repeating the title phrase
over and over again, he intones the help that he needs to be
delivered from the demons that plague him. It’s a deeply personal
cry, and one many of us have made, usually late at night – or
sometime the next morning.
The last couple of songs are the
shortest at under three minutes each, starting with Drama. At this
point he’s just trying to get by and knows that he can’t do if
there is excess drama in his life or games played by the people that
surround him. He closes the album with Bout Time, a swinging number
in which Jetton has reached a starting point in his life where he can
expect, or at least hope that things will start to get better.
I can say, without fear of
contradiction, that Palestine Blues will end up on my Best of 2017
list. Lew Jetton & 61 South have crafted a beautiful blues album
that is stylistically, musically, and lyrically one of the best I’ve
heard in a while.
I think it’s safe to say that Jetton
has found something that he cares about and the blues world is a
better place for it. Check him out to find the album and his tour
schedule at http://www.lewjetton.com/.
Midwest Record
COFFEE STREET
LEW JETTON &
61 SOUTH/Palestine Blues: Achingly badass white boy blues in which
the singer is pouring out his guts about his personal journey through
hell in which there probably were real hellhounds on his tail. Take
Townes Van Zandt's demons, turn them up a notch and set them on fire
and you begin to get an idea what's going on here, with the whole
thing amped up well beyond folkie stuff. This record ain't no place
for poseurs to get their jollies from the suburbs, this is the real
deal.
LEW JETTON AND 61
SOUTH
PALESTINE BLUES
COFFEE STREET
RECORDS
Lew
Jetton has been a friend of ours pretty much as long as we’ve been
doing this—we go waaaay back to the mid-Nineties, when we were
known as the Music City Blues Society. Lew’s music has always been
blues that shoot straight from the hip, with no frills. But, on his
latest set for Coffee Street Records, “Palestine Blues,” Lew goes
to places other bluesmen might never set foot into. The music on
this set deals with a roughly ten-year period in Lew’s life that
most people would bury deep inside their psyche’ and leave it
there, as Lew battled drugs, alcohol, depression, and joblessness
during this time. But, Lew turned the ten originals on this album
into a memoir of that dark time, using the music herein to show how a
person can overcome even the darkest days and find redemption.
Arrangements are
relatively sparse, as it was Lew’s intention that the words and
music carry the weight of the message, but we do have Lew on guitars
and vocals, Erik Eicholtz on drums, Otis Walker on bass, and Colonel
J. D. Wilkes on the harp. The whole thing starts down at the
Crossroads, as Lew asks Jesus, “Will I Go To Hell if I’m not just
like you,?” with the Colonel blowin’ like that hell-hound in the
background. Corporate outsourcing leaves many folks living on the
government’s dime, and those displaced and jobless as a result are
that way “since my job went to Mexico.” Further reasons why a
“country built by the workin’ man” is just a memory is due to
the fact that politicians and Big Business has sho’ nuff “Sold Us
Out.”
We had two
favorites. Set over a booming, Doomsday riff, sometimes you just
gotta get on your knees and pray “Christ Have Mercy, for what I did
and did not do.” And, the set closes with an uptempo shuffle, as
Lew realizes it’s “Bout Time to put the bottle down and pick
myself up,” leaving a positive message for us all.
Lew Jetton “don’t
need no devil to take me down to Hell”—he owns up to the fact
that he’s “done it to myself.” Just as Palestine, the
community where Lew lives, was also a Biblical site of great
conflict, the music laid down in “Palestine Blues” is a testimony
to what Lew has been through to turn his life around and come out on
the other side. It’s not an easy pill to swallow, but it is music
that may help others dealing with the same issues, and we owe him a
debt of gratitude for sharing it with us. Until next time…Sheryland Don Crow's Blues Blog
