Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Obsessions of a Music Geek: Volume I: Blues Guitar Giants
    Obsessions of a Music Geek: Volume I: Blues Guitar Giants
    Obsessions of a Music Geek: Volume I: Blues Guitar Giants
    Ebook79 pages1 hour

    Obsessions of a Music Geek: Volume I: Blues Guitar Giants

    By Ted Drozdowski

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Obsessions of a Music Geek, Volume I: Blues Guitar Giants is the debut ebook from veteran musician and music journalist Ted Drozdowski. The book, the first in a series, focuses on seven guitarists from the blues pantheon: John Lee Hooker, Otis Rush, Johnny Winter, Freddie King, Michael Bloomfield, Z.Z. Top's Billy Gibbons and Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys. Their stories, musical approaches, perspectives and historical impact are explored through warm and insightful interviews and essays delivered in Drozdowski's award-winning style. The book is the prose companion to the author's latest album with his band Ted Drozdowski's Scissormen, titled Love & Life. Drozdowski's experience as a musician, music scholar and fan fuels this first volume of a free-ranging series that will explore a wide variety of topics, from guitar instruction to musical innovators to other aspects of roots, rock and myriad musical genres and subjects. His writing has appeared in numerous publications during his career, including Guitar World, Premier Guitar, Rolling Stone, Musician Magazine, The Boston Phoenix, The Boston Globe, Travel & Leisure, Jazziz and Gibson.com. He has contributed to various publications of the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences and the Blues Foundation, and consulted for music films. He is also the subject of the Robert Mugge documentary BIG SHOES: Walking and Talking the Blues, which premiered at the Starz Denver Film Festival. His band has performed widely in the US and Europe, and released six albums.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBookBaby
    Release dateJun 30, 2015
    ISBN9781483553986
    Obsessions of a Music Geek: Volume I: Blues Guitar Giants

    Related to Obsessions of a Music Geek

    Related ebooks

    Music For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Ozzy Osbourne

      Nov 11, 2021

      How did you first hear of Metallica? “Everybody used to stay at LA’s Sunset Marquis, so I ran into them there. Not long after, we had them out on tour with us. They came right out of their box; people loved them. They brought along a great following,

      2 min read

    • Article

      ICON Kim Thayil

      Jul 30, 2021

      ICON Kim Thayil
      10 min read

    • Article

      Top Of The Class

      Nov 12, 2021

      Top Of The Class
      4 min read

    • Article

      My Pedalboard Steve Stevens

      Jun 14, 2022

      My Pedalboard Steve Stevens
      1 min read

    • Article

      Krist Novoselic

      Dec 7, 2021

      Krist Novoselic
      7 min read

    • Article

      What Should I Practice?

      Jul 26, 2022

      What Should I Practice?
      4 min read

    • Article

      Digital Dollars

      Oct 12, 2021

      Digital Dollars
      2 min read

    • Article

      Murphy’s Lore

      Jun 25, 2021

      Murphy’s Lore
      9 min read

    • Article

      Free All Right Now

      Nov 19, 2021

      Free All Right Now
      2 min read

    • Article

      Play Blues Like Bb King

      Aug 7, 2020

      Play Blues Like Bb King
      3 min read

    • Article

      Rise And Shine

      Jun 13, 2023

      Rise And Shine
      9 min read

    • Article

      Lean & Mean

      Sep 17, 2021

      Sometimes it’s fun to be forced into a situation where you can only have minimal gear and potentially have to play any style known to man. If I have a big-budget studio session then it’s an easy call to ask my roadie to simply bring everything, but s

      3 min read

    • Article

      Tip Sheet

      Jul 26, 2022

      Tip Sheet
      4 min read

    • Article

      Solo Flight

      Nov 16, 2021

      IF YOU’RE LOOKING for musical inspiration, Guitar Player is always a great place to start, and this issue is especially stimulating. Inside these pages you’ll find writeups on more than 100 exhilarating guitar solos chosen by our readers and a host o

      2 min read

    • Article

      Rush To Read

      Dec 7, 2021

      Rush To Read
      2 min read

    • Article

      FOREVER ’50s

      Feb 8, 2022

      FOREVER ’50s
      8 min read

    • Article

      30-minute Lickbag

      Nov 17, 2021

      30-minute Lickbag
      2 min read

    • Article

      Vito Bratta

      Jun 14, 2022

      Vito Bratta
      10 min read

    • Article

      Hit It Like Hendrix

      Oct 26, 2020

      Hit It Like Hendrix
      5 min read

    • Article

      Electric Dreams

      Sep 17, 2021

      Electric Dreams
      12 min read

    • Article

      John Frusciante

      Jan 11, 2022

      ON JUNE 14, 1998, the prodigal son came home. When the Red Hot Chili Peppers walked onstage at the Tibetan Freedom Concert at Washington DC’s RFK Stadium, it was with guitarist John Frusciante, the man who had deserted them mid-tour six years earlier

      7 min read

    • Article

      In The Woodshed

      May 5, 2021

      In The Woodshed
      3 min read

    • Article

      Let's Dance

      Jan 5, 2021

      Let's Dance
      13 min read

    • Article

      Zakk’s Dirty Dozen

      Nov 30, 2021

      Zakk’s Dirty Dozen
      7 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Obsessions of a Music Geek

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Obsessions of a Music Geek - Ted Drozdowski

      HOOKER

      DIARY OF A TARSIER-EYED OBSESSIVE

      I’m pretty lucky. Ever since I was a little kid, staying up late and tarsier-eyed to watch The Midnight Special after my folks had trotted off to bed, I have been obsessed with music and the people who make it. And one way or another music has provided me with a living for most of my life.

      Over the decades I’ve met lots of musicians, from major rock stars to local bar bands, and have had the pleasure of creating plenty of music myself with a string of rambunctious outfits culminating in Ted Drozdowski’s Scissormen — now completing album number six, with about a million road miles on a succession of vans, including stops to play Bonnaroo, Cognac Blues Passions and a lotta other great ‘n’ shabby joints. I’ve been to so many concerts and bar shows that I lost count a long time ago. I’ve done thousands of interviews as well.

      Through all of that, one of my greatest pleasures remains obsessing about music I love. And there’s no better excuse for spending days listening to great albums than preparing for an interview or an analysis of an influential, interesting and profound artist. So sharing some of the fruits of my obsession sessions seemed like a natural place to start for the first of my series of E-books.

      Inside you’ll find some of my writing about legends — both passed and present — re-examined especially for this volume. I’ve chosen to focus on blues this time, because I believe in its immortal power and deeply love the style as the vital, breathing, still-evolving source that I know it to be. I hope these entries will inspire similar feelings in you about these musicians and the thrilling noises they make. And I respectfully and gratefully thank you for sharing in my obsessions.

      —Ted Drozdowski, Nashville, TN 2015

      THE INCENDIARY LEGACY AND ENDURING INFLUENCE OF A TROUBLED BLUES GENIUS

      I’m not alone in my admiration for the glorious playing and soulful voice of Otis Rush. And yet I’d been frustrated by his erratic performances when I’d seen him live. One night in early 1998 in New York City I caught Rush in peak form and it was absolutely breathtaking. The decades rolled off him and it felt as if we’d all been transported back to Chicago’s 708 Club in 1962. In 2004 Rush was robbed of his ability to play — and of the potential for the kind of late career renaissance many bluesmen have enjoyed — by a stroke. This story is based on a piece I wrote for Gibson.com in 2008. I was touched to receive a complimentary note from Otis and his wife Masaki shortly after it was published.

      There’s just one guitar slinger alive today who can say he influenced Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Led Zeppelin, Peter Green, Jimi Hendrix, the J. Geils Band, Carlos Santana, Michael Bloomfield, Albert King, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Bonnie Raitt and Ronnie Earl — and has been embraced as a peer by pillars of blues Willie Dixon, Buddy Guy, John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters.

      But he probably wouldn’t boast. Chicago’s Otis Rush is a humble guy. Nonetheless, he’s also one of the greatest guitarists to ever grace the planet — a master of unpredictable runs packed with daredevil bends, purposefully rattled low strings, and seventh-, ninth-, and eleventh-chord resolutions that create an air of mystery.

      Rush in his prime, wailing his I Can’t Quit You, Baby on the American Folk Blues Festival’s stage in the early ’60s, is the very embodiment of the second generation of electric blues. He snatches the torch from the likes of Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf in a solo that’s simply a scalding fusillade of notes, balanced by the verses’ elegant pentatonic lines that cry in reply to his dark-angel singing. In his slick shades, skinny tie, and a sweater Rivers Cuomo would kill for, Rush is also the absolute embodiment of cool.

      Rush was born in Philadelphia, Mississippi, on April 29, 1934. But his career began in a garage behind the ABC TV & Repair Shop on the 2900 block of West Roosevelt Street on Chicago’s notorious West Side in 1956.

      Eli Toscano, the owner of Cobra Records, sat behind a plate of glass that separated his control booth from the rest of his garage. There, musicians crowded around a single microphone. When it was time for a guitar solo the amp was rolled closer to the mike on a dolly and then pulled back to its literal place in the mix.

      More than a half-century later the claustrophobia-stoked intensity of that session still crackles like lightning. It’s audible in the soaring high-wire vocal moan that opens the song and the tumble of notes that rip through the air of Rush’s original recording of I Can’t Quit You, Baby and the other singles he cut for Cobra.

      In 1956 Rush, Buddy Guy, and Magic Sam were the latest discoveries of Toscano and his talent scout, Willie Dixon, who was moonlighting on the Chess brothers. Together those musicians took blues recordings to a new place: the ghetto.

      The music of the clubs on Chicago’s west and south sides was more vicious than anything that came before. And in the ’50s Rush was its principal vinyl architect. The wiry virtuoso’s early hits — My Love Will Never Die, All Your Love (I Miss Lovin’), Three Times a Fool, Double Trouble, So Many Roads and so many more — are the sound of raw musical change.

      At Chess Records, the Delta tradition gone electric had been captured. At Cobra, when Toscano caught Rush’s anguished shout and the whinny of his guitar spitting out clusters of sheer frustration and pain, he was taping the essence of the city—the pressure cooker of urban poverty and wage-slavery; of crowded living conditions and harassment by the law; of young men and women who’d emigrated from the poor South only to find a new kind of Jim Crow.

      And

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1