Rod Stewart - Every Picture Tells A Story
Rod the Mod finds his solo footing, headed for stardom, with the Faces in his wake.
6:00 AM GMT 22/06/2011
Features Disc of the day
Otis Spann
The Biggest Thing Since Colossus
(Columbia, 1969)
Chicago piano legend is joined by British upstarts for killer blues set...
Two decades spent playing at the side of Muddy Waters could do strange things to a man. Brought into Chess Records' hallowed studio for the first time in 1953, Otis Spann, a puffy-eyed piano-playing giant from Mississippi, became the perennial Chicago blues sideman. A larger-than-life character in more ways than one (he once pursued a career as a boxer), Spann contributed almost all of Waters' landmark performances, including his seminal set at the 1960 Newport Festival. Nine years later Spann enlisted the talents of a young British blues combo then hauling their Chess-indebted jams across the States. Like the Rolling Stones before them, Fleetwood Mac were dumbstruck to find themselves occupying the same space as their heroes. A session was booked for January 9, 1969 at Chicago's Tel Mar Studios and, with Spann's regular drummer S.P. Leary taking the place of Mac's Mick Fleetwood, Danny Kirwan, John McVie and Peter Green went to work. Adept at both speedy barrelhouse boogie (Walkin') and gently soused ballads (Ain't Nobody's Business), Spann roars through this record, chuckling away as Green delivers some of his most impassioned solos. The master and the apprentice made a formidable team, but it can't have been plain sailing for the shy, troubled Green. Listen to his full-tilt guitar work during I Need Some Air - you can hear the nerves. Like all great bluesmen, Spann instinctively knew when not to play, the spaces between the flighty trills of Ain't Nobody's Business testament to his taste. Eight originals and two covers later, The Biggest Thing Since Colossus was in the can. Sadly, it would prove to be one of Spann's last offerings. He succumbed to cancer in 1970.
Ross Bennett
Posted by Ross_Bennett at 6:00 AM GMT 03/04/2009
Further Listening
Muddy Waters – At Newport(Chess, 1960)
Fleetwood Mac – Then Play On (Reprise, 1969)
Ray Charles – The Genius Of Ray Charles (Atlantic, 1959)
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