Cedric Burnside and Steve Malcolm @ Papa Mojo’s Roadhouse - Durham, NC. 05.21.2010.
A word about Papa Mojo’s Roadhouse. I used to drive Cab 170 and Cab 154 for United down in New Orleans. Tourists eat Tabasco. Locals eat Crystal or Louisiana Hot Sauce. Papa Mojo’s has all 3. Draw your own conclusions. If you want a real-deal south Louisiana experience from the food to the music…if you need to have Tasso explained to you or Cochon de lait…if you aren’t right this minute listening to Mel Melton blowing a harp on a mixed-tape cassette one of the Meters made you for that drive you took to Memphis ten or twelve years ago…well, then you ought to be eating three or four meals every week over at Papa Mojo’s – that’ll get you your mojo back.
Memory is a funny thing. You know, about twelve or thirteen years ago, I played a show with R.L. Burnside in Pittsburgh. I reckon it’s an exaggeration to say “with” R.L. Burnside. The promoters set me up in the lobby and I played while people milled about and drifted in to the auditorium clutching their R.L. Burnside T-Shirts and grinning excitedly and chatting loudly about the politics of parking downtown in Pittsburgh. The doors closed; the lights came down; I was handed a check and directly I found myself in the abandoned lobby wondering what in the hell I was supposed to do next. Well, next, I snuck into the show.
Down the dark aisle, Burnside said, “Well, well, well…”
Friday night (twelve or thirteen years later) I was folded up at a corner table in Papa Mojo’s Roadhouse while Cedric Burnside, the grandson of R.L. Burnside, sat hunched over a microphone playing one of his Mississippi Hill Country Blues. “Well, well, well…” he said…and he sounded like his grandfather. He looks a little like him too: slim and hard and quick to smile like he’s got a funny secret he’s about to tell on someone. But he is not his grandfather. Cedric’s got the pedigree, but the show is his own – the songs are his stories to tell. Him and Steve “Lightnin’” Malcolm may have been over to R.L.’s house, but they filled their pockets up with blues and carried them home with them and honed and shaped and bullied those blues into something profoundly personal and theirs alone to share.
This blues is swagger and rhythm and exultant noise. This is proud blues swole up skinny-in-the-jailhouse-tough. It’s loud and aggressive: mean-dogs-barking-behind-a-cyclone-fence loud. Sound boils out of them and hangs in the air like smoke. They make their own joyful noise – sometimes barbaric and hypnotic and sometimes oily and urbane.
In the first set, they slid around the songs “Try Not to Pull My Gun” and “It’s Your Life” - songs at once, unconstrained, elastic and tense. It made me think of what it must have been like to see Muddy Waters in some high school gymnasium in Kentucky or Indiana in 1963 on one of those nights when the band cooks and slides into a groove and it quits being about forty-minutes-of-stage-time-and-then-quick-back-on-the-bus; but rather one of those nights when the band starts playing for themselves and each other and for the sheer pleasure of it and ‘cause no one wants to sleep on the bus but all of ‘em are radiating corn-liquor-heat up out of their bellies and out through their lungs and tongues and fingertips. The feeling of it, you know. For eight or ten minutes on Friday night, Cedric Burnside and Steve Malcolm showed us what that moment in 1963 might have sounded like.
Steve Malcolm is a big man from Missouri. His back and shoulders are broad and hard as hook-hanged meat in a cold locker; his hands put me in mind of the folding mess-kit frying pans they issue in the army. But his fingers are dancer-delicate and precise. He plays with his whole hands like a man should…right-hand-fingers marching up and down the neck, both thumbs on the bass strings, left-hand fingers gathering up the melodies of cricket-loud-nights in the Mississippi hill country. He blends Billy Gibbons’ energy with J.J. Cale’s attitude and comes across as a confident, vigorous, barrel-neck bluesman in size-sixteen sneakers.
Cedric Burnside is an astonishing, crisp drummer. He is lithe and angular, all coils and triangles like a copperhead. He drums as if he were making love in a Pullman berth; a tangle of loose limbs, salty and wet, a primal rhythm – a memory of something buried deep in all of us: our mother’s heartbeat, the rocking of trains, the roll of a lovers’ hips. His drumming has a narrative quality. It is evocative of all this and more…
These two men, with the look and size of Parchman gun bulls, loom over their blues – there is no finesse or tenderness in this blues – just a beautiful, barbaric authenticity shouted out at a volume that’s all about Freddie King, split-atom electricity and the biblical imperative to sing out and make a joyful noise…
Well, well, well…
Cedric Burnside and Steve Malcolm played Papa Mojo’s Roadhouse on May 21, 2010. Buy their record at http://www.myspace.com/jukejointduo and make sure you don’t miss them the next time they come to town.
You sure can weave a great visual with the written word! Well done Bullfrog.
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