Forgotten Greats of the ‘00s # 2:
Mr. Airplane Man

Mr Airplane Man came from Boston, and were a duo of Margaret Garrett on guitar and vox, and Tara McManus on drums and backing vox. Quite why two women with no obvious links to the aviation industry chose to call themselves ‘Mr Airplane Man’ remains a mystery, but that’s band names for you – sometimes they’re just bloody stupid.

Anyway, I LOVE Mr. Airplane Man, and like literally all things I loved in that recorded-off-the-radio C90 saturated golden age between about 1999 and October 2004, John Peel played matchmaker. I first heard them when Peel played ‘Sun Sinking Low’ off their second album ‘Moanin’, and I’ve been sucker for the dark mysteries of their unique approach to the blues ever since. They even made a cameo appearance in a comic strip I was drawing at the time, cos in my head they were recording the soundtrack.

Thinking vague “records of the 00s” shaped thoughts last month, I reckoned that I’d probably played ‘Moanin’’ as much as I’ve played any other album this decade. It’s just always been there, and always hits the spot. Post-internet, I’ve tracked down most of their other stuff (the self-titled debut, the demos collection “Primitive” and their final album “C’mon DJ”), and in the past year or so I’ve listened to Mr. Airplane Man more than ever.

So what’s so great about them? Well it’s difficult to really get it down in words…

Ok, so they’re bluesy, clearly there’s no denying that – they cover Howlin’ Wolf and Fred McDowell and do trad arr songs and have slide guitar all over the place. But coming to my attention as they did at the grimmer tail-end of the post-White Stripes garage boom, Mr Airplane Man sounded more than anything like the antidote to all the raucous, testosterone-fuelled, obnoxious mess of modern blues-rock.

Mr. Airplane Man’s blues is a more subtle, more intangible beast, a lither, scarier and sexier thing entirely. Sometimes, especially on the earlier tougher stuff, they get so disconnected and hypnotic, so lost in their own cloud of sound, that it almost borders on Charalambides territory, even as they rock it up like beef-eating bastards. And what rocking! At their best, Mr. Airplane Man rock out with the vicious restraint and jackknife repetition of John Lee Hooker, spilling over only occasionally into flat-out emotional tsunami, as Margaret hits her fuzz pedal and howls into the night. It’s a beautiful thing.

Big, warm, woozy guitar tone as thick as your arm, totally radical, restrained playing and churning, destructo riffs – that’s what Margaret Garrett’s all about. McManus’s slow, swinging percussion is sweet and essential too, crashing around the song like the waves of a high tide, as she counts out the gaps between cymbal thwaps and hammers on the tambourine like a reconfigured Motown death march. Mr Airplane Man sound like a gentle wrecking ball, crashing toward you in no particular hurry; even in their more overt garage-‘rawk’ moments, they still let things breath and spark, leaving their more lumpen contemporaries in the shade.

I’m not explaining myself very well here, but hey, thankfully this is the 21st century and I don’t have to anymore. This brief live clip, cruelly cut off at 1:33, helps demonstrate what I mean pretty well:



Not to drag gender into things unnecessarily I hope, but you know that old train of thought that says that the blues, before it was recorded and formalised, was primarily a female form of music, and that when Blind Lemon Jefferson came along, they had to sell him by saying ‘this guy sings it almost as good as a woman’? Well a century later, in a completely different context in which blues-derived rock music finds itself in a generally pretty moribund state, a good listen to Mr. Airplane Man can kinda remind you all about all that stuff.





Mr. Airplane Man seemed to stop doin’ stuff in about ’05 or ’06, but Margaret Garrett has recently resurfaced, playing solo as Magi Airplane Man: http://www.myspace.com/margaret-airplane-man. Fingers crossed for some new records, shows, etc.

Labels: blues, Forgotten greats of the 00s, Mr Airplane Man

Forgotten Greats of the ‘00s # 1:
Jawbone

Jawbone was (and presumably is) one man from Detroit named Bob Zabor. Jawbone first came to my attention when John Peel played his song ‘What’s Goin’ On’ like three times in a single programme or something. I think if I had a radio programme, I’d probably want to play it three times in a single programme too. It’s wonderful and insane; an outburst of pure, maniac joy that takes every hoary, overcooked one-man-band-bluesman cliché you can think of and blows the whole lot outta your ass. Listen to Zabor’s feet beat out a bone-crunching double-speed bass drum / hi-hat pound, and to his hands layering total idiot, mono-chord guitar downstrokes over the top, whilst his gob puts in a double-shift, alternating between a brutal, honking harmonica riff and yelping out a bunch of petulant nursery rhyme blather, ending each stanza with the frankly inspired battlecry “DADDY GOT A HAIRCUT, MOMMA GONNA MOW THE LAWN!” How does all that make you feel - Startled? Exhilarated? Amused? Unhappy? Hungry? SOMETHING, that’s for sure. It is, in a profound sense, a tune.

And man, Peel absolutely went ape for this Jawbone stuff – I remember one night he had Jack White on his programme for some kind of special interview thing, and he set about trying to persuade him live on air that he should give Jawbone a slot as tour support for The White Stripes; “c’mon Jack, he’s a local boy and everything, what do you say?” Jack sounded pretty non-committal, but then that’s Jack White for you.

According to what I remember from the sleevenotes accompanying Jawbone’s debut album ‘Dang Blues’, Bob Zabor began his musical career when he was working as a furniture mover or a truck driver or something, and would make up stupid blues hollers to entertain himself when there was nothing good on the radio, pounding on the dashboard to keep time. He got more into this, and as time went on he bought himself a harmonica with which to express himself more fully. Eventually he started getting on stage between bands at shows and doing his hollers, but realised that nobody would take him seriously unless he had a guitar, so he got one of those too, and learned the basics. I guess the guitar probably meant he needed something louder than the floor to do his stomping on, so he got the drums, and Jawbone was born.

And indeed, most of the songs on the record sound like they started life as meaningless, a-capella yelling songs, like the kind of thing a really disturbed child might sing whilst sitting alone in a coal cellar after all the other kids have beaten him up, set to the most simplistic of musical accompaniment. I don’t usually have much tolerance for all that quirky “hey look, I’m a one man band, crazy huh?” bollocks, but Jawbone is really something else. And he’s pretty funny too, showing a total lack of respect for dreary blues tradition, making up stupid, surreal shit on the spot and hammering the same punk-ass chord for about three straight minutes, laughing in the face of the expected 12-bar turnarounds.

Naturally I pictured Bob Zabor as some kind of larger than life backwoods wildman - a Hasil Adkins style outsider lunatic, or a hairy, ostentatious king freak of some peculiar kind. And I enjoyed the album, and Peel continued to point me toward to new and exciting obsessions three nights week, and that was that.

That is, until a few years later, when I was surprised to see that Jawbone was doing a one-off gig in Leicester, where I was living at the time, courtesy of self-explanatory local promoters Not The Same Old Blues Crap (who have now also relocated to London).

Cut to darkened, crappy upstairs venue, about 9pm, and in typical Leicester tradition there’s nobody fucking there – just the promoter and a couple of his mates, and me standing quietly in the corner…. and Jawbone. Jawbone, it transpires, is a skinny, nerdy-looking white guy with an army haircut and a flannel shirt. He looks a bit like Steve Albini, or an electrician. Just a quiet, everyday sort of guy who probably went to college and studied something useful. He gives me a free badge.

Then he sits down on a barstool, and stretches around until he’s got all his various implements in the right position, and then his foot and strumming arm go BANG-BANG-BANG-BANG-BANG, and the sweat flies, and he commences his hollering, the fiery red eyes and apocalyptic bad kid drool of the coal cellar, interspersed with stunned silence and a minimal midlands clap. Whoa there. So let us consider old Jawbone the next time some insufferable blues bore makes a point of harping on about his authentic hillbilly credentials. Daddy gotta haircut, momma gonna mow the lawn!

Mp3s>
What’s Goin’ On
My Daddy

Jawbone’s website: http://www.dangblues.com/

Labels: blues, Forgotten greats of the 00s, Jawbone