The Mercurial Blues of Lurrie Bell

Sometimes I think Lurrie Bell must be the only real bluesman left, though I’m not sure what that word “real” even means in this context. Certainly he is — along with the old master B.B. King, who's still going amazingly strong considering his health problems — the best blues guitarist working regularly. And Bell’s cathartic Let’s Talk About Love is easily my favorite blues album of last year, an absolutely traditional Chicago blues set with both feet planted firmly in the contemporary world. Unfortunately it’s not currently available on eMusic, though much of the most crucial work in Lurrie’s troubled career is. It just needs to be put in context.

Born December 13, 1958, Lurrie is the son of Chicago harmonica master Carey Bell. Carey was away from home much of Lurrie's childhood, and maintained the same fragile, ambivalent relationship with his son as he had with his wife (who eventually divorced him). Unlike most kids his age, Lurrie took immediately to the blues, and began learning guitar at five years old. At age eight, he went to live in Mississippi with his grandparents for a few years before coming home to Chicago. He played with his father through much of the mid-‘70s, and as later albums like Harpslinger and Dynasty showed, their interplay became telepathic, with Lurrie translating Carey’s steely, syncopated harp lines to guitar. Lurrie’s first band on his own was Sons of the Blues, which played irregularly. By the time Lurrie began his five-year stint in Koko Taylor’s band in 1978, he was already being hailed for his mature, singular style featuring white-hot, shards-of-notes soli and rhythmic sophistication. After leaving her, he worked again with his father.

But things had already begun going wrong by then, with Lurrie’s behavior growing increasingly and inexplicably erratic. His mental illness was exacerbated by drug and alcohol abuse, and he spent most of the ‘80s and ‘90s aimlessly wandering Windy City streets, cadging drinks in the blues clubs that didn’t kick him out and sleeping under bridges. Though he tried to continue playing, most promoters and record companies wouldn’t take a chance on him.

He cut the scarifying Mercurial Son in 1995, right around the time he started pulling himself out of his morass. It’s a spellbinding document of just where he was at, an emotional maelstrom full of brutal truths and setbacks but still marked by perseverance, hope and beauty. Most of the time he’s accompanied only by a rhythm section, and the relationship, or lack of one, between him and it recalls early attempts to record John Lee Hooker with just bass and drums: Lurrie shortens or extends lines at will, occasionally stopping in the middle of one and then starting over. Sometimes he neatly resolves his solo and other times he just sorta floats it off into the ether until it disappears. “Blues in the Year One-D-One” is the sound of a man in agony and trying to play his way out of it, while the spooky, a capella “Just One Hour Behind the Sun” is unlike any other blues you’ve ever heard. Yet taken on its own terms, the music has a logic and cohesion all its own, whether Lurrie’s improvising rhythmically off a Bo Diddley beat on the instrumental “Your Wild Thing Ain’t Wild Enough” or cranking out some quality fuzz on “Lurrie Bell’s Hipshank (Vocal)” (there’s also an instrumental take on that one). And even when he gets a little jazzy on “Tell Me About Your Love” or surfy on “Vood-Doo Whammy #2,” everything comes out a deep, uncompromised blues. By comparison, 1977's 700 Blues and 1978 's Kiss of Sweet Blues, both made up mostly of blues standards, sound positively pristine. The Blues Had a Baby, released in 1979, draws on three different sessions, including those that produced Mercurial Son, and the son turns out to be even more mercurial than the original album suggested; the four tracks, all just Lurrie and his electric guitar, include his moaning, scattershot take on “Mary Had a Little Lamb” and a tortuously long, creaky version of, I kid you not, “If I Had a Hammer.”

In 1999, when Lurrie was already responding well to medical treatment for his mental illness, he took up with the superb blues photographer Susan Greenberg. After losing a set of twins shortly after birth, they had a daughter who was but a year old when Susan died early last year; less than four months later, Carey Bell also died. Lurrie’s public response to this double whammy was the big-hearted Let’s Talk About Love, which further distinguished him as the kind of artist you want to root for not just because he’s so good, but also because of what he had to overcome along the way.