246: Fat Possum: Not the Same Old Blues Crap, by Various Artists

Various Artists (USA)
Fat Possum: Not the Same Old Blues Crap (1997)
11 tracks, 44 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

We heard from Fat Possum Records right at the beginning of this big mad project, back in the third week with Takes One to Know One by Elmo Williams and Hezekiah Early. The awesome power of that record was not a one-off – today’s album gives the proof.

This compilation is a label sampler – usually quite dull affairs that come free with magazines and give you a pleasant tour around the catalogue whatever record label coughed up the price. Not this one. Not the Same Old Blues Crap, aside from just being a simply glorious title, says it all: it’s three-quarters-of-an-hour of messy, noisy and impolite blues.

The front cover advertises it as ‘cheap price sampler,’ but I reckon they’re playing a delicious irony with that one. Samplers are usually inexpensive and a bit rubbish, but this one sounds cheap – it’s lo-fi to the extreme, the instruments are old, the performances are imprecise and the amplifiers sound like they’re just about to give up, and that’s exactly how it’s supposed to sound. This ain’t no haute couture, it’s dirty, covered in grit and tastes like smoke and moonshine.

Not the Same Old Blues Crap is still a representative distillation of Fat Possum’s early output, when they shone a spotlight on the new music of the old musicians of Mississippi. So Williams and Early are there, and the label’s most successful names of R.L. Burnside, Junior Kimbrough and T-Model Ford and others such as the Jelly Roll Kings and Hasil Adkins, who all play that modern-day delta sound that leans very close to punk through some sort of convergent evolution. Also featured are a couple of younger-generation punk-blues bands such as 20 Miles and The Neckbones to complete the circle; they fit in perfectly.

Nowadays, Fat Possum’s output is less exciting (to me at least), focussing on more standard rock and indie stuff. But their early releases, as so brilliantly illustrated here, really exploded notions of what down-home Mississippi blues was and could be – and that the old bluesmen were still, and always had been) edgier than any blues-cock-rocker could hope to be. This wasn’t the same old blues crap, and it’s still an exciting, powerful listen today.