Grand Guru
Let It Blurt!

«Whoever doesn't love the blues has a hole in their soul».

Some say they read it during the Great Depression on the peeling wall of a record store in Jackson.

Those in the know attribute it to a certain James Douglas Morrison, someone who sang in the sixties in a band called The Doors, the doors of perception, stuff from old hippie freaks, which I mention here and immediately abandon.

«The blues had a child, baptized rock ‘n’ roll».

This was written by a certain McKinley Morganfield, someone who, while the blues was once rural, urbanized it with abundant doses of electricity, and him too I mention and quickly move on.

«Rock ‘n’ roll is our salvation and our damnation. Too little to make us money, too deep into it to stop doing it. In any case, we are war machines that use their body to create rotten rhythms and melodies and unleash hell».

This is said by Wasted Pido, someone who doesn't need introductions, and here I stop the quotations and get to the point.

That would be the one-man bands.

Now, anyone who claims to have heard or seen a group that plays the ugliest, dirtiest, and meanest blues of all, only says so because they've never stumbled into a one-man band.

What a one-man band is, is quickly said, one - but also one woman, thank heavens - who goes around in perfect solitude with electric guitar, amplifier, and foot-drum.

And here, like a sailor, I betray my word and add another quotation with a vaguely philosophical flavor, for being a one-man band is more than anything else a lifestyle, and wandering the streets always alone is precisely what makes you give everything to those who come to hear what you have to sing and play; going from memory, this is what Tumba Swing says, the one who even made an album on philosophy, alone and poorly accompanied, indeed.

Digging deeper, this thing about one-man bands has distant origins, and the only certainty is that everyone, with no exceptions, has a single father named Hasil Adkins, who started playing in the fifties and went on until he kicked the bucket a few years ago.

Oh, there's another certainty, which is that doing the one-man band thing does not make you rich, so the only moment of fame was earned by Don Partridge who, from that street of which he was the king, walked and walked until one day he astonishingly ended up on Top of the Pops; it was 1968 but still strange.

Which then Don Partridge, the first time I saw him, I blurted out «But he’s like Bennato!», which gives you the idea of the kind of beast a one-man band is; only good Edoardo quickly realized too that with this story of ringing coins, he would see little, so goodbye one-man band, he embraced a new life philosophy and plunged into pop songs; but it gives you the idea.

People like Adkins, Partridge, and even Bennato, and the more or less forgotten contemporaries, all of them lacked something, which was passing under the caudine forks of punk-rock, so they didn’t sound ugly, dirty, and mean nor made that infernal racket that pushed you to listen to records on headphones and not go to concerts with parents in tow.

Instead, at a certain point, the one-man bands became ugly, dirty, mean, and also eardrum-shattering, and it’s more or less when lousy characters like Lightning Beat-Man took the scene, who at least initially had the decency to dress as a wrestler, today not even that and goes around showing a rascal’s grit under the blasphemous pseudonym of Reverend Beat-Man, and he did more damage with his record label Voodoo Rhythm than you can find a proper comparison for; not to mention Bob Log III, who at least has the decency to hide behind a helmet.

This is where the music of the fathers, of Adkins and Partridge, as well as Bennato, becomes noxious, a mixture made of eighty percent blues and sixty percent punk, and if the math doesn’t add up for you, it’s because that of the one-man bands is ignorant music played by ignorant people for ignorant people.

But then again, it’s not quite true, this ignorance story, because to feel this music, love, and translate it into practice, requires an uncommon sensitivity, and when you talk to a one-man band you truly believe that theirs is a lifestyle philosophy even before being stylistic, starting from the thing of wandering alone and poorly accompanied to the DIY ethic and everything that comes with it.

Moreover, the beautiful thing - oh well, beautiful depending on the point of view - is that this one-man band story has also begun to catch on outside the usual places; for instance, Lightining aka Reverend Beat-Man is Swiss, Tumba Swing is Spanish, Wasted Pido and also Elli de Mon are Italian, there’s a thick troop in Latin America, and it’s from these rock ‘n’ roll pleasant places that the one-man band invasion comes, just like the homonymous festival that since 2014 attracts hordes of dandies to Rome; places that used to be on the outskirts of the empire, today at the center of a small yet joyful, anarchic revolution of notes, a bit like what happened for rap at the dawn of the eighties and for punk of the previous decade.

To some, it’s convenient to dismiss them as *#&!` places, but returning to quoting, Bob Log III made a record on that stuff - «My Shit Is Perfect» - skillfully dabbling with philosophy and even sociology.

Speaking of pleasant places, I haven’t mentioned our beloved cousins across the Alps, so here is Grand Guru.

One who in 2011 started pounding the streets of Rouen with his standard gear and in 2014 came out with the first record - this «Let It Blurt!», obviously self-produced under the fantastic Guru Disques name - continuing to pound the streets as if it were nothing, or if some vinyl dealer or the henchman of some seedy joint like that of the one-man band invasion opens the door for him, in front of that caveman Johnny Ramone face and a soul without any hole; all while Nick Drake and Jeff Buckley, if they could speak from the covers of their records, would wonder how the hell we got to this point.

So anyone who wants to hear how the blues sounds when it is truly ugly, dirty, and mean, and also breaks your eardrums, can start here, between a guitar saturated with fuzz and distorted beyond conceivable limits and a foot-drum that keeps a more frantic pace than a hundred embittered drummers.

Like I did when I set out from here to discover the one-man bands and, among these grooves, I also understood how a one-man band that spits out hundred-year-old blues devastates much more than a hardcore-punk group; it’s something to do with lifestyle philosophies, sure it is.

For now, happy listening to those with a soul without holes to hear and make all this their own.