John Campbell
Howlin Mercy

It is impossible to talk about Delta and twelve bars without naming or implying His abject presence. The Lord of the crossroads who exhausts the living to ecstasy, alongside whom the hellhound, the black dog, in 1993 accompanied yet another musician's soul to the afterlife, hoping that at least there he is enjoying some peace.

John Campbell is an heir to Robert Johnson, picking up the banner of the exhausted Jeffrey Lee Pierce to remind the world, or the consumerist facade of Art as business, how colossal waves arise from the most agitated and dangerous ocean. How immortal gifts arise from blood, from suffering, and often from the ultimate sacrifice: the Guest consumes his fleshly shell before returning to where there is only darkness. Is it He who possesses man, or is it the man who usurps the throne of atrocious hell for an instant? Howlin' Mercy is one of the darkest albums ever, without violating the limits of listenability: and it is a miracle, no matter how diabolic it may appear.

There is no cacophony, there is no obsessive pursuit of excess, of transversality, of philosophical or conceptual necrophilia. It is blues in its purest form, but the sound is suited to its generation without resorting to old-style winks and various garishness. John Campbell and his slide can make even the most seasoned listener bleed, and that voice that vividly recalls the Master Howlin' Wolf (to whom the album is dedicated) seems to come from a hole in the depths. "Gotta keep the Devil way down in the hole", as in one of the curses (written by Tom Waits) contained among these ten tracks. The other cover is an apocalyptic "When The Levee Breaks," a piece from the 1920s later rearranged by Led Zeppelin. The concluding "Wolf Among The Lambs": the creeping slow-blues beginning with voice and slide leads to a sublimation of rhythm, bleeding notes, passion. Ten compositions, ten wonders injected with bleeding guitar vigor.

As we said, the Guest consumes his fleshly shell: a betrayed husband, the spiritual and mental devastation of drugs and alcohol; in Campbell's case, a collapse in his sleep at forty-one years old, after a life graced by the gift of genius at the expense of a weak and afflicted body. Listen to "Saddle Up My Pony", and swear you haven't heard the Devil in the strings of that bony dispenser of Music.