Seasick Steve
Dog House Music

The first time in my life that I heard about Seasick Steve was in a review by the disappeared NettaDebaser. I wondered what a nearly seventy-year-old white man had to do with those fiery young men of the Left Lane Cruiser, capable of turning any record store in Indiana upside down with their explosive quick-burning mixture.

 An old hobo, who spent his life getting arrested for vagrancy by the police in half of America and Europe, capable of giving punk blues lessons to kids who grew up with Iggy’s photo under their pillow!? But who knows if Freddie and Sausage Paw really knew about this late 2006 debut, where Steve Seasick does everything on his own. With a small amplifier and a guitar missing half its strings like his mouth missing teeth, the old man manages to spit more blues than sputum, stomping like a madman on the cardboard box that provides the rhythm.

 If you meet him at the corner of a sidewalk playing "Cut My Wings", you look around to try to see where the rest of the musicians are. A bit like the young Samuel Charters who, in 1958 in the Bahamas, drawn in by the music he heard, looked beyond the wall of a construction site to see the band... and found only Joseph Spence playing the guitar during his lunch break. Take for example "Fallen on a Rock", which rumbles a quiet finger-picked boogie and then suddenly lashes out with slide flicks for a real assault on the integrity of your stereo speakers, as if you had put on a piece by the Thurston Moore/Lee Ranaldo duo.

Listening to this record is like sitting at that street corner, letting go of that damn hateful duty for which we left the house. Steve introduces each piece joking and telling anecdotes, but you realize that his life stories are obsessively connected to not-so-idyllic relationships with law enforcers and loving ones with the dogs that accompanied him on the road: "Dog house Boogie" is a hypnotic mantra flavored with howls that cover the harsh slide riff of the guitar. The three strings are tortured, as if to say there's no kindness in the world of the street, during the prayer "Save Me" or reduced to playing a few obsessive chords in "Things go up" and "Cast Po' Man". He even magically transforms a tribal blues ballad like "Hobo Low" into a dark hymn sung to Manitou by a Comanche shaman at the point of death.

 When his music turns to more normal stylistic elements, the old hobo manages to entertain us with joy ("My Donny"), making us nod our heads and tap our feet frantically as we were taught in blues school, and after all, this is what blues was born for. To forget a day of toil under the sun in the cotton fields of Mississippi, numbing oneself not with alcohol, which costs too much, but with music.

Among my few virtues is that I am not racist, and therefore Seasick Steve, even if he has the flaw of being an old white punk, does not pale at all with this fiercely incendiary record placed on the shelf next to true arsonists of the blues like T-Model Ford or Junior Kimbrough.

Well... at least he doesn’t pale too much, and that's a big compliment. But don't expect me to give him a score; what does a lousy number that reeks of school meritocracy matter to someone who has spent his life escaping categorizations? I can only leave my contribution in the guitar case and thank him before realizing that I had a damn obligation to fulfill towards the established society. I'm not as free as a hobo.