Friday night's blues episode

[Michael Eisenstadt]

last night's blues episode was about the English 
blues musicians and the help they rendered to 
BBKing's career by coming over to the states 
to show white kids how to go to BBKing shows.

there were delicious moments in this episode
but in the end as in the Marshall Chess episode
Thursday, it gets tediouser and tediouser as 
the same old cliches get trotted out about how
the blues is...(fill your own favorite cliche).

delicous moments:

Lonny Donegan the skiffle band meister now grown
old and ugly and prissy looking, then a rant by
Ramblin' Jack Elliot (c) about what absolute 
shit skiffle was, 6 people with guitars who knew
one chord

it was instructive to learn that Tom Jones, yes
the same Tom Jones that ladies throw their panties
at when he sings in Las Vegas as god intended for
him, started out covering Chicago blues as a young man

2 or 3 snippets of Van Morrison in his street
clothes, hat & muffler, doing covers -- very
disappointing compared to real Van Morrison

then BBKing back on that luxurious bus allowing
stuff

there was a nightclub in London called the Flamingo
catering to black US airmen which booked Chicago
bluesmen. It took a bit for Eric Clapton to nerve
himself up to even go in the Flamingo him being 
a  physically small English teenager since the 
Flamingo had the identical ambiance of a dollar 
flush nightclub in black Chicago

undelicious moment(s)

then hours as it seemed of cliche mongering about
what the blues REALLY means delivered by older English 
musicians 

Joe Bob Biggs sez "Check it out!"