Elvis Ate Dynamite

… Better known as Muddy Waters, “The blues had a baby and they named in rock ’n roll.”

My late brother Tom, who inspired me to pick up the guitar at, let’s just say, an advanced age, lived by that credo. When he was a teenager, after taking guitar lessons at Chicago’s legendary Old Town School of Folk Music, he dedicated himself to learning the blues like a young Jedi-in-training. (This was the 1970s. We didn’t know the term “Padawan” yet.)

Before you can play rock, he said, you have to master blues. It’s the root of all pop music, especially rock ’n roll, and you can’t fully appreciate rock ’n roll until you know blues on an intimate level. It has to get into your blood.

He and his high school friends gathered almost daily at a neighbor’s coach house a couple of doors down. It was a real coach house, not a garage with an apartment over it. From the alley, you could still see the old doors, now painted white, where horses and carriages came and went. Tom and his friends climbed up the dark stairway to the dingy, poorly lit room above, and that’s where they plugged in their amps and studied the blues like ancient monks illuminating the Book of Kells.

Now, I’m more of a Bruce Springsteen/Clash sort of guy, so when I picked up my first electric guitar (a Telecaster, which would appall my die-hard-Gibson-guy brother), that was the road I went down. In fact, despite multiple guitar classes at that same legendary school, the first song I could confidently play was “The Promised Land” from Springsteen’s 1978 release, Darkness on the Edge of Town. After that, I couldn’t get enough of Springsteen and the Clash, from “Thunder Road” to “Ghosts,” from “Career Opportunities” to “Somebody Got Murdered.” 

Those songs are a blast to play. Most of them are fairly simple, but that’s what makes them great. Even “Thunder Road,” a song Bruce must have written on the piano, translates to a few fairly simple chords on the guitar. And, dear God, it sounds fantastic.

But I always hear Tom’s voice in the back of my head echoing Muddy Waters. The blues had a baby and they named it rock ’n roll. He’s not wrong. The blues is the font of all rock music, and it served my brother well to start there.

To be frank, I’ll never be one-tenth the guitar player Tom was, but he was the one who got me obsessed with rock, obsessed with the blues, and even obsessed with Bruce (he used to play “Racing in the Street” on the old upright piano in my parent’s living room; talented guy).

So, I feel like I owe it to Tom to take a stab at the blues. Don’t be impressed — I’m starting out with some pretty basic stuff, just figuring out typical chords for twelve-bar blues like E7, A7, and B7. It’ll be a long time before I’m anything close to a blues musician.

But I have to say, my brother was right. Even for a complete novice like me, the sound that comes out of that guitar is pretty damn good. 

Especially if it’s a Telecaster.