Live at Blue Cat Blues

The Blue Cat Blues club in Dallas' Deep Ellum district is where this live performance was recorded. It has none of the studio touchup work that's fashionable on many albums that purport to be "live". It figures, you could trust Suhler, Haynes, and TopCat Records to bring to you the music just as it happened, in a true-life Texas saloon on a winter night in '98. There is edge, tension and spontaniety as well as high caliber musicianship. Suhler, the Dallas-born singer/guitarist has accompanied such blues notables as George Thorogood and Zuzu Bollin, and works with his own band (Monkey Beat). He's that rare sort of bluesrocker who can play straight blues more to the liking of blues hard-liners than many who're supposedly specialists in the idiom. He's reckoned to be one of the most formidable slide men on the sphere. Suhler's been seen on national TV on Conan O'Brien's show, backing Thorogood. He's currently a member of Thorogood's touring band. Haynes is generally considered to be the more traditional blues stylist, though that's not to say he's restrained. Alan has played with some of the real heavy guys, like Muddy Waters, Albert Collins, Hubert Sumlin, and Stevie. "One of my earliest blues/rock influences was Johnny Winter and Alan knows Johnny from way back", offers Suhler. The kickoff cut is "Two Poor To Die", the chunka-chunk rhythm of which hosts as sardonic and macabre a lyric as "Black Cat Bone" by the poet laureate of Texas death music, Lightnin' Hopkins. The tune has tons of slashing, volcanic slide. A slide swapmeet of epic proportion brings on "Knockin' On My Door", a hard-hitting shuffle. Suhler sings the former song, Haynes the latter. They tear into "My Baby's Gone", a fast-paced item made famous on North Texas' blues circuit by Fort Worth's Ray Sharpe. Then come room-rattling tom-toms of the sort that either mean you're either in a Tarzan movie or else Paul Hollis is pounding out the intro to "Don't Do It". Another audience favorite is Suhler's reworking of psychedelic bluesmaster Jimi Hendrix's "Are You Experienced?". It's replete with requisite feedback and sonic weirdness wrought not from a Strat as you'd expect but from a National steel acoustic guitar! Jim Suhler & Alan Haynes - Live At Blue Cat Blues is destined to receive rave reviews and generous radio airplay, and is sure to be one of the top blues CD releases of 2000. Look for Jim Suhler and Alan Haynes on tour worldwide this spring and summer!