"This is just me having a good time," Guns N' Roses man Slash told Classic Rock earlier this year, when asked about Orgy Of The Damned, his blues album. "It’s not even all traditional blues in the first place. It’s a mix of different things.
"It was just kind of a fun thing that I don’t want anybody to over-analyse or try and pick it apart, because it just wasn’t put together with that many pieces to begin with."
Below, we examine those pieces, exploring the origins of the 11 covers featured on Orgy Of The Damned.
The Pusher
Written by Hoyt Axton
‘I’ve seen a lot of people walking around with tombstones in their eyes, but the pusher don’t care if you live or if you die…’
Those haunting words are forever linked to the opening scene of the 1969 classic film Easy Rider: sun-scorched desert, Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda on their chopper motorcycles, on the lam with the loot from a cocaine deal. And roiling beneath the action, Steppenwolf’s cover of Hoyt Axton’s The Pusher.
Coming out of the West Coast folk scene of the late 1950s, Axton first made his mark with Greenback Dollar, a hit for The Kingston Trio. By the early 60s he was a regular performer at LA clubs like The Ash Grove and The Troubadour. That’s where Steppenwolf singer John Kay heard him sing The Pusher, a song Axton wrote after one of his friends died from an overdose. “The Pusher brought down the house every time he played it,” Kay said.
Although The Pusher wasn’t the first song played on the radio to have obvious drug references, it was the first to include ‘God damn’ - as in ‘God damn the pusher man.’
Hoyt Axton went on to have a long, successful career, writing such hits as Joy To The World for Three Dog Night, Never Been To Spain for Elvis Presley and The No No Song for Ringo Starr. He died of a heart attack in 1999.
Crossroad Blues
Written by Robert Johnson
No other word gets at the mystique of the blues like ‘Crossroads.’ It’s a metaphor for a life in the balance, and the location of that enduring origin story of how Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil in return for musical genius.
Even without that myth, Johnson’s life has been veiled in mystery and speculation. Born in Mississippi in 1911, he recorded 29 sides during three recording sessions in 1936 and 1937. Those songs, and two photographs, are all that remains. In 1938 he was murdered, purportedly by a jealous husband who poisoned his glass of whisky. Johnson was 27, the founding member of that morbid ‘27 club’ that would later include Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison.
One of his best-known songs, Crossroad Blues, captures Johnson’s raw sorcery. The driving, scratchy slide guitar, the tendon-taut vocals, the bare-wire emotion. It’s two minutes and 40 seconds that once heard can never be forgotten.
Although Johnson’s songs have been covered by Cream, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin and many more, there is something about the originals that defies interpretation. ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons said: “As many times as a Robert Johnson number has been covered, no one has yet recaptured what guitar players would refer to as that internal DNA of Robert Johnson. This was just one guy. Meat on metal on wood. But what he came with was fierce.”
Hoochie Coochie Man
Written by Willie Dixon
Like so many blues standards, I’m Your Hoochie Coochie Man began, in 1954, as a one-two between Willie Dixon (who wrote it) and Muddy Waters (who supplied the velveteen vocal). Yet the relaxed push-and-pull of this Chess Records benchmark perhaps belied Dixon’s desperation. Although pushing 40, the songwriter was at that point a marginal backroom figure at the Chicago label, and having scored a minor hit with the previous year’s Muddy-fronted Mad Love (I Want You To Love Me), he was looking to earn owner Leonard Chess’s trust with this sequel.
“If Muddy likes it, give it to him,” the boss man is reported to have said, and Dixon duly gave the bluesman the hard sell, repeatedly visiting Waters at club shows to help him iron out Hoochie Coochie Man’s stop-start arrangement, and massage a lyric pitched somewhere between a classic blues brag and a spooky southern gothic (“This lady is a witch,” Dixon wrote in his autobiography, I Am The Blues, of the “gypsy woman” who predicts the unborn narrator’s sexual exploits to come). Dixon got his breakthrough – and Waters the biggest hit of his career – and 70 years later it’s impossible to imagine the genre without it including this cornerstone.
Oh Well
Written by Peter Green
“It represents my two extremes,” Fleetwood Mac guitarist Peter Green said of this eight-minute epic. “As wild as I can be, and my first sort of semi-classical attempt.”
In 1969, Green pushed for Oh Well’s release as a single, despite its unorthodox form. And he wanted the moody, flamenco-flavoured back half to be the A-side of the 45, the “wild” bluesy section the B-side. The band’s label disagreed. Green’s bandmates Mick Fleetwood and John McVie went even further, betting him eight pounds apiece that the single would flop, regardless of what the A-side was. It was a bet they lost.
A hit on both sides of the Atlantic, Oh Well became a featured part of the band’s live set, though the instrumental section soon got dropped. Even 25 years later, that rankled Green. “The best bit was Part 2, the Spanish guitar break,” he told Mojo in 1996, “I used to hate playing that one [live] because we played the part that wasn’t as good. I wanted a bit of moody guitar playing; they wanted the bit that was easy to do, that everyone knew.”
Green’s dismissal of Oh Well didn’t prevent it from becoming a rock perennial, and also the only Fleetwood Mac song to be performed by every incarnation of the band, with guitarists from Bob Welch to Lindsey Buckingham to Mike Campbell tackling Green’s not-so-"easy” gordian knot of a riff.
Key To The Highway
Written by Charles Segar, William Broonzy
Although he took the credit, Chicago piano man Charlie Segar’s 1940 recording of Key To The Highway for the Vocalion label was a cross-pollination of a thousand existing song shards, rather than a strictly ‘original’ composition (Big Bill Broonzy, who tackled it next, reasoned that “practically all of blues is just a little change... you take one song and make fifty out of it”).
Whatever its provenance, Key To The Highway struck a pan-generational chord among touring musicians who could relate to the sweet sorrow of parting (in almost all its forms, the lyric finds the itinerant narrator pleading for ‘one more kiss’ from his lover, in the knowledge that he ‘won’t be back no more’).
Harp king Little Walter scored a hit with his all-star cover in 1958, but the bluesman who worked the song hardest was Eric Clapton. In 1970, producer Tom Dowd scrambled to roll tape as Clapton and Duane Allman jammed it to nine-plus minutes during sessions for the Derek And The Dominos album Layla And Other Assorted Love Songs. Clapton later revisited the song at his 1973 Rainbow Concert, when guesting on Johnnie Johnson’s Johnnie B. Bad album of 1991, and on his own 2000 doubleheader alongside BB, Riding With The King.
Awful Dream(s)
Written by Sam ‘Lightnin’’ Hopkins, Clarence Lewis & C. Morgan Robinson
Asked to define the blues, Lightnin’ Hopkins once said: “The blues is a feeling. It’s something worrying people. Your wife quits you. Your girlfriend quits you. Or maybe you want to go to a party and you don’t have sufficient clothes. You sit home and worry. You got the blues, man. It’s not no jive. You ever hear of a person going up on a building and jumping off and breaking their own legs? You know what they got? The blues three times!”
The rhythm of that discursive answer, with its black humour and existential perspective, found its way into all of Lightnin’s songs.
Born Samuel Hopkins in Texas in 1911, he learned to play and sing at an early age, travelling on the road with a blues singer named Texas Alexander. Hopkins made his first recordings in 1946, already experimenting with the distorted, amplified roar that would become a hallmark of his style.
A kind of blues philosopher, his subject matter ranged from the personal to the global. Recorded in 1962, around the time of the Cuban missile crisis, Awful Dream(s) conveys the dread of living in the long shadow of the atomic bomb. And typical of his style, the song meanders across bar lines, with his guitar dropping commentary licks around his intimate, chilling vocal.
Born Under A Bad Sign
Written by William Bell & Booker T. Jones
By 1966, Albert King had gone five long years without a hit, and Stax Records seemed unlikely to reverse his fortunes (when the singer made his pitch to join the roster, label co-founder Estelle Axton told him: “We’re doing R&B, not blues”).
Laundromat Blues got King’s foot in the door, but the bluesman’s great rebirth might never have happened without a late-night writing session between Stax artist William Bell (who had a UK Top 10 hit with Private Number in 1968) and fabled keyboard man Booker T. Jones (leader of the label’s crack-squad house band The M.G.’s).
“William walked in and said: ‘We need to write a song by tomorrow for Albert King’,” recalled Jones. “I remember coming up with the riff, then William put his thinking cap on, and the next thing I know he sang: ‘Born under a bad sign…’”
As the title track of King’s 1967 masterpiece, Born Under A Bad Sign was the ultimate hard times lament (‘If it wasn’t for bad luck’, runs the classic line, ‘you know I wouldn’t have no luck at all’). But ironically, thanks to its rock stylings, the song gave the formidable bluesman a crossover hit (today it’s nudging 53 million streams on Spotify). As Jones once said: “Eric Clapton is still trying to play like that!”
Papa Was A Rolling Stone
Written by Barrett Strong & Norman Whitfield
At the end of the 1960s, Motown songwriting duo Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong began pushing beyond the label’s love-song boundaries with such socially conscious epics as Ball Of Confusion and Runaway Child, Running Wild. The pinnacle of their long-form experiments, Papa Was A Rolling Stone, began as a 12-minute instrumental by Whitfield.
“Norman wanted lyrics that were fun, not serious,” Strong told the Wall Street Journal. “But I didn’t hear the music the way he did. Something about the bass line spoke to me. It was the sound of someone confused about something and trying to make sense of it.”
Barrett’s approach took the form of a ghetto child asking his mother about his late father. “She rationalises the father’s bad behaviour and blames it on his nature, even though they’re left with nothing,” Strong said. “It’s about hopelessness and hope.”
The original version, by The Undisputed Truth, peaked at No.63 in early 1972. Later that year, The Temptations – initially reluctant to tackle yet another of Whitfield and Strong’s lengthy funk workouts - took it to No.1 (the single was a six-minute edit), racking up three Grammys, including Best R&B Song.
A masterpiece of production as much as composition, Papa’s smouldering knit of bass, hi-hat, wah-wah guitar and shivery strings lends the Temptations’ trademark vocal hand-offs extra poignancy. “Norman had the capacity to bring out everybody’s talent instead of just one singer at a time,” Temptations bass vocalist Melvin Franklin said.
Killing Floor
Written by Chester Burnett, aka Howlin’ Wolf
“The blues is problems,” the legendary Howlin’ Wolf told Crawdaddy in 1966. “If you don’t have problems today, you have them tomorrow.”
Born Chester Burnett, he brought the Delta blues of his native Mississippi and a deep feeling for those everyday problems to Chess Records in Chicago in the early 1950s, becoming one of that city’s titans of electric blues, alongside Willie Dixon and Muddy Waters. A man of massive frame, with a feral voice, Burnett chose the perfect stage name in Howlin’ Wolf. And no song better represents his raw, powerful style than Killing Floor.
Set against an upbeat blues progression, the lyric uses the area of a slaughterhouse where animals are killed as a metaphor for a relationship gone bad. As Wolf’s longtime guitarist Hubert Sumlin said: “Down on the killing floor – that means a woman has you down, she went out of her way to try to kill you.” And even though the singer gets away in the song, part of him is still there on the killing floor, wishing she had finished the job.
Like several Howlin’ Wolf classics - Spoonful and Smokestack Lightning among them - Killing Floor has been covered by many artists, including Albert King and Jimi Hendrix. It also provided the DNA for Led Zeppelin’s The Lemon Song, so much so that the band gave Wolf a co-writing credit.
Living For The City
Written by Stevie Wonder
In an interview with saxophonist and Stevie Wonder band member David Sanborn, he said: “Making records for Motown in the sixties for Stevie was like being part of the old studio system in Hollywood. But by the early seventies he became more like the young maverick directors, Scorsese and Coppola, taking over.”
It’s an apt comparison, especially with Living For The City, which unfolds like a gritty seven-minute movie, tackling social class and racial injustice. The song follows a young man from his ‘hard time Mississippi’ upbringing to New York City. He arrives with hopes of employment and better life, but through a ‘wrong place, wrong time’ moment is arrested in a drug bust, then sentenced to 10 years in prison. Is there a more brutal moment in music than the cell door slamming with the policeman’s racial slur?
As with many of the songs on his trio of classic 70s albums – Talking Book, Innervisions and Fulfillingness’ First Finale – Wonder played all the instruments.
Living For The City was a US No.1 and won a Grammy for Best R&B Song.
“I think the deepest I really got into how I feel about the way things are was in this song,” Wonder said. “I was able to show the hurt and the anger.”
Stormy Monday
Written by T-Bone Walker
Call It Stormy Monday But Tuesday Is Just As Bad – to give the original 1947 release its full title – wasn’t Aaron Thibeaux Walker’s first major contribution to the genre (the Texan guitarist had already pricked up ears in the Les Hite Orchestra with 1940’s highly influential T-Bone Blues). Yet this pioneering example of electric blues represented revolution at every level, from Walker’s unprecedented touch on the incoming instrument, to his stripped-back band format, which encouraged kids around the world to plug in and try their luck (no brass section required).
To Walker’s frustration, that unwieldy song title (chosen to set it apart) came back to bite him, with musicians including Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland shortening it to Stormy Monday Blues for their own renditions, and royalties often finding their way to the authors of a 1942 jazz hit with the same title.
Yet while he suffered financially, Walker’s legacy was inestimable – without his bestknown hit, A-list acolytes such as BB King, Chuck Berry, Clarence ‘Gatemouth’ Brown, Albert King and Lowell Fulson might never have taken up the electric guitar. “The first line, the first thrilling notes, the first sound of his guitar, and the attitude in his voice,” BB once said. “It was riveting."
