Muddy the Waters: Basement Boogie

My short-lived venture into music publishing before tab became what it is today. A rather naive attempt to show the basics of various styles of rock music. It did lay the seeds for my later work in self-published comic books and adult comix.

Feb. 1, 1981
Basement Boogie #1
Red hot and makin' me blue......
As an instructional guide it was a bit amatuer-ish but it was ahead
of its time as far as approach a genre rather than an individual song
with tab. I thought the cover illo was pretty good
in an underground comix sort of way.
Copyright: T. A. Echterling 1981

June 29, 1981
Basement Boogie #2
"Juke Joint Jump"
ala Chuck Berry
and a bit of Bo Diddley
Copyright: T. A. Echterling 1981

Oct. 26, 1981
Basement Boogie #3
White boy suburban reggae
"Dreadlocks Dread"
"Nyabingi Chant"
"Exile in Babylon"
I couldn't afford a house in Jamaica like Keef
or even a trip there but '"Catch A Fire" was a favorite LP of mine in 1973.
I was one of the few (14,000) that actually bought
it when it was first released in the States.
I dug it coz it was rebel music, but the reefer smokers didn't catch
a fire about Marley until Rastaman Vibration" in 1976.
And after Clapton's hit with "I Shot The Sheriff."

Oct. 30, 1982
Basement Boogie #4
A year later - a tribute to
Duane Eddy and Link Ray.
And sadly the last Basement Boogie.
A BB King and a Chicago Blues about Muddy and Wolf were in the
works but fate intervened...and I was off to the Motor City...
or at the least the northern suburbs.
Of course Pontiac was as mini-Detriot surrounded by affluence and hillbillies.

Promo photo for the "pamphlets",
circa 1981.
Copyright: Terence Echterling

I got the beat...the beatnik blues..

While the Mississippi Delta blues is the melodic and harmonic mode I love the most I'm been having second thoughts about the country blues style as my true means of expression. My attempts all come out sounding like rock-a-billy or bad C&W anyway, which I'm happy with but it ain't the country blues or the urban blues and there's many others who do both much better than me. I'm finding more resonance with a slightly more jazz flavored talkin' style that is vaguely like the not so successful attempts of the beat poets....still exploring but I think I may have gotten the beatnik blues...philosophically for sure, artistically maybe...

Postmodern Metaphysics: What is does not have to be the case...

Quietly optimistic resistance to the tecnocrats is somehow still possible...the medium is now the only message, who controls the flow of information in the globalized network of electronic communication holds the power...only art can pass by the censors, so let's muddy the waters so the art of social criticism cannot be distinguished from the art that functions as the last claim of intellectual sensitivity of the economic power elite -- the art that is their status symbol, the only thing that provides an illusion that raw power is not all they crave, their only link to humanity and their only way of remaining human themselves so they are not totally devoured by their own game....