An Appreciation of Eric Burdon and Jimmy Witherspoon, “Guilty!”
You’ve probably never heard of this record, but if I had to take just one blues album to a desert island (where I would most certainly have the blues), this would be it. This isn’t blues that more-or-less sounds like the blues, for people who don’t really have them. This is the real thing.
I bought this LP from the 99-cent sale rack when I was just a teenager. I knew nothing about the musicians, and I confess I picked it up for the kitschy album cover. This image was a doozy — a nerdy corporate guy in an urban high-rise office has an image of four prisoners behind bars superimposed on his forehead. When I got home and put on the music, it was my own mind that got taken over. We all probably remember our baptism into the blues, and this was mine.
Burdon, lead singer for the Animals, isn’t an obvious choice to headline a blues album. The Animals broke up in 1969, and Burdon left rock for funk, joining the pioneering group War. They produced a few hit singles, including “Spill the Wine.” A two-disk set, The Black-Man’s Burdon, was released in 1970. Burdon left War (or, better, War left Burdon) after he collapsed on stage from an asthma attack. When Jimi Hendrix died in London in September 1970, it was after jamming with Burdon and War. It took years for Burdon to recover from the trauma.
Burdon shares vocal duties 50/50 with the great Jimmy Witherspoon, an established blues master since the early ’50s. He brings every ounce of his hefty presence and authority to the session without a trace of condescension to his more famous white rock star co-headliner.
Guilty! is a concept album: it’s about getting released from prison, dealing with the survivor’s guilt of being out, and the very real fear of getting hauled in front of an unmerciful judge for something as minor as a traffic violation. Burdon and Witherspoon share the vulnerabilities of victimhood: cops are prejudiced against both the hippies and the blacks. Every track is intense, honest, and gripping. The sometimes-graphic lyrics pull no punches.
The horns are out of tune. The mix is iffy. But damn, when the guitars come in already smoking on “Have Mercy Judge,” you can hear the sweat and anguish. The music doesn’t rock so much as it lurches with a kind of slow-drag funk. Burdon and John Sterling (extraordinary guitarist on the session) wrote “Soledad,” a searing portrait of the ironic suffering that comes with freedom: “As I drove my air-conditioned car/I can feel the pain coming through the door./What could it be, what this country’s doing to me?/When I can ride this ride, and just on the other side/Of the wire, running higher, are my brothers ‘neath the sky.” The guitars preach.
It was brilliant to include the standard “Going Down Slow” (“Somebody please write my mother, tell her the shape I’m in”), and to record it not with a bunch of studio pros, but live on the inside with the San Quentin Prison Band. You can hear the wind in the microphone, the pain in Witherspoon’s and Burdon’s voices, and the will to freedom in the guitar solo.
There were ongoing legal struggles involving the two different record labels that had signed War and Burdon, so Guilty! received no promotion (hence the 99-cent bin). The IRS claimed Burdon owed back taxes, so the group wasn’t allowed to tour or leave the US. Burdon brings all of this to the session — his raw rock voice, his funk sensibility from War, his sense of being screwed over by The Man, and his restless sense of being hounded by unrelenting officers with badges. Witherspoon balances it all with the world-weary baritone shouts of an older black man who’s been there and expects to be there again.
The album was rereleased in 1976 and reissued on CD in 1995 (MCA) and 2003 (BMG) as Black & White Blues, losing the grungy original cover. It was replaced with a smiling and dapper Witherspoon and Burdon, comfortable on a nice clean bus. The reissue completely downplays the prison theme, but once the shiny little digital disk is in the drive, there’s no cleaning up the grit, dust, heat, and throbbing pain of the blues.
(Originally published on the Arts Fuse, June 16, 2021)
