Hound Dog Taylor & The HouseRockers – Beware Of The Dog! – Alligator Records ALCD 4707

Alligator Records’ visionary and owner Bruce Iglauer often and with great pride relays the account of why he started the long-running premier blues label.  The story goes that Iglauer could not convince Delmark Records’ Bob Koester’s (also the long-time owner of the Jazz Record Mart) to record a wild trio he had become enamored with; Hound Dog Taylor & The HouseRockers.  So, Iglauer started Alligator Records solely to capture the untamed spirit of the band on record.  This uninhibited “live” set snares all of Hound Dog’s turbulent guitar and vocal musical proficiencies while his equally deafening bandmates, guitarist Brewer Phillips and drummer Ted Harvey, encircle Taylor with their idyllic competencies.  Taylor was a captivating and slashing slide guitarist whose flair paralleled that of blues slide guitar master Elmore James.  There was a muscle and jaggedness to Taylor’s gashing guitar efforts, but for all the clunker notes and extreme volume, the affecting fire of his type of blues heard here gained him multitudes of rabid enthusiasts when he debuted to a larger audience in the early 1970s as he and the band climbed from the small joints dotting the Chicago landscape they called home.  Well-known for playing low-priced Japanese-made guitars that further influenced his suspect guitar tonal qualities only enriched the coarse, unrelenting core that made his blues authentic. 

For a very brief period, Hound Dog Taylor and the HouseRockers came into the sun out of the darkness of the dingy Chicago blues haunts to tour the U.S. and abroad realizing universal acclaim and fanaticism, provoking unabashed blues ecstasy from already resolute blues fans, and creating new ones over the course of their journeys.  Taylor’s blues was of a basic variety; sweaty and tenacious.  Taylor’s and The HouseRockers’ lights glowed all too briefly, with Taylor passing away in 1975; Taylor didn’t survive his hard-living ways to see this collection’s release.  As Taylor himself indicated, “When I die they’ll say, ‘he couldn’t play shit but he sure made it sound good.’”  That sums-up this astounding collection better than any words I’ve written here.

Below are the running tracks of this astonishing collection.

Essential without any reservation whatsoever! 

Song Titles

• Give Me Back My Wig
• The Sun Is Shining
• Kitchen Sink Boogie
• Dust My Broom
• Comin’ Around The Mountain
• Let’s Get Funky
• Rock Me
• It’s Allright
• Freddies Boogie