Lurrie Bell – Mercurial Son – Delmark Records DE-679

I can’t recall what year it was that I was at the Chicago Blues Festival, though it was sometime in the early 1990s.  I had camped out on the Grant Park lawn by the Front Porch Stage, though I also can’t remember what acts caused me to take up space there, nor do I remember who was on-stage playing when the following scene unfolded.  I heard a loud voice and harmonica nearby to my right, and as I looked over that way, a rather raggedy looking man in a dirty ill-fitting suit and completely ruined shoes was causing a bit of a ruckus.  His short-cropped natural hair was visibly dirty, and it was obvious that he had not had a proper bath or shower in some time.  He continued to move around, half singing and half playing his harmonica to the music coming from the stage, and his bodily movements were somewhat disjointed, while his verbal utterances were mostly incoherent.

I was aware that I knew who this man was, but for the life of me, I just could not recall who he was, especially given his unkempt state.  Out of the blue, the bluesman on stage called out, “Hey, there’s Lurrie Bell!”  Bell seemed especially happy to be recognized, and he continued to whirl and work his way through the crowd from my right to left.  He never was invited to the stage; and ultimately it was as if he just completely vanished.  It broke my heart to see Bell in such a condition.

If the reader here is even peripherally aware of modern Chicago blues history, chances are they know that Lurrie Bell is the son of blues harmonica titan Carey Bell, and together the two of them made some of the most unsurpassed modern blues, either recorded or in-performance.  Lurrie was brought-up with the blues all around him, and from an early age he was mentored and taught the music by a who’s-who of the Chicago blues, bluesmen like Eddie Taylor, Lovie Lee, Big Walter Horton, Pinetop Perkins, and obviously his father Carey.  These men treated Lurrie as if he was not a child beginning at a young age; they handled and trained him as if he was a bona fide man from his earliest indoctrination into the blues.

As it was and is, the blues is more than a tradition or familial bond in Lurrie’s composition.  It is who he is, it is his life, and the notion of the music and him being separate in any manner is not thinkable.  Lurrie was born into the blues, and as much as any component of his DNA, it is as if the nucleic acids of his DNA that form his body’s double helix form the blues as a vital element of his very being.

This will not be a typical CD review where I go track-by-track and comment upon each’s merits.  This will be more of a document that attempts to validate why I think Lurrie’s Mercurial Son is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, blues CD of the past 30 years.

Lurrie’s demons (drugs, homelessness, mental health issues, terrible personal losses) are not going to be addressed here, as those are readily available to be considered in other writings available to the curious.  However, he has withstood mountains of personal pain and toil that conceivably would completely ruin another person.  To this day, having the understanding that I do about Lurrie’s difficulties and struggles considerably pain me.  The conception of the tormented artist almost idyllically parallels Lurrie’s adult life.  However, due to those gravely unfortunate circumstances arose this grand musical platform of blues excellence.  Like Van Gogh, Lurrie’s inner pain wrought by personal choices and unfortunate occurrences framed the monumental work this CD truly is.

Mercurial Son was Lurrie’s first collection as a leader, and with Scott Dirks and Steve Cushing co-producing this set (with Cushing having a hand in writing six of the songs here), the result is a very raw glimpse into Lurrie’s soul.  The sounds and influences that coalesce into the tunes found within this outing are unlike any modern blues CD, and it is highly unlikely that anyone out there today could be brave enough to lay bare their life’s contexts to be able to frame such a magnificent body of work.

Lurrie symbolizes his needs, fears, behaviors, shortcomings, yearnings, failures, desires, humor, and celebrations via the instinctual musical methodologies he deploys.  This is the blues skinned alive, and the cadences and very structures of his songs are shameless in their delivery.  Lurrie’s guitar can be both a fractured, curious instrument that meanders to find its center, and it can also be melodically on-point.  But what it is here is wholly unpredictable.

Lurrie’s voice so masterfully spins his terrifying yarns, though on many of his blues, he is virtually incoherent.  The CD liner book does include the songs’ lyrics, and reading them is startling for the poetic depth that Lurrie mines.

With backing that includes Cushing’s astonishing percussion work, and the rumbling low-end bass entrapments of Willie Black on all but two cuts (Sho Komiya on those two), the spartan assemblage here achieves the loftiest of blues emotionality; with such deep subject matter as Lurrie’s, any additional instrumentation would seem to have diluted the deep pool of the human conditions being addressed across the scope of this astounding CD.

Given Lurrie’s shockingly deep well of personal misfortune, it is difficult to imagine how he manifested his envisioned songs’ frameworks.  At times, it almost seems as if he is leaning back to African rhythms and sounds, and then in another moment he is summoning a twisted take on “the Bo Diddley beat.”  Just what were the specters arising in Lurrie’s mind as he plied his creative energies here?  Only he can know.

Within this single collection, Lurrie offers blues, funk, and other tense narrative musical frameworks that attempt to bring forth his suppositions of why he has undergone the great strife he experienced and how it shapes his musical innovation, and intuitively, his life as well.  He sings, he wails, he recites, all the while fascinatingly moderating his life for the listener.

There are no defined boundaries here; Lurrie is providing in-the-moment cognizance of his life.  This is a man in his most profound uninhibited self.  It’s been hard, very hard, chilling even, this life that’s been led.  But Lurrie is unapologetic.  Here, he is the very essence of the blues.

Dark, moody, yet stunningly beautiful and articulate, Mercurial Son sears as a document that tears, rips, and slashes the soul, while also seeming to rejoice at being alive to tell the tale.

In this reviewer’s estimation, as intimate and moving a blues collection has not been offered by anyone else for decades.  Lurrie is a blues treasure, and his work here stuns, moves, and brings shudders.  Listen closely to it all; you will find layers here that when peeled back yield bewildering blues magnitude.

Essential on every level!