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PAUL " WINE " JONES
Mississippi Madman



Mississippi bluesman Paul "Wine" Jones was once described as "like a blind cave fish" by Fat Possum Records founder Matthew Johnson. What Johnson meant is that Jones seems to have developed a style entirely unaffected by notable musicians — an approach Jones says was influenced by the guitar playing of his father, who ran a juke joint when Matthew was a boy. And on stage at Johnny D’s a week ago Wednesday, Jones was in top form.

He started solo, seated on a chair with a black Les Paul across his lap. Moments before, the guitar had been perfectly tuned. When Jones began clutching and frailing at its strings, they began to wheeze and rattle like a jalopy. Notes in his chords were jarred out of tune by the strength of his attack. When he slid up the neck, he did it with a confident imprecision that caused all sorts of additional tones to ring out. The result was a boilerplate Delta jukehouse sound: raw, ragged, dirty, and absolutely perfect.

Although Jones writes many of his own songs (including the demented "Mad Dog," a scruffy growler in which his angry wife sics a foaming canine on him for cheating, and the childhood memory "Diggin’ Mama’s Taters"), lyrics are the one area where he’s fallen under the spell of other, more famed artists. But the chords he played, accompanied only by the drummer he introduced as "Sweet Dog," were full of small asides that buzzed brief melodies before falling back into the pattern of his picking. And they were of his own choosing, no matter whether the words were Muddy Waters’ ("40 Days and 40 Nights"), R.L. Burnside’s ("Poor Boy a Long Way from Home"), or Little Milton Campbell’s ("Grits Ain’t Groceries"). Jones’s vocal melodies are also distinct. His sings as if he’d smoked a million Marlboros, drunk a million Colt .45s, and then eaten all the cans. If anything, the skinny, sharp-dressed fiftysomething musician has become rawer and louder since he began his recording career with his debut, Mule (Fat Possum), almost a decade ago. This tour was a warm-up for the release of his third CD, Damn Damn Fool (Fat Possum), which is due in January.

The night was also a meeting for the realms of garage blues and garage rock thanks to the openers, Boston’s Downbeat 5. The quartet plowed a similar ragged-but-right terrain while unveiling new songs they’ll record later this winter for their second album and applying their own guitar-driven sledgehammer attack to tunes by Arthur Alexander and the Animals.

BY TED DROZDOWSKI

Issue Date: November 7 - 13, 2003
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