Don’t forget to Breathe.

Only ever two songs from the sea.

In this weekly blog, I share two tracks from my drive to and from the sea I swim in. For those who’d rather just dive into the full immersion playlist, you’ll find it here.

280. **Rock this Town**

All hail Rockabilly and Psychobilly — the working-class hero’s middle finger to the middle-class suburban art school schtick of Punk, new Wave and New Romanticism

Wot!? Socio cultural schisms in musical tribes? Class-riddled musical genres? Who knew. A small sideways look at the heartlands of Rockabilly and most of its Psychobilly progeny finds us at the rough end of the socio economic street.

This is blue collar hard-core, hard-life, knock-n-roll. And the Stray Cats had resuscitated it with aplomb.

In the original American iteration: Rockabilly was often seen as the music of the poorest, least educated parts of America the world preferred to forget. The musical intelligentia saw it as the raw Siamese Twins of Hillbilly and R&B; played in shanty shacks, and liquor pits from the mountains to the plains, via the deep south. This lot were trouble and their rebel yell quite distinct.

Rockabilly was dirt poor, soaked in Bike engine oil, and smeared with Hot Rod axel grease, and all the more beautiful for it.

Rockabillys, Greasers, Teds, Rockers, [and to a large extent Mods] were fiercely blue-collar subcultures: raw, unvarnished; the go-to tribes for working-class kids seeking something outside the oppression of what lay in front of them and ahead of them: and ther taste for casual street violence surfaced often. This was the music of a rebellion far more profound and earthy than Punk’s slightly more art-school vibe as shaped by Viviene Westwood and Malcolm McClaren.

The music was an orgy of sparky, twangy vocal styles over a driving slap bass — with Pioneers like Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Wanda Jackson, Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran leading the way. These rockabilly gods created music that has now stitched itself into cultural history: with tracks like “That’s All Right” (Presley), “Blue Suede Shoes” (Perkins), “Mystery Train” (Presley/Junior Parker), “Be-Bop-A-Lula” (Gene Vincent); and let’s not forget one of my all-time favourites: “*Somethin Else*” by the late great Eddie Cochran, famously covered by the Pistols.

The immersion track, Rock this town, seized its moment in Rockabilly’s early 80s revival, fuelled with the chutzpah of freshly-baked yankee style and vibes. It was the perfect moment of intersection, colliding with the British post-punk Flip kids going to swing and jive nights, soaking up the scene and creating their own sub-sub-culture beneath the existing alternative scene. Things got messy! In a good way.

In my world, Rockabilly came in the shape of a different ‘Billy to Brian Seltzer et al. Enter one ‘Rockabilly Tim,’ a contemporary of mine from Art College. Tim ‘Polecat’ Worman was the front man for the Polecats, the UK’s answer to the Stray Cats. And ‘rumbling’ [the yankee phrase for fighting] was a feature of their scene: just a ‘North London-under-the-M1-flyover’ version: far less glamorous than the flatland, hot rod, slick-back switchblade ‘rumbling’ of original era movies like ‘Blackboard Jungle,’ ‘Rebel Without a Cause’ and the more recent ‘American Graffitti’ and ‘Badlands.’

UK rockabilly culture took more from the bleak seaside Teddy Boy culture of films like ‘That’ll be the Day:’ more Chip shop and Wimpy Bar than Soda Shop and Drive-in-Movie.

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Though the Polecats stayed firmly in the subculture realm, their US hit from 1983, Make a Circuit with me, found its way into the soundtrack of the Pixar film, WALL-E.

There was a shade of difference between the production of the UK rockabilly bands like the Polecats and the Stray Cats. The Polecats had a thinner, scratchier, punkier sound — slightly more analogue tape to tape valve amp — compared to the full fat production of the Stray cats sound. There’s was the big bright Neon Strip alternative to the Polecats ‘wet-Wednesday-in-a-Burnt-Oak Woolworths’ vibe. You could feel the tattooed sweat, sourmash piss and tarmac heat of the American version: it was palpable.

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So, just for the sheer 80s joy of it, check the official video for ‘Rock this Town:’ in fact, take a bath in it, but don’t forget to pop on your shrink to fit 501s before you get in!

# 281. Hellhound on my Trail

If ever there was a sound shaped by a pact with the devil, its Robert Johnson’s.

It’s not difficult to see how these legends and myths arise, especially around an itinerant musician like Johnson, whose biographical information has been drawn from ‘a mass of partial, conflicting, and inconsistent eyewitness accounts’ about a man some described as “indecipherable.”

Look back far enough into the shadows of 20th century history and we find many things that seem problematic from the upper reaches of the 21st Century. Much the same as Jerry Lee Lewis [though he took it up a notch by taking his cousin as his child bride ], Johnson’s marriage to the 14-year-old, Virginia Travis in February 1929 would be seen as a crime in our current times; especially given that she died in childbirth shortly after.

As his travels spanned the US and beyond its borders, into Canada, “with his weakness for whiskey and women, and his commitment to the road” he also formed the relational habits and rituals of the wandering troubadour ‘He cultivated a woman to look after him in each town he played in — homely young women — and in most cases, he was accepted, until a boyfriend arrived or Johnson was ready to move on.’

In death as in life, Johnson’s story is shrouded in various mysteries both banal and fantastical. The causes of his death range from congenital syphilis to his murder by a jealous husband through whisky laced with strychnine — both reasonable outcomes of a dissolute, philandering ‘loose’ lifestyle. We also have the suggestion by a medical practitioner, David Connell, [that] on the basis of photographs showing Johnson’s “unnaturally long fingers” and “one bad eye”, that Johnson may have had Marfan syndrome, which could have both affected his guitar playing and contributed to his death due to aortic dissection.

Regardless of the hand that struck him down, we are told that “he died in a convulsive state of severe pain.” He was 27 years old. Life happened fast and hard back then.

But back to that music. Given the shortness of his life, it seems fitting that his only known recordings happened in one short burst over two days spread over two successive years. Johnson had only two recording sessions; both produced by Don Law, one in San Antonio in 1936, and one in Dallas in 1937, that produced 29 distinct songs (with 13 surviving alternate takes). The sum recording total of the devil-brokering, legendary delta blues musician.

But the world came late to Robert Johnson. It was not until the early 60s that Johnson’s myth began to build to the one we know today.

The oracle of Wiki tells us:

In 1961, Columbia released an album of Johnson’s recordings titled *King of the Delta Blues Singers*, produced by legendary producer and music historian Frank Driggs. It is credited with finally bringing Johnson’s work to a wider audience. The album would become influential, especially in the nascent British blues movement; Eric Clapton called Johnson “the most important blues singer that ever lived” Bob Dylan, Keith Richards, and Robert Plant have cited both Johnson’s lyrics and musicianship as key influences on their own work.

And as for that devil deal, it seems to have arisen in part from the almost ‘miraculous’ improvement in Johnson’s playing over a short period of time. We also have the surviving relatives of Virgina Travis telling the blues researcher Robert “Mack” McCormick that this was a divine punishment for Robert’s decision to sing secular songs, known as “selling your soul to the Devil”.

Isiah ‘Ike’

We also have the shadows cast over Johnson’s story by his association with a famed guitarist Isiah ‘Ike’ Zimmerman, whose style Johnson learned in detail, and which Zimmerman was rumoured to have learned supernaturally by visiting graveyards at midnight.

Hell hound on your trail, Mr Johnson?

Perhaps.

Whatever we may or may not think of Johnson’s myth, legend and satanic brokerings, one thing we do know is that the blues and rock music of the last 60 years would have looked very different if this 27 year old not spent his short time in the world.

RIP [or whatever metaphysical state your ‘deal’ finally delivered you.]

The Author: Julian Borra is a creative writer and strategist, living in Lewes in the UK, with a life-long love of music. A sometime drummer, and percussionist in various bands, music is the sea he swims in when confined to dry land.

Julian’s commercial works can be found at thinairfactory.com or he can be found at linkedin.com/in/julianborra/.