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Review - John Hammond's Ready For Love (2003, Back Porch Records)
by Christian B. Carey, Ph.D.
After his 2001 release of an entire album of Tom Waits covers, Wicked Grin, John Hammond returns with a mix-and-match album from a variety of sources. The album receives it title from Hammond's sole song-writing contribution, "Slick Crown Vic," the first track on the album. With a verse that chugs along on a single chord vamp, by the chorus the sexagenarian Hammond veritably crows that he is, indeed, "Ready for Love." With memorable hooks like this one, it would be nice to hear originals from Hammond with greater frequency.A terrific thing about Wicked Grin was the way in which a smooth voice that was quite at odds with Tom Waits rough and raspy growl could inhabit his songs so effectively. Hammond created memorable interpretations by making these songs his own, changing the narrators from the socially disordered denizens of Waits characterizations to disaffected and disenfranchised Everymen. In other words, the narrators you ALWAYS find in blues songs, who have lost their girl, their truck, their house, and their dog, usually in that order of severity.
But, just for fun, Hammond decides to impart some of Waits' menace to a cover of "Gin-Soaked Boy." By putting it in a key where he has to navigate about an octave lower than his usual suave croon, the bluesman manages to sound quite scary - I didn't know that he had it in him. It is especially effective given the song's placement, right after the buoyant and lilting Freddie Hart tune "Easy Loving." "Gin-soaked Boy" finds us being regaled by the mean drunk in the bar, and no one can get that bottle away from him. We just hope that he doesn't break it and go after us with the shards! His other Waits cover, "Low Side of the Road," finds Hammond regaining a semblance of vocal composure. However, the arrangement of the tune is straight out of Waits' play book, with copious bumptious percussion and mutant guitar work.
The record is produced by Los Lobos frontman David Hidalgo. In addition, Hidalgo plays guitar and sings on the record, and contributes two songs: "No Chance" and "I Brought the Rain." Other highlights include a solidly fifties Rockabilly-styled arrangement of the Jerry Portnoy tune "Can't Remember to Forget," a sterling reading of the George Jones/Lawton Williams country tune "Color of the Blues," and a playful rendition of Jesse Jones "Money, Honey." There is even a Stones cover, a harmonica-infused "Spider and the Fly." In all this, Hammond demonstrates the versatile character of the blues. We may be in the Digital Misinformation Age, but Ready for Love makes the case that the blues tradition remains a fixture of American popular song.
-New Jersey, June 24, 2002.