The Blues Goes On – The Blues Goes On (Gear Fab Records, 1971/2018 reissue) 

Originally released on the German based Ken label in 1971, The Blues Goes On is an exploitation album involving musicians from the Live Experience Band. Like most projects of this kind, the album was pressed in miniscule quantities and quickly disappeared down the drainpipe. Now available in digital form, The Blues Goes On is bound to win favor with those who cherish such enigmatic endeavors.

Soaked to the bone with grating and grungy guitar excursions, throaty vocals and wasted and weighty rhythms, the peculiarly titled “Big Pink Vol. 1 Give Me A Horsecal” makes for quite a mind-numbing event, while “Rimmier Blues” pickpockets portions of Chicago’s “25 Or 6 To 4” and rocks with clumsy force. The airy tweet of a flute and a honking saxophone patrol the grounds on the jazzy instrumental, “He Died In Prison” and “What Do You See When You Turn Out This Life” lumbers along to a meandering blues pitch before dropping some wiggy keyboard fills and a feral drum solo into the picture. Also presented on the album is a slow and punishing cover of “Hey Joe” clearly patterned after Jimi Hendrix’s version. 

Tacked at the end of the album are a pair of instrumentals – “Randolphs Nerver Song,” which is wall to wall with heavy electrified noise, and “Tribute To Lorenz Westphal” that prances and dances to a weirdly cool collision of boogie woogie blues and hillbilly pickings. Disjointed yet daring, “The Blues Goes On” is by no means a lost masterpiece, but it is definitely worthy of a reissue and repeat listenings. 

– Beverly Paterson

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