Somebody once famously stated that: 'If it ain't Mississippi, if it ain't raining and if you ain't sitting on the corner of the street soaking wet, hoping you weren't hungry - it ain't the blues'.
Well I always thought that was true... Until last week, when my good friend proved me wrong by showing me a fantastic album - 'Bluesbreakout' by Tadeusz Nalepa's 'Breakout' band.
Believed it or not, but Tadeusz Nalepa is white, he doesn't come from Mississippi (but from Rzeszów, Poland) and he sure can play the blues! I was really surprised that such fantastic blues music can come from behind the iron curtain.
The album was released in 1991 as a compilation of two of the groups' previous titles - 'Blues' and 'Karate' (1971 and 1972 respectively). The music therefore was recorded in times of deep communism in Poland - when artists where banned from public performances if their hair was too long and when the state treated the Beatles as a symbol of western, imperialistic society's moral decay.
Bearing that in mind, I think the authentic feeling of the music and its uncanny resemblance to American blues is mind-boggling - Western records were really hard to come by at that time. Still, you can hear many influences in Breakout's playing - there's a bit of Clapton, a bit of Robert Johnson a bit of John Mayall etc.etc.
You ask: how come? Well, Nalepa recalls touring Western Europe with his previous band - Blackout - and meeting Eric Burdon, who gave him his guitar and a bunch of tapes with 'black blues music' - Nalepa immediately fell in love with it. Actually, the couple of months of concerts they performed in Holland at that time allowed them to buy some proper equipment - before, they used to manually convert acoustic guitars into electric ones, simply because the latter weren't readily available in the *ekhm* People's Republic of Poland. The Western equipment is the reason why the album sounds a lot better than most other Polish music at that time.
The lyrics sung by Nalepa are in no way worse than the music of Breakout. The person responsible for these great texts is the poet Bogdan Loebl who also used to live in Rzeszów at that time. While the music is clearly inspired by American standards, the lyrics have a unique quality - deep, moving, yet very simple.
So, it turns out you don't have to be a black farmer working in the cotton fields of deep Mississippi to feel the blues. As Howlin' Wolf once said: "When you ain't got no money and can't pay your house rent and can't buy you no food, you damn sure got the blues".
This quote frightingly accurately describes communist Poland...
...Nalepa just found his Mississipi in Rzeszów.
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