All tracks recorded in London, Spring 1974
The fourteen tracks on Tramp 1974 are from live and studio sessions made around the time when Tramp's second album Put A Record On came out. Reviewing that album Melody Maker asked, "Is this the last sound of the sixties?". Listening again nearly thirty years on, the answer here is a definite no. This mixture of blues, soul-funk and R&B is classic mid-1970s pub rock...and, as such, the relative calm shortly before punk, pogo-ing and gobbing at the stage was what kids got up to down music pubs most nights of the week.
True, Tramp was sixties in that it was the late-1960s brainchild of Bob Brunning and Bob Hall. Also, as the name suggests, the band's lineup was big on transience, and all the better for it. But from start to finish, bonding Tramp's deliberately loose ties was the great blues voice of Jo Ann Kelly who by 1974, in her own words, musically found herself "somewhere between Washboard Sam and Bobby 'Blue' Bland". So Tramp 1974 in effect focuses Jo Ann Kelly's development from late-1960s solo artist and Memphis Minnie replicant, into a soul/funk/blues diva happy to front a band.
From the onset, Tramp was never meant to be anything other than a one-off studio band, and the possibility of promoting the album by gigging wasn't even discussed beforehand, even though a few gigs did subsequently materialise, almost as if by chance. And as Bob Hall recalls, it all first came about in 1969 thanks to Brunning:
"Bob would blag a deal with someone and he was remarkably good at it: he did it with no idea who would play on it. He would just say, 'I'm famous - I used to be with Fleetwood Mac. How about making an album with me and my mate Bob?' The guy who was first interested was Peter Eden, who was something to do with Pye Records."
Brunning's blagging landed Tramp two album deals: the first in 1969 produced Tramp, and the second recorded in 1974 - was Put A Record On. These featured similar though not identical lineups, with Fleetwood Mac's Mick Fleetwood, Danny Kirwan and Jo Ann's brother Dave Kelly (ex-John Dummer and Rock Salt guitarist and singer) making strong contributions to both records.
Although Fleetwood drummed on the Put A Record On studio album, like Dave Kelly, he couldn't make these Tramp 1974 sessions. Instead, Pete Miles (who'd previously enjoyed top ten chart success in Australia before coming back to live and work in England) joined for a while, and appears on the Tramp 1974 studio session. Drummer Keef Hartley 'depped' as a one-off only, on the live session featured here.
Danny Kirwan plays on the live tracks 9-14 - this recording is the last known live performance by the ex-Fleetwood Mac blues wunderkind - but on the eight studio cuts guitar credits are shared by Pete Emery and 'Putty' Pietryga.
Yet, amongst the good-time blues and soul, there is another - and sadder subtext to the Tramp project: namely, that it exposes the music business's sometimes cruel fickleness. One year may well be a short time when you're struggling to make it, but it works the other-way round once you've been there. In other words, a change for the worse comes all too unexpectedly, as Fleetwood and Kirwan had both found out by 1974.
Both musicians were on a roll when Brunning asked his old mates to become musical tramps for a day in 1969 - Mac were chart-toppers as well as being Britain's coolest of cool blues bands. Then, five years later when Bob got back in touch for the Put a Record On session both Mick and Danny each were fighting their own very real demons. The post-Peter Green Fleetwood Mac was yesterday's news in Britain with Mick unable to work anywhere whilst he fought an expensive legal battle with his ex-manager over rights to the group's name. Meanwhile, Kirwan - fired from Mac in August 1972 for drunkeness played well enough on the studio album and this live session, but inwardly he was already on the slippery slope that led to alcoholism a few years later.
That same period, 1969-1974, also saw Jo Ann Kelly go through some heavy music-biz scenes. She deliberately passed on Janis Joplin-type stardom in 1969, when she turned down Bob Hite's offer for her to front Canned Heat. Then a year later, what could have been a very interesting hook-up with Johnny Winter never came off. It was at the Second National Blues Convention in September 1969 that she jammed with Canned Heat's Al Wilson on blues harp. Then at the end of the month Jo Ann and fellow Tramp pianist Bob Hall sat in with Canned Heat at the Marquee club and it was there that Heat frontman Bob Hite was impressed enough he asked her to join the band.
Turning Canned Heat down was something she would deeply regret. as she explained to Stefan Grossman in 1978:
"I approached the whole thing with a non-business attitude and turned them down. I now think it would have been great to do a year with Canned Heat because then I would have had the experience and made my name, I was just so much into acoustic blues - a bit of a purist I'm afraid."
Often during this era Jo Ann displayed a complexity and even waywardness where she appeared to be determined in some way to spite herself. For instance, in the early days her image sometimes was very much at odds with the music, she was variously described by the press as a convent schoolgirl or bespectacled schoolteacher. What's more, she shared the bill at the 1968 First National Blues Convention in London with the then unknown Free and also Aynsley Dunbar's Retaliation - both bands heavily into blues-rock's grubby testosterama image. And yet Jo Ann took the stage daintily kitted out in a short frock. Any apparent daintiness only lasted until she began to sing - then, bizarrely, you were listening to a big black woman's voice... even more magical was that she accompanied herself with raw Fred McDowell-style slide guitar (whom she accompanied only a year later at London's Mayfair Hotel).
By the early-1970s her image was better suited to the music, moving from feminine to feminist. For a year, around 1972, she fronted a band called Spare Rib, sharing its name with the recently launched full-on women's lib magazine. Bob Brunning now wrankles at the memory of the one gig he played as a member of Spare Rib:
"We did a benefit at the Marquee for the magazine and that was the first time I encountered sexism. We did the gig for nothing to support the magazine and eagerly awaited the next issue to see the review and...when we looked there was no review. So I rang them up and said, we did this for you and you didn't even give us a review? And they said, no... that's because you're blokes... And I said, I didn't think that that was what it was all about."
By this time Jo Ann's attitude was a million miles from the peace-and-love self-effacement she exuded in the 1960s, as this quote from a 1974 interview with Sounds Jerry Gilbert reveals:
"I was at a club in Boston called Paul's Morn and it was one of those clubs where all the prostitutes looked really great - it was a great club and I was supporting Johnny Nash. But the students think it's a terrible place, they've got their own scene elsewhere. I've decided I can't stand hippies - I'd rather work with crooks and pimps than hippies."
Her distaste for hippies may have started in Los Angeles in 1969-1970. She played a brilliant showcase at the 1969 Memphis Blues Festival - and she'd previously been spotted by Johnny Winter. So, before you could say the words 'this-could-go-platinum', hippy-era record company execs began their hype and smooth-talking: Jo Ann must play with Winter; Jo Ann must sign a five-year deal with CBS's Epic offshoot, and then record with Winter; Jo Ann must tour with the Johnny Winter Band, CBS even flew her out to Los Angeles to perform at their business convention. And yet all this amounted to nothing more than hollow promises: "The people at CBS said, 'All we want you to do is come over, and then we'll fly you to Johnny Winter's house in New York, and you two can see what you can do together."
The Winter/Kelly rehearsals for a proposed US tour went well but then Jo Ann got the bombshell: "CBS offered me $80 a week for the tour. I said, 'Man, that couldn't even take care of my plane fare, let alone my hotel.' So the tour didn't come off because they weren't prepared to sink any money into it and expected management to."
She returned to America in 1973 a couple of years after the Johnny Winter fiasco, this time to tour as a solo artist with Taj Mahal and Larry Coryell. 1972 saw her embark on another ill-fated project - her first permanent band, Spare Rib. Featuring 'Putty' Pietryga on guitar, had it been better organised by Jo Ann, this band might well have taken off.
So, by early 1974 it's perhaps not surprising that the two Bobs needed all their powers of persuasion to talk her into fronting a second Tramp lineup, as Hall remembers: "I seem to remember it wasn't so easy to get Jo Ann and Dave to that session. Though Dave was always easy, Jo Ann wasn't so sure... and yet, on the other hand some of her singing on that second album is the best I've ever heard her."
Put A Record On was recorded on January 9 & 10 1974 with promotional gigs and related projects that went on for a couple of months after that. For instance, they re-recorded the title track in March and Spark released it as a single with excellent backing vocals from Kokomo's singers. Put A Record On wasn't a hit but did make radio play-lists.
Listen to any track on Tramp 1974 and you'll hear Jo Ann's unmistakable vocals melding with Dave Brooks' very free and exuberant sax playing: listen to the very start of Love Blind - track 2 and it's easy to mistake one for the other - what sounds like a sax intro turns out to be Jo Ann's voice with an especially nasal timbre.
Guitar honours are shared out between Putty and Pete Emery in the studio, whilst Danny Kirwan plays live, Putty's soloing is blues-rock with an emphasis on rock - as on Feel Like Breaking Up Somebody's Home track 4, whereas Pete Emery has more of a traditional blues man's approach to solos, as on 'Til My Back Ain't Got No Bone - track 1. Tramp 1974 is something of a blue milestone in Danny Kirwan's blues-playing career. His solos are short with one or two flashes of inspiration, as on What You Gonna Do - track 11 but overall it sounds as though he's far happier ably to be playing second guitar behind Dave Brooks' strong improvising on sax.
The fact that Kirwan makes a bigger and more assured contribution on the studio album does tend to back up the feeling - expressed more than once since then by Mick Fleetwood - that Kirwan's sensitivity meant that the stage was often a daunting place for him to be. As we know, eventually this really did take its toll. Jump Steady Daddy - track 5 shows how Bob Hall was and remains - a key player on the British blues scene, whilst Bob Brunning's bass playing is characteristically solid throughout the album.
Tramp 1974, though, is really Jo Ann Kelly's show. Her most successful band, Second Line, came a few years later in 1980, but this collection, and the entire Tramp project, remain poignant reminders of Jo Ann's versatile approach to blues-based music, and also of the good times her personality brought to the stage.
'Jet' Martin Celmins
Jo Ann Kelly Mooncrest albums Volume 1 "Key To The Highway" - CRESTCD 037 and Volume 2 "Talkin' Low" - CRESTCD 045 include further 1974 recordings from 'Tramp'. 'Til My Back Ain't Got No Bone' and 'Feel Like Breaking Up Somebody's Home', tracks 7 and 9 on CRESTCD 045 and the version of 'Put A Record On' on CRESTCD 037 were all recorded at an earlier session before the versions here, they are without the addition of 'Putty' Pietryga and the Kokomo Singers. The Kokomo Singers are Dyan Birch, Paddie McHugh and Frank Collins. The Guitar interplay between the two guitarists features solos by both Pete Emery, on tracks 1 and 8, and 'Putty' solo breaks on tracks 4 and 7.
The live set features the only performance of Keef Hartley with the band, whose usual drummers were Mick Fleetwood or Pete Miles. The set is issued in its entirety except for a version of Lucille Bogan's 'Jump steady Daddy' which is available on "Key To The Highway"
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