If there was any justice, you would hear Bobby Bland on the radio at night. Especially on the car radio, when you were driving long stretches on highways that were new to you but looked familiar all the same. Eileen Fisher Repositioning The Brand Pdf Reader more. Past neon cocktail glasses and buzzing vacancy signs on beat-up motels where patrons choose to park around in back and everyone is registered under some novel name. His is the music of desire and regret, gaudy and permanent, like a tattoo of some woman's name whose face you can hardly recall.

Without a doubt, Two Steps from the Blues is the definitive Bobby Bland album and one of the great records of electric soul-blues. This 1961 set takes juke join.

As the show-biz name he has worn and discarded will tell you, Bobby 'Blue' Bland sings the blues, but that doesn't really do him justice. Though he began as one of many Roy Brown imitators, shouting his way through the jump blues, he grew closer to -- and further from -- a true blues singer. In a number of remarkable songs ('Cry, Cry, Cry,' 'I Pity the Fool,' 'Turn on Your Love Light,' 'Lead Me On') recorded primarily in the 1950s and '60s, Bland invented a sound that felt both unique and downright lived-in. Shiraz Signature Keygen. While the horn-driven Joe Scott arrangements that buoyed Bland's work formed a natural bridge between the big band sound of the '40s and the soul revues of the '60s, there was something odd and angst-ridden about the tales they told. Beneath titles as lurid as pulp fiction paperbacks ('Woke Up Screaming,' 'A Million Miles From Nowhere'), penned by anonymous artists under the single moniker of Deadric Malone (an arrangement that allowed Bland's manager, Don Robey, to pocket all the proceeds), were songs that snuck in just under the curtain of kitsch. They were songs written in lipstick on bar napkins, found beneath half-empty glasses in roadside taverns.

While Bland's singing owed something to crooners like Tony Bennett and Perry Como, the sound was rougher -- and just slightly removed. It was, as one of his early '60s songs had it, 'Two Steps From the Blues.' But Bland is still going strong. Despite bouts with drink, drugs and depression -- not to mention a triple bypass in 1995 -- he performed over 100 shows last year. (That's down from the 300 gigs a year that was his standard for decades.) A fair amount of his work remains in print (the best of it captured on three double-CD packages from his day on the Duke label), he still records for the Malaco label (a sort of living Smithsonian for blues musicians) and he has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. And like some roadhouse Sisyphus, he seems by and large resigned to the life he has chosen.

The cover of Bland's 1961 album 'Two Steps From the Blues' is a work of art, a Mondrian in black and blue. It's a color photograph of the singer standing in front of a one-story building at the bottom of, yes, two steps. His pants are gray, his shirt is black. His coat is thrown over his shoulder, Sinatra style, and dark glasses hide his eyes from the sunlight. The building that represents 'the blues' is paneled in squares of blue and white -- you would think it was his hotel room except his name appears on one of the panels, as if he were perpetually playing there. (Talk about bringing your work home with you.) In fact, the only thing that isn't black or blue or white in the photo is Bobby Bland's brown skin. 'I didn't like to work much, but I got a job at Bender's Garage, which was $27 a week,' Bland told Guralnick in what remains the definitive piece about the singer (collected in 'Lost Highway').