Seasick Steve/Morphine

My New Years celebrations this year followed my usual routine…. traditional naked conga down the High Street and then back in time for the real party…Jools Holland’s Hootenanny.

The best thing on this year was SeaSick Steve. He’s a busking blues singer with a big check shirt, an even bigger beard, a 3 string guitar, a raw sound and really entertaining patter.

“I’d like to introduce my band here…. on percussion we have the Mississippi Beat Box.” This high tech marvel turns out to be a wooden box which he stamps out a rhythm on.

It’s decorated with a Mississippi number plate and a piece of carpet. “On my lap here is the 3 string Trance Wonder…most guitars have got 6 strings - this one’s only got 3 strings.”

It’s a sentence that could have come straight out of Spinal Tap…but he’s absolutely correct. It’s a battered acoustic with pick-ups gaffa taped to it which he plays with a slide…and it does indeed have only 3 strings.

He claims that he bought it for $75 dollars in Mississippi from a man called Sherman Cooper, and was so outraged that there was $50 mark up on a guitar with 3 strings missing that he vowed he would not replace the missing strings but would travel the world telling people how he had been ripped off. Well it makes a change from the traditional blues biography of riding freight trains and killing a man (or at least mildly annoying him)

Seasick Steve’s mum calls him Steven Wold and he actually grew up in Oakland California where he learnt some chords from Delta bluesman K C Douglas. He started playing the West Coast clubs in the 60’s and during the 90’s he ran a studio in Seattle and for a time had Kurt Cobain for an upstairs neighbour

Doghouse Blues on Jools Holland sounded fantastic. Rough, autobiographical, funny and loud, it sets out the stall for the whole SeaSick Steve persona as he sings “Daddy left home when I was 4 years old, when I was 7 Mama got a new man….It was hell y’awl.”

Leaving home at 14, riding freight trains (It is a blues song remember, so you’ve got to ride freight trains…it’s the law), getting cold and hungry and “I’d pick on a guitar, put the hat out and try and get your spare change…that’s an advertisement”

Apparently Doghouse blues “Aint the kind of blues you get for a day, you have it your whole life long.” The song itself is John Lee Hooker chug with a bit of a Norman Greenbaum Spirit in the Sky feel and some Warren Zevon Werewolves Of London style howling.

He plays sitting down, hammering out a huge sound from his unlikely pair of instruments. He also sometimes uses the The One Stringed Diddly-Bo which is a guitar string nailed to a plank.

If the man looks and sounds like he should be playing the blues on his porch you suspect the only reason he isn't is that the instruments look like they are made out of the porch.

He’s a compelling and entertaining performer and this has probably come out of his busking past where “I learned storytelling. The guitar was just a thing to keep it going, to keep people from walking away!”

Before Seasick Steve the former champions of missing strings were Morphine. This Massachusetts 3 piece had an unusual sound, which they branded Low Rock. A bit like a jazzy Violent Femmes or a minimalist Eels.

Singer Mark Sandman played a 2 string bass with a slide, getting a sinuous bendy sound. Sax player Dana Colley would often play 2 saxes at once like Roland Kirk used to. These were baritone Saxes as well…enormous instruments, outrageously raspy and fruity.

1993’s Cure For Pain is a really good album and includes the excellent adultery song Thursday that starts with meeting every week for a couple of beers and a game of pool and ends in tears.

“Well her husband he's a violent man a very violent and jealous man. Now I have to leave this town I got to leave while I still can.” Over a clattering drums and a chukka chukka bass thrum he delivers the sorry tale in a rich crooning voice full of resignation. The sax egging him on in a “Tell me More Tell me more” style.

Unlikely as it sounds there is something about the lyrical structure and phrasing that reminds me of Prince. The pause as he delivers the line “And the name of the motel was the Wagon Wheel” makes me think of Sign o’ The Times.

I’m Free Now could be a continuation of the purple diddy man’s Nothing Compares to you with lines like “I'm free now to direct a movie Sing a song or write a book about yours truly.” It’s good stuff though. The sax lines build up as long slow ascending notes that then come tumbling down with the singers black mood of despair and self loathing

The song Cure For Pain has got the elegantly simple line. “Someday there'll be a cure for pain That's the day I throw my drugs away.” It just sounds completely right coming from a band called Morphine.and with it’s line “I propose a toast to my self control You see it crawling helpless on the floor” it could sit comfortably (and numbly) alongside the Johnny Cash version of Hurt.

Sandman collapsed on stage and died of a heart attack in Rome in 1999 but the remaining members still tour as Orchestra Morphine. I don’t know how many strings they use now though.