I had a sneaking suspicion I might stumble across the limits of my Hip-Hop knowledge before the end of this Let It Roll miniseries, and, to quote one of America’s most enduringly beloved television dads, Today’s the Day for Homer J.!

One tick of the cultural-historical clock, and suddenly I’m on the outside looking in as Nate, Alexei and Eugene dig the penultimate episode of Netflix’s “Hip-Hop Evolution" season 2.

I do, however, recognize the artists’ names and the era that produced them, and because I’m super hip I visited New York City on numerous occasions during those years and, at the very least, hung out with buds who really were dialed in. (One of them pals around with Killer Mike in Atlanta these days, but I realize declaring that “I know someone who hangs out with Killer Mike” is sad compared to Eugene’s A-List capacities across numerous musical genres, cultural eras and demographic spheres of influence). 

All that writ, I do have one last Hip-Hop card to play, one bit of Southern Hip-Hop cred to cite. Stay tuned for next week’s blog as it accompanies the stunning conclusion of Nate, Alexei and Eugene digging “Hip-Hip Evolution,” when my Old School cred and pre-Jordan, ‘Nique-style game will be on display. 

And know this, friends. I already nabbed one pair of $50 Superstars, my favorite shoe since Isiah took it to the house with the Hoosiers in the spring of ‘81. There’s more deals out there in this post-holiday rush. 

If the world’s greatest bluesman performed his most inventive guitar lick ever while sitting at the crossroads at midnight but no one — not even Mr. D — heard it, would it be any less inventive?

And if no one read this blog post, would that make me any less of a smartass?

These are the kinds of philosophical questions I ask myself when I contemplate Elijah Wald’s book “Escaping the Delta,” a book I’ve actually read and which Nate features this week in a Let It Roll replay interview with Wald.
 
Whether Robert Johnson was a blues magician whose devilish tunes spread Beelzebubba’s message far and wide, or he was an ambitious and peregrinating professional musician who just kept getting better as he incorporated a variety of popular styles, his songs and his recordings have endured and influenced generations of musicians, among them Keith Richards and Eric Clapton.

That Johnson persisted and survived his demons long enough to record his songs but not quite long enough to take his star turn at Carnegie Hall — which was planned before organizer John Hammond knew he had died, by misadventure of course — his bedevilments are in the details.

And, for that matter, so are everyone else’s. ‘Cause the crossroads ain’t just an intersection in Clarksdale, baby.

Michael Bloomfield and Edward Van Halen both moved the artistic needle, but which one was “better,” “greater” or “more important” to rock ‘n’ roll guitar?

I suppose I could pontificate about the merits of each, and I was about to write that I’ve heard more of Van H. than Bloomfield but how much of what Bloomfield did build the table upon which Young Edward did feast?

Can you see Bloomfield starring in a video like the one for “Hot For Teacher” (a song VH the band cribbed from a killer ‘70s Zappa tune)?

Herein lyeth (rhymes with “Wyeth”) the rub. Listen to “Let It Roll” 

There are plenty of other “rubs” in Bloomfield’s saga, but what jumps out and grabs me by my mind-meld is the image of Bob Dylan and Maria Muldaur crawling through Bloomfield’s window to request his presence on what became “Blood on the Tracks.” (He said no, for better or worse I do not know).

I do know this: Of the Edward VH YouTube tributes I’ve seen since his sad passing, the one of him and his brother at the Kimmel show sound check gives us form following function instead of a gymnastic-atomic recitation of rock guitar’s version of the septuplet axel and probably 6,000 other moves.

Could that fucker play? Yes that fucker — Ed and Mike both, you can have both, this ain’t Beatles v. Stones — could play.

I’m not sure I believe everything’s hype, but it sounded catchy and there sure is a lot of hype around.

Which is why many of the conclusions reached by our hosts in this week’s episode of “Let It Roll” digging “Hip-Hop Evolution” seem inevitable in this fickle business we call show. 

That moment comes in every artist’s life: I gotta eat, the prog stuff was a gas but who knows how long this is gonna last, and the latest group of 15-year-olds are hollerin’ for the hits.

The Who tried it in 1973 with Quadrophenia, Springsteen tried it in ‘06 with The Seeger Sessions and Neil Young has tried it innumerable times and at least got away with it — but Neil is the exception that proves the rule.

If you want to keep making art and keep making dollars, it ain’t gonna be easy and Eugene already pointed out what happened to the flow of NEA money starting in the Reagan years.

Put another way, Hammer ended up on the Atlanta Falcons sideline, Tupac got gunned down and, damn, that Too $hort song at the break sounds excellent on my truck’s 2006-era stereo.

That’s a 15-year-old with my kinda taste.

I always thought original Chicago guitarist Terry Kath didn’t get the cred he deserved for being a great guitar player, but Michael Bloomfield laps the field in this regard.

Kath supposedly was one of Hendrix’s favorite guitar players, but Kath once told Guitar Player magazine that he used to sit around playing his guitar to the Butterfield Blues Band’s “East/West” album — except he referred to the record as “Mike Bloomfield’s ‘East/West.’”

I knew Bloomfield played guitar on Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” but every time I heard anything about him I’d think “white Chicago bluesman.”

I never went there with Bloomfield’s Butterfield bandmate Elvin Bishop, an early Capricorn Records signee who wore overalls, posed with a pig on one of his album covers and mentioned Hank Aaron in one of his songs. I bought the farm, so to speak, and figured Elvin must come from a swamp or cornfield somewhere below the Mason-Dixon. Turns out Elvin grew up on a farm in Iowa, which is Southern compared only to Minnesota, Manitoba and the North fucking Pole.

That’s marketing for ya, which I think is a lot of the problem with Bloomfield’s legacy — a legacy his old running buddy Al Kooper has done a lot to burnish.

I plan to follow Kooper’s lead, not to mention the direction provided by the trusty Nate and Ed Ward. The Kooper-curated box set is still quite affordable, and there’s a ton of other Bloomfield material out there.

Next time I go to Chicago...meanwhile, stay tuned for my Frank Marino take in relation to Bloomfield.

I clearly channeled this week’s episode well ahead of time, in fact just in time for the hellish days and I did not know it was coming.

I ain’t kidding—two weeks ago I created a gift for my two hip-hop listenin’ sons, a gift inspired in part by Luther “Luke Skywalker/Skywalker/Uncle Luke/Luke” Campbell. 

I don’t want to spoil their Christmas from me in case they are reading this, so I’ll just say the name of Luther’s crew has remained with me all these years, as has the name of that crew’s album (see: the headline above).

What I either forgot or never knew is Luther was party to a case that appeared before the U.S. Supreme Court and established that a commercial parody can qualify as “fair use.” He and the rest of 2 Live Crew also had an obscenity ruling for their album “As Nasty As They Wanna Be” reversed by the Eleventh U.S. Court of Appeals.

He also had to pay some dollars to George Lucas for adopting the Skywalker name (if not persona). (Why didn’t he just go for the trifecta and also call himself Luke Lukather and perhaps sample that beat from “Rosanna,” creating the possibility of at least one if not two more pop culture/celebrity lawsuits [from Toto’s guitarist and the woman who inspired the song {I’ve now way over-used the word “also” and every kind of parenthetical character available in my iPhone.}]).

What this has to do with the evolution of Hip-Hop is, well, as Nate already noted in miniseries episode 1, the form pulls everything in.

What Nate noted this week and that I’d begun to notice is a pattern is that the form, when it evolves, almost invariably stamps itself locally and regionally as well (starting with the Bronx).

Paul Trynka’s epic description of Stooges Ron and Scott Asheton ranks right up there with the other great rock ‘n’ roll tracts (if there are any), so eloquent is its delivery, at the prompting of Mr. Wilcox hisself in the Iggy Pop discussion that was reheated this week.

The phrase “sheer dumb magnificence” jumps out of the speakers like evidence of the atom’s splitting, and I’m glad Nate wasn’t in the same room as Trynka lest some of his garments were irradiated by the phrase’s brilliance as it came out if the author’s mouth. (That circuits were not blown from hither to ton is one more Stooges-related miracle).

The Ashetons represent that rarest of occurrences, a pair of brothers in the same band whose combustibility does not cancel each other out or water everything down. The catalyst in this case was one Jim Osterberg, who channeled the chain reaction he beheld betwixt those two Bros (Ron on guitar, Scott on drums) and helped to create, along with Dave Alexander on bass, a true rock ‘n’ roll archetype: Iggy and the Stooges.

From the instant they came into being, life for many a bonehead in the decades to follow would never be the same.

If you’ve ever played in a rock band, you will immediately recognize the chain reaction as described by Trynka.

If you’re like me — once a drummer with an outfit along this line but surely not near as great — you will smile and perhaps nod with the familiar bell the Asheton’s antics ring;  you may even have a flashback to that moment when you knew it was time for Plan B (finish college, find a job, etc.) because you knew you could not go on like this.  

And, also like me, you may even shudder with the recurring realization that you are one lucky fucker indeed.

Did the PMRC help Gangsta Rap give Hip-Hop its first megastars and its first billionaire performer? I doubt it, but the PMRC didn’t slow ‘em down, either.

My wife — who has never listened to Hip-Hop — follows Ice T on Twitter and she ain’t following anyone from the PMRC.

I wonder who from the PMRC has a Twitter account, even? I’m not doing the research ‘cause I’m not looking up Tipper Gore’s Twitter handle.

But I will ask my wife if she remembers the PMRC and whether the group’s efforts helped her raise two sons by herself. I’ll correct this post if she tells me “yeah.”

I’m going to predict the opposite because I do not believe “Explicit Lyrics” make the man, though I can see Alexei’s point about the misogynist language his parents encountered with their students.

Had my parents forced me to listen to Gospel, music, would that make me (more of) a Christian?

This episode of “Let It Roll” bespeaks that tension between reality vs mythology, real street vs pretend street, Lynyrd Skynyrd vs everyone else (even vs the Sex Pistols led by the Dickensian Mr Lydon...who’s winning that brawl, Ronnie or Trump-lovin’ Johnny???) circa 1976.

Few artistic myths are as potent as the outlaw musician—Robert Johnson, Brian Jones, Tupac and Biggie...Deaths by Misadventure. . .

Did Run-DMC eschew laces on their Superstars ‘cause that’s how they do it in prison? Alexei’s mom said so, and that had the intended effect.

When a “progressive”-minded hippie suggested to Eugene’s mother that he transfer to a public school, she demurred and Eugene continued on in his path to Stanford.

When I told my mom I might want to transfer to the local Commuter U from Athens to pursue my hard rock drumming career (no music going on in Athens in the late ‘70s, don’t ya know), she suggested I could find a place to stay besides her house as part of that move.

A strong, smart mother’s guidance can go a long way in the life of a strapping young lad. It certainly has done so in my two sons’ lives (their mom had done most of the heavy lifting raising them up before I got to ‘em).