the polydactyl prince: hound dog taylor
Let’s not bury the lead: the late great bluesman Hound Dog Taylor was born polydactyl - not a winged dinosaur, but a man with six fingers on each hand. I would not lie to you. Actually, I would totally lie to you, but you can verify this particular tidbit easily, and I’ll even provide some disturbing photographic proof below. Truth is stranger, once again. You can actually see one bonus finger peeking out on the cover (left) and back of Beware of the Dog. He’s like a blues musician as dreamed up by Stan Lee. So here’s to Hound Dog Taylor! The man who single-handedly gives two middle fingers to polite blues! The man who puts a little extra digital in his analog style!
Otherwise, the basic word on Hound Dog Taylor is: terrific show, raw blues, relatively easy to distinguish him from, say, Mark Knopfler. Even easier to distinguish him from a fruitbat, if you’re not in the mood for a challenge at all today. Taylor played down and dirty slide blues guitar, and one song sounds pretty much like the next, and one album sounds pretty much like the next. He even looks exactly the same on all four albums; either they’re all from the same photo session or there was a serious lack of creativity in the album photo game in the early seventies. The template: Hat, guitar tucked under arm, butterfly collar, big smile. (The one above is the biggest departure: no smile.) Nevertheless, I collected them all - not hard to do, there’s only four - because the man is a party on a disc. He executed a brief, bright burn across the Chicago blues landscape between 1971, when his first Alligator release came out, and 1975, when he died of cancer. He’s near the top of my “people I wish I saw live” list.
Internet rumor has it that both Anne Boleyn and Winston Churchill were born polydactyl. And it’s a fact that the Marlins pitcher Antonio Alfonseca played with some extras. The polydactys walk among us! And, to return to our subject, one of them was a born houserocker. (Possibly two: Internet rumor also has it that Anne Boleyn played a wicked “Smokestack Lightning.”)
If you do get into Hound Dog, there are two more people to hear as soon as possible: Elmore James, Taylor’s obvious predecessor and one of the all-time slide blues greats, and the lesser-known J.B. Hutto, who played with a band called the Hawks, and issued the phenomenal Hawk Squat in 1968.
Finally, we have to mention that Hound Dog sounds, in his priceless drunken stage patter, almost exactly like Eddie Murphy’s father from Delirious. You be the judge. You be the jury, too, and the bailiff - you be an entire courtroom, I’m busy:
(NSFW, of course, this is early Eddie Murphy:)
And here’s the showstopper:
