Artist: Otis Rush
Genre(s):
Blues
Rock
Discography:
Door to Door
Year: 2007
Tracks: 14
Cold Day in Hell
Year: 1993
Tracks: 10
Mourning in the Morning
Year: 1992
Tracks: 11
Lost in the Blues
Year: 1991
Tracks: 1
Professor Blues Review, Montreux, 1986
Year: 1986
Tracks: 9
Otis Rush and Friends
Year: 1986
Tracks: 12
I Can't Quit You Baby
Year:
Tracks: 16
Double Trouble
Year:
Tracks: 13
Any Place I'm Going
Year:
Tracks: 11
Breaking into the R&B Top Ten his identical number one time out in 1956 with the startlingly intense dull blues "I Can't Quit You Baby," left-hander guitar player Otis Rush subsequently established himself as 1 of the chancellor bluesmen on the Chicago circuit. He remains so today.
Hurry is often credited with beingness one of the architects of the West side guitar style, on with Magic Sam and Buddy Guy. It's a cloudy honour, since Otis Rush played clubs on Chicago's South side merely as often during the sound's late-'50s incubation menstruum. Nevertheless, his esteemed position as a meridian Chicago pioneer is eternally assured by the sonority, vibrato-enhanced guitar work that remains his stock-in-trade and a tortured, super-intense vocal delivery that tin force the hairs on the gage of your neck upwards in dumb salute.
If talent alone were the recipe for widespread achiever, Rush would presently be Chicago's ahead blues creative person. But destiny, hazard, and the guitarist's possess idiosyncrasies have conspired to hold him back on several occasions when chance was virtually mendicancy to be recognised.
Rush came to Chicago in 1948, met Muddy Waters, and knew right away what he wanted to do with the breathe of his living. The omnipresent Willie Dixon caught Rush's act and signed him to Eli Toscano's Cobra Records in 1956. The frighteningly intense "I Can't Quit You Baby" was the maid endeavour for both artist and label, streaking to number sestet on Billboard's R&B chart.
His 1956-58 Cobra bequest is a splendid one, imposing by the Dixon-produced minor key masterpieces "Two-fold Trouble" and "My Love Will Never Die," the nails-tough "Leash Times a Fool" and "Keep on Loving Me Baby," and the rhumba-rocking classical "All Your Love (I Miss Loving)." Rush ostensibly dotted off the latter tune in the motorcar en route to Cobra's West Roosevelt Road studios, where he would cut it with the nucleus of Ike Turner's jazz band.
Later Cobra closed up shop, Rush's recording fortunes mostly floundered. He followed Dixon all over to Chess in 1960, newspaper clipping some other graeco-Roman (the stunning "So Many Roads, So Many Trains") earlier moving on to Duke (one sole exclusive, 1962's "Prep"), Vanguard, and Cotillion (there he cut the underrated Mike Bloomfield-Nick Gravenites-produced 1969 album Bereavement in the Morning, with yeoman help from the house calendar method of birth control division in Muscle Shoals).
Distinctive of Rush's fearful hazard was the unnerving saga of his Proper Place, Wrong Time album. Laid down in 1971 for Capitol Records, the goliath label inexplicably took a top on the externalize despite its obvious excellence. It took another five years for the put to emerge on the diminutive Bullfrog label, blunting Rush's momentum once once again (the album is now useable on HighTone).
An spotty only worthwhile 1975 put for Delmark, Cold Day in Hell, and a host of self-colored live albums that more often than not sound very similar kept Rush's gilt-edged name in the market place to some extent during the seventies and '80s, a distressing period for the legendary southpaw.
In 1986, he walked out on an expensive sitting for Rooster Blues (Louis Myers, Lucky Peterson, and Casey Jones were among the assembled sidemen), complaining that his amplifier didn't sound right and thereby scuttling the entire fancy. Alligator picked up the rights to an album he had through overseas for Sonet primitively called Troubles, Troubles. It turned out to be a prophetical claim: much to Rush's chagrin, the firm overdubbed keyboardist Lucky Peterson and chopped out some masterly guitar work when it reissued the set as Lost in the Blues in 1991.
Finally, in 1994, the calling of this Chicago blues fable began travelling in the right focussing. Ain't Enough Comin' In, his first studio record album in 16 days, was released on Mercury and complete up topping many vapors critics' year-end lists. Produced spotlessly by John Porter with a skintight lot, Rush roared a coif of nada only covers -- only did them all his way, his hot guitar consistently to the fore.
Once again, a series of personal problems threatened to end Rush's long-overdue return to national jut ahead it got turned the base. But he's been in super form in late days, fronting a tight band that's solely sympathetic to the guitarist's sizzling approach shot. Rush sign-language with the House of Blues' fledgeling record pronounce, instantaneously granting that ship's company a large dose of believability and place setting himself up for some other career push. It still may not be too previous for Otis Rush to assume his rightful throne as Chicago's blues billie Jean Moffitt King.
