Chris Robinson News

"Roots" is a term that gets thrown around quite a bit in music, particularly for those bands digging into its most cavernous tradition. In the case of the North Mississippi Allstars, that concept just happens to bear more significance than usual.

In the early 1920s a primal, howling sound shot out of the Mississippi Delta, bound in old-time spirituals and preached by a philandering virtuosi fugitive from divine justice. Marinated in moonshine, tempered by struggle, expressing itself with a polymorphous perversity that made even the most vulnerable plea bristle with terse sexual aggression, it would sharpen itself to a point and puncture the collective American musical consciousness — a small leak that set off one vast wave of stylistic change.

As that evolution occurred, another blues mutation began to take place back in the rural Mississippi swampland outside of Memphis. Discarding intricate chord changes and building on the sparse rhythmic directness borrowed heavily from the fife-and-drum tradition, this bastardization eventually known as Hill Country Blues was riff driven, droney and hypnotic, a volatile amalgam of eros and death drive that synthesized the physical and spiritual in a way that manifested itself as a kind of whorehouse confessionalism.

In retrospect, much of it runs into a haze of benders and back-porch jam sessions centered on a basket of shared songs, familial heirlooms which offered a standardized reflection in which the tradition could view its evolution. The result was a collection of intimate music that would come to revolve around communal blues haunts like Junior Kimbrough's Juke Joint, closets full of sweat and smoke that crushed that collaborative electricity into combustion.

When Junior's burned down in the late '90s, as if mourning the loss of its founder, it left a collection of musical moments special enough to bely the usual short life span. The patriarchs of the scene were bluesmen like Otha Turner, Fred McDowell, John Hurt, and eventually R.L Burnside and Kimbrough — figures that traced their musical roots back to the sound's primordial ooze, either in spirit or in cases like Burnside learning his chops from Muddy Waters and his neighbor Fred McDowell. Point is, there was a linear thread that ran through the whole thing, a blues collective with its own insular warmth and identity.

People would eventually call it "Hill Country Blues." When Fred McDowell died, among those at his funeral was Jim Dickinson — a savvy local producer and session musician who had collaborated with figures like Duane Allman, The Rolling Stones and Ry Cooder. With him was his wife, Mary, pregnant with their first child, Luther, who was attending his first of what would be many childhood gatherings of the Hill Country elite. Soon after Luther came Cody. For the eldest of the two, the event was a fitting prelude to a childhood running around among a modernized class of blues icons and listening to Black Flag and Husker Du records.

Soon, the two brothers formed a band.

Retaining that Hill Country core, The Dickinsons infused the sound with their collective post-punk sensibility and the funk-laden gospel influence of bassist Chris Chew, filtering the whole concoction through a psychedelic lens. They got their first real gig backing their extended musical family at The Dixie Fred Festival, and — as if discarding the inevitability of independence — called themselves The North Mississippi Allstars.

___

Eight years later, Luther Dickinson sits in a cramped dressing room in the back of New York's Irving Plaza, rolling his own cigarettes with the natural placidity manifested exclusively by therapists and in parts of the deep south. He slinks back easily into his chair, nodding in solemn agreement with a thought he's just had.

"You know what it is?" he asks, looking up. "It's a kind of primitive modernism, that's what I like in music."

It's an apt maxim for a guitarist who will take the stage in a few hours to inject The Dirty Dozen Brass Band's New Orleans take on the traditionalist Bluegrass revival "I'll Fly Away" with a "Purple Rain" crescendo, dancing the vocal tambour of his slide guitar work merrily over the ensuing chaos. Like any good modernist, Dickinson is necessarily a nostalgic, and who can blame him. After all, he finds himself in the unique position of being able to talk about the late '90s as if it was a watershed moment in music, as if it stood up to the sense of meaning and place that drapes itself over his remembrances of the period with the same hippie ebullience that liberatingly fills the spaces of the band's sound.

Dickinson talks about Junior's the way that Robbie Robertson might talk about the basement tape sessions or Mickey Hart would the festival express, stringing together small memories that contain the feeling of heartbreak, humor, and purpose with which people usually describe some intangible moment that usually doesn't last.

"It was amazing," he says, "Otha was making records and touring, RL was making records and touring. It was like the Blues explosion meets The Beastie Boys. Junior's every Sunday night..." He pauses, shaking his head. "Man, it was so amazing, because whole families were there, whole families of musicians. But it was always about moving forward, too. Different things would make me feel good about what we were doing. I remember Junior's son Dave. He would do 'All Night Long' and just drive women crazy. And he'd do it for like ten minutes, and then he'd just reach back and crank his amp up all the way and just go, freak out. He'd sound like Prince or Jimi Hendrix. I would see things like that, and it would make me feel good about what all of us were doing collectively as a second generation."

He calls Turner one of his "greatest mentors," and was able to offer his own thanks in producing the then 90-year-old patriarch's debut album, "Everybody Hollerin' Goat." While it would take most acts a career to jam that composite pathos of history, innovation, progeny and communal exchange into a meaningfully realized experience, the Allstars managed to come close in their recent "Live at Bonnaroo" release, detailing the band's show-stealing 2004 set at the Tennessee music festival, which boasted acts ranging from The Dead and Steve Winwood to improv monarchs Medeski Martin and Wood and Trey Anastasio.

That afternoon saw the band's original lineup, complete with part-time core member Duwayne Burnside, joined by his father R.L., brothers Gary and Cody, Jim Dickinson, and the Rising Fife and Drum Band, consisting of Turner's grandchildren. Widespread Panic's Jo Jo Herman also joined in, as well as ex Black Crowes frontman Chris Robinson. The entire group united under the banner of "The North Mississippi Hill Country Revue."

The set pinballed wildly from reverential nods to McDowell (a searing version of "Shake 'em on Down"), Burnside ("Po Black Maddie, "Snake Drive") and Turner ("Station Blues") to modernized NMA originals like Cody's "Be So Glad" — a game of musical hot potato between children resisting the legacy that is theirs by right and musical parents who, like any other kind, wanted more for their sons than they had for themselves. Luther crouched down next to one of the drums, bathing in the reverberations with a sheepish grin as if regressing like a middle-aged man under the table grabbing at passing feet. Burnside wore a hat which read "Retired" and was ushered in on a throne, proclaiming in his hangover drawl, "These are my sons! They're doin' alright! Layin' it down!" The eldest Dickinson sang the Delta jewel "Down in Mississippi" with the ferocity of a cultural anthem. In the mid-July Tennessee heat, things must have felt a lot like home, minus the fact that this particular backyard had about 80,000 people in it.

"Our dad, it was so hot that day. He fainted right after the show, just passed out," Dickinson recalls with a grin. "We were supposed to take a group picture, but we just got out of there and took him to the hotel. But he woke up in the pickup truck as we were going down that back road, and he said, 'Well, I'm not the showman I used to be, I should have passed out on stage.'"

Having a producer as a father isn't a fortuity that's been entirely neglected. Since first uniting in '96, the Allstars have roped in two Grammy nominations for Best Contemporary Blues album, ironically a titular amalgam of the nostalgia and genre crazes that drive the elder Dickinson up the wall. Neither hit pay dirt, but with a system that shuns 'Let it Be' for an album by Three Dog Night, sometimes it's really the thought that counts. Either way, the "contemporary" was a step in the right direction.

The first nomination came for their debut album, "Shake Hands with Shorty," based on the Burnside's expression for relieving himself and built around a collection of reinterpretations. The second came for "51 Phantom," dubbed by one writer as "manic cottonfield psychedelia." Underscored by the coiled anarchist hostility remaining from a dormant punk obsession, both albums sounded raucous and undecided, the precise energy, in a benevolent twist of fate, that a blues community was screaming for while being embalmed with PBS specials. "Polaris" appeared soon after, dipping the Hill Country sound into a surprisingly pop-conscious stew, while recalling Electric Ladyland in its juxtaposition of intimate roominess and vast airy space.

The band's upcoming release, "Electric Blue Watermelon," marks a return to the in-family production scheme that Dickinson unflinchingly calls his "life's work," a result of the same emotional struggle that he says bore "Polaris."

"When Junior died, and especially when Otha died a few years ago, it destroyed me — it made me rethink who I was, what I was meant to be doing, and what we represent. I think it's a reflection of what the answers to those questions were. We've talked a bit about the blues, but we're a younger generation and it's just rock 'n' roll, we're just a rock 'n' roll band, and I think this is a great rock record, I really do. Our father worked on this one with us again, and he did a masterful job with it. He was proud, because it was a continuation of his life's work, and extension of his vision."

___

Later that night the band opens its Irving Plaza set with a bruising treatment of "51 Phantom," layering the surprisingly coarse growl of Dickinson's lyrics over the bare-bones hostility of his brother's drum work. It's a caustic wakeup call, which segues easily into "Po Black Maddie," an epic sonic tour through the band's collective consciousness.

"Po Black Maddie got no," Dickinson moans, "change in clothes." The intervening fill — quick, dirty and impertinent, like a slap on a passing waitress' rear — might as well have said, "Damn sure don't." Somewhere in Mississippi, you could almost hear Burnside laughing his cagey coal miner's laugh.

Dickinson might be a rock musician, but he's a blues guitarist by nature and instinct, necessarily predisposed to constructing an instrumental voice; managing to produce one, as it happens, that you can pick out in a crowd, a call and response dialect that veers from viscous, syrupy drone to kineticized lap pedal steel whine to snapping back a yo-yo solo with the safety of those guttural Hill Country sneerings.

For the encore, The Allstars are joined by lap steel prodigy Robert Randolph, forming a semi-reunion of the trio (Luther, Randolph, and keyboard virtuoso John Medeski) that released the myth accruing sacred steel record The Word, which played no small role in Randolph's swiftly ascending success. With the elder of the Dickinson brothers sporting his longtime friend's trademark derby, the two exchange playful, fraternal licks as Cody works through an extended romp on his now infamous "electric washboard."

"We always say, 'World Boogie is coming,'" Dickinson had told me earlier, "and what that means to us is that black blues culture and crazy white boys like us just blending in and partying. That's what Junior's was like. In the heyday there would be a room full of beautiful underage girls dancing with these gnarly old country dudes," he laughed, "and that's what it's all about, in a way." Behind them, The Rising Star Fife and Drum Band beat away ecstatically, as if to reassure the band of an idea they want to remember.

"The last song on the new record is an old recording of Cody and me with Otha and his band," Luther had told me earlier. "At the end of the song, Otha's playing fife and we're playing with him, and he goes, 'It's all on y'all now. Y'all do whatever you want, it's all on y'all now.' And back then, man, we didn't think anything of it. But when I heard that played back a couple of days ago, it killed me. It just killed me."