A question: What exactly is a blues ballad? Can anyone out there help me with this? I first heard the term some years ago during the terrific video that Donald Fagen did about the influence of blues on his songwriting, when he compared his use of major seven chords in a blues form to "blues ballads done by Bobby 'Blue' Bland". I'll have to find the video (that's right - I have it on VHS) before I can double-check the accuracy of the quotation I just gave or provide the correct title of the video, but I think that was the gist of it. And the Wikipedia entry was OK, but not entirely convincing. However it did hip me to an amazing Fats Domino song that I hadn't heard before, called "Every Night About This Time", which you have to check out (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZpJmHldX0s).

And the quandary also got me thinking about other possible examples, such as the hugely under-appreciated Stones tune, "I Got the Blues" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgF-PRY96Is&playnext=1&list=PLFCC93639C9A06912). The song is also a good example of what happens when Jagger and Richards really get down to working together. Here's hoping they do it again soon.

In retrospect, much as I enjoyed Keith's autobiography (Life), certain things about his thinking keep on bugging me, particularly the way he sort of treats Mick as if he was a by-stander while they were making their great albums of the early seventies. Of course, you know that there's an underlying respect there, but for whatever reason he does slag him pretty hard throughout the book. My point in this post is this: what Keith was to rock and roll guitar, Mick was to rock and roll singing, no more or less. And people that don't think that his contribution to the band (and music, in general) was the equivalent of Keith's (or Charlie's) are not hearing things accurately. Try singing along with "Ventilator Blues" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_l0X1w8a7D8) or "Let It Loose" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrCiKD-cBvo) if you don't believe me. Mick's experience as a serious blues student and instrumentalist (Keith does give credit to his harmonica playing - but he's an excellent guitarist as well) allowed him to find melodic material and phrasings that were much more sophisticated than most people (including Keith, apparently) realize. Here are the lyrics to the album, arguably the greatest in rock 'n' roll history, that contains the classic tracks mentioned above: http://dougscripts.com/itunes/pdf/examplepdf.pdf. (You'll need them to sing along. Try it. Seriously.)