A step in the right direction - much better production, savvier song selection, including a few snappy originals, and the five-piece Roomful of Blues horn section in staunch support. The guitarist's Magic Rockers include keyboardist Ron Levy, who would go on to produce Johnson's Bullsye Blues output.
Luther "Guitar Junior" Johnson was a blues guitarist with an impressive résumé, backing Muddy Waters, Magic Sam, and John Lee Hooker before he found fame on his own, earning a following for his soulful vocal style and incisive guitar work. A solid performer in the Chicago style, Johnson found his greatest success while working out of New England, with 1990's I Want to Groove with You and 1992's It's Good to Me capturing his impassioned attack and wiry soloing…
Johnson's third and final album for producer Ron Levy's Bullseye Blues diskery is every bit as spellbinding as the prior pair. Whether fronting his latest batch of Magic Rockers or going it alone, Johnson is totally convincing.
Luther "Guitar Junior" Johnson was a blues guitarist with an impressive résumé, backing Muddy Waters, Magic Sam, and John Lee Hooker before he found fame on his own, earning a following for his soulful vocal style and incisive guitar work. A solid performer in the Chicago style, Johnson found his greatest success while working out of New England, with 1990's I Want to Groove with You and 1992's It's Good to Me capturing his impassioned attack and wiry soloing. Latter-day efforts like 2001's Talkin' About Soul showed he'd lost none of his swagger with the passage of time, and 2020's Won't Be Back No More was an intimate acoustic set that captured the guitarist at his most personal.
Another barn-burner mixing the guitarist's West-side roots with soul and blues shadings to present some of the fieriest contemporary blues on the market. Saxist Gordon Beadle and keyboardist Joe Krown distinguish themselves behind Johnson.
Now this is more like it. Johnson and his New England-based Magic Rockers sizzle the hide off the genre with tough West Side-styled grooves redolent of Johnson's Chicago upbringing but up-to-the-minute in their execution. With this set, Johnson fully came into his own as a recording artist.
On the cover of this album you can see a picture of New York taken in Hoboken, New Jersey where we recorded these tracks. To me it represents the beauty of a familiar place seen from a different perspective. I come from a small town in Austria called Judenburg. If my family when I moved to the next bigger city, Graz, it felt like the navel of the world. Graz is considered provincial for the Viennese.