Musicians play music, and when they play, they don't begin something so much as they pick something back up that was there all along, and music expands like a delta this way, an unbreakable loop that doesn't begin or end but just rolls onward like a wave. And rock & roll as an American musical form is very much like a delta, collecting elements from jazz, blues, country, gospel, R&B, show tunes, and whatever else was floating around into a high-charged, rambunctious music that defined and drove pop culture across the backwaters of the 20th century and into the 21st…
The Blues Masters series, much to Rhino`s credit, adopts an expansive definition of blues, allowing the likes of Count Basie, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Muddy Waters and even Louis Prima admission. There is none of the purist`s quibbling over strict 12-bar form or the relative significance of prewar and postwar styles.
What Rhino delivers instead is the blues in all its myriad guises. This music is old and new, black and white, acoustic and electric, folksy and jazzy, performed by women and men, and yet it is all still blues at its core.
Before Wigwam enter the land of the progressive they spent a few songs more in the Psychedelic vein with blues rock influences in many ways not unlike Pink Floyd. Finland's Wigwam were an original act from the start lead by Britan's Jim Pembroke's song writing and Jukka Gustavson's organ grinds and compositions. "Hard 'N' Horny" plays actually like 2 separate albums or in this case as 2 distinct sides. The album's first side clearly belongs to Gustavson (credited will all side one song penmanship) with his prog-blues organ drenched pieces and clever song writing drawing on genres of psych/jazz/avant art rock. In total contrast the second half of this album rests in the hands of Jim Pembroke (again all songs credit on side 2 to Pembroke) in a sadly forgotten, side-long, conceptual psychedelic masterpiece about some middle aged fellow named Henry.