Robert Johnson is generally regarded as the Blues man with the most mysterious and sinister history. He’s guy who claimed that he supposedly sold his soul to the Devil in return for the ability to play and sing the Blues like no one else. Partly as a result of this story and partly because his music was really quite remarkable he has evolved over the last 40 or so years into the epitome of the pre-War Blues man legend. In some senses he has become more myth than real artist and the modern  Blues World has encouraged this transformation. But…

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So we left the MC5, one of the most politically extreme, wild and outrageously loud bands of all time, in mid 1970 (see ABON 0185), having been dumped by the label that had released their landmark live debut album, with their manager in jail, being constantly harassed by the police, labelled by the FBI as the most dangerous band ever to roam the Earth, struggling manfully to capture their raw live sound in the studio and consigned by Atlantic, their new label, to record their next album with debutant producer and man who would soon announce that ‘I’ve seen rock and roll’s future and its name is Bruce Springsteen’, Jon Landau. What could possibly go wrong?

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The MC5 at their peak were the probably the most genuinely threatening of the American Proto-Punk/Garage bands of the late 60s and early 70s.

The Velvet Underground could tell disturbing stories, sometimes even based on real life experiences, but Lou Reed’s stories were always that – wonderfully told, detached, stories.

The Stooges’ main man, Iggy, was an onstage, dangerously out of control, force of nature, but his self-abusive live performances were always more disturbing spectacle than threat to the audience. In fact Iggy’s audiences in the early days were often more threatening than what was happening on stage.

In contrast, the MC5 were, at times, genuinely scary.

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When we last met ESG, in 1981, they consisted of four Scroggins sisters and family friend Tito (see ABON 0182).

There haven’t been many bands in the history of popular music that have contained four siblings. And the chances of any band, containing siblings or not, surviving 20 years these days are pretty slim.

However, ESG managed to cheat the odds and stay around for over 25. But it would probably have been too much to expect the band’s line-up to have remained completely the same throughout those 25 or so years or to even still contain all four Scroggins sisters that had been there at the beginning.

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Blind Willie McTell Volume 4 …and last for a while.

At the beginning of the 20^th Century, vast gangs of, mainly black, workers were employed in the pine growing areas of Northern Texas to siphon off resin and distil it into turpentine.  

Not only was it dirty and dangerous work, it was also pretty lonely as the logger camps were usually buried deep in the woods, far from the nearest town.

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ESG were originally a group of four teenage sisters, Renee, Valerie, Marie and Deborah Scroggins and their friend, Tito Libran, who were encouraged to form a band by Ma Scroggins in order to keep her girls off the streets, and out of the gangs, of their native Brooklyn.

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