Steve Hooker's guitar is on fire - again

England's Steve Hooker is every bit the genuine specimen. No pretender could boast his resume. In addition to producing a decades-spanning body of vibrant, sprawling solo endeavors boasting imperial bearing, he's gigged and recorded with pegged personages like Robert Gordon, Wilko Johnson, Boz Boorer, Johnny Thunders, and Levi Dexter.

It's not difficult to dissect the many-sired Rock'n'Roll roar that inspires earthy abandon and nocturnal, hip grinding hours. Blues, Country, and Rhythm and Blues each play prominently. Easier still to throw oneself into their combined mesmeric grasp. 

But wrenching such storms from six strings, with the blood familiarity Steve so obviously possesses, is hardly on common offer. And only the emphatically cubish would turn from opportunities to savor.

Last year, Steve remastered 2013's Smokin' Guitar. It's what those hip to the tip anticipated from the RockabillyBluesSoulMan, and his Stripped-Down Stompin' Band: gut punches from rugged Rock'n'Roll territory. A corrupting beat-trove of slide-guitared dirty fun, the way taboo Rock'n'Roll (in its varied and thorny/horny countenances) sounded in its early years. And the way that it can still come over.

"I can't play in any other way than what's true to me," Steve once confessed.

Bracing and hard-lashed, "Wolf Farm (Grange Aux Loops)," "Gospel Ground," "Steel Sedan," and "Wicked Blues" are but half of the disc's stouthearted examples of what ensues when someone with true, roots-music heart and soul plugs in.

All songs bounce and drive, crazily cool, sliding and swaying wonderfully in coarsely-grained rudeness. The rollicking blast is packed out by harmonica swipes bespeaking real-world experience. 

Think of basic, guitared-juggernauts of the sort the Rolling Stones gave up, back in the day. Or early Faces.

Steve agreed with that assessment, in years-ago conversation. "I think we all drink from the same well. Obviously the Stones draw on the whole history of American music and growing up in the fifties with the development of television. I was influenced by the same things."

"I guess this type of Rhythm 'n' Blues hybrid music became 'Mid Atlantic' when I was a kid - I can't and don't want to play or sing anything except what is deep inside of me.

"For instance I don't often refer to cars, automobiles or motorcycles except in passing because I don't have a drivers license. I wouldn't sing that I was born Mississippi - but I might write about a girl in Tennessee or Las Vegas because I just spoke to her by email. It's all around us."

Steve digs that it isn't only the raucous sound but the brash attitude, the way our music makes you live and love and yell and dance and feel -- inside and out -- that won't ever go away. Can't ever go away.

He won't let it.

Videos: "Wolf Farm (Grange Aux Loops)"    "Gospel Ground"   "Steel Sedan"   "Wicked Blues (Non-Filter)"

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