Archive Review: Seasick Steve’s Hubcap Music (2013)

Bluesman “Seasick” Steve Wold is an interesting character by any measure. Leaving his California home as a teenager, Wold traveled across country by train, living the hobo life while looking for work. Throughout the 1950s and early ‘60s, he drifted across the Southeast and Southwest U.S. working as a farm hand, a cowboy, and a carnie before he picked up the guitar and began playing his own unique style of country-blues. He ended up in Europe, where he made a living as a street busker playing for tips before he drifted into studio engineering and production where, most notably, he worked on the band Modest Mouse’s first couple of independent albums.

As Seasick Steve, Wold wouldn’t release his first album until 2004’s Cheap, which he recorded with the Norwegian duo the Level Devils. The critically-acclaimed Dog House Music, his solo debut, came out in 2006, and it was a New Year’s Eve appearance on fellow musician Jools Holland’s BBC television show that made Seasick Steve an overnight sensation in the U.K. Several albums and major festival appearances would follow throughout the late ‘00s, as would various awards and accolades. Seasick Steve made his debut for Jack White’s Third Man Records with 2011’s You Can’t Teach An Old Dog New Tricks, his fourth album in a row to go Gold or Platinum for U.K. sales. 

Seasick Steve’s Hubcap Music

Steve’s Hubcap Music, recorded with his longtime drummer Dan Magnusson, is named for one of the singer’s homemade guitars, his unusual instruments an appropriate match to his unique style of blues. The sound of an old tractor firing up introduces the jaunty “Down On the Farm,” a song not that far, stylistically, from Watermelon Slim’s similarly raw-boned roots-rock. With former Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones holding down a fat bottom end and Magnusson delivering a big percussive beat, Seasick Steve cranks out some scorching licks on his hubcap guitar while he sings the praises of life, well, “down on the farm” with a John Deere tractor, the smell of hay, shovels and other farming implements, including a chainsaw. In the hands of any other artist this might seem trite, but Steve and the band deliver a playful, down-home boogie-blues with plenty of chainsaw riffs that wouldn’t seem out of place on a Canned Heat album.

Seasick Steve’s “Self Sufficient Man” slows the tempo down a bit, rolling as it does into a languid rhythmic grind with plenty of Mississippi mud rubbed into the grooves. Steve delivers some stellar guitarplay in between the mesmerizing riffs, his two-man band following closely in the creation of a heady swamp-water stew, the entire performance sounding like electrified, amplified Delta blues gone to a dark place. By contrast, “Keep On Keepin’ On” has more of a North Mississippi Hill Country vibe, Steve and the crew delivering a rockin’, R.L. Burnside burning down the juke-joint styled performance, Jones’ showing his skills as a multi-instrumentalist with some fine banjo pickin’.

Freedom Road

Seasick Steve 

Mr. Jack White III joins in for the down ‘n’ dirty “The Way I Do,” the guitarist adding some serpentine fretwork behind Steve’s haunting vocals on a menacing Mississippi blues jam worthy of the late, great Junior Kimbrough. Although sporting minimalist lyrics, Steve punches the words home with dead-certain finality, Magnusson’s cannon-fire drumbeats loudly punctuating each word. White’s guitar lines are unpredictable, imaginative, and entirely in keeping with the odd direction of the song. “Purple Shadows” is a gentler listening experience, a soft-edged slow-tempo Americana ballad that features underrated Nashville singer Elizabeth Cook. Steve’s gruff, twangy Merle Haggard-styled vocals contrast nicely with Cook’s sweeter feminine tones, the song a tale of love gone wrong, or maybe just unrequited, the two voices intertwined to emphasize the lyrical heartbreak.

The cacophony that opens “Freedom Road” is just a taste of the song’s raw, reckless performance with Steve strangling his hubcap git for every last damn note, the Jones/Magnusson rhythmic shuffle luring the listener into complacency as Steve’s lyrics evoke memories of Robert Johnson’s hellhounds, his sonorous vocals drawling out each word before the song launches into a raucous freight-train boogie worthy of Savoy Brown. North Mississippi Allstars frontman Luther Dickinson layers on bucketloads of slinky guitar on the trance-blues romp “Home,” but it’s the full band treatment offered “Coast Is Clear” that really mixes things up. After ten tracks of delightfully greasy roots ‘n’ blues, the album-ending “Coast Is Clear” is a swerve, an inspired mix of Stax-styled Memphis soul with gospel overtones and a Southern rock heart. It’s an elegant performance, spiced with Jones’ stately Hammond organ riffs and Steve’s considered vocals, the song representing a new musical direction for the expat bluesman if Seasick Steve should ever want to travel further down this stylistic road.       

The Reverend’s Bottom Line

If you’ve yet to discover the immense charms of Seasick Steve, Hubcap Music is a great place to start. The album’s carefully-crafted mix of country-blues, roots-rock, and Southern soul is delivered with the fervor a true believer, the instrumentation is truly inspired, and the guest performances are understated yet significant. Hubcap Music is delightfully entertaining, with many musical layers and textures, Seasick Steve definitely an underrated talent worthy of your consideration. The Rev says “check it out!” (Third Man Records, released October 15, 2013)