Archive Review: Michael “Iron Man” Burks’ Show of Strength (2012)

The blues world lost a major talent in Michael “Iron Man” Burks when the 54-year-old guitarist died unexpectedly in May 2012. Burks had all but finished his fourth Alligator Records release at the time of his death, the posthumous release of Show of Strength a reminder that our time here is short, and we have to make the most of what time we have left…a philosophy that Burks evidently lived to his final day.

Burks earned his “Iron Man” nickname by delivering hours-long, physically-demanding performances night after night, his soulful vocals matched by a fierce, unique guitar style that would leave audiences breathless. A charismatic performer, nobody left a Michael Burks show without a smile on their face, and the artist would climb behind the wheel of his van and drive hundreds of miles to his next show. A true blue-collar bluesman, Burks was the real deal...something more than proven by what is sadly his final album.

Michael “Iron Man” Burks’ Show of Strength

Show of Strength opens with an icy cold riff that sounds like Eric Clapton channeling Albert Collins. “Count On You” is a perfect example of Burks’ melding of hard-edged blues and smooth-as-silk soul, the song’s title a deceptive play on words that masks the emotional anguish of the romantic betrayal laid out in the lyrics. Burks, a vastly underrated vocalist, does an unbelievable job of choking back the tears with fierce determination, the words punctuated by the wide slashes of colorful guitar that serve as a vehicle for the song’s anger and frustration. It’s an enormous performance, and while a talented band adds instrumental flourishes in the background – like Wayne Sharp’s ethereal keyboard notes – this is Burks’ show and he commands the spotlight.

While “Count On You” opens the door to Show of Strength with a mean uppercut, it’s by no means the only knockout punch the album has to offer. Burks’ original “Take A Chance On Me, Baby” is a deliberately-paced, slow-to-mid-tempo traditional blues plea, the musical equivalent of a controlled burn as Burks’ fiery vocals are matched by his scorching fretwork and a deep, loping groove that his longtime rhythm section of bassist Terrence Grayson and Chuck “Popcorn” Louden maneuver like a formula one race car. 

Cross Eyed Woman

The guitarist engages in a little call-and-response with the band on “Can You Read Between the Lines?” Burks’ vocals are a little more energetic here, mixing up Memphis soul and Southern rock atop a funky rhythm, his imaginative solos a little more Dixie-fried than usual, his fluid guitar lines echoing Duane Allman more than obvious influences like Albert King. If Burks looked towards the South for that performance, he seems to have looked across the ocean for “Cross Eyed Woman,” a muscular blues-rock barn-burner that sounds more like 1960s-era Free or Cream than like Burks’ typical traditional blues fare. 

Laying down some of the meanest slide-guitar licks that you’ve ever heard, Burks’ blustery performance on “Cross Eyed Woman” is supported by a truly malevolent instrumental backdrop, the band – especially Sharp’s Jon Lord-styled keyboard riffs – flexing like the first winds of a hurricane. The song’s long instrumental lead-out, complete with high-flying Burks solo, will thrill blues guitar fans everywhere, displaying the guitarist’s mastery of the form and knowledge of all facets of the blues.

Feel Like Going Home

After three albums with Alligator, Burks was coming into his own as a songwriter, and nowhere is this more evident than on the autobiographical “Little Juke Joint.” A slow-burning blues jam that benefits from Scott Dirks’ spirited harp playing, the song is based on Burks’ family’s Bradley Ferry Country Club juke-joint back home in Arkansas. Burks plays lively above a shuffling groove, flurries of notes hitting your ears like a boxer’s body-blows as the singer recalls good times – and bad – as he colorfully describes the beloved family establishment, warts and all. Another Burks co-write, “Since I Been Loving You,” is a hauntingly beautiful tale of love and betrayal delivered with a slow-dancing blues tempo, the guitarist’s anguished vocals complimented by his mournful guitar notes and Sharp’s sobbing keyboards. Burks’ textured solos here definitely add to the vibe of the song, his playing full of emotion and muted but apparent strength.

Show of Strength closes with a cover of country legend Charlie Rich’s “Feel Like Going Home,” the song taking on an eerie prescience in the wake of the guitarist’s unexpected passing. Burks delivers an incredible, gospel-tinged vocal performance above Roosevelt Purifoy’s tasteful, elegant piano arrangement. Burks’ voice sounds weary, ready to quit this world and prepared to accept the grace offered by the afterlife. His short guitar solos are perhaps, the best that Burks has ever put on tape – strong but not flashy, reverent but loudly vocal, drenched in mixed emotion and resolve, ready to accept the future whatever may come. It’s an incredibly moving and powerful gospel-blues performance by an enormously talented artist.        

The Reverend’s Bottom Line

To his credit, Alligator’s Bruce Iglauer, who co-produced Show of Strength with Burks, chose to leave the album as the two men had intended, as he says in the liner notes, “not as a memorial to a friend and bluesman gone, but as a living, breathing statement, sent straight from Michael’s heart and soul. Although Michael is not here, the music he recorded is indeed his show of his immense strength and spirit. It will live on, confirming forever his status as one of the greatest bluesmen of his generation.” 

The apex of a career cut short far too soon, Show of Strength is a career-making milestone of an album, which makes me all the angrier that it’s also the last music we’ll ever hear from the talented singer, songwriter, and guitarist. Throughout it all, Burks’ performance shines like a supernova, both his singing and guitar playing displaying great confidence, elegance, and melody, the man obviously pouring everything he had into Show of Strength. As a swansong, none could do better… (Alligator Records, released August 21, 2012)

Buy the CD from Amazon: Michael Burks’ Show of Strength

CD Review: Iron City Houserockers’ Blood On the Bricks (1981/2025)

By 1981, Pittsburgh’s favorite sons the Iron City Houserockers were increasingly viewed as old school rockers in a ‘new wave’ world. Pop stars like Olivia Newton-John, Diana Ross, and Kim Carnes ruled the U.S. charts and the AM airwaves while, on the other side of the pond, various flavors of  ‘new wave’ in the form Adam & the Ants, Duran Duran, Soft Cell, Human League, and the Police dominated U.K. charts as they prepared their assault on these shores, a siege made possible by the August launch of the MTV cable channel, which played British rock and pop videos almost exclusively until stateside labels got wise and jumped into the game.

Critically-acclaimed but commercially-challenged, previous IC Houserockers’ albums like 1979’s Love’s So Tough and the following year’s Have A Good Time (But Get Out Alive) provided an introduction to singer, songwriter, and guitarist Joe Grushecky, a street-smart ‘Steel City’ ruffian whose working class roots and insightful, poetic lyrics were backed by a tough-as-nails guitar-rock sound that, at the turn of the decade, was both passé and forward-thinking, presaging the ‘Heartland Rock’ of John Mellencamp and Steve Earle as well as the emerging superstardom of Bob Seger and Bruce Springsteen.

While the Cleveland International label that had released the band’s first two albums was trying to catch lightning in a bottle for a second time with a follow-up to singer Meat Loaf’s unexpected multi-Platinum™ hit Bat Out of Hell, Grushecky and the gang went straight to the label’s distributor, MCA Records, and finagled a deal that resulted in 1981’s Blood On the Bricks and 1983’s Cracking Under Pressure (for which MCA stupidly dropped the proud ‘Iron City’ from the band’s name). The Houserockers were shipped off to Los Angeles to work with producer and Memphis music legend Steve Cropper, whose work for Stax Records in the 1960s was the stuff of dreams.  

Iron City Houserockers’ Blood On the Bricks

Grushecky states in the reissue’s liner notes that he was writing best about what he knew, and it shows in Blood’s lyrics, which are personal and focused on the microcosm of life in the Steel City. Joe would later develop an insightful songwriting style that would make the personal universal – a sort of blue-collar blues – but you can see hints of this evolution in “Friday Night,” Blood’s opening track. A big, bold rocker with Gil Snyder’s tinkling keys and a boisterous rhythm track, the song borders on pop with an infectious chorus and an undeniable melody, and it’s sung from the perspective of the working-class guy waiting for the weekend so that he can cut loose. It’s a high-octane album-opener, and while Jim Horn’s mid-song sax solo edges up to Clarence Clemons’ turf, the late-closing squonk is a bit dissonant to my ears.

“Saints and Sinners” is one of my favorite Grushecky songs, a fantastic story-song that cuts a fine line between the two extremes of the title. A tragic tale of a Vietnam vet who’s gone off the rails and taken his family hostage, the lyrics are succinct, powerful, and poetic and supported by a solid vocal performance and screaming instrumentation. As Grushecky says in the liner notes, “those days weren’t too removed from the war. People my age all knew guys who went there and came back not quite the same.” The up-tempo soundtrack is unrelenting, the vox following a stark spoken/sung dynamic with plenty of silence and swelling instrumentation clashing for the moment.

A mid-tempo love song with some quirky instrumentation and vocal dynamics, “This Time the Night (Won’t Save Us)” is a Springsteen-esque romantic operetta  with moments of light instrumentation that didn’t land far from what the Cars had been playing (with some success), but with an undeniable, recognizable Houserockers feel. Cropper’s arrangement placed the song firmly in radio-ready territory, with a Southern-fried guitar solo from the Colonel to add gravitas, but it’s Grushecky’s sometimes distraught, sometimes regretful, but ultimately reluctantly accepting vocals that push the song over the line.

A Fool’s Advice      

The ballad “Be My Friend” was penned, jokes Joe in the liner notes, “to get some girls to come see us.” It’s a solid effort, Grushecky’s ragged, romance-weary vocals wrapping warmly around a plaintive yet earnest plea. The song could be considered a precursor to some of Grushecky’s later solo songs, a “proof of concept” that tough guys could be tender in the spirit of Otis Redding. A snappy drumbeat opens “No Easy Way Out,” a buoyant mid-tempo rocker with pop aspirations. Snyder’s underlying keyboards edge the performance close to a ‘new wave’ sound again – a conscious effort by Cropper to make the band more AM-friendly? – and while it’s an engaging enough song with grim, real-life lyrics, it’s inevitably just mid-album filler.

Much better is the following “No More Loneliness,” whose jaunty opening git licks and sparse harmonica swing like Graham Parker’s “Heat Treatment,” the song hewing closely to a R&B drenched, British pub-rock sound that is both energetic and refreshing. Grushecky’s vocals are light and effective, with greater range than most of the songs here, while the song’s fretwork flies high above a crackerjack rhythmic backdrop. A few well-placed horns embellish the performance while keyboards provide an instrumental undercurrent. The band gets back to basics with the gritty, forceful “Watch Out,” a street-smart slice of grimacing, dark-hued mid-tempo rock that rolls effortlessly into the album’s bruising title track.

“Blood On the Bricks” is another standout, a “ripped from the headlines” rocker with a raw, sparse soundtrack and strong lyrics that display Grushecky’s bluesy vocal style. The dynamic run-up to the song’s chorus, paired with Reisman’s mournful harmonica riffs, is simply exquisite while the backing instrumentation is restrained, not submissive. “A Fool’s Advice” closed the original LP, Snyder’s piano intro brushed away by a flurry of fierce guitar notes and Grushecky’s growled vox. A romantic ballad with muscle, the added horns are largely superfluous – Reisman’s devastating harmonica licks are all the texture the song needed. An unreleased bonus track, “Let the Boy Rock,” could have replaced “No Easy Way Out” in my opinion, the album outtake a rollicking honky-tonk rave-up with blazing horns, Jerry Lee-styled piano-pounding, and rockabilly-tinged guitar licks…a winner all around!         

“Bonus Bricks”

The bonus disc included with the album provides a real treat for Houserockers fanatics. Disc two kicks off with four live tracks from a 1981 performance at Inn-Square Men’s Bar in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Every one of ‘em is a banger, all from the Blood On the Bricks LP – “Watch Out,” “Saints and Sinners,” “Be My Friend,” and the album’s title track – and the performances in front of an enthusiastic crowd are so hot that one wishes they’d included the entire concert. The lengthy spoken intro to “Saints and Sinners” lulls you into a thoughtful complacency so you don’t realize that the backing instrumentation is gradually building to an electrifying crescendo when the guitars kick into overdrive and smack you upside the head.  

The live version of “Blood On the Bricks” is all muscle and sinew, Grushecky’s growled vox and edgy lyricism matched in ferocity by Eddie Britt’s flamethrower guitar and the deep resonant rhythm section of bassist Art Nardini and drummer Ned E. Rankin, while harmonica player Mark Reisman adds a bluesy vibe to the performance. The rest of disc two is comprised of demo tracks from the Blood sessions, with tentative early versions of album tracks like “This Time the Night (Won’t Save Us)” and “A Fool’s Advice” showcasing Grushecky’s evolving songwriting process. More interesting, though, are proto-versions of the poppy “Angels,” which wouldn’t appear on record until 1983’s Cracking Under Pressure, and “Jukebox Nights,” which evolved into “Blood On the Bricks.”      

The Reverend’s Bottom Line

I feel that there was a ton of opportunity lost with Blood On the Bricks when it was released. Cropper wasn’t a great choice to produce the Houserockers, and although he’s credited with helping the band firm up its song arrangements, some of his production choices are found lacking and contrary to the Houserockers’ bar-band-on-steroids aesthetic. Far too often, Cropper’s production is lacking in depth when a full Spector-esque approach (like Bruce Springsteen’s Born To Run) would have better suited the performances.  

MCA Records could have spiffed up “Angels” and released it as a single from the album; even in demo form, it’s a killer song that needed just a little more to make it radio-ready. Snyder’s keyboards would have fit right in with the sound of the early ‘80s and if the song wasn’t representative of the Houserockers’ ‘modus operandi’, well, neither was Blue Öyster Cult’s Top 40 hit “Burnin’ For You.” The album-opening “Friday Night” was the only single released from Blood On the Bricks (b/w “No Easy Way Out”), and while the song’s sparse, poppy arrangement isn’t miles away from “Angels,” it lacks the demo’s presence; “Angels” could have made for a dynamite, MTV-friendly promotional video.

Overall, Blood On the Bricks offers songs the equal of its preceding LPs, but the album’s lackluster production robbed the band of its streetwise gravitas. Grushecky and crew weren’t yet at the end of their rope, so the material still rocks with reckless abandon, and the live tracks display their strength in an unforgiving onstage environment. Grushecky’s songwriting skills were still growing and evolving into the master wordsmith he would become as a solo artist, and the band performed to the full extent of its considerable talents. Blood On the Bricks isn’t as impactful as Have A Good Time or Love’s So Tough, but it’s still a solid and entertaining album from a band that was always better on stage than in the studio, and still far above what almost anybody else was doing in rock music at the time. Grade: B+ (Omnivore Recordings, released March 28th, 2025)

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Archive Review: Bruce Springsteen's The Ghost of Tom Joad (1996)

Rock ‘n’ roll has long been the voice of the working man and woman. From the R&B rave-ups of Chuck Berry to John Fogerty’s finely-drawn songs to the Motor City anthems of Bob Seger and beyond, the music has reflected the blue collar worker in a way that even country and the blues has been unable. It has expressed the joy, the fears and the passions of the average American, and although it’s largely too “untrendy” these days to hit the hype-driven sales charts, ‘blue collar rock’ is still alive and well, a thriving milieu for a diverse breed of poets and prophets.

Bruce Springsteen’s The Ghost of Tom Joad

During the 1980s, Bruce Springsteen became the predominate voice of the working class, with rocking anthems like “Born In the U.S.A.” or the more introspective “My Hometown” championing the average man and woman and their cause. It was during this period of time that he experienced his greatest commercial success as an artist, and it was during this time that he began the process of political self-awareness that would eventually lead to The Ghost of Tom Joad. Touring the country endlessly during mid-decade, Springsteen began to get involved with “causes,” performing benefit shows for various organizations and donating some of his hard-earned, if newly found wealth to food banks and funds for laid-off workers (which is when he first crossed paths with Joe Grushecky).
 
The more politically-oriented of us among his fan base have waited for Springsteen to cut loose with a more radical lyrical perspective for years. With The Ghost of Tom Joad, Springsteen has made that artistic statement, phrasing it in the language of folk artists like Woody Guthrie and backing it with a sparse, minimal acoustic soundtrack that emphasizes the lyrics and creates an atmosphere as dark and desolate as the songs themselves often are. The last relic of a musical age almost a decade gone, Springsteen reinvents himself with this album, in a way that even his folksy Nebraska couldn’t. The album’s format as radical as the statement it makes. Nearly fifteen years into the ongoing destruction of the great American middle class, The Ghost of Tom Joad describes what we’ve lost in terms stronger and sadder than any artist of Springsteen’s stature ever has.
 
Springsteen has been moving in this direction for quite some time, if articles and interviews are to be believed. It was his chance discovery of the wonderful 1985 book Journey To Nowhere by writer Dale Maharidge and photographer Michael Williamson, however, that inspired Springsteen to create The Ghost of Tom Joad. A collection of stark, ultra-realistic images from America’s growing underclass, matched by Maharidge’s terse prose, Journey To Nowhere is an excellent and damning documentation of the Reagan legacy. The Ghost of Tom Joad strives to become the aural version of the book, and does a fine job of it, Springsteen’s tightly-wound and desolate tales of life in the new world presenting a disturbing vision of the America of the ‘90s.

Youngstown

Vivid imagery abounds in every song, Springsteen outdoing even his usual high standards. Referring to his early material, where the road was a metaphor for escape and fraught with endless possibility, these days it’s just another dead end. “The highway is alive tonight/But nobody’s kiddin’ nobody about where it goes....” sings Springsteen on the title cut, the song a lyrical portrait of the dispossessed. “Hot soup on a campfire under the bridge/shelter line stretchin’ ‘round the corner/welcome to the new world order/families sleepin’ in their cars in the Southwest/no home no job no peace no rest.”
      
The subject matter of The Ghost of Tom Joad is diverse and all-inclusive, its characters brilliantly portrayed, from the ex-con desperately trying to stay true in the face of temptation on “Straight Time” to the border patrol officer questioning his life in “The Line.” From the homeless to the haunted, the hustlers looking for a quick buck or the forlorn lover, The Ghost of Tom Joad relates their story. Perhaps the most moving moment is with “Youngstown,” the story of a lost steel mill town.

The song’s protagonist, a mill worker, sees his life slipping through his hands, the company he once slaved for, working the furnaces, tossing aside loyalty in favor of  profit. He struggles against fate, the song’s true ending unexpressed. Some may question Springsteen’s ability to relate to this subject matter, a self-made millionaire years separated from his hungry days. Springsteen’s talent has always been in the telling, however, and the impact that these stories have on the listener is equal to the force that the disturbing truth has had on the writer. These are heartfelt songs, masterfully rendered and every bit as sincere and real as any street poet or rapper.

The Rev’s Bottom Line

Springsteen is shunned by a young audience as irrelevant, an artist of their parent’s generation that has little to say to them. They’ve latched onto sad clowns like Marilyn Manson, Smashing Pumpkins, or Nine Inch Nails, popular and entertaining performers who nonetheless don’t possess a wisp of Springsteen’s talent and ability. The angst of the younger generation may be appealing, generating brief careers and a few oddly interesting creative moments; Springsteen’s talent as a artistic mirror reflecting society has been unmatched since Dylan’s early days and is every bit as vital and necessary today as it ever has been. (Columbia Records, released November 21st, 1995)

Review originally published by R.A.D! music zine, Spring 1996

Buy the CD on Amazon: Bruce Springsteen’s The Ghost of Tom Joad