Tracks Of My Years: Rev Rob Hercules

I was very lucky growing up; my father’s a music fan with eclectic taste, and a seriously good whistle player to boot, so there was always a lot of music going on.

Trad, folk, Americana, all that good stuff; genres where melody and energy find balance with structure and restraint.

After my initial foray into blues rock as a kid (lots of godawful distortion on the guitar, lots of embarrassing faces), it’s these qualities that I’ve come to value, and I always try to bring them to the table in One Horse Pony.

B.B. King Hummingbird
Despite my inherited love of music and the cheap electric guitar hidden underneath my bed, I didn’t start playing til I was almost 17, and that’s when I heard the blues. I remember telling myself that this was a language I understood, and could learn to speak. That first song was a version of Hummingbird, sung by BB King. Not a typical blues song (if there is such a thing), but heavy on everything that makes blues great thanks to BB. The vocals have that lovely mix of strength and surrender, and the piano, bass and guitar give it an urban soulful swagger. I’ll always be a fan of BB’s. Sometimes, it’s difficult to tell when his voice stops and his guitar begins.

Bob Dylan Changing Of The Guards
I came across The Essential Bob Dylan floating around at home and decided to find out what all the fuss was about. The first listen left me thoroughly unimpressed, the second listen convinced me that maybe it deserved a third. By then I was pretty much hooked on Dylan. Street Legal is an oddity. There’s a lot of sweetness there, a lot of the beautiful pictures that only Dylan can paint. There’s also a lot of anger, a lot of bitterness about his divorce the previous year. The touches of gospel on this album were a revelation (probably a pun there somewhere) to me, and gospel has become a huge part of what One Horse Pony does. On Street Legal, Changing of the Guards was a song that turned my head like no song ever had. Images from the corporate world and Middle Earth walk hand in hand, with blues references and a heavy dose of thorough confusion. After all this time, I still have no idea what meaning underpins the song, but I think I enjoy it all the more for that. It asks nothing more of the listener than to sit back and enjoy the show, and the instrumentation add a weight and a consequence that’s undeniable.

Tom Waits Tom Traubert’s Blues
This list wouldn’t be complete without Tom Waits. Electronica artist Toby Kaar introduced me to Tom Waits at a late night poker game while still in school. Waits is the dark back pages of the Great American Songbook, he’s the jazzy crooner, the carny announcer, the addict-philosopher, the madman conductor of his own junkyard band. As a roadmap of American music, Waits’ work is more important than most. My heart stopped and my hands started to shake when I first heard Tom Traubert’s Blues. It’s a hauntingly beautiful story of addiction and suffering. The idea of taking the worst of ourselves, or the worst of the world around us and finding beauty, is nothing new, but this is probably my favourite example .

Eric Clapton Walkin’ Blues
Like many people, I’m a huge fan of Eric Clapton’s landmark acoustic album. As a young blues-rocker, I worshipped his fire and energy as a guitar player in the early days, the youthful vinegar of the Beano album with John Mayall and the sheer skill and the chemistry of Cream, but lost interest after that. Everything from then on seemed too polished, and lacking something unexplainable, but vital. Unplugged changed that, it made acoustic blues cool again (as if it were ever uncool!), and established the benchmark of quality acoustic material. A bunch of great blues albums followed, but for me, this one will always be king of the hill. Walkin’ Blues was probably the first time I had heard anyone play solo acoustic blues before, something of which Clapton is a master. It was also the first time I heard the lyrics of Robert Johnson, legendary king of delta blues. There’s nothing flashy or exciting here, just good music made to look effortless by a good player. The genuine enjoyment the other musicians are getting out of the performance is totally understandable.

Eric Bibb Where The Green Grass Grows
Eric Bibb is a big hero of mine. There’s a huge amount of soul in the way he sings and the way he writes, and his guitar playing is quality stuff. What I love about Bibb is his ability to sing about the beauty of the day-to-day. He’s not singing epic sagas of love and loss, he’s singing about doing the job in front of him, and counting himself lucky to have someone to go home to afterwards. Its humility and modesty gives it power. The gospel elements on his Good Stuff album always get to me, none more so than on Where The Green Grass Grows. It probably sounds sickly sweet, but this song always makes me think about the rest of the lads in One Horse Pony, and everyone in the extended Pony family. The song speaks to me of quiet aspirations and the love of friends, and I challenge anyone to keep their eyes dry while listening to it.

Howlin’ Wolf Spoonful
I always get a kick out of listening to Howlin’ Wolf. It’s world class strutting music, the kind of thing that puts you in a good mood as soon as it comes on. He had an unmistakeable voice, an amazing band, and delivered the songs of writer extraordinaire Willie Dixon better than anyone (with the possible exception on Muddy Waters). It took a long time for me to grow to love the really old blues guys like Robert Johnson, Blind Willie McTell and a pantheon of others, but Wolf has a raucous sound that grabbed me from the first. I first heard a live version of Spoonful played by Cream, and it was years before I found the original. There’s a wonderful simplicity in the lyrics; the kind of simplicity that tells more about the human condition than a hundred complicated songs rolled into one. Wolf always has that ‘get it from the mountain’ quality for me. The authority with which he sings makes the lyrics feel like facts rather than opinions.

Check out One Horse Pony’s Facebook page here. More info on Friday’s Hot Spot gig can be found here.