My goal here was to find an undiscovered, or at least unexploited, Jimmy Reed gem. I’ve been a Jimmy Reed fan for many years and I cut my teeth playing Baby What You Want Me To Do, Bright Lights Big City, Take Out Some Insurance and all the rest that folks play at the local blues jam. But I wanted something more – to reinvent or just really kill a great, underplayed Jimmy Reed song.
Click the link above to hear the final results
To this end, I got hold of a fabulous three CD set called Mr Luck: The Complete Singles on VeeJay. I took it out of the library numerous times. At one point they made a mistake and didn’t realize that I had it – I could have kept it! But I didn’t want to inject any bad karma into my Jimmy Reed mojo. I gave it back to them when the project was done so somebody else can enjoy the genius of Mr. Luck.
The first Jimmy Reed album that I ever owned.
I was looking for that cooler than cool song that nobody ever noticed. Hah! Fat chance. Frustrated in my early attempts at finding the elusive cut, I finally sat down and listened to the entire CD in order, taking notes on every one of the nearly one hundred cuts. I made a short list and tried to weigh the merits of those ten or fifteen songs. They were forgotten A-sides, formula outings by Mr. Luck himself, some pretty decent B-Sides, and a few of his better known songs that haven’t been done to death.
I kept coming back to this early A-Side called, “I’m Gonna Ruin You.” I loved the title. Especially the irony of it. Besides the fact that it sounds like a line from a 1950s melodrama, how do you ruin somebody who perhaps has very little to lose? Except maybe the fact that they have three or four lovers to your two? With whatever system I was using to judge the merits of the songs, I went with my gut. That, and the fact that I could sing the song relatively well. It turns out that I think I made the right decision.
I recorded the song on Audacity, the free and easy (not!) software favored by the cheap and the poor. I went with a continuous, looped drum track. It was pretty straightforward from there. A couple of things stand out. I recorded the vocals using an analog delay pedal. Super simple and it added a sweet, dirty vibe to the track. The other big thing was that I transcribed the harmonica solo and played it on slide in open G tuning. Mr. Luck did the song in F, one of his preferred keys, so I figured kicking it up to G would work well for me, as that’s one of my favorite keys to sing in and I play slide in G all the time. I triple tracked the solo to get a fat sound or at least to mimic the intensity of Jimmy’s harp to some degree, and it sort of worked.
Guitar-wise, I started with the basic guitar track, really a big-assed riff with a cranked up boogie in the chorus – sounds like a plan, right? Oh, yeah – it’s a stop-time blues. Might be Eddie Taylor on the original track ‘cause it really rocks and sounds like the blueprint for the Stones. I added the rhythm guitar and bass and then did the slide part. Finally, I put a lead guitar in there. It carried the turnarounds and was the coup de grace, as they say. I’m sure I used my Gibson SG with P90s somewhere in there. P90s are really good for playing Jimmy Reed. The slide guitar is a hard-tailed Strat. I used an I-Rig for all of the guitars except the characteristic, Jimmy Reed chunka-chunka offbeat rhythm guitars, which were (a stereo pair, hence the massiveness of it) played with a Kelly Tele through a Fender Deluxe Reissue and miced with an SM58.
Well, if nothing else, I got me a genuine, not-played-a-million-times-by-a-million-people Jimmy Reed tune to cover when we hit the clubs as soon as that’s possible. Check it out. Let me know what you think! -Christian Botta