Like nearly all the things Marshall Chess discusses throughout a 45-minute zoom, the story behind his upcoming album New Strikes is lengthy, sophisticated, filled with record-business drama and enthusiastically associated. “I run on the mouth very simply with tales,” understates the 81-year-old son of the late Leonard Chess, co-founder of Chicago label Chess Information, residence of Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry, Howlin’ Wolf, Etta James and different pioneering blues artists.
The white-haired Chess dishes on Zoom like a pleasant stranger on the bar: His father, Leonard, as soon as made James cry, “to get her to do stuff”; the late guitarist Michael Bloomfield was so anxious about collaborating with Waters on 1969’s Fathers and Sons {that a} buddy needed to take him to a hospital for a tranquilizer; Marshall attended school on the College of Denver within the ’60s, taking day without work from learning to train horses exterior of city and store Chess data to radio stations as a promo man. His extra reserved son Jamar – an indie label exec and writer – interrupts to right dates and hold the dialog centered on New Strikes, the father-and-son album due out this spring by a supergroup of hip-hop and rock ‘n’ roll artists calling themselves The Chess Undertaking.
The story of New Strikes begins within the late 2000s, when Chess and a few musician pals who’d labored at hip-hop label Sugar Hill Information within the ’70s and ’80s needed to make an album of basic blues samples blended with drum machines and up to date digital music. To attain this, Chess wanted permission from publishers to make use of samples of Wolf and Muddy and the others from his household label – which Leonard and his brother, Phil, had bought to indie label GRT in 1969.
Finally, Common Music Group took over Chess’ catalog, and Chess couldn’t persuade the main label’s Los Angeles executives to approve the samples — he even tried an end-run, touring to the U.Ok. and pulling prime worldwide exec Lucian Grainge out of a gathering to present his blessing. (Grainge, in fact, went on to take over UMG as its chairman and CEO.) However when the L.A. execs discovered, based on Chess, they “squelched” the mission; 2008’s U.Ok.-only album Chess Strikes shortly fell out of print and is barely out there on eBay. “I don’t know if I ought to say who acquired mad about it,” Chess remembers. “He’s nonetheless there.”(A UMG spokesperson declined to remark.)
Over time, Chess and collaborator Keith LeBlanc – the experimental hip-hop drummer who’d been in Sugar Hill’s home band – adjusted their thought. As an alternative of utilizing the Muddy and Etta samples, they turned the tracks into quasi-covers, fashionable interpretations of blues songs from the ’50s and ’60s. Chess approached BMG to manage the deal, they usually hammered out the small print, from the advertising price range to the launch occasion. “Then,” Chess says, “I collapsed.”
Chess wound up present process two spinal surgical procedures and was recovering on his sofa in Phoenicia, N.Y., when the COVID-19 pandemic kicked in, forcing BMG, and all of the labels and publishers, to shut their workplaces. All appeared misplaced for the mission. “We have been fairly disillusioned. We let it go,” LeBlanc, the center of The Chess Undertaking, says by cellphone from his residence studio in Meriden, Conn. “I took a pair tracks and put some stay drums on it, and realized, ‘This sounds actually good.’ So I referred to as Marshall, and stated, ‘Let’s simply do a complete different album utilizing a distinct slant on it.’”
BMG kindly returned the rights to the album to Chess — without cost. New Strikes, starring LeBlanc on drums, Skip “Little Axe” McDonald on guitar and longtime Rolling Stones backup singer Bernard Fowler on vocals, will come out someday this yr underneath a brand new label, CZYZ Information. (This can be a reference to the Chess household’s authentic identify in Poland earlier than Leonard and his brother, Phil, immigrated to Chicago and altered it to one thing extra American. Within the zoom, Chess wears a purple hat with CZYZ in white letters.) Owned by Marshall and Jamar Chess, CZYZ will retain the album masters, and BMG will oversee the publishing.
New Strikes comprises no precise Howlin’ Wolf vocals, Muddy Waters guitar solos or Little Walter harp riffs, however LeBlanc’s Chess Undertaking crew surrounded Fowler’s moans and murmurs with blasts of electrical guitars and harmonicas in order that they seize the vibe of what occurred so a few years in the past at Chess in Chicago. The songs aren’t covers, per se, however they present their inspirational supply materials by copying titles of Chess blues classics: “9 Beneath Zero,” “Smokestack Lightning,” “Goin Down Gradual.”
Typically, Marshall Chess says, he needed to summon the spirits of Leonard and Phil Chess to get to the center of a observe. On “Assist Me,” he says, “We had bother getting Bernard to do the vocal — he wouldn’t do it the way in which Keith needed it.” So naturally, Chess, who was president of Rolling Stones Information from 1970 to 1978, advised Fowler a narrative: Within the ’50s, when Marshall was 16, Leonard Chess enlisted him to oversee a session with a distinguished Chess artist whereas he went to the financial institution. Leonard’s recommendation to Marshall? “Inform him, ‘Preserve taking one other one.’ In any other case, he’s going to take a seat round and bulls–t about girls. A kind of takes will likely be nice.” Years later, Marshall utilized this recommendation to Mick Jagger whereas the band was recording “Moonlight Mile.” From a distant truck, he repeated to the singer, “Take one other one,” till they hit the model used on 1971’s Sticky Fingers. “When [Fowler] heard that Mick listened to me,” Chess remembers, “he instantly did what we needed.”
Marshall Chess was born into the file enterprise. Rock and Roll Corridor of Fame doo-wop group the Flamingos performed his bar-mitzvah dinner. As a 25-year-old in 1967, he steered the household blues label into the psychedelic counter-culture – beginning his personal imprint, Cadet Idea, and nudging Waters and Wolf into stretched-out, funky blues with their respective albums Electrical Mud and The Howlin’ Wolf Album. Traditionalists hated the albums, and Rolling Stone panned Electrical Mud – however the album was a prime label vendor for years, and wound up inspiring a era of rappers, together with Public Enemy’s Chuck D.
“Marshall introduced the youth imaginative and prescient to Chess,” says Robert Gordon, a Memphis blues historian who wrote the definitive Waters biography, 2002’s Can’t Be Happy. “It was forward of its time. I dismissed it upon listening to it, and never till Chuck D turned me onto it did I’m going again with open ears. It was f–kin’ rockin’, man! It took me 40 years to catch as much as Marshall’s imaginative and prescient.”
The elder Chess, as ever, is delighted to play promo man for his newest enterprise. “Excessive Temperature,” the slow-burning first single from New Strikes, is scheduled for launch subsequent Friday (Might 12), earlier than the album comes out. “I need you to hear to 2 cuts, ‘Goin Down Gradual,’ adopted by ‘Mom Earth,’” Chess instructs on the Zoom, referring to tracks impressed by Howlin’ Wolf and Memphis Slim classics that cope with considering mortality. “I’m 80 years previous, they usually’re about dying with a smile. They helped me! As a result of I’m the epitome of happening gradual.”
