Martin Scorsese on the band that made the best cover songs
For a young Martin Scorsese, the blues wasn’t all that much of a concern. Like many of his generation, the director had sourced most of the genre’s downbeat through rock and roll. Once the 1960s rolled around, he found himself caught up in the music of his home city of New York, where the blues ostensibly had very little business, but it was always there in the undercurrent.
“In the early sixties, my preference was for Phil Spector, Motown, and the girl groups, like The Ronettes, The Marvelettes, and The Shirelles,” Scorsese explained in the PBS documentary series The Blues. “Then came the British Invasion. Like everyone else, I was floored by this music and struck by its strong blues influence. The more I understood the history behind rock and roll, the more I could hear the blues behind it.”
“With some of the new British music, the blues came to the forefront, and the bands were paying homage to their masters in the same way that the French New Wave filmmakers were paying homage to the great American directors with their films,” he added. “There was John Mayall and his Bluesbreakers. There was the first instalment of Fleetwood Mac, with Peter Green on guitar, basically a blues band. There were the Stones, whose music had a heavy blues accent right from the start, and who did cover versions of ‘Little Red Rooster’, ‘I’m a King Bee’, ‘Love in Vain’, and many others. And, of course, there was Cream.”
Cream proved to be the skeleton key that opened up the possibilities of blues to Scorsese. Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce, and Ginger Baker created the kind of music that directly appealed to Scorsese, and through their knowledge of classic blues, Scorsese was able to expand his own musical scope. In fateful fashion, many of the British Invasion bands were slightly behind the curve of the US. This meant that there influences were closer to the roots, so they fused this with rock and roll a little more directly.
Scorsese found this mix of old and new deeply moving. “I still love to sit alone in a room and wrap myself up in that music,” the Goodfellas director said. “They created an amazing fusion of blues and hard rock, and some of their most beautiful songs were covers: ‘Rollin” and Tumblin”, the old Delta classic, which I first heard on volume one of Live Cream, Robert Johnson’s ‘Crossroads’, which was one of their biggest hits; and ‘Sitting on Top of the World’, which was on Goodbye Cream. When I heard that song, I went back and found the original by the great Mississippi Sheiks.”
“Around the end of the sixties, this urge to find the roots of the music really started to spread,” Scorsese explained. “People all over the country were discovering the blues, and it went way beyond a specialised audience. At that time, the music wasn’t as readily available as it is now. You would have to search for certain titles and others you could find in reissues and package collections.”
The earliest blues stars embraced the cinematic scope of lore, imbuing their craft with mystique. They happily courted the proclamation that they were playing the devil’s music in a manner not too dissimilar from a purposefully obtuse Scorsese character. There was real drama in this music for the future film maestro. This gave a sense of a cultural world you could dive into.
“The blues had such a powerful mystique, such an aura around it, that certain names would suddenly be in the air, and you just had to have their records,” he said.
“Names like Son House, which I heard for the first time when we were editing Woodstock. It was Mike Wadleigh, the director, who brought in the record,” he added. “Someone who once heard Caruso sing said that he was so moved that his heart shook. That’s the way I felt the first time I heard Son House. It was a voice and a style that seemed to come from way, way back, from some other, much earlier time and place. About a year later, there was another name: Robert Johnson. Another ancient voice, another soul-stirring experience.” And another journey akin to a long-running movie.
Check out Cream’s version of ‘Crossroads’ down below.
