ID LOVED Koerner, Ray and Glover for 40 years but ...
Thanksgiving, 2002, Dave "Snaker" Ray died of cancer, age 59. Damn, late again.
Koerner, Ray and Glover were yet another product of Minneapolis, that bland, lily-white city that, for whatever reason, also gave us Bob Dylan, Prince, the Replacements and Hüsker Dü. They were the best white blues musicians who ever lived, one of those lingering background images that gives an indistinct, puzzling meaning to life. They can make me weep, not because the music is plaintive?it's anything but?but because it is a deep, personal yet communal, elemental experience.
Ray was a 12-string prodigy in the early 60s who could ram out Leadbelly songs at the age of 18 with unrelenting authority. Koerner, known as "Spider" John?seated in a chair he looks like a marionette?with his lurch-bop voice, odd-to-bizarre renditions of folk tunes and effervescent foot-stomping has the drive of the Pony Express. Tony "Little Sun" Glover, best known for his music journalism, is a hell of a blues harpist who's picked up a suitcase full of awards.
In the mid-60s, they liked to give the finger to the folk scene. Reportedly, at the 1964 Philadelphia Folk Festival, the home of mellow-in-the-mud, they offered to do severe physical damage to anyone who touched their guitars. Frankly, this approach was refreshing.
They played whatever they felt like, however they felt like playing it, usually without rehearsal or even a song list. Ray's "Fannin Street" is fully faithful to Leadbelly. But both he and Koerner could take a folk piece, strip it to its frame, then rebuild it with crazy additions and stairways leading nowhere. Koerner's "Duncan and Brady" bounces around like a loose superball looking for its mate.
Their first two albums for Elektra (1963 and 1964) were Blues, Rags and Hollers and Lots More Blues, Rags and Hollers (my personal favorite). Over a pristine blues undercurrent they laid an uptempo near-syncopation unlike anything else I've heard, the William Tell overture slicked with chicken fat.
Ray started out a rich baritone. One of his early solo albums, Fine Soft Land (1967), is as true to the blues as you can get?nary an emotional misstep. In recent years, after running his own recording studio and fronting a bunch of small bands, he developed a reedy, older-guy voice that works to wonderful effect on One Foot in the Groove.
Koerner is the only one I saw perform live, about 10 years back in Philadelphia. He seemed a lot more sedate, except when he clamped an umbrella atop his head to tell jokes. But on One Foot in the Groove he's as roilingly unrestrained as ever: His "Shortnin' Bread" turns a minstrel novelty into absurdist, winking sexual innuendo.
So now Ray's gone, and Koerner is recovering from triple bypass surgery. We're lucky to be alive in the first era when the music doesn't die with the music-maker. And nobody who recorded was ever more alive than Koerner, Ray and Glover.
What's Out There: Solo and together, KRG have put out about 25 albums, the majority of which I haven't heard. Amazon.com lists many of Koerner's later CDs, along with re-releases of the three early KRG Elektra albums. The early Ray solos, Snaker's Here and Fine Soft Land, are still hiding in their old record sleeves.