As leader of the Bluesbreakers, John Mayall could rightly claim to be one of the founding fathers of blues rock, providing a launchpad for future members of Cream, Fleetwood Mac and the Rolling Stones. In 2019, five years before his death, Mayall looked back on the band’s second studio album, 1967’s A Hard Road – the album that introduced the world to Peter Green.
The history of the Bluesbreakers in the 1960s is so turbulent and fast-moving it’s like a rock’n’roll creation story. The big bang came with the release of the so-called Beano album on July 22, 1966, establishing Eric Clapton as a Godhead of the new generation of guitarists and enshrining the band’s frontman, leader and sole constant member John Mayall as the most important pioneer, if not mastermind, behind the British blues-rock explosion that followed.
That triumph was all the more extraordinary given that Clapton had already left the Bluesbreakers before that hugely influential album was even released. But, contrary to what you might expect, the business of finding a new guitarist and writing and recording a follow-up album did not phase Mayall in the slightest.
Article continues below“For me it’s never been a problem,” Mayall says bluntly. “Somehow or other I’m always able to find somebody else and make a different band. We were so busy, as usual, playing so many gigs a year that when it came time to make a new album there was more than enough stuff to put on there. I never even thought about the success of the previous album. The comparison with what had gone before never bothered me. It’s not a competitive thing.”
Competitive or not, Mayall’s second studio album, A Hard Road, released on February 17, 1967, proved that the Beano album was no accident and confirmed Mayall’s pre-eminence not only as a bandleader but also as one of the latter-day visionaries of the blues genre. It has always languished in the shadow of the Beano album, but in truth A Hard Road is a work of similarly historic importance, introducing as it did the genius of Peter Green – not only as lead guitarist but also singer and songwriter – and laying the foundations of the band that would become Fleetwood Mac.
I never thought about the success of the previous album. The comparison with what had gone before never bothered me.
John Mayall
“When Eric left there was probably about a week or ten days when we were just trying different guitar players,” Mayall recalls. “Peter was the one who was very pushy about it and told me he was better than everybody else. Once I heard him play, I realised he was quite right about that.”
Mayall also had to replace Hughie Flint, the drummer who had played with him since the beginning of the Bluesbreakers in 1964. “He just wanted to get out of the music business,” Mayall says. “He was tired of travelling up and down the M1. He got depressed and didn’t want to do it any more.”
Mayall spotted Aynsley Dunbar playing drums with Alexis Korner’s band and invited him join the Bluesbreakers. Dunbar played his first gig with the band with no rehearsal. “All rehearsals were done on stage in front of an audience, or you might get a run-through before doing a take in the recording studio,” Dunbar recalled.
The recording of A Hard Road took place over just four days during October 1966 at Decca studios in London with a line-up of Mayall, Green, Dunbar and the incumbent John McVie on bass. As with the Beano album, the producer was Mike Vernon, at that time a staff producer at Decca who had been instrumental in getting Mayall signed to the label in the first place.
Recorded on four-track tape, the album was put together with a speed and lack of fuss that remains a hallmark of Mayall’s working practices. “It’s very easy to make a record,” he says, breezily. “You just go into the studio during the day and do it. We basically played the songs the way we would normally do at a gig. When it comes to blues and jazz, you want to capture the spontaneity of it. You can’t keep overdubbing and building it up that way. To have it come alive you must be getting that energy that happens when you’re on first and second takes.”
A Hard Road is primarily a mixture of Mayall compositions and blues standards. Foremost of eight Mayall originals is the title track, piano-driven and with a high, yearning vocal and a lyric full of sorrow: ‘I’ve been trying to tell you people that the blues hit me in my life/You know I was born for trouble and it’s a hard road till I die’. As a personal and musical manifesto, Mayall has never bettered this tale of road-dog woe.
No less impressive are the contributions from Green, most notably on two instrumentals: The Stumble, a sprightly shuffle written by Freddie King, and Green’s own composition The Supernatural. This latter’s haunting refrain remains a sonic masterpiece, harnessing a series of controlled, one-note feedback loops to conjure a fabulous combination of mood and melody.
It’s very easy to make a record. You just go into the studio during the day and do it.
John Mayall
Where innovators such as Jeff Beck and Pete Townshend had previously used feedback as a tool for unleashing anarchy and aggression, Green here uses it to create a more refined and eerily atmospheric effect. The track was a harbinger of the commercial success he would later enjoy with Fleetwood Mac’s evergreen hit Albatross. “Peter played some really wonderful stuff,” Mayall allows. “Everything happened very naturally and it was all very successful.”
Also pointing to the future were the two songs on A Hard Road on which Green takes lead vocals: You Don’t Love Me, a song written by Chicago bluesman Willie Cobbs, and Green’s own composition The Same Way, a languid, stop-start love song, arranged with a delicious sense of precision and space. Like Clapton, whom Mayall encouraged to sing his first recorded vocal, on the Beano album, Green would soon become one of the distinctive voices in British rock.
“I’d heard him singing and I wanted to feature that aspect of his work,” Mayall says, in his usual matter-of-fact manner. While this is hardly the most ringing endorsement, Mayall’s respect for Green’s talent is evidenced by the freedom he gave him on these tracks, and others recorded at this time which were included in the expanded versions of A Hard Road released in 2003 and 2006, most notably the exquisitely mournful Out Of Reach, written and sung by Green in an aching, world-weary voice, and a lean version of JB Lenoir’s chilling Alabama Blues.
With Green and McVie forming an ever closer bond, the sense of a band growing within a band became manifest when Dunbar left the Bluesbreakers soon after the release of A Hard Road and was replaced by Mick Fleetwood. This brief but nevertheless classic line-up can be heard to amazing effect on the pair of official bootleg albums Live In 1967 and Volume 2, released in 2014 and 2016.
It was no surprise that less than a year after these performances were recorded, the Bluesbreakers underwent another changer. Just as Cream grew out of a pre-Beano album line-up of the band which featured Clapton alongside Jack Bruce on bass and, on one occasion, Ginger Baker on drums, so Green, McVie and Fleetwood left the band to form Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac.
It seems to be the story of my life. I put a band together, and then you get these offshoots.
John Mayall
Mayall, meanwhile, had put together another, completely new version of the Bluesbreakers featuring an unknown guitarist called Mick Taylor, who would later join the Rolling Stones.
“It seems to be the story of my life,” Mayall says. “I put a band together, and then you get these offshoots.”
Looking back now, does he consider A Hard Road to be one of his great albums?
“All my records are indelibly connected with what I felt at any given time,” he says. “I consider all my albums, that I’ve had control of, to be proud moments for me – to know that they’re finished and that they’ve gone out into the world.”
A Hard Road reached No.8 in the UK, but has always remained in the shadow of the Beano album. Is it underrated?
“I don’t think so. I think my music has always been something that will never hit the big time. I’d hate to be doing something that was more commercial and you get stuck with playing the same things. Whereas blues players, like jazz musicians, always have the freedom to explore what you’re doing.”
Originally published in Classic Rock issue 259 (February 2019)
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