King Johnson

King Johnson ain't no blues band. There ain't nobody tellin' you what happened to them when they woke up this mornin'. You ain't got no 12-bar framework hemming these boys in or nobody callin' and respondin' every couple of lines. What you do have is what Arsenio Hall used to call that toe-jam funk -- stuttering horns playing a staccato, stinging lead with jangling or wah-wah heavy guitars providing counterpoint undercut by a laid-back, lowdown backbeat, where everybody falls down hard on the one. Ain't been nothing like it since the JB's went out of business.

Things didn't start out that way for the Atlanta-based band. Guitarist Oliver Wood, the older brother of Medeski, Martin and Wood's bass player Chris Wood, began his musical career as a blues player. Atlanta bluesman Tinsley Ellis took Wood on the road with him in the early '90s. On his down time, Wood hooked up bassist Chris Long and drummer Greg Baba. The trio named themselves King Johnson as a tribute to the great blues players by that name and set out to channel their music.

But after a couple of years the band had become frustrated with that configuration. Hoping to add another dimension to the sound, in '95 the trio recruited a couple of horn-playing friends, Adam Mewherter on trombone and saxophonist Marcus James. That lineup changed the whole complexion of the band. No longer limited to thud, thump and twang, the band swung out with a loose-limbed, swaggering funk fronted by a lead singer that sounds like he'd be right at home fronting a '70s-era Southern rock band.

Critics keep mentioning a New Orleans influence, but most of the material sounds like it's a bit closer to home. This stuff is reminiscent of Macon, Georgia native James Brown's Famous Flames, with St. Clair Pickney on guitar, Maceo Parker on sax and Fred Wesley on trombone, the outfit that paved the way for a generation of funkateers. It was gritty, down-home dirt floor stompin' music with an uptown twist brought to it by the sophisticated yet funky horn stylings of Wesley and Parker.

Some of the cuts on King Johnson's Luck So Strange sound like these boys must have been hiding out behind the amps at one of the JB's jam sessions. "Another 2nd Chance" is about as funky as a group of white men can get. It's obvious these boys spent their formative years with their ears up against a speaker listening to stuff that was definitely not being played on the radio.

But the Kings aren't all about dirty-toe funk. They've written the best road kill song since Loudon Wainwright's "Dead Skunk." Called "Dead Dog," it's a lovely tribute to a fallen comrade: "Lyin' out there like a bump on a log / smellin' just like an ole gut shot hawg / flies so thick I thought it was fog / dead dog."

The title cut, "Luck So Strange," sounds like a gathering of the good ole backwoods good ole boys -- a cross between Dan Baird and the Georgia Satellites, Little Feat, and Homer and Jethro backed by a New Orleans funeral band.

You'll have to get your blues somewhere else. The King Johnson band is too busy stirring up the funk to worry about wakin' up this mornin' with that problem.