John Mayall’s Blues Breakers — Crusade

I do wish there were some consistency as to whether “Blues Breakers” is one word or two, but perhaps that’s a lot to ask of British musicians. On this album it’s two words, so we’ll go with that; but it’s one word on the label, so I’ll never be sure. I wrote last time about how long it took me to finally pick up a Mayall record. For decades, I knew Mayall more from a reference in a Gruppo Sportivo song than anything else – “When Mayall sings the blues / He goes back to its roots.” But once I was in, I was in.

I bought this one last year when I was ordering something else from Sundazed – there’s a weird part of me that never likes to go to the effort to order a single item, especially if the shipping cost isn’t per-item. I think when I was buying “Live Adventures of Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper” I decided to throw this in. I’m not sorry. Another great traditionalist British blues recording, released in 1967, it was somehow their fourth album yet came only 14 months after their first release, and already featured a substantially shifted lineup. Very solid and very much in the current rotation.