Hound Dog Taylor and the Houserockers

Hey there, 2025! Let’s see if we can move through this vinyl collection with some speed, shall we? Elsewise, I shall never catch up.

Like your boogie electric and stompin’? Then Hound Dog Taylor is for you. As I’ve said before, if you like the blues even a little bit, you really can’t go wrong with almost any Alligator Records release. Whatever style it’s in, it’s going to be excellent, and perfectly produced. (For the blues, at least in my opinion, that means you can barely tell it was produced.) This is a nice 180gram remaster, but that’s not why it’s special – it’s special because I bought this on the opening day of Forever Changes in its permanent space here on Main Street (ironically not the main street) in Phoenixville, back on Nov. 21, 2021. Three years and going strong!

It also established something of a pattern, as in the ensuing three years, I have bought a lot of blues records. Just saying that led me down a useless rabbit hole of trying to put a number to the statement, which led me to useless complaints about how that isn’t possible with Discogs, which led me to alternatives, which is precisely why this project never gets done.

This is also a significant album from an Alligator Records perspective – it was his determination to record Hound Dog Taylor that led Bruce Iglauer to use a small inheritance to form Alligator Records and record this very album. Bruce: you weren’t wrong.

I previously had some Hound Dog Taylor samples on the various Alligator Records compilations – and those tracks are here, too. This was first released in 1971, and it sounds like it could have been recorded and released yesterday. It just doesn’t age.