John Mayall – Memories

On the previous album, “The Turning Point,” John Mayall stripped his band down to four players, and no drummer. For this 1971 album, Mayall took it a step further, just a trio with Larry Taylor on bass and Jerry McGee on guitar – still no drums. An intimate little group for a somewhat personal studio album, filled with Mayall’s thoughts about his life and family of origin.

Quite a lovely record – apparently it was released at the same time as a Mayall best-of called “Thru The Years,” which I’ll mention next time, and therefore did almost nothing on the charts.

The title track, “Memories,” is a straightforward piece about “the things I still remember from so long ago,” that somehow he makes into a cohesive piece with some emotional weight. The next song is a weird lament about still being a virgin and having to masturbate – and while I get trying to put on a perspective from an earlier self, Mayall was about 38 years old when this came out, so the present tense nature of the song feels odd. The rest of the album is memories of youth, family, better times, worse times. The music is all so good that it’s easy to let the lyrics slide.

(Side note: it’s interesting to me that both of the other players on this record have a connection to The Ventures. Jerry McGee was, at the time of recording, the lead guitarist for the group (Nokie Edwards having left, though he would come back), and Larry Taylor was the brother of Ventures drummer Mel Taylor.

Found this copy in Troy’s River Street Beat Shop last August (2024). During the years when I really wasn’t buying vinyl, I would still pop into the Beat Shop fairly often, partly out of nostalgia for the old days of digging through the bins, partly out of curiosity. And sometimes I’d even pick up the stray album (or CD) now and then, and I think I sold off a few pieces there when I was trying to thin out the collection. There were other record stores around the Capital District, still, but that one was always my favorite, and I was in Troy a lot so it was often near something else I was doing.

Because now, I only get to shop there when we’re visiting Troy, what usually happens when I’m there is that I’ve got other people in tow, other people whose patience for digging through the bins is perhaps not as great as mine. People who want to do other things. And so I target a few letters of the alphabet (if i can even remember what it is I’m really searching for), find something or nothing, and then we move on. But last summer, I had a whole lot of time to myself and was able to methodically go through everything, and came up with some beauties I wouldn’t otherwise have found – this was one of them.