London Times (UK)

 

WEDNESDAY APRIL 3 1996

100 CLUB, LONDON

THE problem for any Texas blues guitarist is to escape the enormous shadow cast by one of the Lone Star state’s most influential sons, the late Stevie Ray Vaughn. Bobby Mack, born in 1954, is almost an exact contemporary of Vaughan’s. Indeed, when they met in Austin in the early Seventies, they used to hang out in the same bars and jam with the same musicians.

But for Mack the experience of backing such artists as Buddy Guy, Junior Wells and Albert Collins, and a liking for Freddie King and Elmore James, seem to have been enough to give him a niche of his own. With telling, self-composed numbers as Don’t Put No Headstone On My Grave and The Ship’s Going Down, from his new album, Sugar All Night, given a tight, no-frills treatment by Mack, Mark Goodwin on keyboards, Kelly Donnelly on bass and Dan Frezek on drums, Mack is able to distance himself form the rest of the Texas crowd.

In fact, Chicago seems to be as much his spiritual home, as he showed with a soulful reworking of the Tyrone Davis hit Can I Change My Mind? and a relaxed Wang Dang Doodle, leading up to an all-the-plugs-out version of Elmore James’s Talk to Me Baby.

As the 100 Club began to resemble a Texas roadhouse, Mack responded by playing the guitar behind his neck and then behind his back. If the night had been a little longer he’d have probably ended up by picking out tunes with his teeth. For an artist who has been named Texas Music Ambassador to the World by the Texas Senate (the title, says Mack wowed then in Japan), he proved to have all the right credentials.

JOHN CLARKE

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