Today being Howlin’ Wolf’s birthday, I am led to remember the first album of my youth that doesn’t embarass me now. It was The London Howlin’ Wolf Sessions, which my friend Roger Innes had. We’d sit up in his living room and play it. I knew who Clapton was, but I remember Roger having to explain who this Wolf guy was. It was one of those albums where a bunch of the British blues rockers got together with their
genuine blues heroes and made respectful noise, and it was a revelation for this little white boy from the suburbs of L.A. It would be too rhetorically effusive to say it changed my life, so I won’t, but I still love that kind of noise today.