Legendary hard rock guitarist Pat Travers’ acclaimed series of archive live performances has already served up some exhilarating performances. But the latest, Statesboro Blues (Live In Baltimore 1982), is sure to be ranked among the greatest yet, and while we await its April 4 release, the title track peels off as a thrilling new single.
 
Of course Blind Willie McTell blues was long ago proclaimed a classic, with the Allman Brothers having already granted it an incendiary work-up at the dawn of the 70s. It was Travers, however, who made the song his own, and this version illustrates why.
 
SINGLE: https://orcd.co/pattravers_statesboroblues
 
Musically, Travers was truly in his prime.  “I’d added some people to my live band and recording band,” he explains.  “I had a keyboard player and another guy who sang backing vocals so I had a five piece band behind me.  
 
“I was trying to do something a little more sophisticated,” he continues with a laugh, and his then-latest album, Black Pearl, bore that out.  “For me, that was one of my best records with the playing and the production.”  Its opening number, “I La La La Love You” (included here, of course) was a smash even before it was included in the cult movie Valley Girl.
 
By the time this show was recorded, in Baltimore just three weeks before Christmas, Travers and the band had been on the road for most of the year, a back-breaking outing that had long since been aptly nicknamed The Steelworkers Ball.
 
Tonight, however, the line-up welcomed a very special guest as Buck Dharma, guitarist for the Blue Oyster Cult, took the stage first to introduce the band (“some good friends of mine and the Blue Oyster Cult’s”), and then for the final song, an epic take on Cream’s “Sunshine Of Your Love.”  “It was a great version,” muses Travers, but it was also no more than the natural culmination to a show that still blazes in the mind, from the moment the band strikes up the tempest that was their interpretation of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.
 
Black Pearl dominates the set, naturally, but there was plenty of room for the oldies, too - “Life in London,” written and recorded while Travers was living in that city during 1976-1977, and capturing both the mood and the madness of the city as it braced itself for the incoming punk scene; “Snortin’ Whiskey, Drinkin’ Cocaine,” another Travers great that would one day make the movies (Alexander Payne’s 2004 classic Sideways); Little Walter’s blues leviathan “Boom Boom, Out Goes The Lights”; and all leading up to that stunning multi-guitar layered climax.
 
Travers himself is thrilled that this show is finally seeing the light of day. “I had nothing to do with the recording, but I’m glad they did it, as it captures a very interesting time.
 
“It sounds live,” he says. It may be a little rough compared to some of the over-produced and much over dubbed live albums that are out there, but “I’ve found that people often prefer a rougher sounding live mix, even if they don’t know it.  They’re not conscious of it, ‘this one’s too high fidelity’, but when it’s a little trashy, it has more energy and sounds more urgent.  
 
“Rock’n’roll is not supposed to be clean and slick live. It’s got to have an edginess to it, and not be too predictable. There should always be surprises. Especially unintentional ones.”
 
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