Big Al at Boston's Bunratty's - mid-80s

Recorded at Boston's legendary Bunratty's, this is W. Albany St.'s notorious frontman Big Al Cancelino dragging James Montgomery's line-up through his inimitable version of BB King's classic "How Blue Can You Get". The set happened sometime during the middle of the 1980s, and back then Big Al's blues involved having way too much high-grade blow, way too many hot, little spinner chicks vacuuming up that blow, and way too high a profile among those 3-letter federal agencies that care way too much about the sort of people who have Big Al's kind of blues vexing their daily lives.

To say that Al's plate was full is to understate the obvious, but man, could he scramble a slow blues like no one else. And as those 3-letter goon squads closed in on the man, his blues got more and more scrambled. I just thank the gods of music that after 25 years, we have it all in high-def digital audio, and that we can all sit back and enjoy the madness in retrospect.

http://WAlbanyStBluesBand.com is now online, and there'll be new audio and video clips posting from now until this hell freezes itself over. Plenty to get lost inside of, and all the bizarre truth of those dissident years when the W. Albany St. Blues Band was giving the gray suits plenty to hate about life, and Big Al was sprinting from the herd in a legendary bender that had his Adirondack funhouse inked in at the top of every maniac's bucket list who had the cache to know anything about where the real backrooms on this planet were at the time.

Check out BLACK FLIES IN THE BACKYARD WITH SNOWSHOES for the definitive account of how this epicenter of hedonism forced the world's decent folks to send the SWATs in long after failing to figure out what the hell else to do about what had to be wrong, even if they couldn't make heads or tails out of any of it. After all, it wasn't normal, whatever it was, and that much was pretty obvious.

For the paperback, go to - http://www.amazon.com/Black-Flies-Backyard-Snowshoes-Carroll/dp/1453873996/re...

For Kindle - http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005348FAK

and, for all other e-book formats, it's available from Smashwords.com at
http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/63058

It's not like the good old days anymore. You can end up in GitMo for refusing to take off your shoes at the airport now days. Take a breather and log onto http://WAlbanyStBluesBand.com and hang out with the bad kids for a few hours. Raw, visceral music; true, unedited accounts of flipping off everything from mom and apple pie to even thinking about doing the right thing in any given situation; and a cast of characters that really were just as chaotic and potentially treacherous as all the talk about them suggested. If you have sh*t to work out - issues that need exorcising, or even a few demons to exercise - stop by and let's see what you got under that hood. We promise we won't laugh at you. Not to your face anyway.

Category:

Music

Tags:

• DEA
• War on Drugs
• W. Albany St. Blues Band