The Transatlantic Circuit
Blues rock began as obsessive imitation. In the late 1950s, British teenagers with no access to American radio were mail-ordering 78s from Chess Records in Chicago, the label that pressed Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Little Walter, and Chuck Berry into shellac and vinyl. Keith Richards and Mick Jagger bonded over these imports on a train platform in Dartford, Kent, in 1961. They named their band after Waters’s 1950 single Rollin’ Stone. Their first album, released in 1964, consisted almost entirely of covers: Willie Dixon’s I Just Want to Make Love to You, Jimmy Reed’s Honest I Do, Slim Harpo’s I’m a King Bee.
The originals had been recorded with small combos at bar volume. The British interpreters plugged into bigger amplifiers, played faster, hit harder. What emerged was a louder, more aggressive hybrid: twelve-bar structures and pentatonic vocabulary pushed through Marshall stacks to the edge of distortion.
The Ealing Club and the Bluesbreakers
On 17 March 1962, Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies opened the Ealing Blues Club in a West London basement. Their band, Blues Incorporated, played fully electric Chicago-style blues at a time when jazz purists considered amplified instruments a betrayal. The club became a magnet: Mick Jagger sat in on vocals, Charlie Watts played drums, Jack Bruce passed through, and a teenage Pete Townshend watched from the crowd.
John Mayall moved to London from Macclesfield in 1963 on Korner’s advice and started the Bluesbreakers at the Marquee Club. His band functioned less as a fixed group and more as a finishing school. The roster over the years included Eric Clapton, Peter Green, John McVie, Mick Fleetwood, Mick Taylor, and Jack Bruce. Fleetwood Mac, the Stones’ classic lineup, and Cream all trace personnel back to Mayall’s revolving door.
The Beano Album and the Birth of a Tone
In May 1966, at Decca Studios in West Hampstead, Clapton plugged a 1960 Gibson Les Paul Standard with PAF humbucker pickups into a Marshall JTM45 2x12 combo, cranked to full volume. Blues Breakers with Eric Clapton (nicknamed the “Beano album” because the cover showed Clapton reading The Beano) established the Les Paul-through-Marshall template that would define blues rock tone for decades. The combination produced thick, singing sustain that no clean Fender setup could match. Clapton’s Les Paul was stolen shortly after. It has never been recovered.
Cream and the Power Trio
In mid-1966, Ginger Baker quit the Graham Bond Organisation, Jack Bruce left Manfred Mann, and Clapton walked out of the Bluesbreakers. Baker approached Clapton; Clapton’s one condition was that Bruce had to join. Baker and Bruce had a volatile history from the Graham Bond days, but Baker respected Bruce’s musicianship enough to agree. Cream became rock’s first power trio: three virtuosos filling the space normally requiring five or six players. When they started, Clapton and Bruce each had one Marshall stack. By 1968, triple stacks. They sold fifteen million records in under three years, then disintegrated at a farewell concert at the Royal Albert Hall in November 1968.
Hendrix and the Vocabulary of Feedback
Jimi Hendrix arrived in London from New York in September 1966, brought over by Chas Chandler of the Animals. His rig was deceptively simple: mid-1960s Fender Stratocasters (played left-handed, flipped upside down), a Dallas Arbiter Fuzz Face, a Vox wah, and Marshall Super Lead 100-watt heads driving 4x12 cabinets. What he did with it had no precedent. He manipulated feedback as a melodic instrument, controlling the interaction between pickups and cranked Marshalls to produce sustained, vocal-like tones, using the guitar’s volume knob to roll off the Fuzz Face’s distortion in real time. Frank Zappa summarized the recipe in a 1968 issue of Life: “Buy a Fender Stratocaster, an Arbiter Fuzz Face, a Vox wah, and four Marshall amps.” The instruction was accurate. The execution was inimitable.
Peter Green’s Accidental Tone
Peter Green replaced Clapton in the Bluesbreakers, then left to form Fleetwood Mac with McVie and Fleetwood in 1967. His 1959 Gibson Les Paul Standard produced a haunting, hollow tone on Albatross (UK number one, January 1969) that no one could replicate. The secret held for over a decade. In the early 1980s, tech Jol Dantzig at the Hamer factory examined the guitar (then owned by Gary Moore) with a compass and found one pickup magnet oriented north-to-south, the other south-to-north: magnetically out of phase. High notes produced a hollow cry; chords retained body. Green, when asked, said he didn’t know what “out of phase” meant.
Southern Variations
The Allman Brothers Band, formed in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1969, built their sound around the dual-guitar interplay of Duane Allman and Dickey Betts. Allman played slide using a glass Coricidin cold-medicine bottle on his ring finger, fingerpicking exclusively, muting unused strings for clarity, usually in open E tuning. Betts played cleaner, country-inflected lines on a Gibson SG. Layered in harmony, they created what Betts described as “two people having a real conversation.” At Fillmore East (1971), recorded over three nights, captured this interplay at full stretch.
In Houston, Billy Gibbons formed ZZ Top in 1969 after his psych-blues band the Moving Sidewalks dissolved. Tres Hombres (1973) broke through on the strength of La Grange, a boogie built on a John Lee Hooker-derived riff referencing the Chicken Ranch, a notorious brothel outside the town of La Grange, Texas.
The Lone Wolf and the Revival
Rory Gallagher never joined a supergroup, never chased trends, never left the road. The Cork-born guitarist bought his 1961 Fender Stratocaster secondhand from Crowley’s Music Shop on MacCurtain Street in 1963 for 100 pounds, reputedly the first Strat in Ireland. He played it until the sunburst finish wore through to bare wood. With Taste, he performed before 600,000 people at the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival. The band split days later. Gallagher went solo, won Melody Maker’s Guitarist of the Year in 1972, and spent two decades averaging over 200 shows a year.
By the early 1980s, blues rock had been pushed aside by punk, new wave, and synth pop. Stevie Ray Vaughan reversed the tide. A Texan playing Austin clubs since his teens, he performed at the 1982 Montreux Jazz Festival with Double Trouble. Jackson Browne, in the audience, offered free studio time in Los Angeles. Texas Flood was recorded in two days with no overdubs, released June 1983. Vaughan played a 1962/1963 Stratocaster called “Number One,” strung with GHS Nickel Rockers at .013-.058 gauge, tuned down a half step to E-flat. His tone ran through Fender Super Reverbs and Vibroverbs, shaped by an Ibanez Tube Screamer. He made the blues commercially viable again when the industry had written it off.
Essential Listening
- John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers (with Eric Clapton) – Blues Breakers with Eric Clapton (1966)
- Cream – Disraeli Gears (1967)
- The Jimi Hendrix Experience – Are You Experienced (1967)
- Fleetwood Mac – Then Play On (1969)
- The Allman Brothers Band – At Fillmore East (1971)
- Free – Fire and Water (1970)
- Rory Gallagher – Rory Gallagher (1971)
- ZZ Top – Tres Hombres (1973)
- Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble – Texas Flood (1983)
- The Rolling Stones – Let It Bleed (1969)
- Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac – Fleetwood Mac (1968)
- Johnny Winter – Second Winter (1969)