American Blues Scene is proud to premiere “Keep On Drinkin’,” the lead single from Brooklyn-based Grammy-winning musician, poet, and producer Reed Turchi’s upcoming anniversary reissue of Road Ends in Water, due October 9 via Gitcha Records.
Originally recorded as basement sessions, the collection has been newly remixed and remastered and marks the first time these tracks have appeared on streaming platforms or vinyl, after previously existing only in a limited personal CD run. The release revisits an early chapter of Turchi’s work and features special guest Luther Dickinson of North Mississippi Allstars.
Cameron Weeks’ drums and Chris Reali’s bass propel Turchi’s incantatory one-chord groove, and along with his vocals and Luther Dickinson’s gloriously fuzzed-out slide guitar, give “Keep On Drinkin’” the swagger of a vintage Rolling Stones barroom anthem that charges forward like a freight train bound for darker territory.
In an exclusive statement for American Blues Scene, Turchi breaks down the players, places, and perspectives:
Musically, ‘Keep on Drinking’ owes its main riff to the inspiration of RL Burnside — songs like ‘Poor Black Mattie’ and ‘Skinny Woman,’ that are based around sliding-up on the high E and B string (though those RL songs are in open G, and ‘Keep on Drinking’ is in open D, so the riff moves to what would be strings B and G). That’s the verse lick. The chorus lick owes a debt to drummer Cameron Weeks, who came up with the tom hits that close out the lines, and really define that as a separate section.
Lyrically, I was living in North Mississippi at the time, and soaking up a crash-course in some pretty exciting and half-truth-half-mythical stories of some interesting lives. ‘Keep on Drinking’ is an amalgamation and twist of different stories — not based on any one factual occurrence — the song is sung by a son or a neighbor of a man/father that the singer has watched basically live life as an abusive and hard-drinking patriarch to his family — and so the singer of the song is simultaneously out for revenge, and also trying to escape his own demons. I was 19 when I wrote this song, and there are some stereotypes or, characteristic-stereotypes, that I might write a little differently today.
I’ve long admired the songwriting of Randy Newman, and what I love most is how he is able to create incredibly complicated emotional positions in songs. For instance, maybe most appropriately here, think of his song ‘Rednecks.’ I’ve heard all sorts of people cheer to different sections of that song, thinking that THEY are ‘in’ on the joke, that they know which group Newman is satirizing. And yet, the more you listen, the more you hear the joke is on…all of us. I’m not sure ‘Keep on Drinkin’ quite rises to that level of political commentary, but the idea is similar — it sounds like a ‘let’s go drinking’ party song, but the more you listen, the more you realize the layers of darkness (and yes, uptempo groove) beneath it.
Working on Luther with this song was an absolute dream. I had met him a couple years earlier, thanks to Bill Ferris (my mentor at UNC Chapel Hill), and at the time I was working on these songs I was also helping the Dickinsons’ mother, Mary Lindsay, organize the paperwork related to Jim Dickinson‘s (their father’s) musical estate, as he had recently passed. I sent a few unfinished songs to Luther and asked if he would be open to playing on them — I was blown away, and really incredibly honored and excited, for him not only to agree, but to send back these absolutely fuzzed-out, North-Mississippi-mud-bliss slide tracks.
Apparently he plugged his guitar into an old tape recorder, and took the direct out (no speaker) as the recording — and destroyed the tape recorder in the process. It sure sounds like it. Luther’s slide sound on this track, and on the other couple songs on this album, is one of my favorite guitar sounds of all time — and it seems fitting that it could only happen once, before that machine melted down.
Luther gave me an extraordinary gift by playing on these songs, and also paid me a high compliment when he noted that it’s hard to write Hill Country Blues type songs that feel right, in part because the riffs are based on such deceptive simplicity, that it’s hard for it all not to feel like a knock-off.
Of course I know the musical inspirations to this song, but I do think it also stands on its own as an original song — and that is not an easy thing to do, and that is something I feel extremely lucky to have pulled off, with the necessary ingredients of Cam’s drumming, Chris’s bass line, and yes, Luther’s slide-bliss overdubs.
