Jimmy Ley's "No Excuses, No Regrets"

My late friend Tim Schuller was a Dallas-based blues scribe, but before making his way down to the Lone Star State, he grew up in Youngstown, Ohio, and spent time in Cleveland and Chicago. Tim had many stories about Cleveland-based performers like Robert Jr. Lockwood and Bill "Mr. Stress" Miller. While lesser known outside Northern Ohio, Jimmy Ley was an estimable performer who shared plenty of stages with both Lockwood and Mr. Stress, as well as legendary guitarist Glenn Schwartz (James Gang, Pacific Gas and Electric). Now intrepid indie Smog Veil, who've done yeoman work in documenting the late '60s-early '70s Northern Ohio musical underground (including releases by Stress and Schwartz) are releasing No Excuses, No Regrets, a compilation of studio, live, and home recordings that preserve the legacy of this exciting and expressive performer.

A triple threat instrumentalist on piano, harmonica, and slide guitar, Jimmy excelled as an ebulliently extroverted singer, front man, and bandleader, covering a wide spectrum of music, from old-timey boogie-woogie piano to modern soul-blues. Imagine Mose Allison's gift for lyrical rumination wedded to the groove and improv facility of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band when Butter started employing jazz veterans for his horn-driven lineups and you'll get some idea of what's going on here. Jimmy was an entertainer first, and his bands -- most notably, Blues Idiom and the Coosa River Band -- were less raw than Mr. Stress's Chicago-styled outfit and less idiosyncratic than 15-60-75 The Numbers Band, who were evolving their own unique take on blues-based music in nearby Kent. 

This isn't a museum piece; it's sweaty party music for working stiffs to drink and dance to. Just listen to the relentless propulsion behind Jimmy's extended harp solo on Tommy Brown's "Southern Women," or Rodger Collins' "She's Looking Good," which is tight as a patent leather shoe, with guitarist Alan Greene filling in for a full horn section. Jimmy's ear for obscure R&B gems also unearthed Johnny Fuller's "Mercy Mercy," which sports a topical lyric atop the deepest groove imaginable. The four-piece Coosa River Band also applied their stripped-down attack to a modern, "downtown" take on Don Nix's "Going Down" (which audiences of the time would have known via Freddie King or Jeff Beck's versions).

There's even an unlikely commercial appeal to some of the original material. Ley's signature song "Deborah" sounds, as its author admits in Nick Blakey's always exemplary liner notes, incongruously appropriate for Tom Jones, with plenty of guitar ornamentation from Greene. (Jimmy Ley spins a great yarn and has a phenomenal memory for detail. He's also brutally honest in his own self-assessment, owning up to the problems with ego and alcohol that eventually led to his departure from the music business.) "Something's Crawling" is a jazz-tinged statement of determination in the face of adversity, while the late night lament "Thank You" was inspired, Ley says, by seeing soulful Brit psych rockers Procol Harum at Detroit's Grande Ballroom.

My own favorite stuff here is the old-timey, "Down Home Jimmy" material: the rollicking original piano stomper "I Think Your Time Has Come," the raucous train song "The 413," and the one-man boogie-woogie band version of Gatemouth Brown's "You Got Money" that Ley cut for a WMMS "coffee break concert." Even the straight-ahead blues tracks here -- a long version of Otis Rush's "Checking On My Baby" that features guitarist Al Silver to good advantage, a take on Muddy Waters' "Tiger In Your Tank" with Jimmy on slash-and-burn slide, and Willie Dixon's "Spider In My Stew" with Jimmy playing both piano and harp -- posses an energy and spark that'll transport you from wherever you're hearing this music to a table in front of the bandstand of some '70s Rust Belt dive. And that's a compliment.