Walter "Wolfman" Washington
& The Roadmasters
11 February 2000
The Varsity Theater,
Baton Rouge LA
Source: DSBD>CDR>EAC>WAV>FLAC(A+)
Disc 1: [68:51]
01. Wolf Funk
02. Mary Ann
03. Use Me
04. Glass House >
05. Can I Change My Mind?
06. Funk Is In The House
07. Girl I Want To Dance
08. Please Come Back To Me
09. The Chokin' Kind >
10. Nobody's Fault But Mine
11. You Got Me Worried
Disc 2: [77:43]
01. Feel So Bad
02. Save Your Love For Me
03. Chicken
04. Funk Time >
05. You Can Stay But The Noise Must Go >
06. Outro
+ Filler: 05-04-02 Maple Leaf, New Orleans LA
(SBD > Sharp MDMT877 > CDR)
07. I'm Tiptoeing Through
08. Close The Door
09. When The Answer Is Clear
10. Steal Away
Walter "Wolfman" Washington - guitar and vocals
Jack Cruz - bass, vocals
Tom Fitzpatrick - tenor, alto sax
Wilbert "Junk Yard Dog" Arnold - drums, percussion
Luca Frederickson - keyboards
Dave "Bonecrusher" Woodard - trombone
Size: 717 MB (FLAC)
There's nobody quite like Walter "Wolfman" Washington & his Roadmasters. Equal parts funk, soul, and gospel blues stirred with deep feeling and simmered in a special New Orleans roux, Wolfman's music pulses with imagination and joy, framed by the guitarist's exquisitely personal compositions and relentlessly propelled by the crisp punch of his skin-tight ensemble.
Walter "Wolfman" Washington is a glorious individualist from a city known for its flamboyant musicians, New Orleans. The Wolfman’s soaring, deep-soul vocals and funky, choked guitar sound are immediately recognizable. Like Fats Domino, Professor Longhair, and many other New Orleans notables, he has a colourful nickname, the result of missing front teeth and prominent eye teeth. "Just like the vampires be looking, that’s the way I be looking," he says.
The Wolfman’s expressive vocals and jazzy guitar lines mesh perfectly with the churning, horn-dominated sound of the Roadmasters. The over-all effect is of a gleaming, well-oiled blues machine that blends soul, gospel, and funk with straight blues.
The Wolfman was born in New Orleans in 1943, and by 1960 he had become proficient enough to go on the road as the guitarist in the band of his cousin, the popular R & B vocalist Ernie K-Doe. In these years he became a pupil and later the favourite accompanist of the great New Orleans singer Johnny Adams.
For more than twenty years, Walter toured and performed with Johnny Adams. Walter plays lyrical and eloquent backing guitar on four of Johnny’s albums on Rounder in the 1990s, Room with a View of the Blues, Good Morning, Heartache, From the Heart, and Johnny’s superb final album, Man of My Word, released within weeks of his death from cancer in 1998.
Johnny Adams brought Walter to the Rounder label, where the Wolfman recorded three albums in the late 1980s, Wolf Tracks, Out of the Dark, and Wolf at the Door. Walter also learned from Johnny how to be a creative and fluid vocalist; he admits his characteristic soaring falsetto is something he learned from Johnny.
Walter and his band produced several exciting albums in the 1990s: the Ray-Charles-influenced Sada on Pointblank in 1991, Blue Moon Rising, recorded in Europe with James Brown’s horn section, the J.B. Horns (Maceo Parker, Pee Wee Ellis, and Fred Wesley) in 1994, and Funk Is in the House, a heady brew of furious funk and soul on Rounder’s subsidiary label Bullseye in 1997.
The band’s most recent album, On the Prowl, released on the Bullseye label, has been greeted with high praise for its "fiery, skintight ensemble sound . . . an overall level of performance that places Wolfman at the top of the class as a contemporary urban blues guitarist and vocalist" (John Sinclair in Living Blues).