John Mayall, Still Blue After All These Years

NEW YORK (Reuters) - If Eric Clapton is the guitar god, what does that make John Mayall -- prophet of the blues? Patron saint of "the devil's music"? Or maybe John the Baptist?

Mayall, 66, certainly baptised a whole generation of white, British musicians who might otherwise never have discovered the blues. Since 1964, his Bluesbreakers have incubated some of the greatest musical talent to emerge in England.

Clapton, Peter Green, Mick Fleetwood, John McVie and Mick Taylor all played with Mayall's seminal band. And, 35 years after forming the Bluesbreakers, Mayall is still going strong.

He plays at least 150 shows a year and makes albums that stretch a genre often viewed as musically restrictive and irrelevant by the Woodstock III generation for whom rap and heavy metal rule.

Yet the Englishman who has lived almost half his life in an anonymous Los Angeles suburb is modest about his status as arguably the most influential British bluesman.

He defers to Clapton, 12 years his junior, who was a post-Yardbirds, pre-Cream member of Mayall's Bluesbreakers and whose guitar virtuosity prompted graffiti in 1960s London proclaiming "Clapton is God."

"He (Clapton) was the first one in England who had any idea what the blues is all about. He's still magic every time he touches the guitar," Mayall said.

CLAPTON? HE PLAYED WITH ME!

Mayall is not so self-effacing, however, that he will not gently scold a reporter who asks about his playing with Clapton. "HE played with ME, it's the other way round!" he said in a recent interview during rehearsals for TV's "Late Show with David Letterman."

The soft-spoken Mayall, who has appeared on stage with just about every blues great from the late Muddy Waters to B.B. King, John Lee Hooker and Buddy Guy, is painfully modest. "I've played with just about everybody. I haven't always recorded with everybody. We've all been friends for decades," he said.

"John Lee Hooker is on the new album ("Padlock on the Blues"). On the "Wake Up Call" album (1993) I had Buddy Guy and Mavis Staples; Albert Collins was on that one too," he checked off the names dispassionately with no attempt to name-drop.

"You expect the best from these unique performers and usually I have not been disappointed."

But the seemingly mild-mannered Mayall, who on the surface appears all English stoicism, gets animated when he talks about the blues. The emotional music that grew out of the slave culture and the cotton fields of the Deep South could not be further from Mayall's childhood in the comfortable Cheshire suburbs of Manchester in England.

"Suffering is an emotion," he rationalised. "It doesn't have to be hard labour, it's being sensitive and hurt without showing it. You don't have to be thrown in jail over it. Everybody has the capacity to have those emotions and that's what comes out in the music -- as long as you know what the blues is and can play it," the snowy-haired musician said.

The intensity of the music just hit him, he said, when he heard 78 rpm records during his teenage years after the Second World War. "That's what I was attracted to, that's what I felt a connection with. It's exciting, passionate and very stimulating."

'SHOUT FOR JOY'

Mayall recalled buying one of his first records, boogie pianist Albert Ammons' "Shout for Joy" with Meade "Lux" Lewis on the flip side. His blues education came from his record collection of artists like Leadbelly, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Brownie McGhee, Sonny Terry, Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson.

He learned to play guitar from his jazz-playing father but decided on the keyboards when he went to art school.

In the years before rock 'n' roll, when Frank Sinatra and the big bands ruled the airwaves, Mayall stood apart from his friends. "It was always the blues," he said.

"I don't read or write music so it's the only thing I can play. I still can't play a scale. It was all self-taught and consequently it's a very off-the-wall style that guarantees I don't sound like anyone else."

That is evident in his latest Bluesbreakers recording, "Padlock on the Blues," which features Mayall's vocals and keyboards backed by drummer Joe Yuele, guitarist Buddy Whittington and bassist John Paulus.

"My music is probably more diverse and, not necessarily experimental but adventurous in expanding the boundaries of the blues. There's an awful lot of interchangeable blues artists and would-be blues artists on record, who all sound the same, the same twelve bars," Mayall said.

"I try and do something a little different, like a movie maker will try and create a picture, to touch the emotions and give you a visual sense of the story. That's what I try and do with my music."

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