Big British Blues Daddy John Mayall was left at home when that first wave of Britain's rockers fell into the hungry hands of American teendom like some flight of delicious decadent foreign birds. In those days the blues were still a minority taste, so John played the pubs and the clubs and the college halls where beat intellectuals grooved on the esoterics of The Blues and had to admit that yes, John had done his homework, and what's more, he really seemed to hurt in the fine old tradition of the genre.

To the endless succession of Mayall sidemen and leading lights, the blues may have been simply a musical form offering great possibilities for instrumentation, but to the man himself, a product of middle-class English culture, the blues are a whole world of enticing pain complete with a genuine and amply-documented history of mass oppression. John has solved the problem of vicarious torment, but the incongruity of his solution is still bothersome.

Of course, John's career is inseparable from those of his greatest collaborators. First there was Eric Clapton; when he joined the Bluesbreakers from the Yardbirds, word got around to the masses that there was this skinny mod playing beautiful loud fast electric blues, and it fried your brains, it was so good. It did, too. Eric gave the natives their first taste of live undiluted super-charges blues guitar in impeccable fiery virtuoso style, while John tinkled and strutted on his piano just like ol' Otis Spann, strummed his weird guitars just like ol' Elmore James, sang like J.B. Lenoir, blew on his harp like ol' Sonny Boy, and kept the whole show moving. The dour rhythm section did their job. The hottest sound in town. Hear it all on the first Blues-breakers With Eric Clapton album, or catch a measly two tracks on Thru The Years.

Eric tired of playing Mayall's blues and the occasional personal favorite Robert Johnson number, and so became the first famous graduate of The John Mayall Finishing School For Ambitious Skinny English Blues Guitarists. Peter Green followed, then Mick Taylor, then Harvey Mandel, then ... John accepted this high rate of attrition as part of the natural order of things, as part of the Mission. He went through rhythm sections almost as fast as he graduated guitarists. It was all very confusing. By the time you had the new John Mayall album in your hands, Mayall was playing around the corner or far off in the land of Many Dollars with a completely new band; horns where before there were none, and vice versa.

Thru The Years features Clapton, Green, and Taylor on guitars, McVie, Reeves, Thompson, and Williams on bass, Flint, Dunbar, Hartley and Hiseman on drums, and the assorted horns of Heck-stall-Smith, Mercer, Almond, Skidmore, Kant, and Healey. For your money you get a mish-mash of the best and the worst of the first five years' Bluesbreakers, from lightweight piano boogies through Peter Green's hybrid explorations to great thundering horn-and-guitar-laden wailing extravaganzas of perfect beefed-up soulful blues. The double-album set was taken partly from previously released albums, partly from odd tapes owned by London records. Two tracks are instrumentally identical to cuts on his second and third albums. Originality? A small measure. Life? Sometimes. Competence? Variable but generally high.

There was a time when Mayall and any one of his many bands could impress the youthful shit out of me, but that was before I heard much of the original stuff, before I heard what Mayall's discoveries could do when they were not constricted by The Blues Pure and Simpel, and before I heard so many pimply awful neo-blues bands going through the same old tired motions that I lost interest entirely and gave up on British blues. Without being completely wasted, I find myself immune to early Mayall these days, but having said that, I must assure you that Thru The Years is two-thirds very good Bluesbreakers, one third mediocre filler; and that's a pretty nice deal. After all, John Mayall's Bluesbreakers were simply the best-ever white British blues band.

Memories, the new album, offers the work of a paltry unit of three: Jerry McGee on guitars, Larry Taylor on bass, and John presiding hugely over the whole project. Like most other musicians who came out of the past decade relatively intact, John's style has gone from massive electric energy output to tastefully controlled dabbling with forms, so Memories never hits the highs and lows of Thru The Years: it just bounces along on an intricate current of superbly played smooth-blues instrumentals which doesn't fail because it doesn't take any risks. By now, any variation of the blues in existence must be second nature to Mayall. Since his Mission is, after all, contained by The Blues, he must comb even his own output for possible new adaptations on once-tried or ever-present themes. Or in other words, you've heard it all before with a different face on.

It's the lyrics that count, for Memories is no less than a collection of traumatic incidents and/or periods from John's blues-laden life. Given the widely-accepted opinion that John is something less than a great poet or master of English prose, it comes as no surprise to find that his baring of the soul is anecdotal rather than allegorical or psychotherapeutic. John simply wanted to tell us the story of his life. At times the sheer banality of his recollections, coupled as they are with straight "born to the blues" presentation, has me squirming with embarrassment bordering on disbelief that he could actually sing those words with a straight face, let alone a bluesy wail, unless he were stone maudlin drunk or hopelessly and innocently in love, in which case he would save his memories for the hot ears of his beloved.

In the end the man doesn't show us any new weaknesses; he just exaggerates the old ones. And yet, as Thru The Years shows, he has his talents and he has surely had his moments. He may have some left yet. (RS 100)

PATRICK CARR