Willie Dixon: Hidden Charms : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Willie Dixon is a man cursed. He's written many classic blues songs ("I'm Your Hoochie Coochie Man," "Little Red Rooster," "I Just Wanna Make Love to You"); an accomplished bassist, he perfected the walking bass line. His own records, though, have been mixed bags: an adequate but routine singer, he's never been able to invest his songs with the same degree of urgency that Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf and others so readily brought to them.

Yet there's no denying Dixon's enormous influence, and that's what Hidden Charms, a collection of old and new Dixon songs produced with obvious loving care by T Bone Burnett, aims to set straight. The hands-off approach taken by Burnett shows that he is clearly in awe of Dixon, but that's a mixed blessing. Perhaps realizing that the seventy-three-year-old Dixon can't outshout a band, Burnett keeps the band restrained – sometimes too much for its own good. The album is dominated by lazy shuffles sprinkled with Lafayette Leake's jaunty piano rolls and Sugar Blue's lonesome harmonica. That's appropriate for the masterful remake of Dixon's 1961 song "Don't Mess with the Messer," but on cuts like "Study War No More," a grittier arrangement would have worked better. The band doesn't get down and dirty until the last track, "I Do the Job."

Dixon's new songs are merely ordinary, and his voice remains limited, but he can still manipulate the tricky phrasing of his 1956 tune "I Love the Life I Live," and his agreeable growl works on "Blues You Can't Lose." When Dixon – who recently lost part of his right leg as a result of diabetes – sings, "I'll bet all I got on a bet one time/One minute later, I don't have a dime," his credibility easily compensates for his shortcomings.