The Merced Blue Notes • Get your kicks on route 99

Artist Biography by Richie Unterberger

The Merced Blue Notes' career lasted about a decade and a half, but it resulted in few recordings, though apparently it did supply a whole lot of fun for live crowds in central California who wanted to groove to basic, energetic blues, R&B, soul, and rock & roll. That's what the band played on its handful of rare singles, on an assortment of labels, between 1961 and 1966. The group's music was in the stock R&B/blues-influenced rock & roll style, on both vocal and instrumental material, often putting organ and bluesy guitar to the fore, sometimes punctuated with sax and harmonica. In their later days they got into funkier grooves, in the manner that big acts such as Booker T. & the MG's were updating their sound, though they didn't possess the originality to gain a national audience.
The Merced Blue Notes formed in high school in Merced, CA, in January 1957, and would undergo numerous lineup changes over the course of their career, the constant element being singer/songwriter/guitarist Kenny Craig. They actually made their first contacts with the record industry back around 1958, when they auditioned for Specialty Records, with a young Sonny Bono in the control booth. Specialty only wanted to record their singer Roddy Jackson, however, Jackson making three flop 45s for the label in the late '50s. A couple of obscure singles came out on the Merced label in 1960, and they'd intermittently record over the next half dozen years for other companies, including Accent, Tri-Phi, Mammoth, and the Fantasy R&B subsidiary Galaxy. None of the singles caught on in a big way, though their 1961 Accent 45 "Rufus" got enough airplay in Detroit to get them some concert and recording work (the latter for Harvey Fuqua's Tri-Phi label) there in 1962.
With little success on record and a sound that was getting outdated by changing trends in rock and soul music, the lineup that recorded for Galaxy in the mid-'60s broke up in early 1966. Kenny Craig kept the group going with other musicians and continued playing live under the band name for several more years. The member of the Merced Blue Notes with the highest profile in subsequent years was Bobby Hunt, who recorded with the Seven Souls and also formed the trio Head West with fellow Seven Souls musicians Henry Moore and Bob Welch, playing keyboards with the group on several tours while Welch was in Fleetwood Mac in the early '70s.

 

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In the decade before the British Invasion and the completion of Interstate 5, Highway 99 was still California's main north-south thoroughfare. Among the towns evoked by the movie American Graffiti which dot its pathway through the San Joaquin Valley is Merced, approximately seventy-five miles east of San Jose. It is an unlikely crucible, but the whole Merced Blue Notes saga is unlikely: a multi-ethnic rock'n'roll cover band gets nurtured by the blues-loving town Fire Chief and civic activist, shuffles its membership and evolves into one of the all-time regional rocking rhythm and blues bands, leaving a handful of tough 45s including some of the 1960s finest blues-based instrumentals and many unissued tracks in its wake. Nearly forty years after the band split up and twenty years after their only album (of previously unissued material) was released on a small valley label, we can finally celebrate their first complete CD, featuring twenty-six glorious, rousing and bluesy tracks, including eleven heard for the first time and two alternate versions.




1 Whole Lotta Nothing           
2 Greyhound           
3 Bad,Bad Whiskey           
4 Do the Pig           
5 I've Got a Right to Love My Baby           
6 Mama Rufus See All 2           
7 You're Driving Me Crazy           
8 Rufus           
9 Midnight Session Parts1&2           
10 Skippy           
11 Thompin'           
12 Too Much           
13 Soul Sister           
14 Sun Down           
15 Your Tender Lips           
16 Fragile           
17 Willie Mae           
18 Rufus Jr. See All 2           
19 Finger Licking           
20 Head Bad           
21 When The Guitar Rings           
22 Love Love Love           
23 Watermelon Man           
24 Jump           
25 Bad,Bad Whiskey           
26 Whole Lotta Somthing

CDCHD 1026 LABEL ACE records




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