Best known as front man and main man of the original purist '60s garage revivalists, Greg Prevost has always been one contrary mofo. If it wasn't enough to go all '1966' in the height of the immediate post-punk era (the Chesterfield Kings first started in '78), then going Dolls/Hollywood Brats-style glam just as 1966 was back in style – as the Chesterfield Kings did with their mighty 'Berlin Wall of Sound' album at the height of the garage revival in the late '80s – should tell you plenty about Greg's desire to go against the grain, even if that grain was the so-called alternative in the first place.In fact, Greg was operating under the underground even before the Chesterfield Kings got going, doing (unrecorded) solo folk-blues stuff in the original glam days, and doing an hysterical pysch-Stooges things in pre-punk days with his bands Mr Electro & The Void (also unrecorded), the Tar Babies and the Distorted Levels, whose 'Hey Mister ' single was one of the early American independent 45's. Of course all this stuff is just different pages of the same book, but Greg likes to jump from page to page in a seemingly more random order than most.
So it should come as no surprise that Greg has now turned to another new page – one perfectly in keeping with the range of styles previously explored – and become Greg "Stackhouse" Prevost, bluesman extraordinaire, on his new record 'Mississippi Murderer ', out now on Spain's Mean Disposition Records.
Revisiting a primitive blues style the Chesterfield Kings themselves touched on with their 'Drunk On Muddy Water' before heading back to the garage, and picking up the slide skills he picked up in the early '70s from heavy Stones immersion and a pre-teen Son House sighting (the legendary Delta bluesman was rediscovered in Greg's hometown of Rochester, New York in the '60s), 'Mississippi Murderer' finds Greg still bizarrely (and fabulously) looking like he's on call for Hanoi Rocks and cranking out some of the greatest rockin' white blues in decades (or at least since the last time Charlie Pickett or Kenny Brown recorded).
Former Inner Mystique & Black To Comm scribe Bill Shute has described the album as "a primal blues blast that sounds like the blues album the 1971 Iggy and the Stooges might have recorded had they been from Chicago and roadie-ing for J.B. Hutto", and I couldn't put it better myself. Indeed it's the album you've wanted the Stones to make for the last 40 years, and maybe the album the Dolls or the Stooges should've made when they came back.
Whilst he's always worked so far under the radar that he's never had a career in music as such, Greg Prevost is one of those guys who's in it for life – like Jeremy Gluck from the Barracudas, like Mike Spenser of the Cannibals, like Kim Kane of the Slickee Boys, like all those Boston guys like Kenne Highland, Billy Borgiolli, John Felice, JJ Rassler, Frank Rowe, like our own Deniz Tek and Rob Younger even. Guys who just keep on doing it because it's what they do. Like a lot of those guys, Greg has built up an impressive body of work over the decades, throughout which he's maintained a constant contrary vision and found his own authentic voice, even if, in Greg's case, the one that comes out of his mouth still sounds like a cross between Jagger and Iggy.
I reckon "Mississippi Murderer' could well be Greg Prevost's finest work yet. I dig the blues and I've been a fan of Greg's stuff since the Chesterfield Kings first LP, so the album is a big deal for me. If you're a fan, you'll love it too.
