Robert Bennett explores bluesman - Robert Pete William

If Safe As Milk is in your record collection you need to hear Robert
Pete William’s Free Again. If you think R.L Burnside was the last word
in the stone-broke, blind drunk, gut-pit misery tradition of Delta
Blues, you need to hear Free Again. If you are the kind of person that
likes to relax to Nirvana Unplugged, basking in the records grim
twilight of near-catatonic despair and heart-ache, treat yourself with
a dose of Free Again.

The opener is a jaunty, raucous number concerning drinking and
hell-raising: “Well I’m ballin’ baby, ‘til the sun go down.” The
swinging mood soon falls flat as “Almost Dead Blues” reveals what is
really on Robert Pete’s mind: “Tell my mother to please come and see
the last of me..don’t want no doctor, doctor can’t do me no good.”
Suddenly the gusto and hard-ass tone has evaporated and Williams is
drifting among reveries of the most personal and painful kind, so
absorbed in troubles that it sounds like a fire under his chair would
not shake him out of his funk. With only the echo of his moody, rough
finger-picking for company, Williams laments and summons loved ones to
his death bed. The sensation is not dissimilar from hearing a
street-derelict engrossed in a loud, emotionally charged dialogue with
their demons. You feel afraid and fascinated by what is happening in
his mind as the voice soars and dips, occasionally turns to a ferocious
growl and as suddenly returns to a plaintive wail. It’s enough to give
anyone the willies and recalls Robert Johnson’s chilling image of
“Blues walking like a man."If the Blues was sitting alone in the middle
of nowhere, talking to itself, it would sound like this.

Next, a jittery slide version of Rolling Stone pulls off the almighty
feat of imbuing the song with more weird menace than the Muddy Waters
rendition. Williams cries out a warning that he was born mean, has been
delt a crappy hand and is mad as hell: “Seems like everybody, Oh Lord,
tryin’ to pass me by!”

A Thousand Miles From Nowhere is ocean-deep melancholy. Like Cobain in
his acoustic version of Something In The Way, the man is so far down in
dejection and disappointment that his helpless voice sounds distant,
ghostly and quavering. This song was an improvised effort and is the
first real taste of William’s gift for conjuring imagery that lingers
in the mind, nagging until it makes crystal-clear sense: “Tombstone for
my pillow, fairground in my bed.” It seems contradictory but then you
happen to wake up shaking at four in the morning in a cold sweat, so
full of dread and so restless with anxiety that you imagine some
terrible, giant hand is about to sweep you off this mortal coil and you
realise that no psychologist could capture the sensation as perfectly
as one of Robert Pete’s seemingly off the cuff lyrics.

The song that conveys his talent with words most is I’ve Grown So Ugly
and it isn’t hard to see what drew Beefheart to cover it. As well as
the voice that shifts from threatening growl to falsetto cry,
Beefheart’s almost supernatural ability to string apparently random
words together to form fantastic visions has a forefather in this song.
“I walked to the mirror for to comb my hair. I made a move, didn’t know
what to do. I stepped away forward for to break and run. Baby! Oh baby!
Baby this ain’t me! I done got so ugly I don’t even know myself!” On
the surface it seems to be about the depression of old age but the fact
that the protagonist is forced to run away from the mirror and the
rising urgency and pain of his voice suggest something more horrible
and unearthly than just a haggard old face.

Unearthly is perhaps the best way to sum up Free Again. The guitarist,
John Fahey met Robert Pete and was struck by the highly peculiar turn
of his mind. He described him as someone who seemed as though he were
“from outer space.” Listening to him, it becomes clear that this is
somebody who is operating on a different wavelength from anyone else.
The songs go beyond being intimate in tone to feeling like fragments of
internal monologue, musings on the misery of captivity and the fear of
approaching death from someone who exists more in their own thought
processes than they do in the material world. If you have not heard
them, follow up Free Again with some Skip James or Charley Patton.

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