Hound Dog Taylor and the HouseRockers

Hound Dog Taylor played one of the cheapest guitars you could buy, but his raucous, primitive boogie inspired Bruce Iglauer, who worked for Delmark at the time, to start Alligator Records, which became one of America’s biggest blues labels; this album was their first release. It came out in 1971, when Taylor was already in his mid-fifties. (He died in 1975.) The music is played by a bassless trio — Taylor on positively ungodly slide guitar (it sounds like it’s coming through a malfunctioning pay phone), Brewer Phillips on rhythm guitar, and Ted Harvey on drums. The music boogies so hard it’s practically punk rock — you can draw a straight line from this not only to George Thorogood and the Destroyers, whose first album was originally bassless just like this one, but to the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion and other New York noise-blues terrorists of the 1990s.