In the 1960’s cinematic prison drama Cool Hand Luke, character actor Strother Martin famously uttered the line, “What we have here is a failure to communicate”. The film’s title character played by Paul Newman heard the prison warden loud and clear. He just didn’t like what he heard. That’s the way I feel about No B! the 2016 release by a band known as Jane Lee Hooker. Like that sadistic prison warden, Jane Lee Hooker sounds like it has no empathy for listeners as they inflict a full fifty one minutes of relentless abuse on to those who happen upon this misguided recording.  

We have a motto around here at the JUNCTION which is, “Life is too short to listen to bad music.” In order to make a fair assessment of any album, one would have to listen to the recording, do the due diligence and do some research as to who was responsible for such an affront to humanity. So in this case, I’m taking one for the team. My initial reaction was to eschew any research or study of my subject matter. You know like Jane Lee Hooker’s approach to blues music.

Ruf Records, which seems to want to corner the market on Cheesecake blues, simply says this about Jane Lee Hooker on their website, “Tearing out of their native New York in 2016 with a white-knuckle debut album No B!, these five rockers fuse the sticky thrills of golden-era punk and blues with a healthy slug of modern attitude.” Sticky thrills? Golden era punk? Healthy slug of modern attitude? I can’t tell if even their record label likes this train wreck.

This five piece band sounds like the worst 80’s metal/hair band anyone has ever heard. They are fronted by a vocalist who sings everything like she is trying to escape a Turkish prison, which I would imagine to be unpleasant, unsuccessful, pathetic and loud with lots of echo. Maybe this from where the “sticky thrills” comment is derived.  

No B! is so bad that it’s laughable. It sounds like a comedy skit on Saturday Night Live. It is a rodeo where several of the most hackneyed, tired blues clichés are rounded up, trotted out and then turned up to eleven. If the record is a comedy album (and I’m not completely ruling that out) then the joke wears pretty thin very fast.

Everybody from Ray Charles to Otis Redding and Muddy Waters is given the Jane Lee Hooker treatment.  From the utter disrespect and distasteful co-opting of the birth name of a true blues legend to the paint by numbers covering of some iconic blues performers, believe me there is much to dislike about this album and this band.

It has been duly noted that the blues is fairly easy to play and yet very difficult to play well. It sounds like Jane Lee Hooker doesn’t even try.

Why should anybody care about such an abomination? It is because as Tony Coleman so eloquently pointed out right here in the pages of BLUES JUNCTION, music like this “…represents the wholesale destruction of our culture. I think there are people out there who have no idea what this music means to our culture. When people take a dump on this music, it is not only an embarrassment, it is an insult.”

Maybe Al Blake put it best when he said of bands like Jane Lee Hooker that they “…couldn’t hack it in the rock world so they come and play in our sandbox. That isn’t good enough for them, so they attempt to tear down something, in this case blues music, that they don’t understand in the first place. They don’t even know what they are attempting to destroy. There is such a childish naiveté that surrounds many of these so called blues artists which is sad. It’s embarrassing really. They have such a limited perspective of what they are doing that they don’t realize what they are undoing.”

For my part I can’t speak to the motivation of a band in which all the players go by cute/funny nicknames as if they are receiving production credits on a pornographic movie. It is after all their first album.

When covering material made famous by others, one would think that a band would want to choose tunes to which they can add something to the language and contribute to the conversation.  In the case of No B! Jane Lee Hooker does the opposite. In every case, the band demonstrates a complete lack of empathy toward the subject matter at hand and covers this ground with all the subtly of a German tank battalion lumbering down a Parisian Boulavard. They make bad choices as far as selecting their material and then make laugh out loud choices as to how to interpret that material. I suspect that they don’t care enough to understand what they are doing, which is why they do it so poorly and, of course, with such bravado. That is where the comedic elements of this album come into play.

I question the motivation of Ruf Records who put this album out. They should be ashamed of themselves, but have been peddling this type of garbage for a long time now. So they must know what they’re doing. They pander to the LCD ("lowest common denominator") crowd with shameless consistency. I suspect that they welcome this review as they likely appreciate that old saying, “There is no such thing as bad publicity.”

I don’t know about that, but there is such a thing as bad music and Jane Lee Hooker’s No B! is bad music...exclamation point! What we have here with No B! is indeed a failure to communicate anything...on any level.

Without getting hung up on labels such as blues, blues-rock or ok, I’ll bite “golden era punk,” this is just some of the most wretched music I have ever heard in my life. The fact that this drivel is being marketed in the quasi-blues world of Ruf Records speaks volumes as to how far into the abyss they have fallen.

As the rest of us stand on the edge of that precipice, all we can do is hope Jane Lee Hooker returns to the “white knuckled” world of whatever form of music they prefer and leave the blues world to people who don’t treat the music as some kind of joke to forward their own desperate careers. Oh and by the way, just so you know I’m here to help, how about use the band name “Ozzy Tallica” as the next reinvention of yourself.

-  David Mac

Editor’s note: Next month enjoy a BLUES JUNCTION sexy pictorial...The Girls of Ruf Records.