All Your Love. Otis Rush. 1969. Chess.

 After hearing the 1959 Cobra Records version of Otis Rush’s All Your Love, you’ll never again doubt the sexual indomitability of the working class. The recording is vicious, recorded when Rush was only twenty four. He’d arrived in Chicago from Mississippi roughly a decade earlier, and you can hear in the record’s overly amplified production just how deeply urban living had influenced him. The saxophones especially, by Harold Ashby and Jackie Brenston, signify with raucous command that passage through youth when you’ve leaped aboard the carousel of multiple-partner sex and you can feel it begin to spin out of control but you’ve grown attached to the recklessness and vice so you allow yourself just one more go which becomes another string of assignations. Rush re-recorded the song for Chess two years later with another band. This new version is considerably more polished than the original, the tone more plaintive, mysterious. It’s as if the possibility of a large, commercial audience had given Rush the opportunity to shut off the distractions of the carousel and focus on a solo rider. Carlos Santana has said that if you strip All Your Love of its lyric you get Black Magic Woman. With the addition of some popular ideas from the supernatural, Peter Green took the mystery of eroticism one step further than Rush. Yet it’s the Chess recording of All Your Love that tells the most convincing story of sexual excitement at loose on the post-war Chicago south and west sides. The hypnotic energy of that time and place was forever harnessed by a group of working class musicians with the genius to redirect it into an American art form that altered the face of modernity. And helped birth rock and roll.

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