Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown – Timeless

The first time I saw Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown play live some years back, I was amused to see him puffing away on the same kind of pipe as my dad. The joke got even better when I went back to interview Brown between sets, and discovered the tobacco he’d been stuffing into that pipe wasn’t exactly Borkum Riff.

Brown has always been the freest of spirits, defying genre boundaries in as carefree and casually eccentric a manner as his consumption habits. Timeless is another tough-to-classify effort from the 80-year-old Texas bluesman — though one hesitates to call him a bluesman, given how much else he does, and does well.

Timeless includes jazzy covers of Duke Ellington’s “Satin Doll” and Joe Zawinul’s “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy”, a couple of country-picking workouts that would make Chet Atkins proud, and ample amounts of Brown playing fiddle as well as guitar. There’s also a long and meandering version of “Unchained Melody”, which Brown turns into a conga-line workout.

But that’s nothing compared to “The Drifter — Spoken Intro”, a spiel that apparently just baffled the crowd Brown recorded it in front of (at one point, Brown asks, “What’re you laughin’ at, lady?”). It sounds like he’s either getting in touch with his inner Sun Ra, or showing the effects of all that pipe-smoking.

Fortunately, Brown follows that up with a wicked version of his signature song, “The Drifter”. Give the man enough time, and he’ll make it worth your while.