slip case packaged cdr $7
James Pobiega, a 6'9"
Polish-derived man from Chicago's South Side, performed heavily in bars and
and to a greater extent on the street of his home turf during the late 70s
through the mid 80s under the name Little Howlin Wolf. During that time, self-released
32 45s (that weknow of) and two LPs (compiled from the 7"s) titled The
Guardian and The Cool Truth. The LPs show a unique and visionary take on emotive,
raw, dissolved blues featuring Wolf on every instrument he could lay his hands
on with a wrenching souldfulness and commanding fire-brained intensity to
match Albert Ayler. The 45s, though, are where Wolf really stretched out,
taking his music to its furthest reaches including stabs at Calypso, gypsy
songs, Country-Western and children's songs.
This is the second of three volumes of Wolf's complete 7" output (those
not on the two scarce and desirable LPs) which we are releasing in collaboration
with the True Vine Record Store
VOLUME ONE WAS HOT DISC FOLKS CANT STOP TALKING BOUT IT!!
SF WEEKLY- By Justin F. Farrar
Shattered-blues meditations; stoned, staggering polkas; ancient tongues spewing
forth haunted voodoo-gibberish; back-porch gospel delirium; a room full of
Chess session musicians tinkering with their instruments, too wasted to pull
it together for just one more take before the crack of dawn -- these are just
a few of the fleeting impressions the unique American music of one Little
Howling Wolf evokes. As legend has it, Wolf (aka James Pobiega of Chicago)
is a Polish-American genius-freak street busker who self-released approximately
32 45s and two LPs during the late '70s and early '80s. When these singles
are consumed in a compilation-size dose -- as they can be with this release
-- LHW's aesthetic becomes a panorama of 20th-century American folk and pop
forms, methodically shredded and Scotch-taped back together into a mangled
folk-blues groove that's incessantly threatening collapse into some incoherent
muttering-madness -- but never does. Even when saxes, mouth harps, acoustic
guitars, drums, various percussive effects, and LHW's guttural vox are all
seemingly jamming on vastly different tunes from widely different eras, the
ship holds together. That's because this Little Howling Wolf character possesses
true outsider vision. Somebody declare this guy a national treasure.
And Thurston and Byron threw this disc somewhere on
there top list of last year in the Bull Tounge columnn
::::wfmu-
Baltimore noise junk mavens Nautical Almanac are behind this CDR issue of
some stark, raw 45s from James Pobiega, a 6'9" Polish man from Chicago,
whom in the 70s and 80s recorded and performed under the moniker Little Howlin'
Wolf. While the inspiration for his namesake can clearly be heard in his gravelly
voice and rib-sticking electric raw guitar lines, this stuff is all home-recorded,
whatever-goes stabs at genres of all kinds from calypso to New Orleans funereal
marches, sometimes overlapped in the same track while overdubbed monotonous
drums patter away. Comparisons are even made to Albert Ayler (whose "Ghosts"
can be ascertained in the melody lines quite often), but the drifting time
signatures and overlapping ideas are purely in line with other primitive geniuses
like Abner Jay (if Abner had access to a 4-track I think he would have sounded
more like this).