Translucent Blues

By Tre Martinez
Contributing Writer

Attendees of this year’s Fargo Blues Festival will be pleased to learn that Translucent Blues, the new collaboration between slide guitarist Roy Rogers and famed former Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek, has topped the Roots Rock radio chart.

The pair, who headlined the Festival, have been called “masters of their craft” by the likes of blues, country, and rock magazine No Depression. The record shows two musicians at home with their instruments. Rogers’s guitar lines go from jagged, blues-infused riff rock to mellow acoustic country blues, to astral psychedelia to go along with Manzarek’s trademark space launches, like the ones he crafted with The Doors so many years ago. When not in the cockpit of a spacecraft or playing synthesized vibrophone as well as any classic jazz player, Manzarek is on an old stool playing honky-tonk piano.

The two play off of each other, to say the least. Sometimes they’ll match styles, creating a familiar yet refreshing sound, like the proverbial old shoe. Other times the two contrast each other in a way that compliments the other, as only two musicians in perfect sync with each other can.

The collaborative air is furthered by the involvement of such poets as Jim Carroll (The Basketball Diaries), Kerouac and Ginsberg, contemporary Micheal McClure, and many more. The content of the poems vary from political and blunt to abstract and ethereal.

Doors fans should get this record for Manzarek’s just-like-old-times playing, both in stomping electric blues and during brief yet fulfilling psychonautic liftoffs. The album finds Rogers in perfect form, showing the marks of a distinguished guitarist: never overplaying, never playing anything that doesn’t feel like it came straight from the soul. Roots rock fans have got at least one thing right: Translucent Blues is a #1 record.

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