Long John Baldry
It Ain’t Easy
(Warner Bros., 1971)

In order to fully appreciate Long John Baldry’s 1971 album, It Ain’t Easy, it helps to know a little about the events leading up to its release. At the dawn of the 1970s, the British blues pioneer was sitting on the sidelines of rock, pondering his imminent plunge to the bottom after two wild rides to the top in the UK. His career had begun in the late ’50s and early ’60s, when the 6’ 7”, white, gay Englishman had become the unlikely father of the British blues, helping to promulgate the African-American art form in the London clubs with Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies’ Blues Incorporated, and later discovering Rod Stewart, whom Baldry featured in his band the Hoochie Coochie Men. Next came England’s “first supergroup,” the legendary, if ephemeral, Steampacket, starring Baldry and Stewart with Brian Auger and Julie Driscoll. Additionally, Baldry directly inspired Mick Taylor, Keith Richards, and Brian Jones to form the Rolling Stones and even demonstrated to a young Eric Clapton that white English boys could in fact play the blues. 

Then came a bittersweet misstep; he transformed himself into an Engelbert Humperdinck-styled balladeer and went, literally, to Top of the Pops in 1967 with a sappy hit called “Let the Heartaches Begin.” While it probably netted him a few pounds, he all but stained his blues legacy in Britain forever, becoming the darling of housewives and schoolgirls, an audience he secretly had little time for. In the meantime, John Mayall, Clapton, and others stole his blues mantle out from under him. After the demise of his band, Bluesology—which launched the career of Reggie Dwight, the future Elton John—Baldry’s career soon dissipated into in a boozy haze of artistic and commercial recession.

By 1971, a despondent Baldry sat in his Muswell Hill, London flat, feeding his pet goat and finding himself suddenly in the rearview of history at the precise moment when his protégés, Rod Stewart and Elton John, were catapulting to rock stardom in the US.

To save himself, Baldry signed with Faces manager, Billy Gaff, who urged him to get back into the blues-based rock business, with not a moment to waste. Gaff enlisted Baldry’s two star protégés, Stewart and John, to pay back their mentor by producing what would become his American debut.

It Ain’t Easy features balls-up bluesy rave-ups with electric guitars screeching, back beats thwacking, and gospel-tinged female vocalists surrounding your charismatic host, Long John Baldry—a charming English sophisticate who sang like a man with a throat full of Mississippi gravel.

Stewart and John each produced one side of It Ain’t Easy in separate studios and on opposing schedules. This gave the album, in its side-segregated vinyl form, a slightly schizophrenic feel. The Rod Stewart side is more in keeping with his Every Picture Tells a Story album, while the Elton John side works with the piano-fied sonic palette he had employed on his own Tumbleweed Connection.

The first thing you hear, however, is the barrelhouse boogie of pianist Ian Armitt, vamping behind Baldry’s autobiographical spoken word soliloquy, “Conditional Discharge”, in which Baldry recounted his late ’50s arrest for busking in London’s Wardour Street. He then slams seamlessly into the album’s rocking manifesto, “Don’t Try to Lay No Boogie Woogie on the King of Rock & Roll.” It’s one of the great one-two punches in the history of recorded rock, and FM and underground radio frequently played the two as one long song.

The album benefits from great songs, such as Elton John’s “Rock Me When He’s Gone”, the Faces’ “Flying”, and Randy Newman’s “Let’s Burn Down the Cornfield”, while throughout these recordings his raspy baritone seems to celebrate his return to his rock and blues roots. Thus, he seems genuinely thrilled to dig into Willie Dixon’s “I’m Ready”, and his incendiary duet with Maggie Bell on the Leadbelly classic “Black Girl” brims with authenticity.

Released by Warner Brothers in 1971, It Ain’t Easy could not have come out at a better time. For while it may have been harder to convince UK audiences that Baldry had come down from lounge heaven, the untainted American rock audience saw it as a kind of debut. Baldry at last had a chance to tour in the land that had so inspired him in the first place. In fact, It Ain’t Easy was so well-received in America that, in 1972, Warner Brothers brought the whole team back for a follow-up, Everything Stops for Tea, which features cover art by guitarist Ronnie Wood. 

Baldry’s career plot after that was not, in fact, easy. And, while over the next few decades he would comeback and then go away again, It Ain’t Easy remains a classic album, and a great example of career reinvention and temporary redemption.

Listen: “Mr. Rubin/Black Girl” [at youtube.com]

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