Sneak of the Week: Son Seals’ “Just About to Lose Your Clown”

A blues bad ass brings rock and rage to a Ray Charles nugget.

Son Seals didn’t just play the blues; he lived the blues, which was great for his music but not so hot for his life. The Arkansas-born singer/guitarist kicked off his career in the ‘60s when he was still a teen.

In the ‘70s, he made his way to Chicago, and things took off for him when he began his long, fruitful stint with Alligator Records. With his fierce baritone roar and slashing lead guitar licks, Seals was a fearsome force, but he had to navigate a heap of hard times.

The guy’s real life was the sort of stuff blues mythos is made up of—he was shot in the face by his wife, and it was uncertain whether he’d sing again. He did.

He was badly injured in a car accident, and nobody could say whether he’d be able to play again. He did.

He lost a leg to diabetes, but it didn’t stop him from performing.

A fire destroyed his home and all his earthly possessions, but in the end, nothing short of his 2004 passing ever slowed him down.

He once told the Chicago Sun-Times, “I’ve been broke all kinds of different ways. But the one thing I try to keep from being broken is my spirit.” And that spirit seldom bore more guts and gravitas than on “Just About to Lose Your Clown” from 1984’s Bad Axe.

Seals could tuck into a straight-up Chicago-style 12-bar shuffle like nobody’s business, but he always had a knack for throwing in a tantalizing tweak somewhere that would nudge the tune a little to the left of your standard blues structures. There are plenty of those moments in his own compositions, but here he mixes things up by digging into the Ray Charles catalog.

Johnny MacRae was a country songwriter who could step outside that style when the spirit moved him. He wrote the R&B burner

“Just About to Lose Your Clown,” which appeared on Ray Charles’ brilliant 1966 LP Crying Time. Now, it’s a basic fact of life that not a soul on this sphere can outsing Brother Ray. But 18 years after the tune’s premiere, Seals took the song somewhere else entirely.

He comes barreling out of the gate, kicking the track off with a face-melting guitar solo. Bassist Johnny B. Gayden and drummer Willie Hayes catapult him forward with a hard-charging groove that mates the livewire intensity of rock ‘n’ roll with the sensual churn of a rhumba. In other words, it’s about as far from a South Side shuffle as you can get.

The foreboding, minor-key chord changes bend away from the standard blues template. It all provides Seals with a fresh and fiery platform for delivering the anthem of embittered independence that lies within the lyrics. Understatement and fury serve him equally well, and he shifts from smoldering to searing as he gives notice that his days of playing the fool for a falsehearted lover are over.

-Jim Allen

Photo: Son Seals, 1977 (Lioneldecoster via Wikimedia Commons)