1980 Eddie Bo “Watch For The Coming” on Bo-Sound

As someone of partial Cajun ancestry I feel both indelibly wedded to all iterations of N’awlins music, as if Lee Dorsey were my father and Allen Toussaint my uncle and Iry LeJune my aunt and Cliff Chenier & Bois Sec Ardoin my best friends in high school, and Henry Butler and James Booker dudes I got high with under the bridge, and Fess the guy who sold us the weed, and The Meters my better metier, but somehow there’s a very specific 220 Volt circuit between me and Eddie Bo. My man Bo (Edwin Joseph Bocage) is an super interesting cat, a heavy piano funkster zany Treme bar banger dancehall monster giddy creole greasy (greezy) soul-blues slanger, but also a sensitive dude who wrote untold love songs for the mighty RIC label under his wife Dorothy’s name. Weirdly, much in the way I think of Lester Young or Fats Navarro or even Jaco, he never put out THAT record, which is commonly accepted as not only a grail but definitive of his sound. As “Little Bo” he put out two titles for Ace on shellac in 1955. As “Roy Ward” he put out a single BANGER 45 “Horse With A Freeze” on Seven Bs. Now, where I come from, “Horse With A Freeze” means a shot of heroin with a sprinkle of coke, but I think Eddie (Roy) is singing about a dance step popular at the time. So, for many years I had to survive on the excellent CD comp “The Hook And Sling” which is ultra funky action with Bo leading Chuck Carbo’s band The Soul Finders, until I found a copy of “Watch For The Coming”. Which is awesome and totally revered here at the Castle, but also deeply weird and all over the place in that it’s boogie soul that also veers into honkeytonk and YES, reggae! What can you say, the man was the original’s original, and I love him. But J.C. Christ, if anyone out there has a spare copy of “The Other Side Of Eddie Bo” (which shares three tracks with this one), DM me and I will give you all my money and also my house for it, which means the deed to the The Castle, and conceivably the Moat Yacht. It’s yours. Oh yea.