Note: for the full suite of measurements from the SoundStage! Audio-Electronics Lab, click this link.
March 2025
The history of recorded blues and jazz has abounded with legendary figures in the decades since Mamie Smith cut “Crazy Blues” in August 1920, but few artists have been connected to as broad a range of other musicians, and as many seminal events, as 82-year-old John Paul Hammond. Also known as John Hammond Jr.—to differentiate him from his father, a renowned record producer who shepherded budding artists ranging from Benny Goodman to Bruce Springsteen during his long tenure with Columbia Records—he was a veritable Zelig during the 1960s.
After dropping out of Antioch College at 19 to pursue music in New York City, Hammond hung out with a newly arrived Bob Dylan, recorded with members of veteran Toronto bar band the Hawks (whom he then introduced to Dylan), and hired Jimmy James to play guitar just before the young man flew to England and changed his surname back to Hendrix. In October 1971, straight out of drug rehab, Hammond’s old buddy Duane Allman jammed with him in New York right before flying home to meet his fate on his motorcycle in Macon, Georgia.
Outside of music, Hammond’s connections are equally interesting; he’s a third-generation scion of transportation magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt—the Elon Musk of his day. Not that the Vanderbilt association did the young musician much good. As he told me in a late-’70s radio interview, the Vanderbilt money ceased to flow when his father chose the music business over a more “suitable” trade.
Hammond’s early albums were highly derivative of the southern blues artists he loved, and he hadn’t yet developed his own style as a vocalist, guitarist, and harmonica player. But by the end of the ’60s, he’d found his way to Columbia Records—beating Springsteen there by two years—and had become a popular concert attraction around the world. From Tuesday, May 29, to Sunday, June 3, 1973, Hammond was headlining at the 150-seat Boarding House in the northern part of San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. Opening for him: a 24-year-old Tom Waits, still three years away from his debut recording.
In the audience for two nights, manning his reel-to-reel recorder, was another Zelig-like figure: legendary LSD wizard and Grateful Dead sound technician Owsley “Bear” Stanley. Hammond’s San Francisco music roots ran deep; he had attended college with future Jefferson Airplane guitarist Jorma Kaukonen and opened shows for the nascent Dead.
After years in storage, Stanley’s tapes have now been digitized by John Chester and Jamie Howarth of Plangent Processes and released as You’re Doin’ Fine, a three-CD set (part of the Bear’s Sonic Journals series). Reflecting on their long friendships with Hammond, Waits and Kaukonen contributed liner notes.
It’s been awhile since I’ve reviewed any CDs, but I connected my NAD C 538 to the newly arrived Advance Paris X-i75 ($999, in USD), which Thom Moon reviewed recently on SoundStage! Access. As Thom noted, the X-i75 is a full-size (4.7″H × 16.9″W × 12.6″D) integrated amplifier with a rated output of 75Wpc into 8 ohms or 110Wpc into 4 ohms. Specified THD is 0.1%.
While Thom admired the stark look of the X-i75, I found it to be a rather inelegant tuxedo, with the open-grille top countering the stark black-and-silver cladding. Its aesthetic, featuring a large, circular central control knob, felt as divisive as that of a Tesla Model S’s dashboard. I found the amp’s control knob frustrating, but you may love it. And, although it splits out all the controls, making navigation easier, the remote is heavy and cumbersome. Also on the front panel are a silver on/off button and a 6.35mm (¼″) headphone jack.
Those quibbles about the unit’s appearance faded away when I settled in to listen, with the X-i75 linked to my Q Acoustics 3050i floorstanding speakers via AudioQuest Type 5 cables. I used an AudioQuest Forest cable to connect the C 538 to one of the two coaxial (RCA) inputs on the amp’s backside. Also back there are a connector for an optional Bluetooth receiver; a USB-A port for connecting an external drive containing WAV, WMA, and/or MP3 files; and a USB-B port for connecting a PC or Mac, with support for sampling rates up to 192kHz. There’s also a 3.5mm jack for 5V power, a connector for service diagnostics, and an optical S/PDIF (TosLink) input. The speaker connectors accept bare wire, spades, or banana plugs.
Analog inputs include one moving-magnet phono with ground terminal and seven line-level inputs, labeled CD, Tuner, Aux 1–4, and PC2. Also included are a fixed-level record output, preamp-out and amplifier-in jacks, and a subwoofer jack that outputs full-bandwidth summed mono—the low-pass filter is set on the sub itself. There’s also a small slide switch that lets you select between conventional class-AB output and a high-bias option that puts the X-i75 in class-A mode for the first few watts of output.
Like Thom, I was intrigued by how the high-bias setting would compare to the standard class-AB output, and, like him, I found the former added some welcome warmth. More on that later.
With more than a decade of performing under his belt as of these dates at the Boarding House, Hammond knew how to explode onstage. He began the first Saturday set with Willie Dixon’s “Wang Dang Doodle,” one of the newer songs in his repertoire, and one that serves as an effective opener, particularly given his admission that he had overslept and had to rush to the club. During the many times I’ve seen him, Hammond has always won audiences over early with his unbridled passion and intensity, which twist his movie-star looks into a portrait of pain and yearning. So what if he never worked on a plantation or faced unbridled racial hate? Hammond could express lust like few others. Songs like “King Bee” and “Shake for Me” were ideal fodder for him from his earliest days in Greenwich Village, and they stood him well in this opening set, too.
You’ll hear a bit of dialog between Hammond, the audience, and Bear as the singer acclimatized himself to the “giraffe” mike stands the engineer used. Whatever Bear’s secret sauce was, it made everything sound great at the Boarding House. There’s exceptional separation between Hammond’s expressive voice, the puckered squeal of his harp, the snap of his guitar strings, and the sound of his boots on the stage floor; close your eyes, and it’s not hard to be transported. I couldn’t help but imagine that Bear would’ve loved the way his extremely natural recording technique sounded through the exceptionally transparent X-i75.
As Hammond settled down and limbered up, he enthusiastically led the audience through an expansive tour of various styles of blues: the frenetic ragtime of Blind Boy Fuller’s “Truckin’ Little Baby,” the demonically intense drive of Son House’s “Preachin’ Blues,” the sexual energy of John Lee Hooker’s “Ride ’til I Die,” and the urban intensity of Billy Boy Arnold’s “I Wish You Would.”
By all indications, Hammond was really hitting his stride around the time of that San Francisco stand, so it’s ironic knowing that he was about to face a major challenge. Despite the quality and comparative success of his Columbia albums, which included a fascinating trio recording with superstar guitarist Michael Bloomfield and the masterful New Orleans pianist/vocalist Mac “Dr. John” Rebennack, his contract was dropped. Fortunately, Macon-based Capricorn Records was on the upswing with the growing popularity of the Allman Brothers Band and the accompanying rise of southern rock, so they scooped up Hammond as part of the label’s rapid expansion.
I was lucky enough to score a copy of Can’t Beat the Kid (LP, Capricorn 0698) when it was released in the mid-’70s. By then, Capricorn was on shaky ground amid legal wrangling, and when the bottom finally fell out, Hammond’s album became a rare find on the original label.
Produced by one of Macon’s secret weapons—multi-instrumentalist and expressive vocalist Eddie Hinton—the LP featured the cream of the southern studios: pianists Spooner Oldham and Randall Bramblett, bassist Tommy Cogbill, drummer Kenny Buttrey, and Roger Hawkins on additional percussion. Hinton added guitar and piano.
I put the album on my Pro-Ject Debut Pro, channeled the music through my NAD PP 2e phono preamplifier to a pair of the X-i75’s Aux inputs, and settled in to listen to an album I probably haven’t heard in 30 years.
As was his habit in those years, Hammond moved easily between a solo performance of Robert Johnson’s “Terraplane Blues,” a band version of “Statesboro Blues” that nods to both Duane Allman’s love of the piece and Blind Willie McTell’s Atlanta performances of the song he composed, and more contemporary pieces like Otis Redding’s “It’s Groovin’ Time.”
Overall, Can’t Beat the Kid offers a particularly broad view of Hammond’s musical interests 15 years into his career, but only hints at how much ground he had yet to cover.
I decided to jump ahead 28 years to what I believe is the most overlooked recording of Hammond’s career, Wicked Grin (CD, Pointblank 7243-8-50764-28). By 2001, Hammond was approaching 60 and still working the one-man-band circuit. His old friend Waits, who collaborated on this album, had become known around the world as an actor and serious musician who worked with the likes of filmmaker Jim Jarmusch and theater director Robert Wilson. Mainstream artists like Springsteen and Rod Stewart had recorded Waits’s songs.
Initiated by the men’s wives, the album enabled some of Waits’s songs (many co-written with spouse Kathleen Brennan) to move beyond their composer’s distinctive voice, and allowed Hammond to play the part of the always-colorful Waits antiheroes. The backing band was another killer unit, including Waits and Hammond on guitars, Charlie Musselwhite on harp, Augie Meyers on organ, Larry Taylor on bass, and Stephen Hodges on percussion.
In sonic terms, Wicked Grin sounds at least three decades on from Can’t Beat the Kid. It was engineered and mixed by Oz Fritz and recorded at two studios in Northern California. Like Waits’s albums of that era, the recording techniques really emphasized the color of the lyrics and the electric rawness of loud tube amplifiers. Again, the X-i75 made it sound epic, without adding any color of its own.
I completely concur with Thom’s response to this amp. It delivers transparency with a most welcome bourbon-scented warmth, thanks to the high-bias setting. That made an ideal companion for Hammond’s rubbery voice—an instrument that has matured from loving imitation to well-worn authenticity, in much the same way as Mick Jagger’s. With Waits’s rich material, Hammond had the opportunity to show he could inhabit contemporary characters and settings as readily as he could Delta blues scenes that unfolded 20 years before he was born. Like most things Waits touches, it’s a masterpiece.
Just as Hammond’s raw intensity isn’t to everyone’s taste, the design of the X-i75 is likely to be divisive. But for those who want transparent sound amplification for under a grand, this amp definitely won’t give you the blues.
. . . James Hale
jamesh@soundstagenetwork.com
Note: for the full suite of measurements from the SoundStage! Audio-Electronics Lab, click this link.
