The full name of this album is This is Howlin' Wolf’s new album. He doesn’t like it. He didn’t like his electric guitar at first either—hardly a ringing endorsement for this record, recorded in November 1968 by the Chess subsidiary Cadet, which was attempting to bring its roster of classic bluesmen a new audience that may have been weaned on the blues but was moving into psychedelia and heavier blues-rock territory.
A month before Howlin' Wolf recorded this album, Muddy Waters released Electric Mud, convinced by Marshall Chess to capitalize on the new sounds emerging from England and the American west coast. Though reception was mixed, Marshall went ahead and produced a similar record with Howlin’ Wolf with many of the same players.
For my money, compared to Electric Mud, this is the better album. Sure, Muddy had the mighty "Tomcat" on his side, but taken as a whole Wolf’s edgier approach was better suited to the 'heavy' treatment. He had already recorded these tunes numerous times before, including "Back Door Man", which he opens with a statement saying "the thing that’s going on today is not the blues—it’s just a good beat the people just carry, but now when you come down to the blues, I’m gonna show you how to play the blues". Aside from the fuzz tone, it’s the most traditional sounding tune on the record. Great as it is, it’s the rest of the album that points to a direction that the blues could have taken instead of the dead-end path electric blues followed instead.
"Smokestack Lightning" is built around an evil three-bar loping riff, while preserving the original tune’s eccentric yodel. It’s one of many songs in which fuzz guitar and bass pummel the kind of unison lines that were becoming the common language of artists as disparate as The Meters, Sly Stone, Black Sabbath, Parliament/Funkadelic and Led Zeppelin. "Spoonful" is given an eerie effect when a muted spectral guitar lead plays in lieu of his vocal intonation of the title word. "Built for Speed" loses its shuffle and slows it down to a dirgier groove. From the juke joint to the marijuana joint, this was no longer Chicago boozecan blues, speaking instead to the deeply stoned spirit of the times. Check out the difference between the choogling "Moanin' at Midnight" original compared to the percussion-less drone found here to get a sense of how with-it the whole concept was.
We already know Wolf disowned the record, and the flippant cover statement didn’t help matters either. In retrospect, though, it’s an amazing statement from one of the masters showing the young turks that he was still boss.