Right Place, Wrong Time

1	Tore Up 3:17
2	Right Place, Wrong Time 5:24
3	Easy Go 4:41
4	Three Times a Fool 3:11
5	Rainy Night in Georgia 3:55
6	Natural Ball 3:30
7	I Wonder Why 4:41
8	Your Turn to Cry 3:35
9	Lonely Man 2:50
10	Take a Look Behind 5:40

Barnes & Noble

Otis Rush won the 1999 Grammy for Best Traditional Blues Album, but his recording career dates to 1956 when he recorded some of the most memorable sides in the history of blues for Cobra. Barely 20 at the time, Rush built on the B.B. King/T-Bone Walker emotive style and pioneered the use of minor key blues which came to define the West Side style of Chicago blues. After these Cobra sessions, brooding, brimming with emotion, and hinting at dissatisfaction and violence, Rush continued to show sparks of genius, but his recordings were mercurial and inconsistent. RIGHT PLACE, WRONG TIME, originally recorded for Capitol in 1971 but not released until 1976 by Bullfrog, is his most consistent mid-career recording. It's surly and pained on slow tunes like "Right Place, Wrong Time" and "Your Turn to Cry," whereas the horn laden instrumental "I Wonder Why" highlights Rush's laid back, behind-the-beat lyrical attack that attains an almost perfect balance of stasis and forward motion. With the help of Big Brother and the Holding Company's Nick Gravenites, the co-producer, Rush settles back into a comfort zone to invoke the passion and virtuosity of his debut recordings. Don Palmer

All Music Guide

This recording session was not released until five years after it was done. One can imagine the tapes practically smoldering in their cases, the music is so hot. Sorry, there is nothing "wrong" about this blues album at all. Otis Rush was a great blues expander, a man whose guitar playing was in every molecule pure blues. On his solos on this album he strips the idea of the blues down to very simple gestures (i.e., a bent string, but bent in such a subtle way that the seasoned blues listener will be surprised). As a performer he opens up the blues form with his chord progressions and use of horn sections, the latter instrumentation again added in a wonderfully spare manner, bringing to mind a master painter working certain parts of a canvas in order to bring in more light. Blues fans who get tired of the same old song structures, riff, and rhythms should be delighted with most of Rush's output, and this one is among his best. Sometimes all he does to make a song sound unlike any blues one has ever heard is just a small thing -- a chord moving up when one expects it go down, for example. The production is particularly skilled, and the fact that Capitol Records turned this session down after originally producing it can only be reasonably accepted when combined with other decisions this label has made, such as turning down the Doors because singer Jim Morrison had "no charisma." This record doesn't mess around at all. The first track takes off like the man they fire out of a cannon at the end of a circus, a perceived climax swaggeringly representing just the beginning, after all. Some of the finest tracks are the ones that go longer than five minutes, allowing the players room to stretch. And that means more of Rush's great guitar playing, of course. For the final track he leaves the blues behind completely for a moving cover version of "Rainy Night in Georgia" by Tony Joe White. Eugene Chadbourne