"Everybody can steal another's idea, manufacture it, clone it, or whatever. But it's hard to just create. It's the hardest thing of all. You gotta remember, these guys didn't have blueprints. . . . The last thing that makes Wolf so magical is that you see a person create a whole genre of music through just their mind, and you ain't supposed to do it. You're supposed to have a sheet of paper, a desk, a quiet room, you're supposed to think and concentrate. And here's a guy using just his ego, creating lyrics in a room full of smoke, alcohol, four-letter words, and intimidating individuals--and yet he still creates. And that's the magic."

--Vaan Shaw, on Howlin' Wolf

Finished James Segrest and Mark Hoffman's Moanin' At Midnight: The Life And Times Of Howlin' Wolf, a long-overdue appraisal of one of the last century's most accomplished blues masters. Not that I'm a far-ranging blues authority or even the most ardent aficionado of the form (I have maybe 20 blues recordings, mostly from the lonesome, long-distance honey-acoustic wail of Mississippi John Hurt and a more contemporary embrace of the elderly R.L. Burnside), but the Wolf has always been a dear figure to me, and it's about time he received his post-Millennium due, with this carefully compiled, painstakingly researched tour of his jagged yet ultimately satisfying life. Even some 20 years after his death, his scorched legend thundered into the suburbs (or the "suboibs," as he would've called them), leveled contemporary popular music with an indignant elbow, and propelled me to Happy Trails in Corvallis, Oregon, to whet a sudden appetite for blues. I was 17 years old, an age where you can't get enough of anything. Only a dearth of funds kept me from relieving the store's bins of their thick, juicy vinyl, voices hollering from a cruel harscrabble past that not even my grandfather was old enough to remember. That day I bought Vols. 1 and 2 of The Chess Records Story, and when I dropped my last bones on a single-artist compilation, that single artist was the one and only tail-dragger hisself: Howlin' Wolf, his wide-open maw unleashing hellhounds from the moon. That day I bathed in "Evil," "Spoonful" (far heavier and more incendiary than the Doors version I remembered, with a bassline to cut you), "Back Door Man" (ditto; the Lizard King don't know, but the little girls understand), "Little Red Rooster," and that wild-ass "Three Hundred Pounds Of Joy." Wolf didn't exactly have an affinity for the electric blues, and after combing through his life and rollicking through some of his music this morning as I sit here trying to find a way to conclude this entry, I can see why: The man didn't need no help from Thomas Edison; he was an abundant current of flesh and bone. So check out the book or the masterful DVD The Howlin' Wolf Story: The Secret History Of Rock 'N' Roll and suck on that juice for a while. Also, if you got the time, check out the official Web site, maintained by Segrest and Hoffman. Talk about dedication to a subject.

Rest in peace, Chester B. But howl with all your heart.