Collins, Albert

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Albert Collins

Guitarist and songwriter

Albert Collins was born on a Texas farm and moved to Houston when he was 9. Although he is known as one of the most ferocious guitarists in contemporary blues, Collins started out on piano and actually wanted to become a professional organist. It wasn’t until high school, after his keyboard was stolen, that he started to play guitar. But by age 16 he had formed a trio and began working the local scene. From 1949 to 1951 he fronted the Rhythm Rockers, an eight-piece unit fashioned after those of his idols. “I was listenin’ to the big bands: Jimmie Lunceford, Tommy Dorsey, Jimmy Dorsey,” he told Larry Birnbaum in down beat. “I used to love the big band sound. And I had some jazz musicians playin’ with me. I was playin’ blues, but they taught me my timin’.”

Collins went on to tour the south with Piney Brown in the mid-1950s and played weekend gigs with another infamous Texas guitarist, Gatemouth Brown. He returned to Houston to work outside of the music world while continuing to play on weekends through the mid-1960s. In 1958 he jumped on the instrumental wave, brought on by Booker T., Duane Eddy, and Link Wray, and released “The Freeze”/“Collins Shuffle” on the Kangaroo label. “Sold about 150,000 copies in three weeks’ time,” he recalled to Dan Forte in Guitar Player. “That’s what started getting my name halfway out there. But when my name really started to spread was when I cut ‘Frosty.’ I didn’t follow it up until then because I had a good day job. I was playing at night and driving a truck in the daytime. And I mixed paint for automobiles for six years.”

“Frosty” became a million seller for Collins and the Hall label in 1962. It also established Collins’s trademark, the “cool sound.” He explained to Ellen Griffith in Guitar Player, “One night a friend of mine and I were driving through a town called Corpus Christi, Texas, and it started raining and the windshield fogged up. My friend said, ’Why don’t you turn on the defroster?’ I didn’t think too much about it at the time, and then the next day I thought to myself, ’I ought to put me out a tune called” Defrost. “’ I looked at my dashboard and it said ’freeze,’ too, so I put out the tunes ’Defrost’ and The Freeze,’ and then went on to do ’Frosty.’ After that my producer said he was going to keep me in the icebox, and we recorded more tunes with names like that.” The motif continued through a long line of tunes with names like “Sno-Cone,” “Deep Freeze,” “Don’t Lose Your Cool,” “Hot ‘n’ Cold,” “Shiver and Shake,” and “Thaw Out.” Each contained the ice pick sound of Collins’s Fender Telecaster guitar blasting out a storm of high-powered licks.

The impossible-to-duplicate tone can be attributed to many factors. The main ingredient being Collins’s unique tunings of either E minor (E B E G B E) or D minor (D A D F A D)

For the Record…

Born October 3, 1932, in Leona, Texas; married 1968; wife’s name, Gwendolyn. Education: Attended a local high school in Houston, Texas.

Formed and led his first band c. 1948-51, the Rhythm Rockers; first toured in the mid-1950s with Piney Brown; 1958, released first single, “The Freeze’”/“Collins Shuffle”; extensive club and festival appearances, mid-1960s—.

Addresses: Record company —Alligator Records, P.O. Box 60234, Chicago, IL 60660.

taught to him by his cousin, Willow Young. He also straps a capo (a moveable bar that attaches to the fretwork of the guitar) halfway up the neck in order to change the pitch. “I met up with Gatemouth Brown, and that’s where I got the capo from: that gives me that special tone that I have, ’cause I don’t play with no pick,” he told Gene Santoro in Guitar World. “I always wanted my own thing, didn’t want to play like anybody else.” Collins snaps the strings off the neck (as opposed to picking them) of his Telecaster which is strapped over his right shoulder “like the old gunslingers wore their pistols: low at the hip, ready to fire,” as Guitar Player’s Jas Obrecht described it. The guitar is connected to a 100-foot cord, which enables Collins to stalk his crowd freely, and then into a 300-watt Fender Quad Reverb amp cranked up to 10. In a small club setting this setup produces a sound which is similar to having a jet land on your temple.

Collins is able to coax a barrage of special effects out of this simple arrangement. For example, the cut “Snowed In” (from the Frostbite LP) contains simulated car horns, an engine turning over, footsteps in the snow, and the obligatory flurry of notes. Using just his bare thumb and fingers, Collins relies on unpredictable shifts in volume and attack to separate his sound from that of his colleagues.

His influences include guitarists Lightnin’ Hopkins, TBone Walker, Gatemouth Brown, and B.B. King, but horn players and organ sounds are vital elements also. “You know, Jimmy McGriff has been my idol since 1965—that’s when I first met him, in Kansas City, Missouri,” Collins said in Guitar World. “I sat in with him and Wes Montgomery—that was some fun, man. See, I always wanted to be an organ player: when I started out, I started on piano. I wanted to be like Jimmy McGriff or Jimmy Smith.” After establishing his cool sound, Collins recorded a string of regional hits for a variety of small labels from 1958 to 1971 (Kangaroo, Great Scott, Hall, Fox, Imperial, and Tumbleweed). He even replaced Jimi Hendrix for a brief spell after the rock innovator quit Little Richard’s band. After 20th Century-Fox released a compilation album, The Cool Sound of Albert Collins, he quit his paint job and moved to Kansas City in 1966 where me met and married his wife, Gwendolyn.

A year later Bob Hite of the group Canned Heat saw Collins performing and persuaded Imperial Records of Los Angeles to sign the guitarist. Hite brought him to California to record an album which led to constant touring of psychedelic ballrooms in the latter part of the decade. Collins continued recording a few albums, mainly instrumentais, while playing the better part of the 1970s up and down the west coast with various pickup bands. “I learned a lot playing with those young kids: power, for instance, I like power when I play, man,” he told Guitar World. “I’ve heard so many blues players just playing, stop to take a drink play a little again—that ain’t my type of blues, man. I go to sleep like that.”

It would take six years, however, after his last Tumbleweed LP in 1972 before Collins would find another interested label. In 1978 he released Ice Pickin’ on a small, young Chicago label run by Bruce Igualer called Alligator. It was one of the hottest blues records in recent memory and launched a career on Alligator that has seen six more albums since, including Showdown!, a collaboration with two other guitarists, Johnny Copeland and Robert Cray. “Their compatibility can be attributed to Collins’ influence on both… and it is Collins who dominates the session, setting the tone with his stinging guitar work and nearly managing to hold his own as a singer,” wrote Larry Birnbaum in down beat. The album went on to win a Grammy award.

Collins cut back on his ten-month yearly touring schedule during the late 1980s and is now in semi-retirement. He stole the show at Live-Aid with George Thorogood; appeared in the movie Adventures in Babysitting; played in a Seagram’s Wine Cooler commercial with actor Bruce Willis; and was the focus of a PBS television documentary, Ain’t Nothin’ But The Blues. “One thing about the blues, you’ve got to keep moving,” he told Guitar Player. “I’ve been touring as long as I’ve been playing, but I enjoy traveling… I play the blues because I’ve lived it… I don’t want to play any of this other stuff; it may sound good, but it’s just not my style.”