Jake Le Botz CD Review
Jake Le Botz
Sing This To Yourself…And Other Personal Suggestions For A Personal Apocalypse
Charnel Records CGR-109
***
Jake La Botz was born in 1968, the son of truck driver, union organiser and journalist who worked on the Chicago Defender. As a boy, young Jake listened to blues and hillbilly records and was influenced by bluesmen such as Maxwell Street Jimmy Davis, Homesick James and Honeyboy Edwards. He dropped out of school aged fifteen and to quote his biography: ‘Stole a car, made it as far as Colorado one trip, ended up living under a bridge in Trinidad, Colorado for a few days and then into Denver for a bit.’
He worked the bars, streets and tunnels of Chicago and in 1996 he began playing in Los Angeles. He has also appeared in a number of films including, Animal Factory directed by Steve Buscemi, and appeared in Rambo 3, (playing a ‘singing redneck mercenary’), attracted the attention of Slash from Guns’n’Roses and from there played guitar for the Greater Mt. Zion Missionary Baptist Church in South Central Los Angeles. Now whilst other up-and-coming singers play tours of Starbucks, Jake is currently undertaking his third annual five week Tattoo Across America Tour of tattoo parlours across the USA.
Despite Jake’s dalliance with Chicago blues during the late 1970s, with tracks on this set titled Depression Brings Me Flowers, The Devil Lives In My Throat, Hard To Love What You Kill and The World Ended Yesterday, Jake has the blues and has them bad. It ain’t the ‘woke up this mornin’’ styled blues—this is Tom Waits styled, junkie, hard drinking, hung-over, livin’ in the back of a car, singer-songwriter music that will have Leonard Cohen fans hiding the razor blades! Listening to this album, alone in a bedsit, with a bottle of cider is not recommended. But La Botz is undoubtedly a unique songwriter! Tony Burke