I’m putting together a CD full of guitar-driven, dirty blues. Everything from ZZ-Top’s "Jesus Just Left Chicago" to Colin James’ "Just Came Back". I’m having a hard time of it though. There are SO MANY songs that I want to include, so many that deserve a place, but as anyone experienced (even a little) with building music compilations, there’s only so much room to work with, be it on DAT, tape, or CD. Now, a player that would just play the raw .mp3′s would be ideal, but most CD and DVD players will only play music via audio disc or DVD. So I’m limited to about 80 minutes on a 700MB disc.

The impetus for this is have some music to listen to while playing pool at my bud’s house. When the idea came to mind to *make* a CD, the only choice was, of course, the aforementioned "guitar-drive, dirty blues." No other music is as perfectly "Pool" as blues. While that is, of course, my own opinion, I’m going to go ahead and present it here as fact. Just so you know.

Now, the problem is finding those songs that most perfectly embody "Pool" to me. The idea being to come up with music that is inspiring, driven and just throws me naturally into the best rhythm. Something to help reach that elusive "Dead Stroke". To do that as it pertains to pool requires blues tunes that I really really like. It can’t be just any music that I really really like (I have wide, quite eclectic taste in music), it’s gotta be blues. Only blues has the proper "feel". Given that, I’m not limiting myself to the classic STRICT blues format (I-IV-V chord changes). I’m open to any new-fangled, mesquite-flavored jamming that would more appropriately fall under the "Blues/Rock throw in a little Soul" category. SRV, KWS, Lang, Duarte and even a little Big Head Todd and the Monsters are all welcome ("One" by Creed is a shoe-in, but that’s only b/c our favorite local pool hall plays it so much, it’s sorta worked it’s way in by virtue of association). I’m sure there are other artists out there that I don’t know about which would be perfect, but alas… I don’t know about them.

I guess, what with my criteria being wholly personal and subjective, there’s no easy way to describe what I’m doing. Basically, if a song has a groove so fat you could land a damn Boeing 777 in it, then it’s a likely candidate.

Happy day, I got me some input from Omar!