Hollyood Fats Band – The Hollywood Fats Band …album review

This guy was mentioned in the comments last week (he was playing guitar with the Blasters in a video I posted), and I was listening. A blues band that swung like they were on a chandelier… what an incredible band this was. When I write posts, sometimes I think of the readers who would like them. Christian is the one I’m thinking of here…I’m not a blues aficionado, but when I hear something great, no matter what it is…I play it. Rarely would I review a blues album, but this one is certainly worth it. His guitar playing took me by surprise. 

I loved how they recorded this. The band recorded the album in Los Angeles, using vintage tube gear, ribbon microphones, and a minimalist mic setup to capture the warmth and air of those old 1950s records. They wanted it raw, live, and most importantly, human. No overdubs, no studio tricks, just five musicians facing each other and playing to each other.

If you were hanging around the Los Angeles blues scene in the mid-1970s, you might’ve seen a big fedora-wearing guitar phenom named Michael “Hollywood Fats” Mann. For a few short years, he led a group that reminded the world that the West Coast had some great blues. The band had a deep Chicago and Texas blues sound. The Hollywood Fats Band didn’t last long, but they left their mark.

Michael Mann was just out of his teens when he was already playing alongside blues legends. He was born in Los Angeles in 1954. He sat in with the likes of Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, and Albert King when they hit town. He had a tone straight out of Chess Records. By the time he met harmonica player Al Blake and pianist Fred Kaplan in the mid-1970s, the idea of forming a blues revival band that really sounded like the old days began to take shape.

The lineup was a dream team for blues purists: Hollywood Fats on guitar, Al Blake on harp and vocals, Fred Kaplan on piano, Larry Taylor (formerly of Canned Heat) on upright bass, and Richard Innes on drums. They were in the middle of the disco era, but they stuck stubbornly to jump blues, and it swung. The chemistry was electric. Fats’ guitar lines just rip off those recordings I’ve been listening to, and the entire band was just fantastic.

Their lone studio album, The Hollywood Fats Band (recorded in 1979 and released in 1980), sounded like it had been transported from a Chess Records session with better fidelity. Sadly, it didn’t end well. Hollywood Fats struggled with addiction, and just as his reputation was spreading beyond the clubs of L.A., he died in 1986 at only 32. The band members carried on, but it was never the same.

There is not much film on the guy…this is not a great quality video, but you take what you can.

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Author: Badfinger (Max)

Power Pop fan, Baseball, Beatles, Alternative music, old movies, and tv show fan. Also anything to do with pop culture in the 60s and 70s... I'm also a songwriter, bass and guitar player. Not the slightest bit interested in politics at all.

40 thoughts on “Hollyood Fats Band – The Hollywood Fats Band …album review”

  2. Thanks for the shout-out, Max, and I wonder how ya knew I’d dig that stuff! 🤣

    Seriously, I love it! There’s just something about the blues that always grabs me, even though you could rightfully argue it can be repetitive. But I find there’s such a timeless quality to this music. It’s also one of the best genres to experience live – ideally, in some bar or other smaller venue.

    I had no clue of the Hollywood Fats Band, but all I needed to hear were the first few bars of the opening track “She’s Dynamite”, and I knew I’d love it. The group had a really cool sound, which undoubtedly reflected the vintage equipment they used. Nasty boogie woogie – yeah, that’s what I’m talkin’ ’bout. Great find, Max! 🙂

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    1. Thanks Christian…I didn’t think I was going out on a limb thinking you would like this. You are more of a straight blues fan but this hit the mark for me as well. His guitar playing just cuts through the recordings.
      Oh yea…I love how they recorded it.
      Thanks dude…glad you liked it!

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  3. That’s a great idea using all that vintage gear if you want to sound like you were out of that time period. How different do you think they would have sounded were they to have used current instruments and studio setups at the time?

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    1. It would be super clean…and personally for me I don’t like it….I like the sound of mono…it makes everything sound tighter…..plus a little more edgier…
      I don’t listen to straight blues a lot…but this one caught my ear. Like I said to obbverse…I can’t believe people in 1979 wanted retro….but it makes sense.

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      1. well there’s always a market for something that goes against the current tide, though it’s usually a small market. I have an example of that ‘swimming against the tide’ (for better or worse) coming up tomorrow. These guys, from that little introduction, probably not something I’d put on but they have talent and sounded authentically retro.

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      2. If it’s done right…I like it. I’ll put it like this…the Beatles released a box set of all of their singles…2….one was the original mono and the other stereo…the mono outsold the stereo by a large margin.

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  5. I was blown away by him when you posted the Blasters last week and looked into him a bit. Thanks for the tip! As a pre-teen and teen I was the weird kid who listened to the blues.

    But for the youngsters among you, that means I got to see BB King, Albert King, Albert Collins, Willie Dixon, Brownie McGee & Sonny Terry, Muddy Waters, Luther Allison, Otis Spann, Hubert Sumlin (and probably some famous sidemen I didn’t know at the time)…but not Hollywood Fats.

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    1. He must have been filling in for Dave… but yea and CB told me his name and I had to check him out.
      I was wondering if you got to see him because you lived in California for a while…but you did alright with those guys! Geez…you saw the Blues hall of fame.

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      1. Hollywood Fats replaced Dave Alvin when Alvin quit the Blasters in 1985. He served as the lead guitarist until his death and Dave Alvin actually filled in for HIM briefly until they found a new guitarist. Their current guitarist has been with them way longer than those two combined.

        Yeah, I got lucky. Born at the right time so I could live through the 60s blues revival and see some of the greats while they were still around, as well as up-and-comers who learned at their feet, like Luther Allison. (It didn’t hurt that my brother, a folkie in Greenwich Village ~1960 where he was introduced to Delta blues, was recruited to switch to bass by a Chicago blues band in the 60s.)

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      2. Thats right…about Alvin. That was the time it happened.
        Yes you did and not just the blues either…to me the best music (in my tastes) of the 20th century during that span. That is why so many kids now are listening to it still.

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    2. Wow, I’m envious of all the greats you saw. I bought a lot of Alligator Records compilations in the 80s and 90s, and was introduced to Luther Allison through them. I just recently came across his album Bad News Is Coming from 1973. What an album.

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      1. Try to listen to his last recorded concert at the Montreal Jazz Fest. He was smoking, and dead within weeks of that. And listen to “Love Me Mama”, his debut album on Delmark, and you can hear how his voice matured over the decades.

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  8. yo Max! A weird thing today – when I first got up and checked in to post my blogs using my phone this morn, I saw this one and your Rockpile on my WP Reader. Now, on my laptop, only this one is showing up. Did you take down Rockpile or is it another weird WP quirk?

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      1. Guys like Fats, Dave Alvin, the Vaughn brothers, Dave Gonzales from the Paladins and others have this style, pedigree (is that the right word?). They had to be listening o the same stuff. They were happy tp carry the torch because the music grabbed them.
        You mentioned “disco”. I have bucked trends for the most part but when that trend was in style I was hanging out in clubs and bars where this kind of music was played so what disco I heard was by accident.
        I’ve been consumed with that “album” thing for ever. Looks like you’ve sent me off to get “Fat”.
        Oh yeah, being a Blasters guy, when Fats took over lead guitar I was a little skeptical. I missed Dave but Fats did the job and more.

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      2. Trends… some people told me in school that I just…on purpose didn’t like the new trends. I told them no…I honestly didn’t like whatever trend was going on because I didn’t like it period. I guess I was so rooted into more roots based music that when they played with something…I didn’t like it.

        Kinda like those English guitarists who all listened to the same thing and they would carry some of this into it. You know the guitar players I like…like Clapton, Beck, and yes I’ll throw in Neil Young…so when a guitar player really surprises me…I take notice and Fats did. As you know…I knew nothing about him. The tone and the playing was beyond the beyond for me. I see someone is making a doc on him…I want to see that when it comes out.

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      3. You pick out that “tone” thing and other musician type insight. It took me a while to hook all these guys together. I cant listen to Peter Green and not think of BB KIng.
        That doc will be a good one. Down to the good stuff about music. Side note. 32 yrs old. Man that life style can be rough.

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      4. With me, I knew the British guitar people, but with people like you…you’re helping me hook all of these together, the American ones that influenced everyone… I didn’t really know about.
        32 is crazy young and that was so sad to find that out.

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