| Roadhouse Rules | |
| Type: | studio |
| Artist: | Lonnie Brooks |
| Cover: | Roadhouse Rules.jpg |
| Released: | 1996 |
| Genre: | Blues, R&B |
| Label: | Alligator |
| Producer: | Jim Gaines |
| Prev Title: | Let’s Talk It Over |
| Prev Year: | 1993 |
| Next Title: | Deluxe Edition |
| Next Year: | 1997 |
Roadhouse Rules is an album by the American musician Lonnie Brooks, released in 1996.[1] [2] It was his seventh album for Alligator Records.[3] The album peaked at No. 15 on the Billboard Blues Albums chart.[4] Brooks supported it with a North American tour.[5]
Recorded mostly in Memphis with studio musicians, the album was produced by Jim Gaines.[6] Brooks wrote seven of its songs; he made a point of paying attention to what his blues contemporaries were doing on their albums.[1] [7] It marked the first time that Brooks included an acoustic blues song on an album.[6] Brooks used a Gibson ES-355 on most of the tracks.[8] Sugar Blue played harmonica on "Roll of the Tumbling Dice". The Memphis Horns played on "Too Little, Too Late".[9] "Hoodoo She Do" was written by Brooks's son Ronnie Baker Brooks, who also played guitar on Roadhouse Rules.[10]
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch noted the "tough rhythms, deep-from-the-gut singing and guitar riffs to burn, the smell of Chicago permeating the tracks."[11] The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette said that, "blessed with a set of 62-year-old pipes full of finely aged soul and grit, Brooks moves easily from torchy ballads to the sharp edge of hard-rocking blues." The Chicago Tribune wrote that "Brooks pours out a torrent of straight blues, funk, rock and soul rippling with unassailable chops and conviction."[12]
The Wisconsin State Journal called the album "a stirring statement that spans rocking guitar gumbo ('Hoodoo She Do'), soulfully gutty balladry ('Too Little, Too Late') and everything in between."[13] The Press of Atlantic City considered it one of the best blues albums of 1996, concluding that "Brooks moves from modern to retro modes with ease and smarts."[14] The Boston Globe determined that "too many songs fall into woman-done-me-wrong lingo."[15]
AllMusic wrote that "the music on Roadhouse Rules is generally unrelenting in its ferocity, blues-oriented but also quite open to the influences of Stax-type soul and rock."