Peter Karp Returns To His Jersey Roots
Peter Karp by Stephen Gomez
It’s called Jersey Town and it’s a doozy. Singer-Songwriter-Guitarist-Producer-bigtime blues man Peter Karp, born in Bergen County 66 years ago, has carved out one epic career for himself. He lived in an Alabama trailer park at nine years old but made his mark playing CBGBs, The Mudd Club and Folk City in Manhattan, sharing the stage and learning from Mink DeVille, Stray Cats, David Johansen and George Thorogood. Then he up and quit to become a film director before returning to music fulltime in the 1990s, befriending Rolling Stones lead guitarist Mick Taylor who flew in from London to play on his Turning Point album. His 2010 and 2012 duet records with Canadian firecracker Sue Foley brought him a whole new audience before a stunning series of solo albums in ’17, ’18 and ’20 cemented his reputation.
The Karp camp issued the following: “In the 1960s, the rhythms of northern New Jersey pulsed with urgency. A population of first-generation European immigrants, migrating Latinos from South America, Mexico, and Cuba, and a surge of African Americans journeying north during the nation’s post-WWII Second Great Migration, created a musical cacophony unlike anywhere else in America. It was here in North Jersey—in the grayness and grit, the din and relentless rush hour traffic, amidst crumbling rusted steel bridges and overpasses, beneath looming loading cranes that towered like prehistoric skeletons over billowing refineries and post-apocalyptic swamplands, at the last chance and final stop on the New Jersey Turnpike—that Peter Karp was born. Welcome to Jersey Town. The sound is real, aggressive, relentless, and tongue-in-cheek. Eleven songs of loss, love, murder, infidelity, strength, and desperation. Songs of faith, fate, loyalty, and perseverance. Songs with universal themes and a musical attitude that can only be described as "Jersey.”
With prose like that, you know we just had to check it out and guess what? It’s even better than that! Karp sings in a blustery phlegm that captures the ear and the band is one kickin’ mule of endurance.