Beldon's Blues Point

John Paul Hammond

2013-05-20T07:06:00.000-07:00

It should be no surprise that singer/guitarist John Paul Hammond is a musician. It’s in his blood.

Hammond, who on Friday, June 7 will play the State Theatre in Falls Church, Virginia as part of the 2013 Tinner Hill Blues Festival, is the son of famous record producer and talent scout John Henry Hammond. By his son's account, the elder Hammond discovered artists ranging from Billie Holiday to Lester Young to Bob Dylan to Bruce Springsteen.

Sometimes referred to as John Hammond, Jr., Hammond the son has had several brushes of his own with musical history during his forty year career.

He is the only musician known to play in a band featuring both Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton. He also advised Hendrix to travel to England—a move that essentially launched the guitarist to fame.

Hammond befriended Willie Dixon and Duane Allman, got to know Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf and shared a show with Jimmy Reed. He enlisted members of the Band as his back-up band for an album—then saw Bob Dylan steal them away. He attended parties hosted in New York City by blues shouter and songwriter Victory Spivey. Spivey once recorded him playing with Otis Spann and Bob Dylan in the same session.

Performing live on guitar and harp-on-a-rack in a barrelhouse style, Hammond plays classic blues songs from the 30’s, 40’s, and 50’s. He has recorded more than 30 albums since debuting on Vanguard Records in 1962. In 1985 he won a Grammy for the compilation album Blues Explosion, which also featured Sugar Blue, J.B. Hutto, Luther “Guitar Junior” Johnson, Koko Taylor and Stevie Ray Vaughan. He has received four other Grammy nominations, including one in 2010 for his album Rough and Tough.

In 2011, Hammond was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame by the Blues Foundation.

He spoke to Beldon’s Blues Point about his long career in the following interview:

BBP: I did see you at the Hamilton (in November, 2012). I guess you were opening for Coco Montoya?

Hammond: This was in D.C., right?

BBP: Yeah. Yeah. I really enjoyed your show, I must say.

Hammond: Thank you.

BBP: Well, I was reading about your background, and you’re part of the Vanderbilt family, right?

Hammond: Um, indirectly. My father’s mother was Emily Sloane, who—her mother was a Vanderbilt. And I never got to know that whole scene at all. My dad was a rebellious guy who broke away from his family and all of that stuff and I mean was practically disowned by his family. And so I grew up not knowing much about that side at all. I grew up mostly with my mother, who was Irish, born in Toronto, just off the ship from Ireland. So that was my reality as a kid. You know, as I got older I heard all of these things about my father’s mother and her Vanderbilt connections. My grandfather, John Henry Hammond, was the son of a very strange dynamic guy from the Civil War era, a general in the army who became a scout for the railroad and all of this stuff. A real character. So that’s my background.

BBP: Wow. I was curious also—just as a thought—are you related to Anderson Cooper from CNN?

Hammond: Indirectly, indirectly, yes. Anyone that had a Vanderbilt connection, all of these trainspotter types are quick to say (affecting a pompous type voice) “Oh, you’re related to (whomever). He’s your third cousin twice removed.” I don’t pay attention to that stuff.

BBP: Well, I don’t know why I thought of that. It just sort of popped into my head. But anyway you were talking about your dad, and I understand your dad was pretty important in the music business in his own right. That he actually discovered Billie Holiday?

Hammond: Billie Holiday, Count Basie, Lester Young, Charlie Christian, Meade Lux Lewis, Albert Ammons—he put the band together for Benny Goodman, then went on to discover artists like Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, um, Bruce Springsteen…

BBP: Really!

Hammond: It goes on and on. He was quite a guy.

BBP: But I understand you really didn’t have a lot of contact with him as you were growing up.

Hammond: Well I didn’t grow up with my dad. My folks were divorced when I was five. I saw my father on occasion. My brother and I grew up with our mother, basically.

BBP: But did his line of work influence you at all?

Hammond: Maybe indirectly, but I wasn’t part of his household, so I got into this on my own. It’s my own passion.

BBP: Well, why the blues, of the different styles of music you could have gotten into? What about them attracted you?

Hammond: When I was seven, my father took me to hear Big Bill Broonzy, who was one of the great country blues players. I was very impressed. I don’t know how the seeds were sewn, but as I got older, I just sort of gravitated towards blues music and all of that passion and feeling, to me, it was where it all came from. I just got deeper and deeper into it. And when I was 18, I got a guitar, and when I was 19 I started playing professionally. It’s all I wanted to do.

BBP: Hmm. And I understand that you were a big fan of Jimmy Reed, that he had a lot of influence…

Hammond: Oh, yeah. I got to be on a show with him.

BBP: Really?

Hammond: 1964. In Oakland, California.

BBP: You were playing with him?

Hammond: Yeah, I was opening the show. It was a show put on by a record producer named Chris Strachwitz who had a label called Arhoolie Records. And I got to know Chris: he’s a big blues fanatic, and he put on shows, recorded artists and so forth. He was—is—a terrific, dynamic guy.

BBP: And what was it like meeting Jimmy Reed for the first time? He was somebody you admired all of those years.

Hammond: It was awesome. I was so humbled I don’t think I said more than four words, like, “so nice to meet you.” And I watched his show intently. He was just amazing.

BBP: Wow. And I also understand that you were a big fan of Robert Johnson.

Hammond: I was, but I never met Robert Johnson (laughs). He died before I was born.

BBP: Yeah. He died before a lot of us were born.

Hammond: But I got to know a lot of great blues players, including Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters. Willie Dixon. I could just name hundreds of other artists that I’ve toured with and played with—got to know and—I’ve had an amazing career.

BBP: Yeah, I’ve been reading all about you. You certainly have. Tell me about Willie Dixon though. I know that you were a friend of his.

Hammond: Well, he was happening on many levels. He was a songwriter of course, and wrote songs for Muddy and Howlin’ Wolf and Little Walter and just about everybody. He was also a great bass player—bandleader—he put artists on the map, you know from obscurity to having recording deals and so forth. He worked hand and glove with Chess Records and he took care of himself. I mean he got his songs published, he made money that way. He was a very happening guy. He was from Vicksburg, Mississippi. I’d driven through Vicksburg on my way to New Orleans once and I said “Oh, I was in your hometown, Vicksburg” and he said (imitating a very deliberate tone of voice) “don’t talk to me about Vicksburg.” Ooooh. So I guess he didn’t have wonderful experiences there. He had been a professional boxer for a while. He was a big, tough guy, but a really nice person.

BBP: A lot of musicians in the past I know were boxers. Jackie Wilson, the great R&B performer. A lot of folks. But you were described to me as the only person in the history of music who ever had Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton together in the same band.

Hammond: (laughs) For about a week, yeah.

BBP: How’d that happen?

Hammond: Well, I met Eric in 1965 when I was on tour in England. I hooked up on some shows with John Mayall and his Bluesbreakers and Eric was his guitar player. So we hung out a bunch in England and played a bunch of shows together. They actually backed me on a TV show called Ready Steady Goes Live and we became friends at that point. And in 1966 I was playing at a club in New York and was introduced to Jimi Hendrix who was a fantastic guitar player and a great guy. I got to know him as a friend and I put a little band together with him as my lead guitar player and he was discovered and went over to England and became a huge star in Europe. In 1967 I put my own little band together, just drums and bass and Cream came over for their first tour in the U.S. and Hendrix came back to the U.S. from England, where he was a huge star. And they both had some time off, and they both came down to this club where I was playing with my little band. And they both said “Hey, suppose we sit in with you?” Every night that week they came in and sat in. It was just phenomenal.

BBP: How did they sound together? How was the mixture of…

Hammond: Oh, they were just incredible. They fed off each other; they were both great players, very passionate about blues music and—no problem.

BBP: That’s incredible. I also know that you actually played with Levon Helm and some members of the Band?

Hammond: Yeah. I met them in Toronto in1963. They had just left Ronnie Hawkins and they were on their own and playing gigs in Toronto. I went down to hear them one night and became good friends. I would go to their shows, they’d come to my shows, and they were in New York in 1964 trying to get a demo tape together. And it wasn’t going so well, and I was already signed to Vanguard Records. So I approached Vanguard and I said, “I’ve got a little band together. Can we have a recording session?” And reluctantly they said okay, and so we had three hours to do whatever we wanted to do, and we made a whole album called So Many Roads. Levon (Helms) and Robbie (Robertson), Rick Danko and Richard Manuel and Garth Hudson and the whole Band was my band for a while. My friend Bob Dylan came to the recording date and I introduced them to Bob and the next thing I know, they were playing with Bob!

BBP: (laughing) He stole them from you, huh?

Hammond: Well, yes. Well, I mean not that they were ever my band; they were always their own band. But they recorded behind me on that So Many Roads record.

BBP: Did you ever record with Dylan himself?

Hammond: I did. I went to a recording date, he asked me to play some guitar. Highway 61 Revisited, but it was obscure. I think I may have been on one track in the background maybe. Or perhaps it didn’t make it, I don’t know. It wasn’t a big deal to me.

BBP: But getting back to Jimi Hendrix, you actually advised him to—when Chas Chandler approached him—I think it was at the Café Go-Go in New York?

Hammond: The Café Au Go Go.

BBP: Right. You actually advised him to take Chas Chandler up on his offer.

Hammond: Oh, definitely. Oh yeah. He was so good. He was so dynamic, that how could you not suggest that he go over and make his own career happen? I mean he’d been a sideman for –for three or four years. He’d been with a band called Curtis Knight and was fired in New York, I think, for probably upstaging him (laughs). And I mean he was so dynamic, it was just incredible and he was a really, really nice guy.

BBP: Do you remember the conversation? Do you remember his reaction?

Hammond: He said “Man, this guy has offered me a ticket to go to England and record.” And I said: “You just have to do it. You’re not going to have a whole lot of chances like that just off the bat.” And he came back and looked me up when he’d already become a huge star.

BBP: Hmm. Well, I’ve heard you are a great electric player. Over the years, your trend seems to be to do acoustic shows, one man acoustic shows.

Hammond: Yes, that’s what I enjoy doing most. I can play some electric guitar but that isn’t my real focus. I prefer the solo style that I’ve developed over all of these years and I feel that’s my strongest point. I do enjoy playing the electric guitar, but having a band together and all of that, that’s not been my focus.

BBP: But you have done some albums where you’ve played electric…

Hammond: Yes. Yes.

BBP: The one you recorded with David Hidalgo from Los Lobos….

Hammond: Yes.

BBP: How do you know when something calls for a band and when something calls for you to play solo?

Hammond: Usually it’s the record label that says “well, we don’t want a solo record.” So it’s kind of on my shoulders to put a band together. What I like to do and have done in the past is to do some cuts on the album being solo and some with just a piano or a smaller combo, and then some with a full band; you know drums, bass, piano, whatever. And I’ve made albums in the past with big bands and horn sections and all of that stuff, and I’ve had a chance to do a whole lot of stuff over the years.

BBP: Yeah, I kind of picked that up. One thing though. Do you—you don’t really do a lot of original material, do you?

Hammond: I’ve got some songs of my own, yeah. I think I played some that night. I don’t think of myself as a songwriter. I’m a blues singer and I know hundreds and hundreds of songs so I have a lot to fall back on, be inspired by.

BBP: But it seems like your aim seems to be to kind of pay tribute and homage to the genre.

Hammond: I do songs that I like. I’m definitely in the genre. This is my life. I think that blues music is always relevant and dynamic—very honest—and I’ve been inspired to do this for my whole career. A great song deserves to be sung, and I don’t think you have to be a songwriter to be a good singer or player.

BBP: But when you do write songs, what artist do you think of?

Hammond: Well, they’re so many that I’ve been inspired by. I just go with the feeling that comes, you know?

BBP: So it’s just a collection of people who are calling to you in the background as you’re writing your songs, right?

Hammond: I get inspiration; I don’t know where it comes from. But it does come.

BBP: You know something else I was curious about? I’ve seen a lot of people do this—Bruce Springsteen—you did it at your show at the Hamilton. Playing the harmonica and playing the guitar at the same time. That must be very hard. How do you..

Hammond: Well, it isn’t anymore. It used to be like a huge challenge right at the beginning, but I began playing harmonica and guitar almost at the same time. So in order to put them together, I guess it’s like a piano player that has a left hand independent from the right hand. And after a while, you don’t even think about it: it just flows. It’s hard to put in the words.

BBP: It’s just something that happens more or less.

Hammond: Yes, that’s what I’ve started out to do and got to a point where I could do it and was encouraged to do it and felt like I was getting better.

BBP: And I guess at the same time you’re throwing in the singing as well, so that kind of complicates things…

Hammond: That one man band aspect.

BBP: Right. I mean, are you kind of following a blues tradition when you do that?

Hammond: Well, there’s only a handful of players that play on the rack like I do. Jimmy Reed was one. I don’t know if you ever saw Doc Watson play…

BBP: That might have been before my time…

Hammond: Great harmonica player on the rack. It’s uh…you have to be a little nuts to do it, I think (laughs).

BBP: When you say “the rack” you mean…

Hammond: the harmonica on a rack while you’re playing guitar.

BBP: Got you. Now I also hear that you actually look for obscure blues songs that are actually in danger of disappearing.

Hammond: I don’t go out of my way to look for stuff like that. I mean, if I hear it by chance or whatever, and I feel “oh, that’s a good one,” that’s the kind of way I go about it. I don’t go looking for them.

BBP: It’s just something you hear and you try to incorporate it.

Hammond: Yeah.

BBP: When you hear something, is there something particular that appeals to you?

Hammond: it’s got to appeal to me; otherwise I don’t want to be involved with it. There are so many great songs out there, it’s what I feel that I can do that I like that I can make it mine. I think that’s where all singers are. Find something you can latch onto and make it your own.

BBP: I mean can you put into words what about a song grabs you? If somebody were to ask you what you would look for, or what would strike your ear?

Hammond: Well it would have to do with the words and how they go together, what the image is that it creates in your mind. I’m a guy who’s been on the road 51 years, I’ve seen a whole lot of stuff and I can relate to traveling. I can relate to every statement you can make in the book: passion, adventure—when a song grabs me it has to be something I can relate to.

BBP: Something in your personal experience, in other words.

Hammond: Yes, I guess. I’ve had a lot—a lot –of that.

BBP: That’s interesting. Now I know you’ve played with a lot of musicians over the years, we kind of talked about that earlier. And there were others too that we didn’t mention: Dr. John, Duane Allman, Roosevelt Sykes. Which of these musicians actually taught you the most? I mean, did any of them actually take you aside and say “John, you need to do more of this…”

Hammond: No, nobody ever did that. I traveled with a fellow named Charles Otis from New Orleans, who, when I put my first band together, he was the drummer, and he’s been on the road with Professor Longhair and Little Richard and Alvin Robinson and Frogman Henry, all of these great New Orleans players. I mean he’d been on the road and knew about how to comport yourself, you know, how to be professional and not go crazy. Charles taught me a lot about, just how to be yourself in your own shoes and be professional; respect your audience, you know, that kind of thing. Charles is my friend to this day. We made many records together, travelled all over the place and…you’ll meet folks like that in your life that will hip you to things. One of those guys.

BBP: Wow. How did you hook up with Roosevelt Sykes? The reason I ask is because I actually saw him back in the seventies.

Hammond: You did? Wow, I was on some films with him. And we became friends, and I was going to make a record, and I wanted that sound of just piano and guitar. And I asked him if he’d do it, and he said he would. So I flew him up to New York; he wanted $700. And so the record label was going to write him a check and he said “no, no, no, I want cash on the piano.” (laughs). So he got the cash on the piano and we had a great time. I was on a lot of gigs with him; just a phenomenal guy.

BBP: That’s incredible. What year was this?

Hammond: Probably ’75.

BBP: Hmm. That’s about the time I saw him.

Hammond: It was called Footwork.

BBP: Hmm. That’s the name of the album?

Hammond: Yeah. An album I made with him. I also had recorded with him back in the ‘60’s for Victoria Spivey. When Sykes came to New York he played at Gerdes Folk City and this was a hangout for Victoria Spivey who was an old time blues shouter from the 20’s and 30’s. And she knew Roosevelt and anytime he came to New York, she’d be there, and the idea was to invite everybody in the band up to her place in Brooklyn and she’d record you there on a tape recorder. And so I went up there many times and I got to record with some phenomenal players, including Otis Spann and Bob Dylan. It was back in the wild 60’s, ’65 or ’66, or around there.

BBP: Otis Spann and Bob Dylan in the same session?

Hammond: Yeah.

BBP: Really?

Hammond: Oh yeah. And they’re still available. I don’t know if they’re on CD yet, but I imagine they are somewhere…

BBP: Wow. What a combination. I mean…

Hammond: …on the Queen Bee label.

BBP: Queen Bee label? And these are based on recordings that Victoria Spivey made on a tape recorder?

Hammond: Yeah, on her tape recorder with her friend Lenny. She’d feed you a huge fried chicken dinner and then you’d have to play (laughs). It was a wild scene.

BBP: It sounds like an awful lot of fun.

Hammond: It was.

BBP: Who else would show up for those things?

Hammond: Well, a harmonica player named Bill Dicey. Babe Stovall. Anybody who was coming through and playing;if she liked you, you’d be invited up to her place.

BBP: Well it sounds like you’ve known a lot of interesting people. Duane Allman, how did you meet him?

Hammond: Well, I was recording for Atlantic in 1969, and Duane came to the recording session, he wanted to meet me. He had heard some of my earlier recordings. So one of the players on the recording date, Eddie Hinton, knew Duane and introduced him to me. And Eddie said to me “you’ve got to hear this guy play, he’s phenomenal.” So Duane played a little bit, and I said “Oooo. Would you like to be on this next tune we’re going to record?” And it was just mind-boggling. Everybody in Mussel Shoals knew of Duane, he had played behind Aretha Franklin; he had played behind other artists that were recording for Atlantic…so anyway we became really good friends. At one point the Allman Brothers band actually opened for me in St. Paul—probably ’69 or ’70—and then I opened a lot of shows for them later (laughs).

BBP: You returned the favor in other words.

Hammond: Oh, man, we were good friends.

BBP: Wow. That’s something. You’ve had some pretty amazing experiences there with musicians. I was wondering, how do you think the blues has changed? I know you like the more traditional styles, but the things that the modern artists are putting out, what’s your take on them?

Hammond: Well, you do too much, it isn’t blues anymore. You do too little, it becomes a ballad. It’s hard to put into words. I mean blues; you’ll know it when you hear it… (Hammond had to stop our conversation briefly at this point to take another call. Our interview resumed upon his return.)

BBP: Just a couple more I want to throw at you. You know it was funny, I was watching TV the other night, and they showed that movie Little Big Man.

Hammond: Oh yeah…

BBP: And I understand that you were involved in putting together the soundtrack for that?

Hammond: I did the soundtrack for it. I mean I didn’t do the cavalry stuff, but I did the entire guitar playing. 1970.

BBP: Mmm-hmm. Yeah. That was the year that movie came out.

Hammond: Yeah, they flew me out to Hollywood. I said to Arthur Penn, “I don’t think the music that I play existed back then.” He said “it doesn’t matter, it will work.” So they sat me in front of a five-hour movie, and where they wanted to have music, I would play; there’d be a little strip that would come on the film and then I would start, and they recorded it as I played to the movie. It was an amazing, amazing experience for me.

BBP: Was that the only movie you ever did? Were there others?

Hammond: I was involved in two other films vaguely. One was called Matewam, a John Sayles film and one called The Indian Runner; it was a Sean Penn film.

The Tinner Hill Blues Festival is held annually in Falls Church, Virginia to honor blues guitarist John Jackson, who lived in Virginia and died in 2002. Scheduled for June 7-9, 2013, this year’s festival will also feature singer/guitarist Big Bill Morganfield, Sheryl Warner and the Southside Housewreckers, The Acoustic Blues Women, Guitarist Roy Bookbinder, Beverly Guitar Watkins, pianist Daryl Davis, singer Mary Ann Redmond and singer Sista Monica, among others. For specific performance times and other details, check out the Tinner Hill Website at:

http://tinnerhill.org/blog/2013-tinner-hill-blues-festival-line-up-announced

The Impressions: Part 3 of Our Interview with Original Member Sam Gooden

2013-04-24T14:27:00.001-07:00

In Part III of our interview, Sam Gooden of the Impressions talks about his group’s influence on and its relationship with the late Bob Marley. Gooden also recounts a tour the Impressions had with Eric Clapton, during which all performers began each concert by praying together.

BBP: I understand that the Impressions were a very big influence on Bob Marley and the Wailers.

Gooden: (laughs) yeah. We had fun with them.

BBP: You actually met them? Bob Marley?

Gooden: Oh yeah. We knew since we first went to Jamaica back in—boy that was the early years—that was ’61, something like that. We went there, we met Bob…Bob, Bunny (Wailer) and the rest of the guys, they used to come and see our show. And I know they would take some pattern sometime when we did an album and we had a cover where the three of us had hats on and we were dressed in suits. And somebody said that Bob and Bunny and them would have an album cover with the same type of layout as ours. They were calling them the “Jamaican Impressions,” and it was a very big compliment for us.

BBP: Hmm. Did you talk a lot with Bob; did he ask you for advice on how to do things?

Gooden: Only things where we saw and songs. He would learn things that we did and he would use, within his writing, things Curtis had done as far as political type situations. Which there would get you in trouble.

BBP: It can get you shot.

Gooden: Over there, it can get you killed! But that was a line he wanted to go in, and he wrote songs that way. I know there was one song that Curtis wrote called “Lord we’ve got to keep on moving.” And it was talking about somebody was after him. They were coming after him, this and that, and Bob wrote a song also right after that. He wrote a song called “I Shot the Sheriff.” Very similar song. The guy was running away from the sheriff. And the same thing with the song that we did called “I Gotta Keep on Movin.’ Because if I stop, they’re going to catch me. And the same thing with “I Shot the Sheriff.”

BBP: Wow, that’s amazing.

Gooden: It’s beautiful. I like a lot of things that Bob has done. Bob was a talented guy. It’s just that he went before his time. He had a lot more to give.

BBP: Yeah. Yeah, he did.

Gooden: A couple of songs that Bob had done, he added “People Get Ready” in it. He had some of the lyrics in there, yeah. Curtis was an influence of Bob; Bob liked to write along the same line as Curtis. See, Curtis could say things in his words and his songs that Bob would do, then they may be offensive to the people there, I guess. I don’t know the whole story of what happened there but I know he had to leave. Because, different country, different laws. You know and they just, uh, they hurt you. Here in the United States, then you can do a lot of different things. You know and you can say things, because you have freedom of speech. (In other countries) if you say things the government don’t like, then they will hurt you.

BBP: Yeah, that’s why Bob had to flee, I guess.

Gooden: Yeah, he went to England. Doing a lot of good things over there.

BBP: Did you keep in touch with him over the years? And did you keep in touch with Curtis and the other Impressions?

Gooden: We didn’t. Of course we knew things that he was doing. New music; that’s the only way we related to Bob was through music. And I know that—somebody else told me—that he had a toe that caught gangrene and that they wanted to remove that, that particular toe, but he wouldn’t let them do it because he felt that it would enhance his performance. Because Bob—if you watched him on stage—he’s a guy that’s very active. He moves awkward, but he moves in a Jamaican way, which with their music, it may be a little bit different than ours. And the way he moved, he was just all over the place. And he looked wild. But it was in sync with what he was doing.

BBP: I was thinking that you mentioned that Curtis had influenced him a lot, and I was thinking of that song Exodus (singing), “Exodus, Movement of the People.”

Gooden: Yeah.

BBP: It sounds like “Movin’ On Up.” Kind of. Same theme.

Gooden: Yeah. Like I said, Curtis had a lot of influence—not only on Bob, but a lot of other people also—when it came to writing songs. That’s why, when we were talking earlier, I was telling you that this guy really didn’t get his just due.

BBP: I do know that some folks did try to record an album. I think Bruce Springsteen was on it, and a bunch of rock people were on it actually. And it came out; it might have been while he was still alive (I was wrong; I later found out it came out in 1994, three years after his death). Do you remember that album?

Gooden: I don’t remember that album but I know he did one called New World Order that he recorded while laying down. And it took a long time to do, all the breathing he had was right to his neck and stuff. So that he had to get all of the air to sing from there. When I sing, I sing from my diaphragm towards my stomach and I would breathe deep and I would come out with my lyrics. But he didn’t have that. So he had to use what he had and he did one heck of a job. It took a long time to finish it, but he did.

BBP: I know you guys were in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. What did that feel like, when that happened? That must have really been a blast.

Gooden: When you can be recognized by your peers…it’s not just some writers like you go into the Baseball Hall of Fame, you got these baseball writers who vote you in—you’re voted in by other acts that are already there. You know, guys like Chuck Berry and Fats Domino and B.B. King and all of these people. These are the people that vote you into the Hall of Fame and it’s very big in my sight because it’s something I never realized that I ever would do or be a part of.

BBP: Now I understand that you guys also get calls from other musicians to come in and kind of sing on their work. Has that been happening a lot over the years? Did I hear that right?

Gooden: (laughs) Well you have some, some that you might accept. But then there’s some that you won’t.

BBP: Eric Clapton, you did something with him I remember.

Gooden: Yeah, we did a whole CD with him, which was beautiful. Nicest guy you ever want to meet. Matter of fact, we were just supposed to do one song. And that was one of our old songs which was “I’ve been Trying.” And we wind up doing the whole album! And it just went from one to the next, to the next, to the next, to the next, to the next. And it was beautiful because all of those musicians, and the people that were there, and dealing with Eric; you will never find a nicer person in the world than Eric Clapton. He made you welcome, he made you comfortable—he had a way he liked to do things…which…that’s what we went there for. We said: “that’s what you want, that’s the way we do it, the way you want it done.” And that’s what we did.

BBP: Wow. Did you record it over in England? Did he come here, or how did that work?

Gooden: Well most of the album we did in California. He has a home out there. And we did most of it there. It was only when he had to go back to London that we had to go there and do a couple of songs. Most of it was done in the States. We did—I think it’s two—two songs, we done overseas. We only went there when we were going to do the last performance with him. We did part of a tour with him there in London. And then we did I think four or five days here in the States with him. I think we did Atlanta and we did Memphis, we did Nashville and we did Charlotte, North Carolina. But overseas we did Royal Albert Hall there for seven days. And then we went to Birmingham, Manchester and some of the other places there.

BBP: You guys must have had a great time!

Gooden: It was. It was beautiful, because everything was laid out for you. You didn’t have to really do much of anything but sing. And we had a tendency to pray before we went on stage and he saw what we was doing and he asked if we could do that with the whole group. And I said “sure!” So before the show would start at Albert Hall, then we all would get together and we’d pick out anyone that would feel like it, they would do the prayer. And it would go from one to the next, one to the next, and one to the next. Then finally Eric said he wanted to do it. Then he said the prayer. It was beautiful. Beautiful guy, and if you ever get a chance to meet him, you’ll meet one heck of a guy.

BBP: So when you guys did this prayer, where were you? Were you kind of in a circle? What kind of setting was it?

Gooden: Well we’d go in one dressing room, which was the band room. We were all together in the band room and we’d all make a big circle and we’d all join hands and whichever one that chose to pray, they’d pray for the whole group. We prayed that the Good Lord would be with us while we were performing, that we’d go out, that the people would enjoy what we were trying to do, that each member and their family would have good vibes and good everything and that the Lord would bless us all. And said “Amen.”

BBP: And did it help your performance?

Gooden: It always does. We don’t go on stage unless we pray. You can call us 15 times, but until we gather and pray, we’re not going on. And when we go on, we ask Him to be with us on stage, give us voices and give the band and everyone the good and the talent to perform the way you wish it to be and be there with us on stage as we perform. That we give You all of the praises and give You all of the glory. In Christ Jesus’ name we pray, Amen.

BBP: There’s a—Spike Lee did a movie about comedians—uh—God, uh, Bernie Mac was one—Kings of Comedy, that movie. And it showed D.L. Hughley—I don’t know if you’re familiar with him, he had a show on CNN for a while; he’s a pretty famous comic. I mean they showed him before he went on stage...it looked to me like he was praying before he went on stage. So I guess it’s kind of a combination of your gathering your spiritual energy, but at the same time you are gathering your performance energy, right?

Gooden: Well, we saw him. We met him at the airport in New York. We were headed home after we finished the show there in New York and I don’t know where he was going. But we said a few words, and he went to his gate and we went to ours.

BBP: Wow. That’s amazing. I wanted to ask you (something else) about Eric Clapton. He kind of plays in a blues/rock type of style. How was that to play behind, to sing behind? Was that kind of a challenge? Was that different for you?

Gooden: Well, I’m going to tell you, it was fun to do those things because they’re—it’s just a matter of us getting the basic harmony that we wanted together. The blend that we wanted. Then they would let us know where the group was coming in, and this and that. But most of all, it’s already mapped out for us. It’s just a matter of us finding out what notes and what pitches each one of us is going to sing…and that was the basic thing. After that, everything was very easy.

BBP: Were you used to playing that kind of style though?

Gooden: Well it didn’t make any difference. That’s why, like I said, you have to—in this business—you have to be versatile, you have to be able to adapt to different styles. Like the way the style of music is now, it’s a different texture of music now. And where the kids come from now is totally different. But the thing is, you have to learn how to be able to be versatile to be able to entertain younger people of today, as you did years ago.

BBP: Have you worked a lot with hip-hop? And what do you think of hip-hop?

Gooden: I like some of it. And some of it I don’t. I like the ones that are very nice. But I dislike the ones that have so much vulgar in it. I don’t think that belongs in music, where you have to use those type of words. And basically talking under people’s clothes. You know you’re talking under ladies’ clothes and you’re calling ladies out of their name. You’re calling them different names that I will not use right now, you know, and it don’t fit ladies. I don’t care what lady it is, what color, what nationality, it just don’t fit them. But to have people call them this, and saying this, and using it in the way they use it: I guess it’s what sells. And I guess that’s the music that sells and guys, they say some of everything now. And it just uh—it didn’t happen back then. You know, you had good music, you had music that people could relate to. It might mean that you love a person, that you’re making love to this person, this and that. But not in a way where you really just—it’s almost like you’re explaining the same thing that you’re getting ready to do. And there’s some talent out there; a lot of those kids are very talented. If they weren’t they wouldn’t be in this business. But then you have a tendency to have everything that sounds alike. You have one act that gets very famous—of doing it this way—and the next thing you know you have 15 acts that are all doing it exactly the same way. So you don’t know who’s who.

BBP: (laughs) Right. But putting aside the vulgarity and all that, and the things they call women, hip-hop as a style…

Gooden: You’ve got a lot of talent. There’s a lot of talent in that. You know, you’ve got guys like L.L. Cool J. Very clean. And he went on to do different things now; you know and the thing is he started out in one way, and he did not stick to wearing his pants hanging halfway down. Now, he dresses suits, and if he’s dressing in anything casual, nothing’s hanging at all. No pants hanging down, anything. You have sloppy pants, everybody has that. That’s the new style. But that doesn’t mean it has to be hanging down to your knees either. But you don’t see that very much now on stage. It’s influenced a lot of the young kids today. If you go to any store right now…if he hasn’t got on boxer shorts, then it’s all messed up, because the pants are down below his shorts. And it looks—I don’t know…

BBP: You just wish they’d do something different with their style.

Gooden: Uh yeah, but everybody has their own style. I’ll have to say that they have their own way of doing things. But there is always a better way of doing things and still come out the same.

BBP: I’d also like to ask you about the blues. I mean how much of what you guys do is…

Gooden: (laughing) Oh, man. I love the blues. Good friends of mine there. Albert King, B.B. King and all of these guys. Man, I love that. And Bobby Blue Bland. Those are all good friends. And I’m going to tell you, music in general, I love music in general.. I like country music, they have good lyrics and good songs—if people would listen to the words—because they tell a story. Most of those songs are similar to things that Curtis does: they tell stories. And they paint a picture. Johnny Cash, his songs paint pictures. He talks about different things. He talks about things that he did when he was younger. He talks about things when he was in jail, and when he got out. He talks about these things. These are—if you don’t talk about things, if you don’t live with it—then you wouldn’t know the blues. Because blues singers, it’s something—somebody will ask, “how do you learn to sing the blues?” He said, “if you live that life, then you talk about it, and you write lyrics that tells the story. And if you listen to all of the blues singers, from B.B. to Bobby Blue Bland, Albert King, to all of the other great blues singers, then you listen to the lyrics of their singing. It tells a story.

BBP: Some people may argue that what you guys do is the blues…

Gooden: (laughs) Well some of it, yeah. Mostly our stuff and the stuff that Curtis wrote was gospel-oriented. You know it has a lot of—if you would listen—the songs, you probably could sing all of them in church. And not be offended; you wouldn’t offend anybody by singing them. Because they have that orientation, that gospel orientation.

BBP: I’ve noticed over the years, like when I was growing up and I was going to see shows, the acts seemed to be more segregated. If you were a black act, you had mostly a black audience. Do you see more white kids in your audiences than you used to?

Gooden: (laughs) Oh yeah. Nowadays when we go to California, it’s mostly Hispanics.

BBP: Really!

Gooden: Oh man, and there’ll be younger kids. Kids that maybe—well, over 20. Yeah. That’s the audience that we play for in California. We play there; we play to Las Vegas, to Los Angeles there at Gilbert Arena. We usually play that for two days; last time last year we were there. But this year, we’ll go the other way. We’ll be in Las Vegas and probably in Fresno.

BBP: Are you getting a large Hispanic following?

Gooden: Yes. Finally! It’s something that we had to get…they had to get comfortable with us. They like our records but they’d never seen us before. We’ve been going and singing out there for a few years now and it’s getting better and better and better and better. More of a following.

BBP: What about the Impressions do you think touches the Latino culture?

Gooden: I feel that with our music and the way Curtis wrote songs, that we could touch anybody. You know, any nationality of people, even people that don’t speak English, like in Spain. We did a show last year there and half of the people couldn’t speak English. But they knew the songs. And they sung the songs, along with us, and that’s kind of weird. We’re singing English and they’re singing in their language. And they’re singing the same song. So it just goes to show you how sometimes your music, it goes for all nations, all different languages. And that makes me feel good, that we can relate to so many different people. A lot of countries, we probably would never go to. We still sell records there. And the people know about us there, and that’s quite an accomplishment for some guy that grew up in Chattanooga, Tennessee, a small city in the South.

BBP: Is the following overseas bigger than the following in the United States? Or do you think it’s more or less even?

Gooden: Well I’m going to tell you, now it’s getting bigger over there, because we’re starting to sing to the public there. When we used to go over there, we went to Europe I think from 1970 all the way up to ’83, and we never did play for the public. We only played for military. And so now, which might be good for us, is that now when we go over we’re playing for the public all of the time now, which is good. There some people that, some guy said—even his wife said—they had been waiting 40 years to see us on stage. Now that’s really saying a whole lot.

BBP: Well, let me ask you this—don’t take this the wrong way—but we’re all getting older, I mean, I can’t do everything that I used to be able to do. As you get older, is it harder to do touring? I mean, that’s hard on a young person, so I imagine somebody…

Gooden: (chuckling) No, it’s fun now! I enjoy it now better than I did then.

BBP: Really?

Gooden: Well, back then when I was younger, then you’d be up half of the night, you’d hang out here and you’d hang out there. During those times, as you grow and you mature, then you have a tendency—you make sure you get your rest. You don’t go clubbing, you know you go to the place and you do your show, and you meet and greet the people, and you sign autographs. Then you go back to the hotel, and you lay down and get some rest. And you don’t drink, and you don’t smoke, so…

BBP: Meaning you’re more disciplined when you’re older.

Gooden: Exactly!

BBP: I got you.

Gooden: When I stop doing this, that’s when it becomes work. Now it’s still fun! I’m really enjoying it now because I’m meeting a lot more younger people—this generation. And I’m able to entertain kids, whose parents have told them about us, and their grandparents have told them about us. And it’s weird. If you look at it—there’s kids that come to our show and they said “My Grandma” loves y’alls songs. They’re great! He said, I don’t mean it in a bad way. I said “I know you don’t. That’s great! You know, it’s just that I, I’m just happy that I can entertain you all.” It’s a feather in my cap to be able to jump the whole generation gap and be able to still be able to entertain the audience of today as we did audiences back then.

The Impressions: Part 2 of Our Interview with Original Member Sam Gooden

2013-04-22T09:29:00.000-07:00

In Part 2 of our interview with Sam Gooden of the Impressions, he talks about his nephew, the bassist Joseph “Lucky” Scott. Gooden talks about how Scott came to play bass for the Impressions after a tragic accident killed several of the group’s band members. And he talks about how, when Curtis Mayfield left the group, he took Scott with him and how the bassist later played on Mayfield’s famous Superfly soundtrack.

He also talks in depth about two of the Impressions’ greatest hits, “People Get Ready” and “Move on Up,” giving an almost line-by-line interpretation of those songs’ lyrics. It will definitely make you look at those recordings in a different light.

BBP: Tell me about some of your biggest hits. I remember the one I used to hear all the time when I was growing up was “We’re a Winner.”

Gooden: That was down the line a bit. You want to ask me about the Impressions, or you want to ask me about somebody else?

BBP: Well, I guess I want to ask you about everything. You have all of this knowledge in your head, and I guess I want to share it with the world. That’s just my attitude. I definitely want to know about Joseph (“Lucky” Scott, bass player and his nephew) because I was looking up stuff about him and there’s hardly anything about Joseph. Well, let’s go to him now. Tell me a little about Joseph. How did he get into music?

Gooden: Well that’s my youngest sister’s oldest son. And he started playing bass here in Chattanooga. No, he had started very young here in Chattanooga, playing local, playing the city with musicians that we grew up with and listening to. There’s a group called the Upsetters Band and he started playing bass for them.

BBP: The Upsetters?

Gooden: It’s just a group. Not the Upsetters that you hear. It’s another group that was here. And they had the same name. Not the one that became famous. And he played for them, and of course I knew with him being my nephew...well I had actually three nephews that played; two of them eventually came out to play for Curtis and play for us also. But Lucky, he started that, but we had a bass player that traveled with us, his name was Lenny Brown, and Lucky learned a lot from him because he used to listen to him play and he would copy different styles and different changes that he made. He didn’t read music, but he had the best ear you wanted to hear, because he could go into the studio and record anything that you want to record and still couldn’t read not a lick of music at all.

BBP: Wow. That’s incredible. Do you know what made him choose bass as opposed to, like, guitar ?

Gooden: That I don’t know. I think he played some guitar. Plus he played some keyboards. He’s a very all-around talented young man.

BBP: Did you and he collaborate on stuff? He played back-up for the Impressions for a while, right?

Gooden: Yeah, well he started with us. What happened? Let me say this, is that in ’68 we were on tour with Jackie Wilson and our band got killed while we were on that tour. We lost all of our musicians.

BBP: Oh wow…how did that happen?

Gooden: Well, we had just finished the show in the Carolinas and we had a day off. The sound system that we had for the tour, the switch broke on it and the only place we could get it fixed was in Atlanta. So the band was putting it in the van and bringing it all the way to Atlanta to get it fixed, and then we would go have a day off. So the next day we were going to go back to Greenville, South Carolina to continue the tour. The group…Fred and I, and Curtis, we left right after the show, and the band left about an hour or two after that.

BBP: By plane?

Gooden: No, by car. But that morning, my road manager woke me up and told me they had had an accident on Interstate 85 and that all of them were killed.

BBP: Oh my God!

Gooden: So that kind of took us off the tour, but all of a sudden we had no musicians. So I knew that Lucky knew our stuff, knew everything that we had done because he had worked with Lenny quite closely, and I told Fred and Curtis that he could probably play our stuff. So we called him in, and then he started playing with the group. And he became our bandleader for quite some years, ‘til Curtis decided to step down from the group and be on his own. And he had no band. So we decided to let him take the old band that we had, and we started a new band. And that meant Lucky went with Curtis. After that, Curtis started going in the studio. He used to sit down with Lucky and they just would do rhythm. And they’d sit down and learn songs. And Lucky would listen, and they would play along with what Curtis was playing, and learning the songs, so that when they went into the studio, he knew exactly the way the song was going, so he didn’t have to read nothing. He was that talented. He could just pick up all the things and also add a little bit of himself within the song. That’s what he did as Curtis grew. And then when Curtis did the Superfly thing, then he had a bass pattern that he created himself, and he became famous for it.

BBP: Like for “Pusherman” and “Freddy’s Dead….”

Gooden: All of those things. Every one of those songs. He could not read a lick. He had the greatest ear around as far as a musician is concerned. You figure, say, “Well okay, this guy reads music well. He reads this, he reads that.” No, he learns the track with what the rhythm does, and he goes in the studio and he plays it!

BBP: Now this was around the time that Larry Graham was doing his thing with the slapping and the popping and that kind of thing….

Gooden: Yeah.

BBP: In Lucky’s recordings, I didn’t hear him doing too much of that. Did he do that at all? Did he not like to do that? It wasn’t just part of his style?

Gooden: No, it wasn’t his style to do that. He just created the bass patterns. He did no popping, he did no pulling on the strings and none of that other stuff. He was just a professional bass player that created different sounds that other bass players have copied.

BBP: Yeah. For sure. I know, getting back to Larry Graham, Larry Graham likes to use different amplification devices, and sound-altering devices. Lucky didn’t like that stuff either, I guess, right?

Gooden: No. He got a good amp and he played through it. That’s basically it. It wasn’t that he added four or five different amps up there to enhance the sound, he used a big amp—that’s it. What came out was beautiful music.

BBP: You’re right. It sure was. Especially Superfly. I was curious about that whole Superfly thing. Were you involved in that at all? You and the other Impressions? Or was that strictly Curtis’ thing?

Gooden: No. That was Curtis’ thing. When Curtis decided to stay in and basically run the company, then we moved on with Leroy Hutson. We added musicians, we added a singer. And we went from there. But with Curtis, he went in and all of a sudden now, he could kind of branch out the way he wanted to branch out. He could do the things that possibly, that he probably wanted to do when he was with us, but he didn’t want to take us over to that style of music. Even though we probably could have done it, you know, it’s just that it wasn’t for us to do. It was for him to do by himself.

BBP: Did Lucky ever talk to you about what he was doing on Superfly? I know that you mentioned that he and Curtis used to work out the songs together. And how did he feel about the reception to the soundtrack? I mean that movie is known more for the soundtrack then it is for the movie itself.

Gooden: Well Lucky got a lot of publicity from it. He got to meet a lot of different acts and the people that was in the movie, he got to know those people. He got to know those people, so, he got a way to establish himself in the hearts of music as one of your better bass players around.

BBP: Was he getting a lot of offers from other musicians after that happened?

Gooden: (chuckles): Well, yeah, cause at one point, he left Curtis and he started doing some church thing here in the city, which is where his heart was. You know, he liked playing in church. And he also put the bass down and he started playing piano, keyboard, for one of the church choirs.

BBP: Was he a very religious person? I mean….

Gooden: I would say that he liked playing in church. I won’t say that he was constantly a church goer. Did he join a church, did he do this, did he do that? That’s something I don’t know because I didn’t sit down and ask him about something like that. Some things you ask and some things you just leave alone. Cause if you start throwing church at somebody, all of a sudden they clam up and they don’t want to say anything about it. But I know that he liked playing the church music. He traveled around with a lot of choirs, not only in the city but to Atlanta and some of the other places around outside of the city.

BBP: Do you remember some of the names, some of the groups that he did specifically?

Gooden: I couldn’t recall some of the people, because the thing is, I was living in Chicago then. And that was before I moved back here. And when I moved back here, I know a couple of people that he used to sit down with for rehearsal, for the choir rehearsal. But as far as knowing the names of the different groups, the people in the city that he’s done music for, I can’t recall them.

BBP: Did he consider the bass to be his primary instrument even though you said he gravitated more towards the keyboard when he started playing church music?

Gooden: That was his tool. That was his main thing: his playing bass. Anybody that knew him, that’s what they knew about him, by his bass-playing.

BBP: I guess his death must have been hard—especially for you—I mean you’re his uncle. That must have been …

Gooden: You…you…you…you love your niece and your nephew….you look at him, you think about what other things he could have done. You know if he could have survived that situation….he didn’t survive that. I know I went to the wake, and uh…have you ever been to a wake where you looked down at somebody and their eyes moved…

BBP: ….yeah, I think I know what you mean, or at least something gives the impression that they do, yeah.

Gooden: But, I looked at him, I stood there and I looked down and his eyes moved. His eyebrows moved, and it wasn’t me the only one who saw it. So, you don’t know. I don’t know. Because I know some people say—and that’s hearsay—that a person always remains until the funeral is over, even at the cemetery, and then they leave. But they are there, overlooking their funeral. Which is something I can’t relate to. I won’t say it’s true and I won’t say it’s not true.

BBP: (laughing): Well, we’re not going to know until we get there ourselves, I guess!

Gooden: (laughing) Yes! Exactly!

BBP: Well, what do you think was happening there? Do you think he was just acknowledging the people who came to see him?

Gooden: I think so. I think he knew that we were there, and that he was saying “it’s alright….I’m going on.” And take his talent to the Lord. And play there.

BBP: Hmm. So he’s probably in a band up there with a lot of other great….

Gooden: A lot of other great musicians and singers and friends of mine. It scares me some time. I know quite a few of my good friends have passed on there. It always makes me sit back and try to overlook my own life, and just try to do better and try to live the right way and try to take care of myself, take care of my body and stuff. And try to stay here as long as I possibly can. Because I know I’m not going to be here forever. You know, just as long as the good Lord allows me too.

BBP: Yeah. That’s all you can do. You just try to do the best you can with what you have. Did Lucky have kids? Was he married?

Gooden: Yeah. He had kids. I’m not sure how many, but I know he does. I met his daughter, and I think he had a son. But yeah, he had kids. And they’re actually grown up. I see his brothers now and they talk about it. Because I know they probably see his kids. But he had two brothers who also play.

BBP: What are their names?

Gooden: Larry Scott, he was a guitar player. He played mostly for church and around the city. And Vinnie Scott. He also played for us. He also was the last person playing for Curtis when Curtis had the accident.

BBP: Oh yeah, in 1990-1991 I think it was.

Gooden: Right, and that was Vinnie playing—he was Curtis’ band leader, just like his brother was. And played bass also.

BBP: Did he learn from Lucky?

Gooden: I don’t know. I know the style of playing; he plays very similar to Lucky. He’s not as tall as Lucky. He’s a shorter guy. But Lucky was a tall guy. Lucky was probably—I guess Lucky was probably about six-one, six-two. Tall and slender, but his brother was short…

BBP: Yeah. Lucky’s kids: are they gravitating towards music at all?

Gooden: Never kept up with them because, like I said, most of the time I was in Chicago so the family that he had was here in Chattanooga. I just moved back here in 1977.

BBP: I want to ask you a few more questions about The Impressions. You guys have quite a footprint, you know, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and all that?

Gooden: We kind of made a name for ourselves and thank the Good Lord that he had kept Fred and myself to a point where we could copy what we’d done years ago and with us not drinking, not smoking, or anything like that. Then we have a tendency to do songs in the same key that we did years ago. Same songs, same keys, same everything. Anybody who comes in with us, they will have to learn exactly the way we do things. The way people will recognize everything that we do. So we have them to make sure that they learn the song the way the song is, because you find so many lead singers that replace the other lead singers. They always come in; they always want to change the flow of a song. And it takes away from what the people remember of the song. So the main thing for us is that everything remains the same. If you’re going to ad lib anything, do it on the end, or just before you start the song. This way, once the song starts, you’d be surprised how many people sitting out there are singing along with you. And they’re saying each word, each note, exactly what you’re doing, and like the record. So if you go any way from the record, then you’re not singing the song right.

BBP: Hmm. I’m curious. We were talking about footprints earlier; how much of a footprint did Curtis have on the Impressions? I mean is his influence still with your group today?

Gooden: I think Curtis’ influence will be with us forever. Because Curtis was a genius. Curtis did not get all of the recognition that he should have gotten. They waited until he was handicapped and couldn’t move or anything, and then all of a sudden want to give him all of these different awards. But why couldn’t they have done that when he was walking around, talking and active? They could have done that then. But no, they waited until he had this accident and he couldn’t even move nothing but his head. And now they want to hand him a Life Achievement Award, they want to give him this, they want to give him that. And he can’t even touch it. And you know that’s the said part of it. Because I feel that Curtis is the best writer that ever lived. He writes songs, not for right now, but he writes songs for years ahead. If you listen to some of those songs and the words to the songs that we sing now, they relate to today, instead of years ago.

BBP: Superfly and some of the things they talked about in that—you’re speaking from the point of view of lyrics, right?

Gooden: Well, all of the things. You take songs like “People Get Ready.” You take songs like “We’re a Winner.” There’s another song that we’ve done called “The Young Mods’ Forgotten Story.” He was talking about bombs and explosions and stuff, and back then, that wasn’t happening. But if you look at it today, it’s happening right now. There are bombs going off all over the place right now. So it actually—he was so far ahead—that he wrote songs that are up-to-date music.

BBP: I tell you one thing I hear all of the time in the clubs—I still hear this song— “Move On Up?”

Gooden: (laughing) Oh yeah. That was a tune that could have went two ways. When Curtis left—he had just left—that was a song that was supposed to have been a part of The Impressions album. And when it came out, it never was on there. But when Curtis’ album came out it was on his album. But we do it now on our show. And it’s a nice upbeat tune; it’s almost like a get-together song. You know, no matter what you do, what obstacle that comes in front of you in life, you can always move on up. And that’s the whole thing: just keep on pushin’ and keep on movin’ on up. And that’s in life, with anybody that are doing anything, like whether you are a singer, or whether you are a boxer, any kind of musician, baseball player or football player or basketball player, you still look forward and move on up! If you have faith in yourself, and then faith in your system and faith in the good Lord; hey, you can’t do nothing but do better!

BBP: Yeah, that sounds like…who wrote that song? How did that song come about?

Gooden: Curtis. Curtis wrote it. It’s one of those—like I said, it’s what you call a “together” song that everybody can sing together. And a lot of songs that Curtis wrote are similar to that, that the whole audience can sing along with you. And “Move on Up,” well it just, you know, “Hush now, child, don’t you cry. Your folks might understand you, by and by. Just move on up.” And it keeps telling people to move on up, and it also—you wouldn’t believe it—but it’s a religious song.

BBP: Oh wow…

Gooden: But you have to sit down and you have to carefully listen to the lyrics of the song and all of the stuff it’s telling you. No matter how this world is around you, you keep on moving, keep on moving on up.

BBP: Wow that’s so interesting, because I always see that song used as kind of a dance song, because it’s got a long instrumental part.

Gooden: You know it’s the same thing. It has two parts to it. You have the group part and then you have the rhythm part, which is part one and part two of the song. And it has a blues R&B sound. But you have to look at the lyrics of the song and listen to them. And it tells you a different thing about spirituals within there. But you have to figure out the lyrics. And that’s the way Curtis wrote. Sometimes he wrote songs that are hard to understand until maybe years later. You have to sit down and say “Man, I didn’t know that was in this song until I listened to the lyrics!” Because, well, of course, when I first heard “People Get Ready,” I didn’t know it was a spiritual until later on. But then you start listening to the words of the song, but what he’s talking about in that particular song, is that “People get ready, there’s a train-a-coming,” which is—it’s going to be the last train. There will be no other train coming. Like they say: when Christ returns here, it’s like a train. It comes to collect everybody that’s ready. You don’t need no ticket. You don’t need no baggage. You don’t need no money. You don’t need anything. You just get on board when you’re ready, and once you get on this train, and once this train comes and once this train leaves; there will not be another train. You’ll just be left here. So it kind of analyzes the words and stuff in it. It’s that—it’s like, when Christ comes back to earth to gather his flock, he won’t return again for that. He’ll take all of the Blessed Ones with him. And all that’s left are sinners. And if you notice some of the lyrics, they’ll tell you about the sinners. It also tells you about the diesels humming, which also can mean angels singing.

BBP: Diesels humming?

Gooden: (quoting the song) there ain’t no room for the hopeless sinner, whom would hurt all mankind just to save his own.” Oh…I got to go back to my head to find the lyrics! (Continues) ”People get ready, there’s a train to Jordan...”

BBP: Yeah! That’s the line I’m thinking of…

Gooden:”Picking up passengers coast to coast.” “(first few words of sentence not clear) diesels humming.’” But actually you could say “Angels singing.” You could turn the whole phrase around. It’s just the way Curtis put it. And what it did, he just left it—he left it just like that—for you to figure out. For you to figure out “what do I mean by that?” Those lyrics, what did I mean by a “diesel humming?” Train humming. And I know you never heard of a diesel humming. But you have heard Angels singing. So if you can just reverse what he had said in that line of that song, then you can figure that that’s what he really actually meant. But see the thing is, it’s there for you to figure out yourself. And if you are a religious person then you could figure it out. But if not, then you just sing the song the way it is.

BBP: Hmm. I never looked at that song like that, but yeah, I see what you mean now (both laughing).

Gooden: A lot of people have recorded (this song), from church people like Al Green, Aretha Franklin; other great spiritual singers have sung this particular song. And they know. And that’s why they sung the song. Sure they sang it the way the record is, but they know the meaning of the song. And they know the reverse words that they would put in for themselves. But of course they can’t do it on record because they have to sing the song the way it is. But if you had a minister that was teaching in church, then he would reverse the words for a sermon that he was teaching. Then he would teach it a different way, than saying diesels humming. You see Curtis is gone since ’99 and they’re still trying to figure the song out (laughing).

BBP: Yeah. And they probably won’t until long after we’re gone. Let me tell you how I used to interpret that song “People Get Ready.” I know the song came out in the 60’s. And there was a lot going on back then. There was the Vietnam War; I mean I was a little kid then. And then there was the Civil Rights Movement, you know, black people were trying to get rights. And there was other stuff going on. There were protest marches going on. The country was in a lot of upheaval then, and I kind of interpreted that song as sort of a reflection of that upheaval.

Golden: It was. It was a wake-up call not only black people, but it gave other people food for thought. You know all of a sudden now, not just black people, but white people, whatever colors, and Latinos and whatever, people get ready, there’s a train a coming. That means it’s coming for everybody, not just for one but for everybody else. But mainly it’s for to enhance black people to kind of stand up and be counted. You know, you’re not the tail. You can be the head too. You know you’re not the tail. So it’s just that when you’re called out your name, that name…could signify to anybody because anybody can be that name. You know it’s not whether you’re a black person and they call you that particular name. Then that other person can be called that same name because all it refers to then are ignorant people. That’s what it stands for.

BBP: You’re talking about the n-word.

Gooden: Right. And if there’s an ignorant person you can call them the same name.

BBP: So basically in terms of black people, the message is “Take charge of your destiny.”

Gooden: Exactly! Stand up and be counted! You’re not the tail. You can also be the head. You know you’re not the lowest part of the totem pole, you can be the top. All you have to do is get off your tail and represent yourself. And stand up and be counted. Because we’re just as good as anybody. Maybe better than some others. It’s just that, if you believe what people call you and people tell you, then that’s exactly what you’re going to be. But if you stand up and be counted as just as good as or better than anybody else, then you will be.

BBP: Right.

Gooden: It’s up to you to learn.

BBP: So the message “People get ready, there’s a train a-coming” that could also refer to social issues as well.

Gooden: Exactly. Well the song, it hits different ports. It hits church. It hits black people. It hits white people. Everybody! It hits everybody. But mostly with my race of people, it gives them something to live by, to stand by, that we can do this if we stand together. If we separate and scatter, that’s exactly what it will be: we’ll be scattered everywhere. But if we band together as a race and be counted, we can be just as good as or better than anybody else.

Tomorrow Gooden talks about the group’s association with Bob Marley and touring (and praying!) with Eric Clapton.

The Impressions: Part 1 of Our Interview with Original Member Sam Gooden

2013-04-20T15:20:00.003-07:00

Growing up Chattanooga, Tennessee in the 1950’s, Sam Gooden and Fred Cash regularly entertained themselves by singing; modeling themselves after the Midnighters, Ray Charles and other rhythm and blues stars of the day.

By 1957 they were ready. Joining with two other boys and a young lady, they dubbed themselves Four Roosters and a Chick, following a trend among singing groups of the time to adopt bird names.

Seeking more fertile ground for their talents, some members of Roosters—Cash couldn’t go because he was too young—travelled to Chicago. There, they joined two future music legends, Jerry Butler and Curtis Mayfield, to form the Impressions. The group went on to carve its place in music history with gospel-infused, inspirational songs such as “People Get Ready” and “We’re a Winner.”

Though some would argue that the group's heyday has passed, The Impressions, now made up of Cash, Gooden and Reginald Torian, are still very active, both as a touring and a recording group. The group is in fact on the verge of releasing a new CD, only its second issue of newly recorded material in decades. For the project, the group has reportedly tapped legendary producer Johnny Pate, who worked with Mayfield on his landmark soundtrack from the 1972 film Superfly.

The group is preparing "Rhythm," its first single from the upcoming album; a song Mayfield wrote for his friend and fellow rhythm and blues performer Major Lance. Specific details on “Rhythm’s” release were unavailable.

Gooden and Cash were neighbors “next-door-but-one” to one another when they formed Four Roosters and a Chick with brothers Arthur and Richard Brooks and a female friend. The group regularly sang in a Chattanooga club called Memos.

Because his parents didn’t want him out after dark singing, Cash frequently had to slip in and out of his bedroom through a window. And Cash’s mother did not allow him to accompany Gooden and the Brooks brothers to Chicago, where they thought they would find more recording companies than in Chattanooga.

When they met Gooden and the Brooks brothers, Butler and Mayfield were part of a group called the Northern Jubilee Gospel Singers.

One snowy day, the new group took its song to Chess Records, but was not allowed in. The singers then crossed the street do Vee-Jay records. The company took them under its wing and released their debut song, "For Your Precious Love," in May, 1958

Back in Chattanooga, Cash heard the song on the radio. Six months after that, his former group mates arrived at his house, one flashing a big roll of money. Gooden and the Brooks brothers had actually come back to get Cash in anticipation of the departure of Butler, who was planning a solo career.

Cash joined the new group and Mayfield took over from Butler as lead singer. The new group signed on with ABC-Paramount Records in 1961 to release “Gypsy Woman,” its biggest hit up to that point. But subsequent songs released by the group did not do as well, and the Brooks left.

The brothers’ departure left in place the trio most associated with The Impressions: Mayfield, Cash and Gooden. Seeking a sound overhaul, the trio turned to Johnny Pate, afterwards recording a string of hits that began with 1963’s memorable “It’s Alright.”

The group went on to carve a place in the 1960’s Civil Rights movement, thanks to socially-conscious songs by Mayfield such as 1965’s “People Get Ready,” and 1968’s “We’re A Winner.” Likely because of its un-named yet supportive references to black leaders of the day, “We’re A Winner” was banned from radio play in some sections of the country.

In 1968, The Impressions joined Mayfield’s new label, Curtom Records. But Mayfield himself left the group in 1970, taking with him Joseph “Lucky” Scott, the group’s talented bassist and band leader. Nephew to Gooden, Scott had joined The Impressions after a tragic vehicle accident that killed several members of the group’s band along with musicians backing up singer Jackie Wilson. Scott, who, according to relatives and Chattanooga Public Library records, died in August, 1996 at the age of 47 of a blood clot to the lungs, went on to play a key role in much of Mayfield’s work.

Singer Leroy Hutson replaced Mayfield as lead singer, but left in 1973 after the group’s popularity began to slump. Ralph Johnson and Reggie Torian then came on board.

The group had a hit with 1974’s “Finally Got Myself Together,” enjoying continued success with follow-up tracks “Sooner or Later” and “Same Thing It Took.” The string of hits continued into 1975 with “First Impressions,” the group’s first—and, to date, only—Top 20 hit in the United Kingdom.

The Impressions left Curtom in 1976 to work with Cotillion Records, an affiliate of Atlantic Records. For Cotillion, The Impressions recorded “Loving Power,” their final major hit. During this period, Ralph Johnson left to join the group Mystique (which recorded an album on Mayfield’s Curtom Records). Singer Nate Evans, who grew up in Gary, Indiana across the street from the Jackson family and later performed with the Temptations, replaced him.

The Impressions hit the charts again in 1981 with a remake of “For Your Precious Love,” then launched a highly successful reunion tour in 1983 that featured Butler and Mayfield.

Since 1987’s “Can’t Wait ‘Till Tomorrow,” its last release to hit the charts, The Impressions have received a string of honors, including induction into The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1991, The Grammy Hall Of Fame in 1998 and The Vocal Group Hall of Fame in 2002.

In 2001 Eric Clapton tapped the group to perform on his multi-million selling album Reptile. The collaboration turned into a tour of some British and American cities.

The group made its latest recording—I’m Coming Home for Christmas—in 2009.

The next few posts of Beldon’s Blues Point will cover interviews with two members of this seminal group, Fred Cash and Sam Gooden. Among many other things, Gooden talks about legacy of Mayfield, who died in 1999 as a result of a 1990 stage accident that left him paralyzed from the neck down.

Gooden also talks about “Lucky” Scott, who, though he lacks the overall name recognition that many musicians have, arguably became one of most influential bassists who ever lived largely through his work with the Impressions and Mayfield. It is Lucky's bass that punctuates Mayfield's Superfly soundtrack. At some point in the future we will publish an interview with Scott’s younger brother, Lebron, a highly accomplished bassist in his own right who will talk about his brother as well as his own work with Lenny Kravitz and others.

We are dividing our interviews with both men into several parts. We start with Sam Gooden:

BBP: I guess I should just start with the future. What are you guys doing now? I did hear about the new album that’s coming out. Tell me a little about it.

Gooden: Well it’s in the process of being mixed….we have finished that part of what we have to do. There some more songs that are going to be added to it. Then we have to go and record those. But the one that’s going to be released has already been finished.

BBP: Okay. Can you tell me a little about that song?

Gooden: Well, it’s an old song. It’s an old song that Curtis wrote years ago for a friend of ours in Chicago, Major Lance. And Major did this particular song. And sometimes we have a tendency to go back into the studio when we want to just throw some stuff into an album, to finish it. We go back and do some of the things he’s done—he wrote for somebody else—we would just record it. And this is one of the songs that he wrote.

BBP: What’s the name of it?

Gooden: It’s called “Rhythm.”

BBP: “Rhythm?”

Gooden: Yes.

BBP: Okay. And is it a love song? Is it a dance number?

Gooden: No, it’s a semi-dance. It’s just something that I feel the younger set could really catch hold to. It’s almost like a sing-along type of song. It’s one of the songs that Curtis…such a great mind that he had, that he could come up with all kinds of songs to be recorded. When he would write these songs, he would bring them to Fred and myself and ask us how we like it, and we would tell him. And if it’s something that we feel that we wouldn’t do at that particular time, and then we would say, “Well maybe you should let somebody else do this song.” And so forth and so on. And this was a song that we decided to give to Major Lance. And it was called “Rhythm.” It’s been recorded some years back. I don’t know if it was one of (Lance’s) biggest hits, it was just one of his dance songs.

BBP: I know that the Impressions have been around since—God—the late fifties or early sixties, but when you do stuff now, do you kind of incorporate the styles of music that have come about since, or do you go with traditional Impressions?”

Gooden: Well we try to stay within ourselves. We do things similar to what Curtis wrote, and if there are some songs that have never been recorded by us—that Curtis has done—then we would go in and do those. Like there was another tune that he wrote that he…about 20 years ago he wrote a song called “Hopeless,” and we decided that we wanted to do it and we never got a chance to do it and just a few months ago Fred (Cash, another member of the Impressions) found a copy of it, and we decided to go in and record it again. It’s a very, very touching song.

BBP: Can you tell me when the album is going to be released?

Gooden: They haven’t given us a date on when it’s going to be released. When they get time enough to go in and finish mixing. Because all you do is go in and record the stuff, and turn it over to them. And they take it, and whenever they have studio time, because there are other acts that are recording, that has taken up the recording session time. So it takes time for them to go in and set down and mix this stuff so that it will be ready for release.

BBP: I see. What’s the name of the album?

Gooden: I don’t know. I don’t know what they’re going to call it. I just know that’s one song that’s going to be taken off of it. But I don’t think they’ve even made a title to it yet. So I won’t say something that I don’t know. They would have to let us know what title they’re going to put on it.

BBP: Okay. When you say “taken off,” you mean released as a single.

Gooden: Right…

BBP: I got you…

Gooden: Well you know there’s two or three different ways you voice things. And sometimes they voice different now than they did years ago.

BBP: Yeah that was one question I wanted to ask you. I know you’ve been in the business for…decades! And has the way that music is recorded or put together, has that changed and is it easy to kind of like adapt with those changes?

Gooden: Well, you learn to go with the flow. You learn how to do things that people will like today, like the songs that Curtis wrote. It’s as well-received today as it was back then. Because you find a lot of people nowadays just now realizing and understanding what the song’s all about.

BBP: Yes, he was an issue-oriented songwriter, if I recall. But, in terms of the way the music is delivered, the CD’s and Ipods and this sort of thing…

Gooden: Well they have a different way of doing things now. It’s just that, it takes so much time to do things, and you may have an act go in and do…and maybe take two years to get a whole CD done. Back when we were recording, we have done one whole album overnight. So it just depends on the act that’s going in, and how they structure your session time. Like now, you go by tracks. Back then, you had musicians in the studio with you.

BBP: Well let me go back in time. Now when you guys first started out, you called yourself the Roosters, right? You’re from Chattanooga, right?

Gooden: (laughs) Yeah that was something that we—a bunch of kids—in the city, we had no name so everybody else had a name. So we found something just to call ourselves. We weren’t very good at the time either.

BBP: You mean the name?

Gooden: No, the group!

BBP: (laughs) Oh. Okay.

Gooden: We sounded terrible.

BBP: Hmm. Wow. Well considering what you grew into, that’s sort of hard to believe…

Gooden: Well, you live and you learn. And if you set your mind to learning the trade, then you’ll learn different things and different techniques on how to do things. And then you learn how the voice structure is. Not going to school for music or anything, you just…you learn as you go. And the Good Lord gives you the talent to learn. And you go from there.

BBP: Now I understand that Jerry Butler was an original member. Well, how did the Roosters become the Impressions? I guess that’s my next question.

Gooden: Well, that’s when we did the first recording, which was 1958. The company said that—no we said that the name didn’t match the song, because we did a recording called “For Your Precious Love.” And it just didn’t match the name of the group. You have to have a better name for a song like that. So we took names and put them in a hat, shook it up, and I stuck my hand in and pulled out a name called “The Impressions.” And we’ve been trying to live up to it ever since.

BBP: Who was the one who put the name in the hat?

Gooden: My manager. The guy who was managing us at the time: Eddie Thomas. He put the name in there. And it just so happens that I picked that name!

BBP: Wow, that’s incredible. Amazing story! Now I understand that Jerry Butler was part of the original group.

Gooden: Well he started with us. Jerry started with us, in, uh, well before we got on records, in 1957. And Jerry stayed for about six months. And then the company branched him out on his own.

BBP: Oh, I see. So it was not his decision to leave. It was the company’s decision?

Gooden: Well, I don’t know. There’s two sides to a story. You know, you hear one side and you don’t hear the other side. All I know is that he left after six months and went on his own. And I think it was the company’s idea to branch him out. They always do things like that; they take a good lead singer, and if there’s another lead singer that’s within the group, then they turn that over to another guy. And you have two acts instead of one.

BBP: Oh, I see. Yeah. There was a lot of that going on. David Ruffin and the Temptations. I guess Motown was doing that as well.

Gooden: A lot of things go down. It depends on the guy that’s leaving, and the guy that was there in the first place. With David, it was a different situation, you know, where one guy feels he’s bigger than the group. At least I’ve heard that from some friends of mine who were members of the group.

BBP: Yeah, I guess that was a different situation. But how did Curtis come aboard? Now I understand he was playing guitar for Jerry Butler at some point?

Gooden: Oh that was long after the group had started. Jerry started with us and in ’57 we were rehearsing and we had no music, so he knew Curtis. And he said Curtis played guitar and that he sang top tenor. So we brought him by and we started rehearsing. And it went from there.

BBP: During that time, who was doing most of the songwriting for the group?

Gooden: Well actually, we had no songs really…because the thing is Jerry and a couple of other guys wrote “For Your Precious Love,” and it took them quite some time just sitting at a piano running these things down, and then always learning with myself and with Curtis. And then Curtis started playing the guitar on the intro. We learned it that way.

BBP: And what was your role in the group? I mean, you sang what part?

Gooden: I sung all parts. I sung bass. I sang tenor. I sang baritone. I sang lead. I… (pauses) did most all of it.

Tomorrow Sam talks about Joseph Lucky Scott and the tragic vehicle accident that brought him to the Impressions.

Superharp: James Cotton Comes to D.C.

2013-03-31T14:53:00.002-07:00

Last week, I caught James Cotton in concert at D.C.’s Howard Theatre. Just thought I’d put together a few factoids on his life as I know them:

Although he started out as a drummer, James “Superharp” Cotton is best known for his work on harmonica, which he played for artists such as Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters.

He first became interested in music after hearing Sonny Boy Williamson II over KFFA radio out of West Helena, Arkansas. As a youngster, Cotton actually did spend time learning blues harp from Williamson.

In the early 1950’s, Cotton played harp in Howlin’ Wolf’s band. By the mid-fifties he was playing with Muddy. Still, for most of his recordings during that period, Muddy used Little Walter on harmonica. Cotton’s first recording session with Muddy took place in 1957; afterwards he would alternate with Little Walter.

In 1965 he joined forces with pianist Otis Spann to form the Jimmy Cotton Blues Quartet, which recorded together between Cotton’s gigs with Muddy’s band. Cotton toured with Janis Joplin after leaving Muddy’s band in 1966 and then formed the James Cotton Blues Band in 1967.

In 1977 he played harp on Muddy’s award-winning album, Hard Again, which was produced by Johnny Winter.

In 1984, his band received a Grammy nomination for Live From Chicago:Mr. Superharp Himself!

He received a second Grammy nomination for his 1987 release, Take Me Back. He finally won a Grammy in 1996 for Deep in the Blues.

A throat condition left him unable to sing from the mid-1990’s on, but he continued to tour, using other singers. He recorded the album Baby Don’t You Tear My Clothes in 2004 and joined singer and multi-instrumentalist Ben Harper in 2008 to induct Little Walter into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

In D.C. he was joined on stage by 12-year-old Josh King from Charlotte, N.C.

James Cotton’s website can be reached at http://www.jamescottonsuperharp.com/#inx

From Purple Rain to the Blues: Part 2 of our interview with the Time's Jellybean Johnson

2013-03-13T10:17:00.000-07:00

Here is part 2 of our interview with Jellybean Johnson, drummer for The Time. In it, he talks about, among other things, how real tension between Prince and The Time made Purple Rain a hit; playing with Ronnie Baker Brooks and Bernard Allison and why, when it comes to the blues, his instrument is the guitar and not the drums.

BBP: The movie Purple Rain. You were in that, right?

Johnson: Yeah.

BBP: There was a rivalry (in the movie) between the Time and Prince’s people, the Revolution.

Johnson: And trust me, he used that—that had been going on for a couple of years—he used that to his advantage in that movie. And this is why he actually kicked Terry and Jimmy out of the fucking Time! Right before Purple Rain! Go back and watch Purple Rain. Jimmy and Terry—and people to this day think they are (in the movie). They’re not in Purple Rain. They’re not! He kicked them out! And it was supposed to be Morris’ band. He (Prince) fired them a few days before, and that’s why they went on to be famous producers.

BBP: So he did them a favor more or less, right?

Johnson: He did them a favor, more or less. But still it’s just—it’s just—all this shit is just so childish when you look back on it 35 years later. You’re like, “what the fuck was he doing?” Because you know what, man? He could have had all of us. We could have all been working for him; we could have all been making hits for him and everything and he would have made even more money. But his ego won’t let that happen. His ego cannot take that. He had all of us: every guy in the Time, with the exception of Jerome—and Jerome had his own record deal—every guy in the Time had a top 10 hit. Every one! Monte, Jesse, Jimmy and Terry sold over 100 million records. Morris, I—all of us—had Top Ten, Top Five records. Prince could have had all of us. Didn’t want to pay us; didn’t want to do it.

BBP: So you think it was a money issue, or was it an ego issue, or both?

Johnson: I think it’s ego and money. I think it was ego and money. Because he didn’t want us to become bigger than him. When I first toured, we first went on a major tour, we made $150 a week, dude.

BBP: (laughs) Really?

Johnson: Prince made millions. Those millions he took to make Purple Rain, he made that first tour, when he got the bonuses and shit, our bonus was $150. After three fucking months on the road! That’s all we made was $150 a week! That’s all we made! Morris made more: he paid Morris more because Morris was his alter-ego, as you said. The rest of us? That’s all we got! That includes Terry and Jimmy too.

BBP: But you know what’s interesting though, that movie would not have worked if it had not been for that tension, you know?

Johnson: Yeah. You’re right. He used that, like I said, he used that to his advantage. Because the automatic tension was there, because it had been there. He used it to his advantage. And I give him credit for that. I’m still famous today for Purple Rain. I still get a little bullshit check every two or three months for Purple Rain…but Purple Rain’s going to always be part of his life too, even though he tries to poo-poo and play all of this new shit like “Screwdriver” and all that. People come to concerts, they want to hear “Purple Rain” and that old shit. This recent shit, they don’t be wanting to hear his ass with that. But it takes him time to figure shit out. But then he’ll sit down at a piano and brag about how many hits he’s got, and kick his man offstage and just play the shit by himself. That’s the kind of shit he does.

BBP: Wow. What’s the deal with these women? I mean he gets these women and he promotes them and then you never see them again. What’s up with that?

Johnson: (laughs) Women always get treated better than men in that organization. That’s why he has an all-girl band right now. This is why his drummer, John Blackwell, is gone. He’s a professor at Berkeley now. And Prince has had a cow about that because John left. John has a family like the rest of us. John needs money too. John cannot come here and just sit and don’t play and shit, or sit here and rehearse and don’t get a retainer. For a major league artist. That’s bullshit! He’s got this new group, Third Eye Girl or whatever shit, where he can play his rock and roll and rock band and all that shit, and I’m sure they’re treated like queens. He came in, he had auditioned some drummers but he ended up getting Ronald Bruner—I think he plays with Chaka Khan or whatever—he got him, but he’s talking about he’s having auditions there, but he wasn’t. He got Bruner and that’s who his drummer is now. So he’s got about two or three different versions of his band. That’s what he’s doing now.

BBP: So why do you think the women get treated better?

Johnson: This goes all the way back to Vanity 6, Apollonia 6, and how we used to get treated because of them. We played for Vanity 6 and we were in their band, we didn’t get but an extra $100 for doing that shit…and when we came to major cities like New York, L.A., he booted our asses off there. He kept them, made us play for them and wouldn’t let The Time play. Do you know what it’s like to have a major star—Quincy Jones, Sting—coming to see us, and we don’t play? You know what? You should buy the Original 7ven. There’s a DVD in the album Original 7ven. You should buy that, man and watch that.

BBP: Yeah, I heard about that DVD.

Johnson: It would explain a lot of this bullshit I’m telling you right now.

BBP: And I heard that the last album—the album you guys did in the early 90’s…

Johnson: Pandemonium

BBP: Yeah! That one! That was the first album you really had a lot of creative control over as a group.

Johnson: Yeah. Yeah, and he was actually cool about that. He gave us two or three songs. He stayed out of our way. That when he was (with) Kim Basinger, so he brought her to the studio and shit, was hanging out with that, and he was nice that whole time. And I don’t know what happened. I don’t know what happened to him about that. In a couple of years he just became a different person. He was good to us in ’04 when he did Musicology, because the Morris Day and The Time version did 14 of those gigs. We did 14 of those shows out in different cities and stuff. But after that, he’s just been nothing but problems for us. So I don’t know. I don’t get it. Me and him don’t talk. He knows I hate him; I’m sure he don’t like me. And we’ll just leave it like that. No really, I don’t have time for it. But it’s why I play the blues, brother. It’s why I play the blues. Cause Lord knows I got ‘em.

BBP: So what’s happening with fDeluxe and the Original 7ven?

Johnson: fDeluxe is still looking for gigs.(bassist and vocalist) Paul (Peterson) and (keyboardist and vocalist) Susannah (Melvoin) are in L.A. right now working on stuff. And our manager is Australian, he’s Neil Richards from Australia, he’s trying to find us a gig and stuff. The Original 7ven, I doubt if you’ll ever see it again. I hate to sit here and admit that: I doubt if you’ll ever see it again in light of Terry and Jimmy’s bullshit and Jesse’s bullshit. I don’t know. And the Morris Day and the Time version, we’re still onto it bro,’ we’re still doing spot dates. I was pissed because the one date we got this February is cancelled but March we got a couple and then in April we got a bunch. So, we’re still going to keep that version rolling and stuff and just play around here and try to keep the lights on, you know? We gotta do something. We got to eat.

BBP: Who’s in Morris Day and the Time now? It’s not the original members.

Johnson: The only original members in Morris Day and the Time are me, Morris and Monte. Jerome left in like ’05 or ’06 or something like that and got with his brother. You know, Terry Lewis is his brother. And he decided he didn’t want to be in it anymore so he was back in the Original 7ven. But now him and Morris fell out in the Morris Day and the Time version because of money. He wanted more money and he was making more money than any of us except Morris and that wasn’t enough for him. So Morris got him a guy he could pay $300 a show and was happy with it. So that’s been the case for the last five or six years.

BBP: What’s that guy’s name?

Johnson: His name is Sylvester. We call him Sly.

BBP: Oh. Because of Sly Stone. I got you.

Johnson: Yeah. Yeah. We call him Sly.

BBP: So let me ask you a few questions about the blues. Because I talked to Bernard Allison and—well actually I saw you—I saw you at the Chicago Blues Festival with Ronnie (Baker Brooks). It had to be either 2007 or 2008, because those were the last two years I went there.

Johnson: A long time yeah. It was a long time ago.

BBP: Yeah, and he said “Jellybean Johnson.” And I said “That’s the guy who used to play for The Time, and he used to play drums! Whoa, what’s going on here?” But Bernard Allison was telling me that a bunch of you guys get together and just jam and play the blues. (Bernard Allison interview below)

http://beldonsbluespoint.blogspot.com/2012/06/guitar-slinger-bernard-allison.html

Johnson: Yeah we do. Yeah we do. We do. I played on Bernard’s records, I did Ronnie’s first three records and it’s like the world’s best-kept secret around here and shit. But you know it’s always—I give Ronnie credit because Ronnie really exposed me to the whole blues thing. When I did his first record in like ’97 or ’98, and I was traveling around with him and stuff, going out and playing with him and his dad, because you know Ronnie was in his dad’s band for 13 years. So I would drive to Chicago sometimes and go to shows with them and play with them and it was always “ain’t he the drummer from the Time? What’s he doing with a guitar?” (laughs) So that’s the thing man. It was cool, man. You know me and Ronnie’s been friends now for a long, long time.

BBP: But was it kind of hard getting into the blues groove after doing R&B and funk for all that time?

Johnson: You know why, you know why it wasn’t hard for me? Because I was born in Chicago! I’m from Chicago and my mom exposed me to all that shit at a young age. So I always had that Chicago soul and blues side. You know my mom loved Otis Rush, she loved all of the Tyrone Davises and Otis Clays, Z.Z. Hills, all that whole Chicago type thing. So I was exposed to that as a youngster. And so when I started teaching myself how to play guitar at 15, those are the records I gravitated towards, in addition to like Albert King and Freddie King and Hendrix and Clapton and all that shit. So the blues has always been in my blood. That was the thing about Ronnie; Ronnie was shocked that I was well-versed in it. But I had been listening to it. Even though I would play the drums, in my spare time, when I picked up guitar, I leaned towards that kind of shit. I leaned toward playing the blues and trying to bend strings, and vibratos and that shit, you know.

BBP: Yeah. Does it come out when you play the drums though?

Johnson: No! No. And that’s the thing: I suck as a blues drummer. I always give Ronnie shit about that because, you know, I never played drums on any of his records. And that’s the thing: he begged me and begged me and stuff, because I just don’t think I have a feel for it. I have that R&B pop, that R&B funk pop and blues; you have to be well-versed in this, you’ve got to have that Chicago shuffle and stuff. You know I’ve got blues drummer friends that are just killin.’ Buddy Guy’s drummer for many years, his name was Jerry—I forgot Jerry’s last name—but he’s from Chicago (editor’s note: Jellybean could have meant Jerry Porter, who has played in Guy’s band as well as with Ronnie Baker Brooks and Ronnie's brother, Wayne). You hear him play the drums and you just feel it; you feel that “pop” he has, that Chicago shuffle, that Chicago thing about him.

BBP: But people are putting things in the blues now. From that perspective it may be…

Johnson: I always tried to stay pure with the shit, so that’s the thing. I always like to approach the blues playing the guitar man, because I know too many badass drummers that can play that shit down better than me. So I always lean on them and just throw my guitar shit over it.

BBP: So is playing with Bernard, is that like a different thing than playing with Ronnie? Do they have different approaches?

Johnson: No, they have different approaches but, Ronnie and Bernard, they’re young, they’re younger, so they’re absorbing all of that young shit around them too. So you’ll get some little hip-hop, and some funk shit in their shit too, which is good for me when I play with them. Eric Gales, the same thing. Eric has that heavy rock, Hendrix side to him too. So you really have to be on your shit, man, to play with them, because they’re heavy. But I like it because they challenge me. They challenge me. “Okay, you’re a funk guy, but…hang with me on this!” you know, so I like that. That helps me become a better musician. So it’s cool and stuff. And I was lucky enough to get to see (Bernard’s) dad when he was around. His dad was a motherfucker too, man. Luther Allison was something else. He was scary, man. Yes he was.

BBP: Listen, I’m not going to keep you on the phone much longer. There are a couple of other things I want to throw at you. Do you remember your first band?

Johnson: My first band was called “Wars of Armageddon,” man.

BBP: Yeah, I saw that name. I was like “Whoa!” Where did that come from?

Johnson: That was so crazy, man. It was me, a childhood friend of mine named Dave Island—he’s a badass Spanish guitar player, sax player we grew up with—Prince tried for years to get him in his band and couldn’t do it—and there was a bass player named Greg Ash, or something like that. And that was it: Wars of Armageddon. And we got the name from, on Funkadelic’s Maggot Brain album there’s a long instrumental called “Wars of Armageddon.”

BBP: Oh, that’s where that comes from. That’s where you got the name from.

Johnson: That’s where we got the name from.

BBP: Did that band eventually become Flyte Tyme?

Johnson: Yeah, that band eventually became Flyte Tyme. Terry Lewis joined up with us and stuff; we changed the name to Flyte Tyme and the rest is history, man. Flyte Tyme was a band way before it was a production company.

BBP: Yeah, they got the name from a Donald Byrd song, right?

Johnson: Yeah, we named it after a Donald Byrd song. Cynthia Johnson was our lead singer, from (Lipps Inc.’s) “Funkytown.”

BBP: Yeah!

Johnson: She was our lead singer. Yeah, that was our first lead singer. Sue Ann Carwell (onetime back-up singer to Barbra Streisand, Whitney Houston, Britney Spears, Mariah Carey and others and known more recently for Blues in My Sunshine, her collaboration with guitarist Jesse Johnson) was our singer for a while. Alexander O’Neal was our singer for a while. We had a bunch of heavy, famous singers in it before they started doing production.

BBP: Sort of like the movie The Magnificent Seven, a lot of stars before they were stars.

Johnson: Exactly. Exactly.

BBP: Yeah, that’s amazing. What’s “Soul Vaccination?” You were in a band called that too, right? Or was that the same band?

Johnson: What was that?

BBP: “Soul Vaccination.”

Johnson: No. I learned the beat from that, but I was never in a band called that. I used to play the drums to that—David Garibaldi—funky shit, but I never was in a band like that.

BBP: Okay, got my information wrong…

Johnson: I used to play “Soul Vaccination” with The Combo: Dr. Mambo’s Combo. They’re called the Combo now. I used to play that song with them years ago. I still jam with them two nights a week as it is here…they’re called just “the Combo” now because they kicked Dr. Mambo out years ago, but that’s what they were called years ago, Dr. Mambo’s Combo. Everybody’s jammed with them: Prince, John Mayer, Anthony Hamilton, Slash…you name it, everybody has been on the Combo stage at some point.

BBP: Is this a club in Minneapolis?

Johnson: It’s a club. Yeah. Bunker’s.

BBP: And they’re the house band?

Johnson: Yeah, they’re the house band on Sunday and Monday.

BBP: Okay. And anyone who comes to town usually shows up and goes there?

Johnson: Yep…yes they do.

BBP: One more thing…maybe a couple. What’s the Minneapolis scene like now, I mean in terms of the music scene? Is it the same thing going on, or is it changed, or what?

Johnson: You know what? And I tell people this all of the time: we have one of the best music scenes in the country. Because literally here, seven nights a week, if you take your time, you can find something good to go see live. And a lot of cities—and I’ve been to damn near every city—cannot say that. They can’t do it. You can find a different band here every night of the week playing some cool-ass music if you take your time.

BBP: So what’s the focus: the sound that you guys created, or are there other sounds coming in?

Johnson: Yeah, you’re hearing rock, you’re hearing R&B, you’re hearing funk, you can even hear some country. We’ve got the best jazz clubs. Whatever it is you want to see, you can find it here most nights of the week. You can find it!

BBP: Okay. How about blues?

Johnson: Blues, we’re a little lacking in that, but now I’ve been hanging out at a club there called Shaw’s. I’m going there tonight. And they play the blues there damn near seven nights a week. It’s pretty good; we’ve got Famous Dave’s of course. That is some blues but they change it up and do other bands too.

BBP: Okay. Because the way it was described to me is that Minneapolis kind of has a hipster community. That’s the word that was used.

Johnson: Yeah. Yeah.

BBP: That’s interesting. How did you get the name Jellybean? I know your real name is Garry, spelled with two “r’s,” right?

Johnson: Yeah. That was given to me by a trumpet player we had in our band years ago, his name was Robert Martin . When we were like, 15, 16 years old (at this point, the connection started to go bad, but I heard enough to figure out that Jellybean and some of his friends were playing at a local club. He takes the story from there) We were lucky enough to be in high school playing that night. We had no business doing it, but the club owners let us do it and shit. So anyway, we’re in there one night and we had like a 12 or 13 piece band, and we were kind of goofing around, wasn’t sounding that great or anything, and the trumpet player (says) “Ah man, we sound like a bunch of jellybeans in there.” Anyway, he came to the next gig the next day and he had me a t-shirt with “Jellybean” on it and the band just lost it. And so I’ve been “Jellybean” ever since! And then when I joined Prince’s organization, I don’t know if you remember but there used to be a Jellybean Benitez that was (with) Madonna and was her boyfriend and shit, and he actually had the nerve to call Prince’s organization and try to get me to change my name! And Prince told him “kiss our ass, he’s not changing his name…we know the difference between the two, bro’!

Jellybean! The Time's Jellybean Johnson talks about Prince, the Minneapolis sound and the Blues (Part 1)

2013-03-11T13:13:00.001-07:00

In 2008 I saw Jellybean Johnson playing guitar with Ronnie Baker Brooks at the Chicago Blues festival. “Isn’t he a drummer for The Time,” I thought to myself. “What’s he doing playing the blues?”

But there he was.

Actually, by that time, Johnson was deeply involved with the blues. He had already produced three albums by Brooks, a member of the legendary Brooks family of Chicago. Since then, he has played with Brooks and others on the Legendary Rhythm and Blues Cruise, an annual boat ride in which passengers groove to top blues talent as they bounce between stops along the Gulf of Mexico.

Whenever he plays rhythm and blues for any of the variations of The Time now in existence, Johnson is on the drums. He works out daily to stay in shape to play them.

But when he’s playing the blues he’s on the guitar, an instrument he started learning when he was 15 years old.

Johnson has referred to the guitar as an “emotional instrument.”

“When I play the guitar, I feel it deep within me,” he said. “Whereas the drums are like physical and violent…I look at the drums; they help keep me alive, they help keep me younger, because it’s so physical and violent and I love playing them. But at the same time, I don’t get the same spiritual and emotional thing from them that I do from the guitar.”

Born in Chicago, Garry George Johnson was brought to Minneapolis at age 12 or 13 by his mother, who wanted to get him away from gangs trying to recruit him.

Once in Minnesota, he became part of a cadre of musicians who would eventually make names for themselves nationally as pioneers of the fusion of rock, new wave, rhythm and blues and funk that came to be known as the Minneapolis sound. Johnson and several other then-stars-to-be—Prince, Morris Day, Jimmy Harris III (better known as Jimmy Jam), Terry Lewis and Alexander O’Neal among others—refined their talents in bands that regularly skirmished with other groups around the city.

Formed in the early 1980’s, The Time grew out of one of those bands: Flyte Tyme, which included Johnson, Lewis and Harris. Drawn from another group, Enterprise, percussionist and actor Jerome Benton joined the Time.

Johnson reportedly was initially not part of the group. He took over as drummer from Day after Day replaced lead singer Alexander O’Neal, who had left after a disagreement with Prince.

The Time went on to tour with Prince, who was viewed as the linchpin of the Minneapolis movement, both in music and business. The group released the albums The Time in 1981 and What Time is it? in 1982.

But tension developed as Time members complained of being underpaid and underexposed, and of not having creative control over their recordings.

Released in 1984, Prince’s breakthrough Purple Rain featured a Time without some original members. Harris and Lewis, on their way to becoming the mega-songwriters/producers they would later be known as, had been fired after a blizzard in Atlanta prevented them from making a Time concert in San Antonio. Keyboardist Monte Moir also left.

Still, the movie, which included the hit singles “Jungle Love” and “The Bird,” boosted the group’s name recognition.

But the band disintegrated in 1985, with Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis continuing their rise as leading songwriters and producers and guitarist Jesse Johnson launching a solo career.

Jellybean, Benton and new Time member Paul Peterson joined saxophonist Eric Leeds and keyboardist Susannah Melvoin to form The Family. The group’s one album, The Family, was made up mostly of material composed by Prince. It included “Nothing Compares 2 U,” later covered by Sinead O’Conner, and “The Screams of Passion,” an extended version of which was later released as a single.

The Family disbanded after Peterson, reportedly frustrated over Prince’s control, left for other pursuits.

Johnson began to spread his wings as a producer, becoming an associate of Flyte Tyme, the company started by old band mates Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. (The company was named for the band Flyte Tyme, which in turn had been named for a Donald Byrd song).

He started off with Nona Hendryx, formerly of the group Labelle, producing her single “Why Should I Cry?” Among other projects, he went on to produce “Breakin’ My Heart (Pretty Brown Eyes) and “Forever in Your Eyes” for Mint Condition (from St. Paul, Minnesota); “Crucial” for New Edition and the chart-topping “Black Cat,” Janet Jackson’s venture into hard rock.

During that time, he frequently applied his guitar skills as a studio musician, delivering a blistering solo on the last half of Alexander O’Neal’s “Innocent,” and playing a funky guitar on a version of “Black Cat.”

The Time’s original members re-formed in 1990 for Prince’s Graffiti Bridge movie and a new album, Pandemonium, which featured “Jerk Out,” the group’s highest selling single.

In 1991, Johnson met Ronnie Baker Brooks at Kingston Mines, a Chicago blues club. Brooks recalled the meeting in an interview with Blues Revue:

“I was on tour with my father back in ’93. We were doing fifty-three dates with B.B. King and Buddy Guy. Koko Taylor was on it. I was playing behind Koko Taylor, Junior Wells, and my dad (guitarist and Brooks family patriarch Lonnie Brooks). It was the Alligator All-Stars. We’d go on first, then Buddy Guy would come on, then Eric Johnson, then B.B. We did fifty-two dates around the country, and we played up in Minneapolis and Bean saw the show. I didn’t talk to him then, and then a week or two later, he was in Chicago at the Kingston Mines…and I was down the street at another club called B.L.U.E.S on Halsted. Somebody was like, “Albert Collins is down the street at the Kingston Mines hanging out with A.C. Reed.” I heard Albert Collins was down there. I jumped, I was running down there. And Jellybean saw me and said, ‘Ronnie, I’m Jellybean Johnson. I just saw you in Minnesota with B.B. and your dad.’ When I saw him, I thought he was a football player. I was so intimidated because he was so big. I didn’t hear when he said Jellybean Johnson. I’m looking at him, and, oh, Jellybean Johnson from the Time. He said, ‘I dig your stuff, man.’ And we were coming back to Minnesota like two weeks later. He said, ‘Take my number. Whenever you come to Minnesota, call me.’ He came and jammed with me. I went back there and stayed at his house, he stayed at my house, and we became like brothers. It was time for me to record my first solo CD, and the producer I had pulled out at the last minute. I had the studio and everything booked, musicians booked. And I was just calling Jellybean to vent. He said, “Ronnie, get me to Memphis, and I’ll do it.” And that’s how it happened.

Johnson went on to produce—and guest star on--three albums by Brooks: Golddigger (1998), Take Me Witcha (2001) and The Torch (2006).

Starting in the mid-90’s, Johnson joined in on various reunions of the Time. In 1995, he and other former members joined to form a band referred to as Morris Day in the Time. The band, which appeared in the movie Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, is still active today.

In February, 2008, all seven original members joined Rihanna for a medley at the 50^th Grammy awards. The members came together again that summer for a series of Las Vegas performances. Two years later, at a “hometown” concert in Minneapolis, they announced they were working on an album of new material. They released the album, Condensate—which featured the single, “Trendin—“ in October, 2011. But the Time could no longer call itself the Time. Prince owned the original name, and he refused to let them use it. The group came up with a new name: the Original 7ven, a reference to Michael Jackson’s and his brothers’ use of the name “Jackson 5ive” for their group.

But the Original 7ven began losing steam when guitarist Jesse Johnson announced on Facebook in December, 2011 that he was leaving, reportedly complaining that the group had a lackluster touring schedule.

Johnson had a similar “band-formerly-known-as” problem with the Family, which re-formed in June 2011 with all original members except Benton. The band renamed itself fDeluxe after Prince refused to allow it to use its original name. Afterwards, fDeluxe released two CD’s: 2011’s Gaslight and 2012’s Relit, as well as a single, “You Got What You Wanted.” fDeluxe put on a string of concerts during 2011-12—including an August, 2012 performance at D.C.’s Howard Theatre—in which Johnson could be seen full sway on guitar.

In the following interview, Johnson talks about the development of the Minneapolis sound and his own beginnings in the “City of Lakes,” and the roles that guitar and drums each play in his musical life. He also talks about the blues and his association with Ronnie Baker Brooks. He also talks about Prince—and not in too flattering terms. The Purple one’s controlling behavior has made things tough for him and others, he says.

BBP: Well I’m curious as to—I was going over some things, man—and I found some videos of you with Ronnie Baker Brooks on the Legendary Rhythm and Blues Cruise. Are you going to do that this year?

Johnson: No, I haven’t been able to do it the last couple of years, man, and I miss it too, you know. Ronnie is in the process of doing his album with Keb’ Mo’ and stuff, and I’ve been dealing with my transgressions around here. The Original 7ven has not really been doing anything but I’m still in another version of the Time; I’m still in another version of the Family, fDeluxe, and at the same time bankruptcy and foreclosure and other personal problems. So it’s been kind of tough for me around here, man, so I’ve got to get back on my mojo around here. But it’s kind of hard.

BBP: Uh. Yeah! Man! I’m surprised to hear about the bankruptcy because you’re such a talented cat and you have so much going on. How’d that happen?

Johnson: Well you know, here’s the thing: that’s the myth everyone thinks. I’m so well-to-do because I grew up around them and have been in bands with rich guys,” but it didn’t translate it out to me because there’s been a lot of selfish bullshit that went on in my career over the years. So that’s where we’re at today. I hate my rich friends: I’m not going to lie, they get on my damn nerves. But at the same time, I’m attached to them for the rest of my life. It’s like HIV: they’re going to always be attached to me, so I just accept it and move on. It’s kind of a bitter pill sometimes that I’m struggling like this and I probably shouldn’t be. But I am, so I have to get through it the best I can.

BBP: Wow! Well who particularly are you mad at? I guess I have to ask that question.

Johnson: Well, a prime example, Prince has messed up three bands I’ve been in. He wouldn’t let us be The Time. You know I’ve been in Morris Day and the Time and I’m in the Original 7ven. We put off our major release last year because he was threatening to sue us. He didn’t want us to be the Time because he’s been a selfish jerk, because he didn’t want a partner. We offered him money, we offered him everything to be part of the project and he didn’t want to be. The same thing with fDeluxe. He did the same thing with us. We got ready to put a record out, we asked him, “Man, you have any songs for us?” No, he didn’t want to have nothing to do with us. He wanted to leave it totally—he created us, and he wanted it to just stay like it is. Well, uh, I’m 56 years old; the rest of us have careers. The rest of us are talented. So we want to make albums, whether he was part of it or not! And he always thought that these bands couldn’t make albums without him.

BBP: Wow. It’s interesting that you bring him up, because I heard today he has a new single out. Something called “Screwdriver?”

Johnson: Yeah, “Screwdriver.” He has a big-assed orchestra now; he’s got bands with guys, he’s got all-girl bands. He was just here; he just played a few days here. But that’s how he is. Prince has not treated our version of the band with any respect since ’06, since he did the Super Bowl. He’s had a hair up his ass about these other bands who have been around him for over 30 years, I might add. And I just don’t understand why. On the other hand, my other people—I was in the Original 7ven with Terry and Jimmy and Jessie Johnson—and they always do this. Anytime a crisis comes, they run off, because they’re rich. They run off, and you don’t hear from them no more. And Jessie Johnson bailed on another project too. So you know I’m just tired of babysitting and bowing down to cats that I grew up with. Because I got talent too. So..

BBP: Yeah, Yeah, I’ve heard it. Yeah, because you guys have been friends since way back. You went to high school together, right?

Johnson: Oh yeah, we grew up together. I grew up with Prince. I’ve been knowing Prince since I was 12 years old. I’m 56 years old now; he’s 54. I’ve been around him since I was 12 damn years old.

BBP: Yeah, and Morris too? Because I remember hearing that you guys used to set up drums in his mother’s house.

Johnson: To play together, yeah. That’s the reason me and Morris are still friends to this day. This is why we’re still friends and we still get to play in a band together because Morris gets this. And even though Morris has his greedy moments and shit too, I understand that. But you know, at the same time, he takes care of me, he makes sure I have some money in my pocket. My other friends that are rich, they didn’t ever do that shit. Except for the years that I worked for Flyte Tyme. And the minute I stopped working for Flyte Time, then that was done. So you know, whatever. But me, I’m just an old rock ‘n’ roller, man…actually I like the blues so much because you can play the blues until you’re 80 damn years old. And so that’s why I’ve always been attached to it. I know this funk/R&B thing that I’m famous for—sooner or later—it’s going to let me down. So I gotta have something to fall back on, because music is all I know. It ain’t like I can go get a job at Wal-Mart, or you know any shit like that, McDonald’s, or any of that bullshit. Who wants a damn-near 60-year-old man doing that? It’s gotta be music for me. That’s what I deal with.

BBP: You played drums first, right?

Johnson: Yeah. I got famous playing the drums first and the guitar was more incognito, because I started doing solos on Jimmy and Terry’s projects, like Alexander O’Neal. I did (O’Neal’s) “Innocent,” I did (The Time’s) “Fishnet,” I did Nona Hendryx “Why Should I Cry?” I did stuff for Janet (Jackson), I did stuff on New Edition, I did Mint Condition; you know, so that’s when my guitar playing came out. But still it was in the background as I was producing, but I was playing on the records. But the drumming—even to this day—here in town a lot of bands want me to play the drums. I just don’t do it. I sit in on guitar. Because my drumming I save for The Time. That’s the style of drumming that I want to play.

BBP: I heard you described guitar as an “emotional instrument.” I was curious about that term. What did you mean by that?

Johnson: Well, this is what I mean: the guitar I look at as spiritual and emotional because I feel it in my soul when I play. …Sometimes, as you know, being in a band with Jesse Johnson, being around great guitar players, and I’m playing the drums, it hits me emotionally. I’m not going to lie about that, but still that’s coming back to me being a guitarist. So, that’s what I meant by that.

BBP: And I notice you kind of like the blues guys. You like Albert King and B.B. and Hendrix was—

Johnson: Oh yeah. Yeah. Albert Collins. B.B. King. All the guys, man. And you know Hendrix, and you know I like some of the hot-shot white guys too. I always liked Frank Marino (Mahogany Rush), Robin Trower, Jeff Beck…I like all of the hot-shot guitar players…and I’ve been lucky enough to either see them or see them live or actually play with some of them. So..I like all the young guys, you know, like Eric Gales. I think Eric Gales is our 21^st Century Hendrix. I think he is absolutely scary.

BBP: Yeah, I’ve seen him. Experience Hendrix tour. Did you ever pick up anything from Prince? He’s been known for his guitar playing.

Johnson: You know, I did. I can’t lie and say I didn’t pick up stuff from him. I learned how to be funky because of Prince. You know a lot of my funk came from being around him, because he’s such a funky cat. But at the same time it’s hard, because he’s not an easy guy to be close to. So it’s like he’s begrudgingly letting you learn shit from him, but he really don’t want you to learn it. But you can’t help but learn something from him if you’re around him enough, and that’s the thing. So I retained what I got from him. I just keep it in my back pocket, and like I said I’m always going to be, I’m always called a Prince disciple. Well, I accept that label even though sometimes I resent it. I accept it because I grew up (and) he made me famous. He made the people realize who Jellybean Johnson was. So I will give him that. But at the same time, I want respect from him. Because I helped make him a ton of money too, just like the rest of us.

BBP: Right. Now I heard you guys started in some school called “The Way Opportunities in Music School” in Minneapolis?

Johnson: It wasn’t a music school. It was like a community center where we hung out and stuff. And we didn’t hang out as much. Prince did, but Flyte Tyme was a whole separate thing from the guys at The Way. Prince was up there with Sonny Thompson; they had The Family, their band was called The Family back then and stuff..

BBP: He was a bass player, Sonny Thompson…

Johnson: Yeah. Sonny T. Sonny T: bass player. He’s legendary around here. He’s a badass, and Prince learned a lot from him. And The Way used to give these outdoor festivals every year, and all of our rival bands…we would fight against each other in front of thousands of people. And that’s how we got famous around here in the city, because we used to go at it at a young age. We had a community center here called Phyllis Wheatley. There’s a park: in the middle of July we’d go out there—thousands of people—and all day we’d have battles of the bands. Prince learned a lot of shit from all of us being around. We all learned from each other in this Minneapolis thing when we were younger, around the 70’s, in the middle 70’s coming up.

BBP: You know what strikes me as remarkable about that? It was basically live bands doing shows there—were doing the party scene in Minneapolis—at a time when the rest of the country was going more towards deejays…

Johnson: Yeah. They didn’t even know about us! They didn’t really know about us. That’s the reason Minneapolis music—Prince—made such a big splash in ’78 when he came out. Because they’re like: “Not Minnesota! Cold-assed Minnesota? They’ve got people that funky up there in Minneapolis?” You have to realize too, man, I moved here from Chicago. My mom moved me here from Chicago in 1968 to keep me out of the gangs because the gangs were recruiting me. I was 12 or 13 years old. When I moved here, man, the black radio stations stayed on ‘til about five o’clock in the afternoon. That’s it! That’s all! So I grew up listening to all the white rock bands, man. Black Sabbath. Rare Earth. Three Dog Night. All that shit. All the white rock shit, I grew up listening to that, in addition to having the funk shit because I’m from Chicago! I had already been around Chicago soul—Tyrone Davis; Chicago Blues—Buddy Guy; I had already been around that shit. My mom had records of that, and God bless her, I knew about James Brown, Funkadelic, all that shit, I knew about it. At the same time, I absorbed all of the white rock, and that’s why Prince is different today because of that. Because he was around here—we didn’t have no black radio—we still don’t have a major black radio station here in Minnesota, which is tragic. We don’t.

BBP: Wow. So that’s why the Minneapolis sound you guys played had elements of rock in it.

Johnson: It had a lot of elements of rock because we grew up around that kind of shit. We grew up around the white rock guitars and, you know, Rolling Stones and Kiss and all that. I remember going to see Kiss in 1976. I was the only black kid there watching them there, man. I remember bottles and shit crashing around me. Everything. Because I was standing there, watching them. This is 1976, and I’m watching Kiss and Rush at the fucking Met Center, you know. And like I say I’m probably the only black kid there.

BBP: Wow, that’s incredible. That’s right, because I notice in your drums, the guys you like on drums. I heard that you like the drummer from that Bay Area band, not Tower of Power, but the other one: Lydia Pense is the singer?

Johnson: Oh yeah, Sandy McKee. Sandy McKee was motherfuckin’ scary! Him and David Garibaldi were absolutely scary when I was coming up. And me and Morris learned a lot of shit from most of them.

BBP: David Garibaldi of Tower of Power, you mean.

Johnson: David Garibaldi of Tower Power. And I went from that and I started getting into the fusion drummers, like Lenny White and Billy Cobham, Tony Williams and stuff like that. But I started with David Garibaldi and Sandy McKee. They had that “pop;” I just like it. If you listen to any of the Minneapolis drumming, that’s what we got. We got that “pop” on our shit, man, because of that. To this day.

BBP: Wow. What was that band called?

Johnson: Which one?

BBP: Sandy McKee’s band.

Johnson: Oh. Cold Blood!

BBP: Yes!

Johnson: Lydia Pense was the lead singer and they had horns, and some of those horn players used to play in Tower of Power. That’s East Bay, that’s Oakland, man. That’s Oakland funk, man. That’s what it is: Oakland/San Francisco, that’s where we got that shit from, man!

BBP: “Squib Cakes…”

Johnson: “Squib Cakes” and all that shit, man! Yeah, Morris could play “Squib Cakes” beat-for-beat, man. That intro that David Garibaldi played, Morris is the closest cat on this earth to sounding like David Garibaldi. I tell people that, they freak the fuck out. I’m telling you, if you heard Morris Day, cool-ass Morris Day play the drums, he sounds like David Garibaldi when he plays drums.

BBP: I heard that he started out as a drummer but he never does it with The Time, or I’ve never seen him.

Johnson: No he never plays with The Time. We were going to do it. We played back in ’08: we did a three week stand at the Flamingo in Vegas, and we were going to do that. Morris was going to play the drums, I was going to play the guitar, and Jesse Johnson had a hissy fit, and we couldn’t do it.

BBP: Oh, wow. Wow! What’s your relationship with him (Jesse Johnson) like? I heard he had an interesting background. He used to play in biker bars and stuff like that?

Johnson: He’s from East St. Louis and Springfield, Illinois and all that shit. But Jesse is crazy, man. I love him to death, but Jesse is nuts, so, we have a skewed relationship. We have the same last name, people think we’re brothers. We’re brothers in one way, but we don’t get along. We’re like estranged brothers—trust me—because he’s hard to deal with. He’s very hard to deal with, and he’s a selfish person. That’s his biggest problem. His biggest problem is he wants to be Prince and he’s not Prince. He can’t be Prince. So that’s the whole thing.

BBP: So what’s this I hear about him getting handcuffed to a—what was it—a coat rack?

Johnson: That’s back in our early days of The Time and shit. We got into a food fight with Prince’s band…that was our first year out. That was us, them and Zapp. And the last couple of nights of the tour we got into it with him and his band, Prince and his band, and they started doing shit to us while we were on stage. And one night they just took Jesse off stage—and Jerome—and took Jesse back in their dressing room while we were in concert. Prince had his bodyguard take Jesse off the stage, take him back in the dressing room, handcuff him to the thing. He (Prince) played guitar, Prince jumped in The Time and played guitar while this is going down. Back then his band put food and shit all over Jesse and Jerome.

BBP: Wow…

Johnson: This is the kind of childish shit that Prince did. So, after we got done, we went back and rescued Jesse, and we went and got us some shit, put us some dirty clothes on and found every egg, and everything we could and waited for them after the concert. And we beat their asses! Of course it cost Morris a bunch of money because Prince charged Morris a bunch of money for wrecking the arena. But we beat their ass! You know, because it’s ridiculous! You have to realize, we’re some kids from the street. The original Time was just some ghetto kids from the street, and there’s some shit you just ain’t going to put up with. And that includes Jimmy and Terry—all of us. Even Monte, the little white boy; some shit, we just will not put up with. Because we’re like a gang. And Prince’s band, they couldn’t compare to us with that. And he knew it. And deep down, Prince wants to be one of us. He had created this Frankenstein and he couldn’t control it no more. So he actually wanted to be one of us and he couldn’t, ‘cause he was Prince.

BBP: He wasn’t part of your group, he wasn’t part of your circle while you were growing up? Was he different?

Johnson: No. He made music and he told us what to play and we came in and played, a lot of times better than what he had. And in concert it went over better than what it did on record, and after a while he resented that shit. He resented it! And so then, when it came time for us to do a record on our own, he didn’t want us to do it. ‘Cause he didn’t want it to be better than something he had come up with.

Catch Part II of our interview with Jellybean tomorrow, in which he talks about, among other things, how he got the name Jellybean!

Magic Slim: Obituary

2013-02-22T05:24:00.004-08:00

Check out this obituary of Magic Slim from Don Wilcock of American Blues Scene:

Veteran Chicago blues artist Magic Slim passed away on Thursday, February 21, 2013 after several months of illness. A consistent crowd pleaser, Magic played with a raw-boned intensity not often found in artists his age and reflective of such seminal Chicago blues giants as Howlin’ Wolf. He was able to capture that rough tone in scores of albums working with producers including Dick Shurman and Poppa Chubby. Born 75 years ago in Torrence, Mississippi, Magic Slim a.k.a. Morris Holt first came to Chicago in the mid-’50s and played bass for West Side soul man Magic Sam whom he’d known in Mississippi.
“Sam was four years older than me,” Slim told me many years ago, “and when we went to church on Sunday morning I’d go up to his house or he’d come down to my house, and we’d set up under the shade tree and play them guitars. His momma and my momma always said, ‘The devil gonna getcha all for playing guitar on Sunday.’”
Slim filled in for Hound Dog Taylor at Florence’s on the South Side in 1972 and began a long relationship with Blind Pig Records in 1990. His latest release for them is Bad Boy produced by band leader Michael Blakemore and Jerry Del Giudice released in 2012. Bad Boy is another chapter in the life of a musician that Blind Pig Records promoted as having “the meanest vibrato in blues.” His manager Marty Salzman with tongue only partly in cheek, says the guy knew 9000 songs.

Slim told me late last year that all the songs on the CD had been road tested. “Someone Else Steppin’ In” may be by Denise LaSalle and is a staple of Buddy Guy’s repertoire, but Slim claims he first heard it by Wilson Pickett. The title track is by Eddie Taylor, “that guy from the West Side.” There are three originals, “Sunrise Blues,” “Gambling Blues” and “Country Joyride.”
“When I’m sitting down like I am now, even in the hotel, I think of a couple words. I write ’em down, and then I go back and make them words rhyme. That’s how I do my songs.”
Magic Slim was industrial strength Chicago blues boogie with authentic Mississippi underpinnings. He played hard, he played mean, and his sound was so solid, right, and straight ahead, you don’t need a resume to know this guy came from the Mississippi mud.
Salzman admits they tried to get Slim to throw in some creative curve balls on some of his records. When I asked Slim himself about it, he answered with a comment that was not related to the question but puts any further questions down. “Magic Sam, we went to school together. See, I was slim and tall, and he’s the one that give me that name, and he told me to keep that name, and that name one day was gonna make me famous. So, at the time I’d kept Magic Slim, so, hey, I’ve had it ever since.”
Slim first gained attention outside of Chicago in 1989 when he toured Brazil with Buddy Guy. “It was Buddy Guy, Etta James, Jr. Wells and Albert Collins, all those and myself, all up on the show. I just had four pieces, guitar, bass and drums and myself.” When Marty Salzman walked into Slim’s dressing room for that show he told him that even though he wasn’t as famous as the others on the bill, no one in Brazil knew that. When he walked out on stage, all six foot, six inches with another six inches of cowboy hat, he got their attention, and it was Slim out of the five who got invited back several months later and for decades after that.
He’d been with Marty and Blind Pig ever since Brazil. “I can’t read and write that good, and I ain’t no dummy. I know when somebody doin’ right and when somebody ain’t doin’ right at all. Blind Pig and Marty Salzman they doin’ better than I think some other guys would do it. So, hey, man, I ain’t got no problem with ’em so I don’t see no sense of changing, booking and the record label and stuff like that. I don’t see no sense in that.”

Slim was missing his right pinky finger lost in a cotton gin accident when he was young. “There was a piece of wire in the cotton, and it was going up to the saw. I would then dry cotton. One spark would set it off. The saw went so fast. I see-ed the wire, but I tried to grab, but when I tried to grab it, it snatched my hand up in there. Lucky I didn’t lose my whole hand, but I was fast enough and quick enough to turn that wire loose.”
He said he owed Hound Dog Taylor for helping establish himself in Chicago. Hound Dog had an extra vestigial finger, and Slim laughed aloud when I suggested that perhaps Hound Dog could have loaned him that finger. “Hound Dog Taylor helped me a lot. He gave me a lot of jobs when I first got here, let me sing with him a lot and let me meet different people a lot. Hound Dog helped me a lot.”

Mickey Carroll: The Old Tricks Still Work Part III

2013-01-19T19:56:00.001-08:00

Here is the third and final part of our interview with singer/guitarist Mickey Carroll. Here Carroll talks about what he thinks of today's music. He also reflects on the changes in music business technology that have taken place over the years:

BBP: I’m just curious, you’ve been in the business half-a-century, more than half-a-century. What do you think of the music that’s out now?

Carroll: You know, to me, there are two kinds of music, nowadays. There’s commercial art, and it’s art, and it takes a lot of creativity and academics to get that done, what we’re listening to, some of that stuff. I do get a little indifferent about—I know this is going to strike you as odd—but I’ll tell you the truth, since you asked me: I miss drama; I miss people that know how to act and sing. Like Nancy Wilson, Nina Simone, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Jimmy Durante, Eartha Kitt. These people knew how to dramatically sell a song by putting their heart into it. You could see it. You could feel it. Now the churchy thing that where people are hitting three octaves and twisting it around in a gospel way, and all the white kids too as well, it’s powerful and it’s wonderful but boy, there’s so much of it, Kirk, it’s just crazy. I want to see acting. I love acting. I like people to become the part that they’re singing, you know.

BBP: But when you say that though, do you mean like they’re acting on stage? When they’re doing records? Videos?

Carroll: If you listen to Nancy Wilson’s “Guess Who I Saw Today?” you’re going to be told a story. She’s going to act it out; she’s going to let you know what she saw today. (laughs)

BBP: Yeah, you’re cheating on her, right…

Carroll: She’s not after knocking you out with her vocal chops; she already knows those are there. She’s very confident in that part of it. But—I don’t know, you asked me and that’s what I miss. I’m not saying that there are not talented people out there, because there’s some wonderful talent out there. But I’m starting to get a little bored with the “stay in the studio” thing and pile up tracks, and see how you can shape the sound. I kind of like the truth, I like to see people hit the floor and be what they are.

BBP: But we talked about this earlier. You mentioned when you were starting out, they used to record the bands as a band. And after that they started laying tracks down. Would you like to see a return to that approach?

Carroll: (laughs) I’m doing it! I don’t know if the younger generation will be even interested in it. I did like it when Eric Clapton did his live acoustic thing with Chuck Leavell –“Layla.” I think was one of the tunes he did, and I always like Tony Bennett when he hits the floor, but he’s not a stranger to that. If he stood up in a room and started singing, he wouldn’t even need a band…because he knows how to deliver things. Some people just have that. I don’t know…you’re not so worried about...well what can I say? Am I out of line saying this stuff?

BBP: No! No! Not at all. It’s interesting, because I mean you worked in the industry for so long and your observations are very interesting.

Carroll: …if you watch an old Jackie Gleason “Honeymooners” show, that was done live. Those laughs you were hearing, that was a real audience. And, uh, we’re talking about an hour show, buddy. Same way with the studio. When you sing, there’s no time for you to worry about this or that and ”can you do this” and “can I come back and sing over that.” Just go in and do it, baby! You’ve had plenty of time to practice. You know, half of your life, some of these people (laughs)… I mean, can you imagine Miles going in there and saying, “you know I think I want to add another trumpet over that one” and “that one’s a little out of tune, I’m going to tune that up and then...” it’s just not real.

BBP: I see what you’re saying. But another thing I was curious about was the way they distribute music and how that’s changed. I mean, you know when you were coming along they had records, 45’s I guess, and AM radio, and now they have satellite radio and IPod, and…

Carroll: I feel as though everything is going to go to the Internet. Television, everything is heading that way. It’s all going to be right in your living room, you know, you’re going to have so many choices. I don’t see it as a negative. I see it as a powerful tool. Satellite is going to serve us well. Right now, everybody’s looking for copyright, licensing, what are we going to do, they’re taking this or that, they’re downloading that for free, you know these are the issues right now. Well, hey, I’m sorry but somebody had to answer up and take care of that. And find out where it belongs and how to handle it and that accounting is something that has to be done. It’s not just music; it’s a lot of things. So, what’s going to happen with the business is, it’s starting all over again like it did in the fifties. You know when all of the independent little rock and roll labels started, and all of the independent artists and everything. And all of the conservatives kind of had to take a back seat because they weren’t buying the product. And the same thing’s happening. Guys back in those days selling their 45’s at a record hop or out of the trunk. You know, they go into a drive-in movie theatre and pay the guy that has a theatre to play their song while people are sitting in their car.

BBP. Yeah. Same thing is going on. I know that the hip hop people tend to do that a lot..

Carroll: Exactly! That’s where it comes from. And I can also; I go back far enough to remember when jazz was doing hip-hop. I mean guys would get up with conga and upright bass and they’d recite a straight-ahead poem. In those days I believe they called it “beatniks.”

BBP: That’s kind of the origins of modern hip-hop, I guess you could say. A sort of precursor to it, or whatever.

Carroll: Oh yeah. Sure. Sure. A lot of this stuff goes right to Africa in terms of storytelling and rhythm. You know, from slavery on up. I think everything came out of folk, including classical music, where people were just sitting around town playing or telling a story, or doing it in church. You know, it gets sophisticated and it should, it should grow. But at the same time, technology is bringing us into a place where we have to communicate more. And we do have the tools to do it.

BBP: I guess as you think about “Old Dogs,” if you had written that song in the 1950’s, you would have thought, “Well, I gotta get it on AM radio.” Is it hard to make that jump to what’s going on now in terms of distributing your art?

Carroll: It’s a mindset. It’s always hard. That’s part of the road. It’s not easy for anybody, but anything that you do from the heart—that you do with passion—is not going to be easy. There are so many examples of that, why even get into it? But what you need to do is know yourself. You don’t have to be so concerned about the rest of the world—it’s vast—how many people are doing this or that and why not me. Don’t waste your time. Go to where you want to go creatively and say what you want to say. And if it’s meant to be, say your prayers baby! It will be meant to be! If that’s the way it is, it will happen. You know, I was telling my son about success and success is a pretty controversial word. I truly believe—I’m looking around at my family and a home and I have a beautiful little home in a nice town, and good friends, and I’m playing music. Let me tell you what: if that’s not success, I have no idea what success is.

BBP: Yeah...So what you’re saying is that, if you have the product, if you go learn what you need to learn, to get it out there.

Carroll: Yeah. You just listen to what you are. And say Kirk wants to do a certain type of show; he wants to say something and interview a certain clientele or a certain type of person, because that’s what he wants his show known for. He wants to go to that audience, he wants to have a demo situation of all those shows that you did and time and work that you did and all of a sudden you want to make a presentation and network that show. That all has to do with you, and that all has to do with your vision. And if you compromise yourself, that could be a failure. You’ve got to go with your heart, you got to know exactly what you’re focused on. And do it, okay? Take the punch. If it’s not meant to be, keep on going. Keep the same process going. Tell you what; you’re going to be happy (laughs)!

BBP: Yeah. That’s true. That’s true. As you look back at all of the people you interacted with, all of the musicians—is there any kind of moment that you recall, just one moment that just sort of stands out—I mean, if someone asks you the most defining experience you have ever had in life as an artist, what would that be?

Carroll: The best answer I could come up with is—I have never been asked the question before—but I do have to say that it happened to me when I was a little boy. I went to Catholic School, and I had to learn a Mary Alonzo tune “We Three Kings,” and I also learned a tune by Johnny Ray which was called “The Little White Cloud that Sat Right Down and Cried.” And they asked me if I’d be interested in singing. Something in me said “Yes,” because I already knew those tunes. And my grandma had me singing in the living room, and of course she praised me and gave me what I needed, and when I got out in front of those kids—I was a horrible student because we moved a lot, we didn’t stay in one school for long and my parents struggled, so I didn’t get to have the academics that the kids had in my class, and I had failed a few times. This was my opportunity to make myself known in terms of “yes, I’m valuable too; I can do something.” And I got up and sang with those kids and I blew them away! They were all my friends and I thought to myself, “Kirk, this works, man (laughs)!” The grid took place, man. I followed it, that’s all I did. Just went ahead and made it my life.

BBP: So that’s when you knew that music was what you’d want to do with your life?

Carroll: Oh, God, yeah. To me it was a special place in time, when you say a moment. It was a special place in time. And it stays there. It’s like—isn’t it funny how your body changes as you get older? And yet you still maintain the development of your soul and the things that mean much to you, you still have them? Isn’t that cool?

BBP: Yes, it is cool, I wish…well what plans do you have in terms of—well you have the “Old Dogs,” you want to do something with that…but beyond that, and I guess you want to do the Mother J-style work you were doing.

Carroll: Oh definitely. I’m creating a show with these songs. I want each song to have a video, and they do. And I want it to be known that the show that I was doing, just like I did with Mother J—has to do with them.

Mickey Carroll: The Old Tricks Still Work Part II

2013-01-16T08:21:00.001-08:00

Here is Part II of our interview with Mickey Carroll. In it, he talks more about Don Cornelius; “Love is Where You Find it,” the song he wrote for the Whispers and about the role race played in the music world of the 1950’s, when he started out. He also talks about his own efforts to use music as a tool for creating a better world.

As we started this segment, Carroll talked about his Grammy-nominated album Love Life:

Carroll: Love Life is me and Eric Schilling. I recorded that in Miami in Coconut Grove. Coconut Grove is a studio there that Bill Szymczyk owned. Bill Szymczyk produced B.B. King and the Eagles, and Eric worked for him and I met Eric when I did my RCA album. And then of course Eric and I went into that studio in Miami, in Coconut Grove, and we recorded Love Life, and the funny part about that is that Love Life was nominated for a Grammy for Best New Artist. But it was kind of a jazz thing, you know, and nobody knew where to play it. You know, they were just starting out in those days with smooth jazz stations, and that’s what it leaned into a little bit, you know. So I was kind of a day late and a dollar short on that. We did sell out what we pressed up so that was an indication that people did like it. And “People Love Life” comes from that, the song I mentioned to you earlier.

BBP: Okay. Didn’t you re-release that album, I think?

Carroll: Yeah, I’m on three different little labels. One is Bendera; it’s an Asian company, it’s Korean, excuse me. And of course they license to put it out, and they were nice to me and gave me a nice advance and they loved the album. And it’s out now. And I understand it’s doing pretty good.

BBP: Oh, that’s great. What made you decide to re-release it?

Carroll: Um (laughs) they offered me money.

BBP: This company did…

Carroll: Yes, that would be Bendera. Isn’t it funny Kirk what happens when people say “I’ll give you a check? “

BBP: Yeah, that moves things, it really does. (laughs)

Carroll: Well yeah, they got it out, and we’re okay with it. And I also have it out on Vision Records. And I told them, “You know it’s already out on Vision.” And they said “That’s okay, we want to put it out.” They did! And now, as I understand it, Vision is all over the world. There’s no question about that, they’re distributed by Orchard, which is on the Internet. That’s probably the largest distributor, and they just went to all the Asian countries and I do believe to even China.

BBP: So wait a minute, you have this record on two different companies that are distributing it at the same time?

Carroll: Can you believe that, man? Love Life, the album you mentioned, is on two different companies. Yes it is.

BBP: And there’s no legal wrangling over things?

Carroll: No, I told them, there’s no secret about it. I wouldn’t be telling you. They didn’t mind at all. They wanted to put it out and it’s out.

BBP: Oh wow, that must be a first.

Carroll: (laughs) Well, the recording at sea was a first, Kirk.

BBP: Well this is a new first with this album, right?

Carroll: Hey, let no song be served until its time.

BBP: Wow, I guess that’s quite an accomplishment.

Carroll: I didn’t set out to do it. I think it’s funny, and I enjoyed telling people about it when they ask me. You know…you’re right, I think it is a first. And Vision has been good to me, Howard and Ron Albert Studio in Miami. And they are really—they’re friends. I’m just a lucky guy that way: I’ve got buddies in the business that still think I’m hot stuff, so they’re going to go and spend their dime and do what they do.

BBP: That’s good. That’s great….

Carroll: But Kirk, I’m getting old, man!

BBP: Well, it’s better than sitting around and being bored doing nothing…

Carroll: I know. That’s not for me. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but with “Old Dogs” in the back yard there, I’ve got a little claw-foot tub up on my deck. If you look at the video, you’ll see it. And I sit out there in that tub, man, and I have a nice glass of Scotch and I say my prayers and I’m good with God and everybody. (laughs)

BBP: I guess you do! You have two different companies putting out your record, that’s quite an accomplishment. I’m pretty amazed by that. Well, I was curious: the first time you said that Don Cornelius heard you in Miami at the Hideaway, was that the first time you met him?

Carroll: That was the first time. He and Griffey were looking for some kind of new talent, and I believe they had gone to the islands, if I remember correctly. And they came to Miami after that, and they had their ladies with them and their staff, some of them from Soul Train. They were just absolutely wonderful people. I couldn’t have been treated any better, buddy, I mean to tell you. They put me up at the Beverly Hills Hotel, you want to believe this? I had a cottage, not a room. Isn’t that something, man? And a limo would pick me up, and I’d go to dinner with these guys and they were showing off the town and Holy Canolee, I went to one they called the Canteen or the Cafeteria or something there—near where The Johnny Carson Show was—and sitting in there was Marlon Brando, and what the hell—another cat—Ed McMahon, and just all of these celebrities. I’m sitting in there; I’m going “Oh My God, I’m from Camden, New Jersey. Here I am here, having a hamburger.”

BBP: “Pinch me, pinch me. Make sure it’s real…”

Carroll: I got a big kick out of that. And then they—they were just sweet. They really did roll out the carpet. God bless ‘em, man. They thought I was going to set the world on fire, you know. I’m pretty sure they were looking to spill over into the pop market, you know, from R&B. And they noticed I had a little something that connected with them that might spill over into that. So that would be my guess.

BBP: And you were involved with Soul Train in some capacity, right?

Carroll: Not on a production level, but I did write for Soul Train Gang’s first album. Did “I Can Do It All Night,” which is a little dance floor thing, a little funky thing. And I wrote of course for Griffey’s—I guess that was his top group—the Whispers. I wrote their title cut called “Love is Where You Find It.” And hey man, it worked out! And I made a few bucks too!

BBP: Yeah, that always helps.

Carroll: Oh, of course. Are you kidding me? These are the arts. You’ve got to do that. There’s no way to avoid that. I mean even at this place in time, I’m doing things like that too. I actually have to keep it down a little bit, because my wife goes “are you getting paid?” (laughs)

BBP: Don Cornelius. Over the years did you stay in touch with him?

Carroll: Yeah, as a matter of fact I talked to him about a year prior to his death. And I was amazed at that. I had no idea that he had that in him. He was a very internal guy, very powerful personality. Internalized, I don’t think he shared everything he was thinking. And he was also premeditated, you know. He’d be thinking about a couple of things while he was talking to you, you know. But it wasn’t disturbing. It was just the way he was.

BBP: He was a promoter, he was a business person.

Carroll: There you go. And he wasn’t stupid, man. He was smart. What those guys did was an amazing thing for their generation at that point in time. They really did build some stairway.

BBP: So you were shocked when you heard that he had committed suicide, that he had been ill?

Carroll: Oh, yeah. That’s so sad. All I can do is guess that he was suffering, I would imagine, and he didn’t want to deal with it.

BBP: Yeah. That’s probably what led to that. You also mentioned that you were one of the few white acts during that time. What was the racial situation like when you started out in the fifties? I mean I’ve heard stories. …

Carroll: I always have to step back a little bit. Because when I went to high school, I was being played on black radio, as well as doing—there was a show called “The Mitch Thomas Show” which was a black dance show, sort of an answer to “Bandstand.” And I’d come back to school and those kids wanted my autograph, all the black kids. I broke right through the barrier there, and I realized at that point in time that music—the arts in general, not just music—can do it. It can do it. Kirk, it can do a lot of stuff. You always think about God creating the world in seven days, well there’s the word: create. And I truly believe that when you’re creating, you are close to your Creator. That’s a prime example of it. That let me know that everybody’s on a playing field, that we’re all even when we chose that. Sports and music, it does that. You don’t have a choice. You’ve got to answer up and do it, or not. And I learned that about music and I fell in love with that aspect as well. That was quite a place in time in the fifties. And I would do the record hops and things and they would love the music and sign autographs and do all that. And I can remember thinking then, they just play wonderful. I would do some of them live with a band. And I thought “these guys are just” and you know they were jazzers.

BBP: I remember talking to African-American musicians at the time and some of them were telling me really harrowing stories about touring the south and getting pulled over by the police…

Carroll: Oh yeah, well they were outside of...Oh, man, yeah, I know. I know that, and I know that’s true. But from my perspective, I can only tell you what happened with me, and you remember I’m white….but at the same time I always wondered at certain events, how I would be treated. Because I would be the only..well Billy as well…the only white guys there. And nothing happened that bad, buddy, or I’d tell you. Everything went smooth, they just loved the music.

BBP: Do you think, as time went on, did that ever change? Through the sixties, the seventies and the eighties, I mean…

Carroll: I thought so. I used to go to a club to hear people play because most of the music I liked was, like I say, blues or R&B, and I would go to a club there called the Sir John in Liberty City in Miami, which is now..you know, you don’t do that now. ..so that’s a strong indication that the days that I knew, I’m not saying they were innocent or perfect, but it wasn’t as violent as now. There weren’t the weapons that they have now. Have you heard “Song from my Son?” It’s a song that has maybe 102 or 103 thousand views on YouTube. It’s about the subject that we’re talking about, about kids and weapons and, you know, the change that’s taken place.

BBP: A lot of this is very disturbing to you, it sounds like.

Carroll: Oh, man, come on. They’re kids. I don’t care what color. They’re all kids. And the attitude, the thing’s changed, quite a bit. I wish I could tell you what’s causing it, only thing I could dip into is education—I know they’re programs and things to help out and all that, so I would say that there needs to be, it’s always communication. And you know what, I did a show here—wait ‘til you hear this—I did a show here in Mount Dora that was called “Mother J,” that’s where the Mother J Productions comes from, I did a show and I wrote the town into it, Kirk. I wrote the police chief, the fire chief…everybody… the Center for the Arts, I wrote them all into it. They all had something to do with that play. And that created an atmosphere of harmony because they call it East Town, which is the black area here, and it’s really Mount Dora, and I kind of got pissed at that. “What do you call that East Town for? What are we doing with this?” And I went over there and I recruited my kids from school and things from school and we were all on the stage, everybody was up there together. And we did a play and guess what? They stood in line to get in, buddy! There should be a movie about this. Because we hit a home run with that. And on top of that, we raised money. Out in the lobby you had all kinds of different-colored people associating and saying “hi.” Well guess what does that? The arts! The idea, for example, when I did my show, I talked to the art teacher at the high school and all of the kids created the posters for the show. They had posters they created for Mother J. Mother J, the story of Mother J is that she had found an old church in the city…she got an old church in the ghetto—let’s put it that way—and she decided—she’s a blues singer—she decided that she’s not in love with playing those clubs as much anymore. She wanted to do something with a higher call, so she decides to take that church over and work with kids in the neighborhood, so that opened up different songs for me. It’s where “Song For My Son” comes from, and she’s singing—Jacqueline Jones played Mother J in this, she’s a blues singer here, kind of a blues diva in the Orlando area. She played the part and she played it well. I mean it was just cookin’. And of course, the kids don’t know, they don’t know entirely what they’re listening to. They know it had a beat and it was danceable and it was high energy and she was selling the audience, so they felt good to be in the play. Then we had at the art center afterwards, we hung up their art and all the art had to do with was—oh—spirituality; what do you think of God? What about cultural diversity, what do you think of your parents, personal things? But at the same time they got to express themselves. And guess what happened? This is just too good, okay? Not only did they have their art hanging up—it wasn’t judged, they all got an award, for doing it—but meanwhile, the people in the town fell in love with this, and I proposed to them that they build an archway in the park and have the kids do the same thing with tiles. But this time I wanted seniors involved, so we had seniors and kids down there doing tiles that have to do with—oh—spirituality and giving back. The archway is called the “Unity in the Community Archway.” And guess what? I got an award. I got an arts and humanities award for that particular project.

BBP: When did you do this? How long ago?

Carroll: Oh, let’s see. I’d say a good eight years ago. Maybe eight years, nine years. And that, I’m sure you’d find on the Internet. If you looked at my website you might find it.

BBP: Well, you know earlier you brought up the Whispers, and actually they were one of my favorite groups when I was coming along. “Olivia Lost and Turned Out,” I used to love that song. Tell me a little bit on your association with them, how you met them. They’re twins in that group, right?

Carroll: Yes, they’re twins. I didn’t hang with The Whispers, I just knew them, met them a few times through Dick Griffey. And they showed up at the boat, they came out to the boat when I recorded on the ship, I mean. And that was my first introduction to The Whispers. They didn’t have any hits or anything, yet. And there was something about them: they had class. You know there was something about them, you just got the feeling that they were on the way to something. And then on top of that, they were surrounded by some serious company. So they got done what they wanted to do. I could tell they wanted to be in that place in time where they were, and have that class act, you know. And deliver those romantic pieces that they had. And you know, they got a little funky too, so you had fun with them, you know. And, you know as people, I really didn’t spend time hanging. We had dinner together at Fisherman’s Wharf, with Griffey. He picked up the tab.

BBP: That’s incredible.

Carroll: I neglected to say, when you asked me about “Old Dogs,” I neglected to tell you that “Growing Bolder,” which is a marvelous show, I mean, you’ve got to dig it, you’ve got to check it out. They cover all kinds of different stories in regard to what people are achieving at a certain age. And they liked “Old Dogs,” and they came by the house and they shot a whole story on me. Man, it just took off! I’m talking about the L.A. Times, The Chicago Tribune, Eye in the Sky, the Orlando Sentinel. I mean it just spread all over the place. All the TV galleries picked it up. So that means if they need to use it, they have it.

BBP: Let me ask you, I know you’ve written songs for other people, and I was just curious: when you write a song for somebody, how do you go about doing it? What’s your approach?

Carroll: You know, it’s a labor of love, and it’s not for me. I’m talking about for me; everybody’s different. I’m not a prolific writer; I’m not one of these guys that say “Hey, I’ve written 350 songs this year, you know.” I… to me, it’s so personal that it’s painful to try to get it done the way I want. And of course, if it’s not accepted in a way that people would buy it…that of course is not something you want. What you really have to want is, did you achieve what’s in you? Did you say what you want to say? And to me that’s hard. It’s not like starting out with the drum track and paying attention to the drum, which I’ve done. But at my age now, it’s quite an undertaking.

BBP: But when you write the song, do you have it in mind for a particular person?

Carroll: Oh, gosh. I wish I could say yeah. I just feel what I need to say and I go after it. I don’t think about a person or a radio station or anything. I just “I want to do this. I want to say this.” Of course if it gets wings like “Love is Where You Find it,” (which) to me is a Brazilian jazz piece, I wrote it kind of like a bossanova. (singing) Ba-bo-da-do-da-do-din-da. You notice on the end that one of the Whispers is scatting? (laughs)

BBP: Right! Yeah!

Carroll: He picked it up. He went, “okay, let’s lead it into jazz a little bit.” And I really thought that was cool.

BBP: Well, they were good at it. That’s one thing about them I remember. A lot of their songs sounded like that. But did you hear that tendency in them to do that and you just decided to play off of it?

Carroll: Um, I guess—you know, I did get to hear them work a little bit in L.A., but I didn’t stay for the whole session and I just kind of heard a little bit. But it wasn’t something I could say I knew their whole groove, but when I heard them sing, I thought “Oh my, these cats, they’re able to stretch out here a little bit.” It had nothing to do with me writing a tune, I was just out there and they were doing a session. That’s it…”Love is Where You Find It,” I actually did that live, with a big band. I had the university jazz band—well not all of it, but most of it—Miami University, and man, it was cooking! And I was lucky enough to get video of that, and this is way back in the day! These guys shot it. And of course, we’re all sitting around the studio going, “Man, look at this!” So we sent it off to Dick Griffey, because I already knew Dick and had recorded for those guys, and they said “Yeah baby, we’re going to record this!” (laughs). It was a hell of a demo to send somebody, I can tell you that!

Mickey Carroll: The Old Tricks Still Work Part I

2013-01-14T11:18:00.001-08:00

At 72, singer/performer Mickey Carroll is an “Old Dog.”

To some of you young pups out there, that may translate to “out-of-date.”

But Carroll wears the title with pride. So much so that he has recorded a song about it.

Entitled “Old Dogs,” the single is a New Orleans-style testament that experience--in his case, decades of experience--doesn’t mean obsolescence. “Now they might be a little slow,” Carroll sings. “But there ain’t much that they don’t know.”

Released in 2011, “Old Dogs” is the title track from a CD of the same name Carroll will release next month.

The song applies to music as much as life for Carroll, a Grammy nominated singer/songwriter/guitarist who once worked with Don Cornelius of Soul Train fame and has penned songs for performers ranging from John Mayall to the Whispers.

A South Jersey native who now resides in Mount Dora, Florida, Carroll caught his first taste of show biz as a dancer on American Bandstand in the pre-Dick Clark days when the show was still being hosted by founder Bob Horn. Carroll then went on to form a doo-wop singing duo with a friend, Billy Harner.

During the 1960’s, Carroll spent time down in New Orleans. The quality of the musicians in the Crescent City made him realize he'd have to step up his game a little on guitar, his chosen instrument, he recalls with a chuckle. “I got out there and I realized I’d better woodshed, man,” he says. “These cats play! They’re not just playing blues progressions; they’re playing some really creative stuff.”

But he learned a lot in New Orleans, and some of the styles he absorbed took hold, resurfacing later in works like "Old Dogs."

He met Cornelius one day while playing the Hideaway Lounge in Hollywood, Florida. After hearing Carroll play, Cornelius and Dick Griffey, founder of the rhythm and blues label Solar Records, wanted to make an album with him.

Entitled Mickey Carroll, the recording is believed to be a first—not because of the music it featured—but because of where it was recorded: a 110-foot boat!

The musicians who joined Carroll for the recording—many of whom arrived by seaplane from other gigs—included many of the best in the business at that time: Leon Pendarvis, a keyboardist who later became music director for Saturday Night Live; Chuck Leavell who had performed with the Allman Brothers and would later play with the Rolling Stones; Tim Drummond, a bassist who over his career has worked with Bob Dylan, James Brown, Eric Clapton and Neil Young; and drummer Willie Hall, who would later appear in the Blues Brothers movie with John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd.

The album was produced by Bob Johnston, who at that time had previously worked with Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash.

Also on the boat was a young engineer-in-training named Eric Schilling. Carroll would later tap him to work on his 1978 album Love Life, which was nominated for a Grammy.

In 1984, Carroll hit another career milestone after a recording by the Whispers of his song “Love Is Where You Find It,” became a gold record.

But the 1980’s also saw Carroll turn his music towards another pursuit: social activism. Partnering with the performing arts organization PACE, he put on shows for the disabled, senior citizens, and others who needed help.

In 2000 he founded Mother J productions, a non-profit based in the Mount Dora area that raised money for art education through concerts and community events. In May, 2005 the organization held a concert for the deaf at a Mt. Dora gymnasium. Later that year, after Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans, the group organized a concert for hurricane victims at a Mount Dora park.

More recently, Carroll organized a free concert to raise money for victims of the 2010 Haitian earthquake.

“People just know when they come to see me that I’m up to something,” Carroll says. “I did a wonderful gig not long ago in an airport. They took a whole airplane hangar like a World War II kind of deal, you know—U.S.O. show, that’s what they were doing—and a big band. And man, it was cookin’! We had a party! And that was for the troops. That was money to help the troops. “

Carroll put together “Old Dogs”—album and single—with help from a roster of musicians headed by saxophonist Charlie DeChant of Hall and Oates fame, who handled the horn arrangements. The project was produced by Howard and Ron Albert, best known for producing “Layla” with Eric Clapton’s Derek and the Dominos.

With over 50 years in the music business, Carroll had a lot to say: so much that we are posting our interview with him in three parts. In the first part he talks about “Old Dogs,” American Bandstand and the early days of rock and roll—and that high seas recording he made with Don Cornelius:

BBP: Well first Carroll tell me a little bit about this song “Old Dogs.” I’m kind of curious about it, and how it came about.

Carroll: Sure. Well, “Old Dogs “was written by a fellow named Dan Kyle and he played that for me, gosh I guess, a good three, four years ago at a party at our home. And I thought, “Oh my, that’s got a little something to it.” You have to realize I’m an old dog, so it kind of fit me perfect. So on my—don’t laugh now—on my 70^th birthday, I recorded that puppy. And I was really lucky because I had Howard Albert produce it. Can I speak about him a second?

BBP: Sure, go ahead.

Carroll: Well Howard Albert is from the Ron Albert/ Howard Albert team, from Criteria, which was the largest studio in the country. They also have audio vision now, and those guys have recorded everybody from the Allman Brothers to Barbra Streisand, the Bee Gees and on and on.

BBP: Was he involved with Eric Clapton? Derek and the Dominos?

Carroll: Yes, he was. Yep. As a matter of fact, your guest on your last interview, Fred Wesley, I’m sure they must have worked with Fred because they worked with James Brown too. Anyway, he’s an old buddy, and you know I recorded there quite a bit over the years, and he came up here and we recorded that in my backyard. (laughs)

BBP: Wow.

Carroll: And you know, we just hit the line and did our time. The musicians were wonderful; I mean we had Charlie DeChant on there, he’s with Hall and Oates and Orleans and all that. He was more or less the music director for that session. And I mean to tell you we had a party. And I forgot to tell you we invited the whole—I mean we had the mayor, we had the president of the chamber, and the city manager—I mean after all, they weren’t going to call the police to keep the sound down, man! We were covered!

BBP: Right, that’s a good strategy there! A very good strategy. Mickey, what town are we talking about?

Carroll: Ok, I should have said that. This is Mount Dora, Florida, which I guess is maybe 40 miles north of Orlando. It’s a little diamond in the rough; it’s just the sweetest little town. Sort of like a Norman Rockwell kind of painting, you know.

BBP: And what do you plan to do with the song? What are your plans for getting it out?

Carroll: Well, I’ve got to finish this CD that we’re working on. And I worked hard on trying to get these songs particularly picked out for this thing, so it would fit my age and also cover that New Orleans flavor. That’s where I learned how to play out there. And the point that I’m trying to make is that you can do this live, you can do this live in the studio, or you can do it live in concert. Something about live that puts all of the musicians on line, and they really have to dig into the impulsive nature of their vocabulary….I find that to be exciting, especially when you’re playing on the edge like that.

BBP: How did you get these other musicians involved in it?

Carroll: (laughs) Kirk, I’ve been around forever! A lot of these guys I’ve known and met at the studio, like I wrote for Don Cornelius for the Soul Train gang, for the Whispers. I wrote one of their hits called “Love is Where You Find it.” If you keep on moving through the woods, man, sooner or later you’re going to find gold. But I’ve been lucky. I write sort of in-between jazz and blues and this brings on a challenge for a lot of cats who want to play. So I’ve been really lucky, you know, to have these guys (imitating them) “Hey I want to play this tune. Here, let me sit in. Let me do that.”

BBP: Now tell me a little bit about how you got involved in music. I mean, when you were a kid, you used to listen to a lot of radio?

Carroll: (laughs) Man, I was there at the beginning of rock ‘n’ roll and big bands started to lose ground and combos came in. And I started listening to Louis Prima and Louis Jordan and Red Prysock and Doo Wop. Actually I wrote for some of these people. You remember Dion?

BBP: Yeah…from the fifties?

Carroll: I’ve written a couple of songs for him. And it was quite a thrill, you know. And, yes, I’ve been at it since the fifties and just kept on going and I managed to raise a family doing it. I don’t know…I’ve just been blessed buddy, if you really want to know the truth.

BBP: And I understand that you were a dancer on American Bandstand?

Carroll: Oh my God, where did you find that out, Kirk? (laughs)

BBP: Well, I have my sources.

Carroll: I used to live in South Jersey and those days you could just jump on the bus, go over the bridge—which is the Delaware River Bridge—and then then you’re right there. 46^th and Market was where Bandstand was; you got on the subway and you’d go there. In the summer I’d dance just about every day—and of course I had to go to school—but sometimes I’d be a bad boy and go over there and dance.

BBP: Did you meet Dick Clark or get a chance to talk to him?

Carroll: Kirk, this was before Dick Clark. A fella had Bandstand originally. His name was Bob Horn, and Bob Horn started Bandstand and it wasn’t quite all over the country, but it was really the roots of rock ‘n’ roll. I don’t think he’s with us anymore (Horn died in 1966). That’s the story. When I went there, it was Bob Horn’s Bandstand. And I did a little bit of Dick Clark, but by that time I was doing record hops with a guy named Billy Harner, and the name of our do-wop group was Billy and Carroll.

BBP: Tell me a little about that. Did you guys tour?

Carroll: Yeah, we did record hops with Fabian, Frankie Avalon, you know? Running all around; no money, honey. But boy did we have fun! The girls loved us! And we’d sign autographs, and I’d go back to school. Most of the people who played our stuff were on black radio stations. We did a lot of their dances, and, man you talk about musicians! I just jumped into the rainbow (laughs) in those days and Billy was right there with me. We’ve since then, of course…we’ve seen each other, but we’re not—he’s still up there in South Jersey, I’m down here in Florida, and—he can have South Jersey (laughs)! There’s two things you have to do there: box and sing. And maybe dance.

BBP: Well now you get to be on that show “Jersey Shore.” Well, that’s a different part of Jersey, I guess.

Carroll: Oh yeah…oh jeez! Please!

BBP: I’m curious, you said you were on “Bandstand,” you must have met a lot of the pioneers of rock back in those days..

Carroll: Oh man, I’ve got some beautiful stories about that. You know, when you’re a kid, especially when rock and roll first started… the jazz…. you had to wait until late to hear it on the radio. But they started playing rock and roll—especially “Bandstand—“early, so you could catch it when you got home from school or whatever. And watching that grow and doing record hops and meeting the people that you’re asking me about—like Bill Haley and the Comets (sighs) God—you know those cats knew how to play! But most of all, they knew how to record. They knew how to record, which they would get separation in those days with just two tracks on that band. If you listen to a Bill Haley recording, or some of the early rock ‘n’ roll stuff, you’re listening to two tracks, man, sometimes four—nothing like today—and those guys would cook.

BBP: Explain that in a little more detail though, because I’m not sure I understand the technology. When you say “separation,” what exactly do you mean by that?

Carroll: Well, you know, engineers in those days had the mike fixed in such a way, because they only got one pass. Let’s say Count Basie and Frank Sinatra, they went into the studio and did that. They didn’t do like double-up tracks, and, you know, in the early days that big band was recorded, and those engineers had to mike that properly. They had to know how, by nature, those instruments sounded. And that spilled over into early rock ‘n’ roll with some of those recordings, because you couldn’t just pile tracks on top of one another forever or even tune them up! If a singer was out of tune they had to do a whole new take. And I mean everybody, you know.

BBP: You know Bobby Parker, he’s a blues guitarist who lives in this area, but I guess he must have run across some of the same people you did. But he said they were recording a group playing, and that they actually put the drum set on an elevator so they could get the right sound or the right reverberations. ..

Carroll: Sure, they would have singers sing in bathrooms, there was all kinds of experimentation on. They didn’t want the drums to leak into all of the other instruments sometimes. I could see maybe why they would put them in an elevator shaft, you know. Whatever. I mean they had all kinds of experimentations they were making, especially out when Sun Records started, they had been known for their echo, you know. And man, if you wanted that sound, you had to go there and record. In Philly there was a place called Reco Art. Actually John Coltrane of all people was early rock ‘n’ roll. He was running around Philly playing early rock ‘n’ roll. I don’t want to ruin anybody’s dreams (laughing), but this guy was walking on bars. In those days the horn player would come out in front of the band and start walking on the bar and the people would go nuts. Your horn players, they were kings, man, and there wasn’t as much guitar as there was sax back then.

BBP: That’s very interesting. Did you ever run across John Coltrane?

Carroll: Oh, no! Jeez, are you kidding? You asked me about it, I’ll tell you. I went to Birdland before it closed, you know, in New York. That was a magnificent experience. Got downstairs, you know, they had a real short fellow that used to MC the show….And what a night, man. I’m sitting there watching ‘Trane, I’m watching Elvin Jones, I mean...McCoy Tyner, I mean these cats were playing in front of me and it was just too good (laughs). There were no recordings and tracks there, baby, they hit it. I mean it was just…rippin,’ you know. And then on top of that, Bill Cosby got up, and set up a few jokes, you know?

BBP: Wow, Bill Cosby? That early? In the fifties?

Carroll: No, that wasn’t in the fifties. I’m sorry buddy, that was during the 1964 World’s Fair.

BBP: Oh, yeah, right, in New York City.

Carroll: Right. That was kind of like when those jazz clubs were—I don’ t know—they were sort of struggling.

BBP: Right. I guess they were sort of on the wane at that time. You play guitar, right? You’re a guitarist?

Carroll: Yeah.

BBP: You mentioned that, during that time—when you started out—horns were kind of a big thing, as opposed to guitars…

Carroll: ...Yeah…

BBP: What made you go into guitars?

Carroll: I was purely thinking below the belt (laughs). The girls all liked it. And Elvis came along, and I went nuts. I thought “Oh, I’m going to do that.” And picked up the guitar, and—oh my God, we didn’t have any teachers, nobody knew about rock ‘n’ roll, they didn’t know what to do about blues—I’d tell them what I’m listening to on the radio and they’d look at me like I was from another planet. And Chuck Berry, forget it, he was just starting out. All that stuff. Bo Diddley. These were the cats that just started coming along in rock ‘n’ roll, put it out front for you, you know. So that’s what inspired me to play.

BBP: Hmm. And also I know you kind of lived through the changes that rock went through, what was going on in the 50’s to the late 60’s. I guess, Jimi Hendrix, the Stones...

Carroll: Oh yeah, well that’s way up there. I had left Philly and went to Florida, played there, and then put a little band together, a little trio: Hammond organ, drums and myself on guitar. We decided we’re heading for New Orleans. And I got out there and I realized I’d better woodshed, man, these cats play! They’re not just playing blues progressions they’re playing some really creative stuff! You know things that kind of like spill into gospel as well as jazz and blues, you know. And I loved the concept of how they played in different time, like funk marches, and things that I hadn’t heard. And they were very exciting. What really knocked me out is they were joyful and levitating. They made you feel real good. Even a funeral, man. You know, you would feel that levitation and that way about that. There’s something special out there, that’s all I can tell you.

BBP: Now you’re talking about the New Orleans musicians?

Carroll: That’s where I wound up after leaving Philly. Spending a little time in Florida, I headed out to there, and I think maybe that’s where I had to sit down with my axe and figure out “Man, this does more than what I’m doing, you know, I’d better (practice) if I want to learn to play”—and it’s 24 hour kind of thing. You can go out after you play in those days, and hear somebody else play at one o’clock, two and three in the morning. (laughs)

BBP: In New Orleans.

Carroll: in New Orleans. In those days, yes.

BBP: Wow. So you were kind of intimidated by what you were hearing around you?

Carroll: Oh, are you kidding me? I didn’t make the first round! I was knocked out of the ring! I just was looking at these guys and saying “How do you do that?” I was playing rock ‘n’ roll as I knew it—50’s rock—but that wasn’t what was happening in New Orleans. They had a whole new way of dealing with things, and they wanted to tell you about blues and jazz, you know. And they were kind. They’d share what they knew with you. And just—you’d find cats like sitting in a diner in a restaurant, having something to eat or coffee “Hey come on over here and sit down, man. Don’t you play at so-and-so’s?” Gunga Din is where I was playing, you wanna believe that name? (laughs)

BBP: Sounds like a place I’m sorry I never got to see…

Carroll: Oh, man, I tell you what: I wouldn’t change a note of any of this. All the way back to Fabian and Frankie Avalon. It was just one wonderful roller-coaster ride, and all of the things that went with it. And of course my father, he was going to have a heart attack, you know. He didn’t think I was going to make a living. I don’t know how I did, to tell you the honest truth. I’ve just been lucky and kept on going.

BBP: You mentioned your father. What did he do for a living?

Carroll: He was a painting contractor. He’d just hand me a brush and tell me “off we go.” And he’d laugh and I’d say “Man, I’m not doing this.” (laughs) And he’d tell me to “keep painting and shut up.”

BBP: Did he want you to follow in the business?

Carroll: He watched me, uh—God bless, him, he’s passed on—but he did watch me hit a few bells. I started working with people who are disabled and I fell in love with it, in Miami, and next thing you know I’m doing veteran’s hospitals and things for Down’s Syndrome and things like that. And all of a sudden I’ve got a pretty good following. I play somewhere and they’d all show up in wheelchairs or be shuttled in by buses, or what have you. The Today Show got a load of this and they came down to—Coconut Grove is where I was living at that point in time—followed me around to all of these facilities and I was on The Today Show doing that. So I kind of tied that in with my thinking in music. There is a way to express your art other than just dance floor. Dance floor’s fun, but there’s other exploits that you want to take yourself on, an adventure, and creativity is wide open. It’s freedom. You know, you can express many different things, and when I started doing that, I realized “well this audience here, is pretty darn cool, man! I’m going to lay it out right here.” I did. I moved to Mount Dora, which is where I’m at, started a company called Mother J Productions, and heck, we raised all kinds of money for folks: in Haiti, when they had that problem; Katrina, we raised money there; got money for the uninsured here in Lake County; there’s no end. Actually I got some award; I won three arts and humanities awards for all this stuff. Not bad for an old dog, right?

BBP: Now I understand at one point you recorded a song with Don Cornelius on a boat? Is that true?

Carroll: (laughs) Yeah, man! You know, I’ve had such a unique career. I did the first album at sea, on a 110-foot ship. You ready for that? All the people that have managed me or had anything to do with promoting my music have all been African-Americans. That’s where I fit best. I’m probably the only white artist that Cornelius managed. When we did that ship, it was not just him, it was Don Cornelius and Dick Griffey. Dick Griffey was huge in the concert business as well as owning Solar records. He was pretty much over the top, man. He had made it big time. And those two cats, man, they just put me right where I needed to be out there, and let me give you an idea of who was on that session. This is what’s cool. Leon Pendarvis was one of the keyboard players and he’s the musical director for Saturday Night Live nowadays. Chuck Leavell, who is a piano player for the Rolling Stones. Willie Hall, who is one of the Blues Brothers in the movie. Willie played drums. And Tim Drummond, who was Bob Dylan’s bass player. So you could tell by this staff of people, it was all top of the line. And Cornelius and Griffey did not spare a dime. They laid it all out there; I don’t know what they paid for that, but can you imagine staffing a ship? And moving an entire recording studio onto the bow of the ship for a week?

BBP: Wow, that’s incredible. What was the song that you recorded?

Carroll: I did a whole album out there. Bob Johnston really was the producer. The executive producers were Don Cornelius and Dick Griffey, but the producer was Bob Johnston and Johnston produced Dylan and Simon and Garfunkel. And there’s no end to it—Johnny Cash—so he was pretty much the top dog as far as that goes, and off we went. And we did a whole album...maybe ten tunes, maybe eleven tunes, and most of that stuff was kind of bluesy…you know, what they call “Americana” now? It’s kind of a mixture of stuff? Americana music. Well that’s probably the category it would fall into now. Back then, I had a little trouble; they didn’t know what it was. That was a problem (laughs).

BBP: Whose idea was it to do it on a boat? I mean, how did that come about and—tell me how the whole thing happened.

Carroll: Okay. I’m playing a place called the Hideaway—what a metaphor for this story—and here comes Cornelius and Griffey and they come in and they go “Oh my God, Man are you recording any of that stuff? Let’s do it!” Now it’s started: “Okay now, who do you want to produce you?” I said “Well, I sure would like Quincy Jones. He’s out there in LA with you guys, you know.” And they said that they could, but there’s another producer that’s hot, you know, and had a couple of hits out, and Quincy was doing what he did with Michael Jackson at that point in time. He was kind of in-between.

BBP: Where were you when they met you?

Carroll: When they saw me play, Griffey and Cornelius, I was in Florida, in Hollywood, Florida at the Hideaway Lounge. They asked me about producers as it went on. Not that night, but later on we decided to record. And they asked me about producers, and of course Quincy Jones was my favorite, but—Jeez I still kick myself over not going that direction—but they had said Bob Johnston was hot and that he might understand what I’m doing. Because he was doing some, oh, you know, he did a variety of things from Johnny Cash to Paul Simon, you know. So you could tell that they were thinking about those routes. Anyway, Bob Johnston got the gig, and he was quite—he had all the gold records. He was quite a big deal at that point in time. And that’s how that happened. And Johnston came up with the idea of doing it on a ship. And he wanted to do it off the coast of Catalina. Man, the kind of money they must have spent in those days! Can you imagine, these guys are landing in the water…seaplanes! Coming from gigs, man! Get out of here! Yeah, it was Hollywood, you know. It was like being in a movie or something.

BBP: You mean Catalina off the coast of California?

Carroll: Yeah. Catalina Island. Off the coast of Catalina Island.

BBP: Wow. That’s incredible.

Be sure to catch the next installment, when Carroll talks about the song he wrote for the Whispers.

Coco Montoya Interview

2012-11-29T07:02:00.002-08:00

Thanks to the D.C. Blues Society, I had a chance to hear Coco Montoya on Sunday, when he played the Hamilton in downtown Washington, D.C. And it was an amazing show: both he and his band were in top form.

Had a chance to talk to Coco a little bit afterwards. The conversation went from his amazing band and how they came together, his work with Keb Mo and his views on the popularity--or lack thereof-of blues music. Check it out.

Last Hurrah: the 2012 D.C. Blues Festival September, 2012

2012-09-25T20:09:00.002-07:00

The annual D.C. Blues Festival is one of my last hurrahs of the year when it comes to blues. After that, it starts getting too cold for festivals. You can catch individual acts at clubs, but it’s just not the same as the musical smorgasbord available at a festival. I’m sure you can relate.

Anyway, this year’s festival at Carter Barron Amphitheatre in northwest D.C. provided enough good music to hold me for a while. The headliner was Sugar Ray & the Bluestones, a New England-based band that has backed Roosevelt Sykes, Big Walter Horton and J.B. Hutto. Also playing was Sista Monica Parker, who has shared the stage with luminaries such as the Neville Brothers, Ray Charles, Little Milton, Etta James and Koko Taylor and Lionel Young, who fronts his award-winning band with an uncommon lead instrument, the violin. Two D.C. area favorites, Clarence “the Bluesman” Turner and the D.C. Blues Society Band with singer Ayaba Bey, were also on the bill.

The Bluetones pretty much highlighted the blues festival with a performance of “Evening,” the title song of their 2011 album, a project that secured four nominations in the 2012 Blues Music Awards, including Album of the Year:

A former Marine, Sista Monica is known as “The Lioness of Blues” in Europe. She cut her teeth singing in the choir of the church she attended in her native Gary, Indiana. I can definitely hear that influence here:

Lionel Young is a classically-trained violinist who has played with the Pittsburgh Opera-Ballet Orchestra, as well as other orchestras. He is the first and only person to win both the solo/duo and the band competition at the International Blues Challenge, winning the former in 2008 and the latter in 2011. He also played the 2012 D.C. Blues Festival’s after-party, where this performance with singer Nadine Rae was shot:

We didn’t shoot video of Clarence “the Bluesman” Turner or the D.C. Blues Society Band at this year’s festival. But we have plenty of them from past years.

Here’s Clarence at the College Park Blues Festival last November:

And here’s the D.C. Blues Society Band featuring Ayaba Bey at the same event:

Hey, I don't have to tell you it was a fun festival with good performers. Let us know what's going on in your area. Contact us at beldonsbluespoint@yahoo.com

Off to See the Wizard: Steve Vai On Tour

2012-09-14T15:35:00.003-07:00

At age 18, while a student at Boston’s Berklee School of Music, Steve Vai started transcribing guitar compositions by Frank Zappa. At 20, he sent the Zappa a copy of “The Black Page,” an instrumental the music legend had written for drums. He also sent Zappa a recording of himself playing the guitar.

Vai caught Zappa’s attention. And when the two finally met, they started a relationship that would eventually lead to Vai playing in Zappa’s band.

Since then, Vai has built a reputation as one of the world’s most highly-regarded and influential guitarists. Now 52 years old, he has worked with some of the leading names in music: singer David Lee Roth, bassist Billy Sheehan, steel pedal guitarist Robert Randolph, Ozzy Osbourne and the group Whitesnake, among others.

And he has released a number of highly acclaimed solo projects, the latest of which is The Story of Light, his eighth studio album and the second in a planned trilogy that started in 2005 with Real Illusions: Reflections. Vai is promoting the album on a tour that is taking him to several cities in North America and Europe, including D.C.’s Howard Theatre, where the videos you see in this post were recorded.

A rocker at his core, Vai crosses the line into the jazz-rock territory explored by Zappa, Jeff Beck as well as Joe Satriani, who gave him guitar lessons while both attended the same Long Island high school. Some might describe Vai as flashy, both in his playing and in his stage presentation (at one point during his performance at the Howard, he came out in what looked like a space suit!)

But with someone of Vai’s abilities, flash is only on the surface. To me, it appeared that he was experimenting to see what sounds he could coax from his guitar; the audience just happened to be in the room with him.

Thinking about it again, I wasn’t sure which one was in control, Vai or his guitar. They seemed to have the same kind of relationship that a good ventriloquist has with his mannequin: after a while you’re not sure which one is actually doing the talking.

Vai started learning guitar at 13. A year later, he was taking lessons from Satriani, four years his senior.

His professional career took off in 1979 after Zappa hired him to transcribe his guitar solos. The transcriptions were eventually published in 1982 in a volume called The Frank Zappa Guitar Book. Vai then went on to overdub many of the guitar parts for Zappa’s album, You Are What Is, and in 1980 started touring with Zappa.

During the tour, Vai would sometimes ask audience members to bring musical scores which he would sight-read during the shows.

After leaving Zappa in 1982, Vai recorded Flex-Able, his first album. In 1985, he became the lead guitarist in the group Alcatrazz, replacing Yngwie Malmsteen.

Later in 1985, following the advice of his friend, bassist Billy Sheehan, Vai joined a new group formed by David Lee Roth, former singer for Van Halen.

As a debut album, the group, which also included Sheehan, released Eat ‘em and Smile. The album, which sold over two million copies, eventually reached #4 on Billboard’s 200 album chart. Vai personally drew kudos from Rolling Stone magazine, which compared him favorably to Van Halen guitarist Eddie Van Halen.

In 1988, the group released its sophomore album, Skyscraper, which Vai and Roth produced.

Vai joined the group Whitesnake in 1989. He played all the guitar parts on the group’s album Slip of the Tongue after guitarist Adrian Vandenberg injured his wrist. He also played on Alice Cooper’s Hey Stoopid, joining forces with his old guitar teacher Joe Satriani on the song “Feed My Frankenstein.”

The year 1990 saw Vai release a solo album, Passion and Warfare. A reader’s poll in Guitar World magazine picked a single from the album, “For the Love of God,” as number 29 on a list of the 100 greatest guitar solos of all time.

Vai began recording and writing with Osbourne in 1994. Although a cut from these sessions, “My Lilttle Man,” was included in Osbourne’s Ozzmosis album, Vai did not play on it. Instead, guitarist Zakk Wylde played his parts.

In the late 90’s, Vai joined Satriani for the so-called G3 tour. A live album was released from the tour.

Vai, Sheehan, pianist Tony MacAlpine, guitarist Dave Weiner and drummer Virgil Donati held a concert at London’s Astoria, releasing a DVD of the event in December, 2001.

The guitarist traveled to Tokyo in July, 2002 to join the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra for the world premier of composer Ichiro Nodaira’s Fire Strings, a concerto written for a 100-piece orchestra and electric guitar.

Vai premiered The Blossom Suite, his piece for electric and classical guitar, in 2005 at Paris’ Châtelet Theatre. The following year, he joined the “Zappa Plays Zappa” tour led by Frank Zappa’s son, Dweezil.

In 2010, Vai joined the North Netherlands Orchestra to play several compositions mixing rock and orchestral music. That same year, he appeared on The Tonight Show and American Idol to perform with artists such as Mary J. Blige, Orianthi, Travis Barker, Ron Fair and Randy Jackson.

Outside of his work as a performer and recording artist, Vai is a supporter of Little Kids Rock, a non-profit organization providing free musical instruments and instruction to public school children. He also is the founder of the Make A Noise Foundation, an organization which provides money for music education to people of limited means.

He also has developed a line of guitars with the Ibanez company. Among them is a seven-string guitar that, because of its capability for low tunings, eventually attracted the attention of the metal groups Korn and Limp Bizkit.

After the concert at the Howard ended, we were able to ask Vai a couple of questions. First, we asked him about Frank Zappa:

We then asked him who his favorite guitar players were overall:

We are Family- Prince's The Family Returns as fDeluxe

2012-09-04T07:49:00.002-07:00

Any of you eighties aficionados remember “The Family?” It was an off-shoot group formed post-Purple Rain by Prince with members of two bands in his revue: Morris Day and the Time and the Revolution.

Last year, four of The Family's five original members decided to reform the group. Now calling itself fDeluxe, the group last September released Gaslight, its first CD in over 25 years.

And last week the group reached another plateau, performing its latest single, “You Got What You Wanted,” before an audience at Washington, D.C.’s Howard Theatre only a day after the song's official release. The performance took place while fDeluxe was opening for yet another star in the Prince universe: Sheila E.

The core members of fDeluxe (the old name was off-limits for reasons we’ll discuss later) are drummer/guitarist Jellybean Johnson, a one-time member of the Time who in recent years has traded licks with blues musicians Ronnie Baker Brooks and Bernard Allison; singer Susannah Melvoin, twin sister of Revolution guitarist Wendy Melvoin and one-time fiancé of Prince; saxophonist Eric Leeds, previously a member of Madhouse, a Prince project that focused on jazz/rock fusion and singer/bassist St. Paul Peterson, who started playing with the Time while still in high school and who comes from a family of jazz musicians.

Prince formed the original group, which then also included Jerome Benton of the Time, in 1985 with Peterson as the lead singer.

“When we were filming Purple Rain, our dressing rooms were right next to Prince’s and Morris and I used to have these little sing-offs,” Peterson told SoulTrain.com last year.

“I’m guessing this is where Prince heard me sing. When the Time disbanded (with the departure in 1985 of Day, guitarist Jesse Johnson, keyboardist Mark Cardenas and bassist Jerry Hubbard), Prince gathered everyone who was left and we talked and he said, ‘I want to do a new band and I want you to be the lead singer.’ And he pointed at me. So that was how that baby began—the dissolution of the Time and him having a creative outlet for some other songs.”

Internal pressures soon led to The Family’s dissolution, but not before it had released The Family, an album that includes the 1985 hit “Screams of Passions.” Another song, “Nothing Compares 2 U,” was covered by Sinead O’Conner.

The members moved on with their lives, with Peterson releasing songs as a solo artist; Melvoin first joining the Revolution, then taking up songwriting and Johnson and Benton rejoining a re-formed Time. Leeds, meanwhile, played with Sheila E’s E Train group and also garnered accolades from critics with a series of solo albums, but reportedly left music for a while to become a railroad engineer.

But in 2003, Sheila E invited the group to do a charity benefit in San Francisco. According to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, it took only one hour of rehearsal for the old juices to start flowing again. When the session was over, Melvoin and Peterson agreed to “finish what we started” and the family--most of it anyway--was reborn.

Still, things did not really get underway until 2007, when the Roots invited the group to play at its annual pre-Grammy party. There, they were told by Roots drummer Ahmir “?uestlove” Thompson that The Family was one of his ten favorite records.

The name change to fDeluxe came after Prince reportedly turned down requests from Melvoin and Peterson to use the old name.

Group members spent personal funds to finance Gaslight, which derives its name from a 1940’s film starring Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman.

They describe their sound as “adult pop music.” “We don’t have any illusions about this music appealing to younger kids,” Leeds told SoulTrain.com. “The goal and the challenge are to get this music in front of people who will enjoy it.”

At the Howard, the audience was eager to hear "You Got What You Wanted":

The group also played “Sanctified:”

And my personal favorite of the evening was this one:

Of course, we can’t let you go without sharing a little bit of what the extraordinary Sheila E gave the Howard that night:

Meeting Musical Needs Everywhere: Part II of Our Interview with Mikey Junior

2012-08-29T06:01:00.002-07:00

Here is part 2 of our interview with blues harmonica player Mikey Junior:

BBP: How many times have you been to the IBC (International Blues Challenge)?

Mikey: Four. I was there in 2005; I was there in 2007; I was there in 2011 and 2012. I’ve been there competing four times; however I’ve attended six times. Because ever since 2005 I’ve been going every year except one year. It was the year I was buying my house that I told you about. Because it was a fixer-upper house, it was a construction site. I basically bought a house that needed to have a new roof, new siding, new windows, the whole shebang, so because of my construction background I was the one who was being the contractor on it. So I had to be here for it and that was the one year I missed going to the IBC.

BBP: This year I think you were in the quarter-finals?

Mikey: We were in the finals. We made the finals this year.

BBP: Right! Yeah! Have you ever won?

Mikey: No, I never won and I never made the finals. This was the very first year that I even made the finals.

BBP: What does that say that you’ve been there five years and you’ve finally made the finals? Do you feel like your getting closer to…

Mikey: No. It’s great, but I don’t look at it like—first of all, and please put this in there, music is a cooperation, never a competition. To me. And the reason I take part in the IBC is I like what it is as a place to promote your music to a mass amount of blues fans, promoters, agents. I don’t look at it as “Let’s go win a competition.” The competition is always secondary to me. What is most important about going to the IBC is to get people who have never heard the Mikey Jr. band, Mikey Jr. and the Stone Cold Blues, to hear us and say “Hey, we’d like to have them at our place. We’d like to have them come play for us at our festival.” We’ve already gotten three festivals from playing the IBC this year. And I’m sure we’re going to get some festivals next year off of it as well. It’s basically a promotion thing for me; I really like to promote myself at the IBC.

BBP: I see. One thing I noticed—getting back to playing the harmonica—I was listening to a couple of your album: did you listen to a lot of jazz growing up?

Mikey: Not a whole lot, but it might be because I listen to a lot of William Clark a little bit and maybe he’s like a lot of the jazz horn players. That could be where it comes in at, a little third hand, third party. But yeah, I’m really into jazz. I’m getting more into it. But I like the really slow kind of boring… you might say, jazz…for lack of a better word. I like the slow, down-and-out, really bluesy jazz.

BBP: You know the reason I asked that, because, if you don’t mind me saying, it seems like you sort of approach a solo like a jazz person would do. Like a jazz saxophonist or trumpeter. I mean I was listening to some of your albums and I was kind of thinking that.

Mikey: Well thank you. I just try to take my time in the studio because less is always more, and sometimes I try to not play….I try to play with space.

BBP: Okay, I see what you’re saying. Another thing I noticed was that—when I saw you at the IBC—you had a four piece band—a guitar player, yourself (on harmonica), Jimmy Pritchard on bass and the drummer. And I noticed that on some of your albums you use other instruments, like keyboards and stuff. What’s the ideal band for you?

Mikey: Well I’m looking for—of course I would love—a horn section, a piano player, upright bass—but right now, I think—I just added a guitar player to my band by the name of Dean Shot—so now we’re a five piece band. I would just love to have, first and foremost, a piano player that plays Otis Spann type piano, in my band. I’m looking for someone who knows and loves and wants to play like Otis Spann on piano in my band. To tell you the truth, I love the band the way it is right now. I’m very happy. Musically we’ve all got it together as far as being on the same page with each other, which is very important, and we all have a lot of fun when we play. So basically my ideal band is the band I have now with some sort of piano player. Like we love Bill Heid but Bill Heid lives a little further away so he can’t be on a lot of our stuff. Bill’s the guy who was on the last two albums of ours out of D.C.

BBP: Mikey, I wanted to ask you. You have talked about Sonny Boy Williamson. Would that be Sonny Boy Williamson the first or the second?

Mikey: Two. Aleck Miller.

BBP: Is he the harmonica player that you like the most? The one who has most influenced your playing?

Mikey: Yeah.

BBP: Okay. Tell me what you took from him listening to his records and why he stands out from the others.

Mikey: It was just his whole character. His demeanor. The way he just had…. It was his presence too. Just his presence and I just liked the way he performed. And, seeing his old videos, I was a big fan of him and his music, but being able to see all of the stuff on YouTube now, I had all of the DVD’s especially of the American Folk Blues Festival. But being able to see a lot of this stuff on YouTube that’s coming out, and being able to see even more his demeanor, he just was very personable, he was a born entertainer and he was just musically just really good.

BBP: Is there somebody who comes a close second? Another harmonica player?

Mikey: Well, you know I never really put nobody first. But what I’m saying is, he’s probably my most influential. I could never put nobody first because that’s how people develop their styles, by taking a bunch of different styles from a bunch of different artists. But I definitely, without them being in any order, for me it’s Sonny Boy, William Clarke, Little Walter, George “Harmonica” Smith, Gary Primich, Big Walter, Snooky Pryor, I mean I can go on and on. Steve Guyger—those are right off the top of my head, they’re probably the ones that influenced me the most. There’s a lot of harmonica players out there…but those are the ones I mostly liked. If they were all playing up the street from me, I would definitely probably have to go see Sonny Boy Williamson. And I’m pretty sure that all of the other harp players, I would go. And Junior Wells is one that I forgot to mention, but he was very influential, I would say the most influential to my playing when I first started playing the harmonica.

BBP: And Sonny Boy is at the top of the list? And Junior Wells, you’re not that much influenced by him anymore?

Mikey: No, I’m very much influenced by all of them, all of the time. When I first started learning, I learned a lot about Junior Wells and a lot about Sonny Boy, and then when I started getting into chromatic of course, I started getting into George Smith and William Clarke and you know, I wanted to start getting into third position or what have you, then Gary Primich, and of course William Clarke again.

BBP: So you’re talking about different harmonica techniques…

Mikey: Yeah, I love them all. See, I don’t think I could put any one harmonica at the top, any one player and go, “this is my favorite,” because they’re so many techniques out there. For instance, guys like Kim Wilson and guys like Rick Estrin are my favorites living these days because they can play like those people. And if you say hey, play me this song, play it like this, play this song, play me a Sonny Boy song, or play me a Big Walter song or play me chromatic William Clarke, or play me Junior Wells—they can play it, you know. And they can do it just like that.

BBP: Tell me a little bit about the songwriting that you do. I know that songwriting’s a very integral part of what you do as well. How does that kind of figure into things? And when you write a song, where does it start, the process you have for writing a song?

Mikey: We usually start with some sort of saying or some sort of—I don’t know it’s like a gift that kind of comes to you. And basically all I can say about songwriting is you better have the paper and pen, because it only comes to you then, and if you go “I’ll remember it,” and “I’ll get back to it later” you never do. And so many of my songs are probably lost in the wind like that, because you know, I’m busy throughout my day. I’m like:”Oh, I’ll get back to that later…” I have a lot of unfinished songs, because you know it’s just sometimes you get that vibe; you know sometimes you’ll do a song and you’ll write a song, for instance, you take a song, and you’ll be pouring your heart out into it and you say exactly what you feel. But then in the middle of the song, you might feel it’s a little too personal, so you might write it for the song next. You might have been writing the beginning of the song for you, because it’s really how you feel, but sometimes you say “ah, it’s getting a little too personal. I’m going to start making this song fictional.” So you never know, with me and my writing, you never know where the fiction stops and the truth begins….All of my songs basically have a lot of truth and a lot of fiction in them. And some of them are just written fictionally. But I think it’s hardest to write stuff that’s really really really real. I put a lot of fiction in my songs, because I’m not very open like that, you know?

BBP: Tell me in your albums, what percentage of your songs are covers and what percentage are originals? You know, typically.

Mikey: The record labels want to hear originals. But when I go out to see a blues band, I’d love to hear Little Walter just like Little Walter. But just like him now, I don’t want to hear Little Walter play where I can tell where the guy is really like, doing it the right way. I want to hear just like it or very—I want to hear it with the feeling. That’s just me, and it’s very opinionated. Back to the IBC, that’s another reason why you can’t look at it as some concerts, because it’s opinionated. People like what they like and don’t like what they don’t like. And they like a certain thing. And it’s just like me; it’s my opinion that I want to do covers, but the radio people or anybody making money trying to make a living promoting blues music or whatever, they want the originals. Because you get royalties, you want original music. They want something new and original.

BBP: Right.

Mikey: I do want that too, but I like being able to do covers. But do I believe you should do just the same old covers? I don’t know. I did “Can’t be Satisfied” on one of my last records, and yeah, maybe it should be left alone. Muddy did it the way he wanted, but I wasn’t doing it because I thought I could do it better than Muddy or whatever. I was just doing it because it’s a song I like to perform. When I perform it, if anybody ever asks me, “Hey, do you have that song on your record?” the next time I go to the studio, maybe I can record that song. Because if people like it when I play it live, the whole point is that I want to try and sell the CD so they come see me again and I get my name out there. And now I’m in their household. So basically that’s also how I choose to record what I record on a CD is, if someone asks me, “Hey is that song on your CD?” and it’s not, sometimes the next time in the studio, I’ll record that song.

BBP: Sort of like you do at the nursing home…

Mikey: Yeah! Exactly! I try to make people happy, and if people come out to see my show, they’re getting in their car and they’re driving out to come see me perform somewhere, and if they ask me to do something, I want to try and do it for them. And especially if they’re asking me, “oh is that on your CD?” The way I look at it is, if it was on my CD, I could have sold a CD right there. Maybe next week they have my CD and they go “oh, we’ll listen to Mikey while we’re cleaning up our dishes here. Where’s he playing at this weekend? We’ll go on his website, you know.” I want to get CD’s into people’s hands.

BBP: So it’s a matter of giving people what they want to hear…

Mikey: Yeah.

BBP: Gotcha. Tell me, I was looking at your itinerary and you got a gig coming up with Bnois King and Smokin’ Joe Kubek. That sounds like it’s a definite step in the right direction. How’d that come about?

Mikey: Well, we’ve been working up at Stanhope House, and we’ve been trying to beef up our attendance there because quite frankly not a lot of people know who Mikey and the Stone Cold Blues band are. So we try to go places and try to say “Hey, can we open up for one of your acts” where we can try and get people to see if they like us and want to come back. So that’s what we’ve been doing over at the Stanhope House; we’ve been trying to develop sort of a following. We’ve got a few shows over there, and we’ve gotten more and more people to attend every show. So now they’ve got us opening for Smokin Joe and Bnois King, so hopefully we can get some more people to attend our show after we open up for these guys.

BBP: Okay…

Mikey: And we also opened up for Smokin’ Joe and Bnois King for the Diamond State Blues Society in 2005.

BBP: So they know you. They’re familiar with you.

Mikey: I’m not sure. I’m sure that they’ve been on the road. They’re musicians their whole lives so I don’t know if they remember being on my show, because I’m pretty sure they came in after I was done. But it’s nice to be on the bill with them. Absolutely. I don’t know if they know me, but …

BBP: But you’ve opened for other people that have national prominence…

Mikey: Oh we’re going to be opening up for Johnny Winter again, for the second time since July. We’ve opened for like Michael Burks…probably the list goes on and on. I’ve never had a list of who I’ve opened up for, but I’ve opened up for a lot of people. It’s great; we’ve opened up for Nappy Brown before he passed away. Bob Margolin. So it’s been really good.

BBP: Yeah. And I also noticed that you tend to kind of favor the East Coast, the Eastern Seaboard, I guess. I notice that you’re doing a show in Florida, a festival—I forget which one it is—

Mikey: Daytona Blues Festival…

BBP: And that’s coming up in…

Mikey: October. October 6^th.

BBP: That’s definitely sort of a step-out as well. How’d that come about?

Mikey: That was a gentleman who had seen us at the IBC.

BBP: Is there anything else you’d like to add?

Mikey: Yeah, I’d like to tell all of the blues fans out there, to work hard and try to get some new blood out. Bring your friend out to a blues show, become a member of any kind of local blues society, go to a blues club, and it’s an American art form and we have it and we need to nurture it so that it can grow. And I just encourage everybody to be members of blues societies. I’m a current and up-to-date member to almost ten blues societies. Which means I pay between $20 and $60 a year to maintain my membership. It’s because I believe in the societies and what they do. Even though I’m an artist, I’m also a blues fan. Before I was an artist, I was a blues fan. And it’s very important that we support your societies. If you send them that $25 a year, that really helps them to bring talent from all over the world, and all over the country to your local neighborhood. You know, be a part of something to preserve something that needs to be preserved, it needs to grow. And everybody should try to—buy a CD, buy a blues CD, give it to someone, buy a book about blues and give it to someone. There’s a lot of young people who are intrigued about the folklore of Robert Johnson., because they heard this guy sold his soul to the Devil to be able to play great guitar. That intrigues young people, and then they’ll say “I like Robert Johnson.” And the next thing you know you have a new blues band. You’ve got to be able to educate people and tell stories so that we’ll be able to keep these guys alive. That’s what I’d like to close with.

Meeting Musicial Needs Everywhere: Mikey Junior and His Stone Cold Blues Part 1

2012-08-25T20:20:00.001-07:00

As a teen-ager, while waiting tables in a Bucks County, Pennsylvania restaurant, Mikey Jr.’s primary aim was to take care of his customers.

“I worked every single Friday and Saturday night from the time I was 12 to the time I was basically 22. And worked at Italian restaurants,” recalled Mikey. “And by the time I was 15, I was a waiter …I had nothing but requests from Friday and Saturday night because I was really good at anticipating people’s needs and taking care of people.”

These days, he is still anticipating needs—but as a harmonica player of rising reputation in the blues world. As leader of Mikey Jr. and the Stone Cold Blues, Mikey tries to give blues fans the music they want.

Mikey tries to please his fans through albums, through a heavy touring schedule that these days is taking him more and more frequently outside of the Pennsylvania-to Baltimore corridor he has--up until now--been best known in; and through his role as house musician and booking agent at the Twisted Tail, Philadelphia’s newest blues venue.

Mikey is always busy—he frequently had to put me on hold during our hour and a half phone conversation to handle business. But that's what comes with having such a love of music that you decide to pursue making a living at it full time.

“You’ve got to be able to work, and you’ve got to be able to get the stuff done,” he said. “You know I do all of the booking, I do all of the promotion, right down to my web design, and designing flyers and posters.”

Born Andrew Michael Hudak in Trenton, N.J., Mikey was heavily exposed to music as a youth through his father, a full-time harmonica player and pianist.

“My dad took me to see James Brown in 1984 when I was four years old at the Trenton War Memorial Building--that was my first concert—and it was great,” he recalled. “I just always loved rhythm and blues, but it wasn’t until I was older that I found blues. I found what I liked so much and a lot of the influences of music that I was listening to, whether it be rap music or even Pink Floyd for that matter. I just fell in love with the blues and Sonny Boy Williamson and B.B. King and Buddy Guy and then, later on, Little Walter and George Smith. And then all of the way down to people like Gary Primich, of course, William Clarke, you know, people like that. “

Mikey lived in Trenton until 1989, when his mother, in search of a better school system, moved him to Bucks County. He moved back to Trenton at age 20, into a house left to him by an aunt. He has since moved back to Bucks County, into a condo he purchased.

Growing up, he frequently went on gigs with his father, liking best the fifties-themed parties the band hosted at campgrounds throughout the area.

Industrious from a young age, Mikey joined the staff of Salvatore’s restaurant in Morrisville, Pennsylvania as a busboy at age 12. “And then......(near Morrisville) also was this place called Café Antonio’s,” he recalled. “And a waiter from Salvatore’s went to work there and he liked the way I took care of him so much because I used to really take care of my waiters when I was a busboy. ..(he) liked me so much that when he got a job at this new restaurant that was opening, he called me up and said ‘hey, I can get you a busboy job at this restaurant.’ Well, I only bussed there for a couple of weeks, until they said ‘Hey, if you want to wait tables, you can wait tables.’ And they let me start waiting tables.”

At 19, he added another trade—real estate—to his repertoire by earning his real estate license. Then, his work days consisted of a nine-to-five job as a real estate assistant, followed by evenings waiting tables.

But the music continued to call to him, and eventually he dropped the waiter’s gig. The real estate job soon followed, and in 2002 Mikey Junior went to music full-time. He starting performing shows; the instinct for customer service that had served him so well as a waiter compelling him to play songs he sensed his audience really wanted to hear instead of dryly spitting out a set list.

Mikey also began to release a series of CD’s, all under a label he created, 8^th Train Records. In 2003 he released The 420 Sessions, an album recorded at a studio in Tarpon Springs Florida and produced by Danny DeGennaro, a Philadelphia area guitarist known for his work in Kingfish, a group that also included Grateful Dead guitarist Bob Weir. Other notable musicians DeGennaro had worked for over the years included the late Clarence Clemons and Parliament Funkadelic guitarist Michael Hampton.

DeGennaro, who died last December after he was found in his Levittown, Pennsylvania home with a bullet wound to his chest, also played on Mikey's album along with bassist Gary “Bubba” Balduzzi, drummer Kenny Suarez and keyboardist Pete Kane.

DeGennaro also produced and played on Mikey’s second album The New York City Sessions, released in 2005. The CD also featured Balduzzi on bass but included a different keyboardist, Glen McClelland, and alternated between two different drummers, Adam Stranburg and Dave Mohn.

Mikey’s present band began to take shape with 2007’s Look Inside My Pocket, including Stranburg, now his current drummer; and Matt Daniels, a guitarist from New Jersey who had shared the stage at various times with Sonny Rhodes, Walter Trout and Rod Piazza and who had been lauded by a critic from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette newspaper as a guitarist whose instrument “crackles especially hard.” Mikey also brought on bassist Jimmy Pritchard, known for his work with Rhodes and with Randy Lippincott, a Philadelphia-area guitarist who had once played bass for Johnny Copeland. (If you want to know more about Pritchard, check out the post: Jimmy Pritchard )

For his next album, 2009’s Mikey Likes it, Mikey brought in Upright Bass Player Mike Lampe, Piano player Bill Heid and guitarist Dave Gross to round out his core band of Daniels, Pritchard and Stranburg.

Mikey and Daniels then decided to branch off into a solo project. The result was 2010’s Pocket Full of Money, an acoustic album that showcased Mikey’s take on more traditional styles.

The Stone Cold’s latest venture is It Ain’t Ours to Tell, released in 2011. A song from that album, “The Cheapskate,” was part of a three-way tie that won Big City Rhythm and Blues Magazine’s “Coolest Blues Song of the Year” award in 2011.

The band also was a finalist in the 2012 International Blues Challenge, held in Memphis in February. It was Mikey’s first time to the finals in four visits over seven years. He had previously attended the IBC in 2005, 2007 and 2011.

Mikey said he will soon release a collection of “original Mikey Junior” material. In addition, he and Daniels will travel to France next year to perform.

We began our interview by asking him about the very first time he picked up a harmonica:

BBP: I know you grew up in Trenton. Tell me how you got into music. You know, the first time you ever picked up an instrument, and especially the first time you ever picked up a harmonica.

Mikey: Well, I always loved music….I mean you know my dad was a musician, that’s why they call me Mikey Jr. He still is a full-time musician in the Trenton area. He lives in Browns Mills, New Jersey and he taught me how to play piano at first—he always played harmonica and piano. I’d always try to pick up the harmonica as a kid, but never really took it seriously until I was 17. I started being able to make sense on it and then I started to study it, and that’s how I got into the harmonica.

BBP: So you play the piano in addition to the harmonica?

Mikey: Yeah I play the piano but very much not professionally (laughs). But I do dabble. I know some songs on both the piano and the guitar and I love music and I play a little bit of piano and guitar as well.

BBP: What style of music does your dad play?

Mikey: Well he does everything now because he specializes in doing nursing homes these days. He does two or three a day. And I also do them during the day as well too. That’s what pays my bills for day work. I do between three or four a week; he does between two or three a day. I just got into it a couple of years ago. He’s been doing it for the past ten years. So he works a lot steadier than I do doing that, but I also try to go out on the road and do touring. So I try to work at them sporadically. But anyway, my dad—when I was younger—had a seven-piece, fifties rock n’ roll band where they did “Runaround Sue” and “Secret Agent Man” and “the Wanderer,” which is pretty cool because I had a chance to be on a Blues Cruise with Dion this year and talk to him and get my picture taken with him. My dad was real proud of me. My dad used to do all kinds of stuff. He was quite the showman. He used to do “Leader of the Pack” and drive around the bar on a tricycle—a little kid’s tricycle—and my dad’s like six-three. He had a routine where he used to do “Secret Agent Man” and come out in this trenchcoat with a suit on and basically do “Secret Agent Man.” He’d be hamming it up. In his later years he slowed down a bit. He just does a duo show with my stepmom—who I introduced him to—and they travel all throughout New Jersey and Pennsylvania doing nursing homes. And they work a little bit of the clubs at night as well, but they mostly do nursing homes during the day.

BBP: Okay. Now when you were young, did your father take you with him when he did his shows?

Mikey: Oh absolutely! Absolutely. I remember when my father—I remember distinctively, there’s a picture of me and my dad outside of one of the places he used to work at—that I work at now—in Tuckerton, New Jersey. My friend bought a bar in Tuckerton called Doyle’s Pour House.

(Mikey has to put me on hold to take a phone call, and we resume a short time later)

BBP: So your father used to take you out and do shows with him…

Mikey: For instance, I got a picture of me at this place Doyle’s Pour House in Tuckerton, New Jersey—it used to be called Cock’s Tail and it was a strip club where my dad and I had our picture taken out in front of there with one of the strippers, of course fully-clothed when I was really young—but yeah, I used to go to his stuff. He used to do campground gigs where the whole band would go to the campground for the weekend and they’d have a fifties revue party where everybody would dress up in old fifties clothes and stuff and of course it was great because everybody knew that I was the son of the lead singer, you know. So I was a little bit of a superstar in my own right. And I used to sing, and, like you know, my dad would bring me up. I was real into Guns N’ Roses at that time—I think it was like 1989, I was probably nine years old—and he got me to sing “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” with the band and stuff like that. So yeah, my favorite times was probably going to the campgrounds to see his band perform and being able to camp out all night. Because needless to say, my dad and his band would be partyin’, so I’d pretty much be unsupervised to do whatever I wanted, so it was pretty fun.

BBP: Wow. Did your father actually take you aside and show you how to play the harmonica?

Mikey: Oh absolutely. My dad taught me a lot about the music business, both musically and businesswise. And yeah, he taught me how to play the harmonica; he bought me my very first Sonny Boy Williamson CD. He bought me my B.B. King CD. And yeah, absolutely taught me how to play the harmonica and the guitar. Other teachers of mine are a guy named Dick Davy in Bristol, Pennsylvania; Big Daddy Lambertson; and I listen to a lot of Steve Guyger. Steve Guyger is one of my heavy influences, as well as some of the people I mentioned earlier, you know. Little Walter. Sonny Boy II probably goes down as one of my favorites as far as the whole package of singing, songwriting. But yes, my dad did have an influence on my music and my career. Another person who was like a musical father to me was a guy named Danny DeGennaro. He just passed away December 28. He was actually murdered in his house from a home invasion, unfortunately. I performed a couple of his songs—one of his songs—in Memphis, Tennessee. I co-wrote a couple of songs with him—he was on my first two albums playing guitar, producing my first two albums, and he taught me a lot about the music business. He was on a record with Jerry Garcia because he was in a band called Kingfish, which was a take-off of the Grateful Dead’s band, with Bob Weir. He also toured with Billy Squire, James Montgomery, I think backed up James Cotton at one point in time. And he also recorded with the late Clarence Clemons—who just passed away—from Bruce Springsteen’s band. He had Clarence on a saxophone on one of his recordings and he was another one who taught me about the music business and stuff like that too. And then I just try to pick up as much as I can, because people a lot of times forget how hard it is to make it playing music full-time and not have another job to support yourself. Which is what I’m doing and I just have to learn everywhere I can from everybody and take what I can learn from each and every person in this business so that I can try to do it to the best of my ability. Because at the end of the day, it’s make or break on the bills, and you’ve got to be able to work, and you’ve got to be able to get stuff done. You know I do all of the booking, I do all of the promotion, right down to my web design, and designing flyers and posters, I do it all. So it’s kind of weird, because people forget that it is a music business and there’s a business side to it that must be tended to or else it’s going to hurt your music career.

BBP: Getting back to that, did you ever talk to your father about wanting to be a full-time musician like he was?

Mikey: Actually, yeah. He told me to quit waiting tables and play music full time.

BBP: Your father encouraged you to play music full time?

Mikey: Yeah.

BBP: That’s kind of unusual..

Mikey:…He told me to quit waiting tables and play music full time. He said you might not have a bunch of money but you’ll be happy. I’m very similar to him and very much like to be my own boss and very much like to do things myself so that they’re done right as well. And to want to be your own boss means that you’re also good at taking orders and following orders and pleasing the boss. Because how can you be your own boss when you can’t please someone else that’s your boss? So I like to think that I’m pretty good at working, because in the music business you have many microbosses; from festival promoters to club owners, they’re all your bosses, so you have to be able to please all of them and get along with all them and put on a good show. Because that’s what we’re here for, we’re here for the music. The music is the most important thing….the music part involves a lot of work and a lot of business. I’m on my computer and I’m on my phone for hours, every day, to promote and for book and for work on tours or whatever I have to do.

BBP: What your father said, that sounds kind of unusual—I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong about this—you would think that most parents would try to talk their children away from a competitive career like music.

Mikey: He also told me that I have to be smart and work really hard at it. It takes one to know one and my dad has a house that’s paid off from playing music, so it can be done. But what he also said was, I’d be working just as hard, if not harder, but I’ll be doing something that I love. So even though I won’t have a lot of money, I’ll still be happy because I’ll be doing something that I love. However, it can be done and you can make a decent living out of it. However it’s a lot of hard work. But if you love what you do and you love communicating with people and you love doing that kind of stuff, then it’s not going to be a problem for you. And it’s been great: this is my ten year anniversary, I quit being a waiter in 2002 to be a full-time musician. So it’s now 2012. In 2002, I was living in Trenton, New Jersey. I bought a house across the river in Pennsylvania—I bought a condo in Pennsylvania—and I now have another house that I live in that I bought at a sheriff’s sale because I have a real estate license. Because when I was 19, before I got into music, I was supposed to be the first in my family to go to college. I wasn’t into going to college. So instead of going to college, I went and got my real estate license at the age of 19, started doing real estate nine-to-five being an assistant for a real estate firm, and then go to do a waiter job from five o’clock at night. And then what I did was quit the waiter job, started playing music full-time while I kept my assistant job at the real estate firm nine-to-five. And then I was making enough money to the point where I was working enough where I was coming into the office very tired. So I had a real good relationship with the firm that I was working with and they believed in me because they would come to see a lot of my shows, and they said “go ahead and make a go at it” because I told the man “I’m probably going to leave the office, starting to do this music thing full-time.” And I’ve been doing it full-time ever since 2002. I think I stayed at the real estate office until 2003. I dabble in real estate as a hobby of mine. My friends, they want to buy a house. I’m not a real estate agent to the point where I take people out that I don’t know to see houses. A few of my friends, if they want to go look at a house or one of them tries to buy a sheriff’s sale property or an investment property or something like that, I’m into that kind of thing. I put down real estate and waiting tables to do music full-time.

(Mikey then puts me on hold again, returning a short time later)

BBP: Are the calls that you’re answering, are these potential bookings for your band?

Mikey: Yeah, absolutely. And I book a club in Philadelphia. My friend, who’s a theatre actor—one of my friends that used to come see me play all of the time—bought a club in Philadelphia and turned it into a blues club on Second and South Street called the Twisted Tail. The website is thetwisted tail.com…

BBP: Yeah, I noticed that when you sent me a schedule of your shows. I used to live in Allentown and I used to go to Philly all of the time. And I didn’t remember that place so I figured it must be new.

Mikey: Yeah, it’s a new place. It’s right in South Philly. It’s a great place; I’m the house band there. And I handle the bookings for all of the other bands. I’m really trying to make it a national spot for national acts. So that has my phone ringing as well. And it also helps me to talk with these agents to let them know who I am and say: “Hey, if you can ever get me something, if you have all of the people in your roster already working and you’d like to get me something, you know I’m available.”

BBP: Okay, so there’s a double benefit to that…

Mikey: Yeah!

BBP: Now I understand you had an extensive record collection when you were coming along and that that kind of influenced your tastes.

Mikey: Well that’s another thing talking about me spending money—my dad has a very big record collection that just got legacied to me because my dad had basically no room for it and it was at his sister’s house and like I said, I bought this house at a sheriff’s sale so I used to have a little condo, now I live in a full-sized house. You know single family home or what-have-you. So I was able to get my dad’s record collection, so yeah growing up I always had tapes and CD’s . I bought all kinds of blues box sets and all of that stuff, and yeah, I still have it, I still have my record, CD and tape collection. Now I have my dad’s. So yeah it influenced me big time, you know, records that you know will—I call them the “island records:” If you can only take ten records and they put you on an island. You know they’d definitely be B.B. King, Sonny Boy, Muddy, Little Walter, (Howlin’) Wolf, Steve Guyger and a couple of killer guitar players too. Buddy Guy, Junior Wells. So these are guys that I heavily find myself—if I call out a cover song—because I like to do my originals, but I love to do covers too. And if I call out a cover song by some people that I just happen to want to play and want to perform their music straight off the top of my head, those are the people who have heavily influenced me, you know what I mean?

BBP: The harmonica. What made you gravitate towards that as an instrument?

Mikey: Well one night I was jamming with my friends, my friends were all jamming together and there was no piano. And I saw that there was this harmonica on the table and I picked it up and started playing it. I was 17, and it just seemed all of a sudden to make sense to me. And the next day I went out and bought a whole set of harmonicas because, like I said, I always worked and I like to spend money. I told my dad it was a real harmonica. That day, he showed up at my house with a B.B. King CD and a Stevie Ray Vaughn and a Sony Boy Williamson CD, and he’s like “these are the three blues CD’s that I really like. Listen to these and try to play along with them. “And that’s exactly what I did. I played along with the CDs and he would show me some pointers. Mostly I taught myself by listening to CD’s, playing along with CDs, but when I say people are my harmonica teachers, they’re the people that “here. Let me show you this trick. Let me show you how to do that better.” Because usually they build on something that they see, which is how I teach harmonica now. Because that’s another thing that I do, during the day on Tuesday and Thursday I give harmonica lessons.

BBP: Okay…

Mikey: So I have a student on Tuesday and a student on Thursday. And of course I do nursing homes, I between three and four of them a week.

BBP: You do those alone—by yourself—or with a band?

Mikey: I do them by myself with tracks. Like I’ll get karaoke tracks with the vocals taken out of it and then I’ll go sing and play harmonica. I mean I don’t want to cheapen it by saying karaoke tracks, but I mean basically they’re the tracks without the vocals on them, and I go and I go and I perform. And I do almost the same kind of material that I do—you know it’s a blues show. I book it as “Mikey Jr.’s Blues Show” and I go in and I do some of the songs that are blues songs and some oldies stuff too. And then, you know, if they request it, what I’ll do is, I’ll go home and learn it. I had a guy request some Dean Martin and some Frank Sinatra, so that’s what I did: I went home, I went on the computer , I got the tracks to do the Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin. Because I mean I know the songs because of growing up as a waiter in Italian restaurants, I know the words to the songs. So, you know I’ll do them too. And those are kind of the older, older ones, you know. Sometimes you do the nursing homes that are not as old. But then sometimes you do the nursing homes that specialize in like 80- or 90-year-old people. And they’re the ones like “Hey, we want to hear this. You know Louis Armstrong, you know this, you know that?”

BBP: So you kind of have a fan base? You play the same nursing homes and within those nursing homes you have people, they hear you regularly and…

Mikey: Yeah. They live there and absolutely, yep. And I’m part of their entertainment and they’ll hear me play and they’ll say “hey, next time can you do some Dean Martin?” And I go “Yes sir!” And I’ll show up and have that Dean Martin ready for that guy. There’s the one guy in this nursing home, he loves Dean Martin.

BBP: Do you ever use the nursing home as sort of a sounding board for new music that you might want to do with your band?

Mikey: Oh yeah! There’ll be stuff that—yeah! That’s another thing: me and my band, we work so much….I used to have this every single Wednesday night gig in Lawrenceville at this place J.B.’s. For five years straight we played there every single Wednesday night. And we don’t rehearse. We work together so much that we very very seldom rehearse. Even for the IBC, there was no rehearsal. We just do the songs that we do, and because we’ve been doing them together for this many years, because we do them together every week or whatever, we very seldom—I mean I can count on one hand whenever we had a rehearsal, and it’s always before we go to record. It’s just because we don’t want to waste time in the studio, we just want to get a quick rehearsal down, and we only rehearse when we go to record really.

Zac Harmon

2012-08-21T09:34:00.001-07:00

A few weeks ago I ran across a sight that seemed totally incongruous: a concert by bluesman Zac Harmon that wasn’t filled to capacity.

It’s not that any musician can’t have a poorly attended gig; it just seems it’s a shame when the musician is as good as Harmon.

I caught him August 3 at a show organized by the D.C. Blues Society at the American Legion Post 268 in Wheaton, Maryland. As you can hear from the videos I shot, the problem certainly wasn’t his performance.

And the D.C. Blues Society worked hard to promote the event, as they do on everything they put together.

If Zac Harmon is a well-kept secret, he shouldn’t be (I don’t really think he is; it’s just that I can’t figure out what cosmic forces led to the event being so poorly attended). I’m here to say that, whether you’re a fan of the blues or no, you need to pay attention to Zac Harmon, either through his live performances or his recordings, the latest of which, Music is Medicine, was released in July on Urban Eagle Records to very positive reviews.

First, the guy has a pretty interesting background. He’s a person who, at least professionally, split away—but eventually returned—to what he loves:

According to his website, Harmon was born in Jackson, Mississippi, home of the Farish Street district, which nurtured blues legends like Elmore James.

In high school, he played gigs with Z.Z. Hill, Sam Myers and Dorothy Moore.

But he had to follow a more pop-oriented course after moving to Los Angeles in the 1980s, becoming a writer and producer for rhythm and blues acts such as the O’Jays, the Whispers, Karyn White and Alexander O’Neal.

Still, the blues in his blood continued to call, and in 2002 he recorded his first blues project Live at Babe and Ricky’s Inn. Two years later, he and then-band the Mid-South Blues Revue won the title of “Best Unsigned Band” in the International Blues Challenge.

The rest is blues history, with perhaps one high point being his involvement in the 2008 Bluzapalooza tour which brought top blues talent to Iraq and Kuwait to perform for U.S. service personnel.

I interviewed Harmon just outside the door of the American Legion hall: you can actually see him graciously opening the door for folks who passed us as we talked.

He talked about how Music is Medicine is dedicated to his father, George “Doc Harmon” Harmon, who passed away May 29 and whom he described as “the most important man in my life.” George Harmon was also important to the history of the city of Jackson. Known as the city’s first African-American pharmacist, he owned a store on Farish Street for over 60 years, according to his son.

Harmon also talked about his friendship with the late guitarist and fellow Bluzapalooza alumni Michael Burks, who died in May and with whom he was supposed to tour this year:

Well, can’t let you get away without hearing some of the show. He starts this one off by introducing the band:

And here he is with his 2008 release “Hattie Mae:”

Anyway, the point of all this is that if you have a chance to hear Zac Harmon, take it. With him on stage, there shouldn’t even be room to dance...

Sugar Ray Norcia Part 2

2012-08-19T05:13:00.000-07:00

Here is part 2 of our interview with Sugar Ray Norcia:

BBP: What harmonica players do you like or what blues players overall do you like? I know you did an album in 1999 with several musicians-- Billy Branch and… I believe it was called Superharps? Charlie Musselwhite…

Sugar Ray: …And James Cotton.

BBP: Yeah…

Sugar Ray: Those are the kind of players that I like. And of course I like other traditional kind of players like Rod Piazza and Kim Wilson and Mark Hummel. These are guys that are thinking the same way I do. But there’s really not a whole lot of them these days. I sued to be able to go out and see Muddy Waters, Otis Rush and work with these people. Now, of course, they’ve passed on, so now it’s tough to hear the real deal.

BBP: So you don’t like the new guys who are coming along?

Sugar Ray: I wouldn’t want to name anyone specific. It’s just that sometimes feel that, when I’m at a blues festival for example, I feel almost like I don’t fit in. Because we’re so traditional. Then when the audience hears us, they’re like “Wow! I haven’t heard anything like this in a long time!” So hopefully that will continue. But, uh, if I want to listen to reggae, I’ll listen to reggae. But if I go to hear a blues band, I want to hear blues.

BBP: Speaking of reggae, it mentioned that you actually shared a bill with Bob Marley.

Sugar Ray: I hardly remember that, but yeah, that was in Europe on some TV show that was actually a variety show, like an Ed Sullivan kind of thing. And he was one of the artists on it. We didn’t hang out or talk or anything, but I do remember that.

BBP: How do you feel about other kinds of music? You said you like country. Are there other types of music that you like as well, besides country and blues?

Sugar Ray: Yeah, absolutely. I like good music. You know that old saying, there’s two types of music, good music and bad music. What makes me relax, say when I’m around the home—I live in a rural area, I really do live in a cabin in the woods.

BBP: In Rhode Island?

Sugar Ray: in Rhode Island, yeah.

BBP: Outside of Providence?

Sugar Ray: It’s south of Providence but it’s surrounded by 14 thousand acres of state land. Sort of like state forest, so it’s a very nice place to live for me.

BBP: Yeah. Sounds like it.

Sugar Ray: Yeah. When people think of blues artists, they think of Chicago or the big cities. But not necessarily so, so..

BBP:… It gives you inspiration?

Sugar Ray: Yeah, my inspiration is being out here in my cabin and having solitude. And listening to the birds playing and writing the blues. But I was going to say that I listen to classical music. I have friends who have a home in Hawaii. I really love Hawaiian music, that’s why I like a lot of the old country recordings with the steel guitar or the lap guitar, which is incorporated into Hawaiian music, so it really soothes my soul. Same thing with classical. I like a little reggae and ska music. It depends on what mood I’m in, you know.

BBP: Right. Right. I understand. You know also I read somewhere, you apparently had some interaction with Roosevelt Sykes. I’ll tell you why I asked about that. Actually when I went to college—I went to college in Connecticut; I went to Wesleyan in Middletown. And back when I was there, they used to bring all kinds of jazz and blues people in. And they brought Roosevelt Sykes in and I had no idea who he was. I guess he’s been dead for many years now, right? He played harmonica, right?

Sugar Ray: Well, he sang and played piano. ..

BBP: Right..

Sugar Ray: And he always wore an impeccable suit with his big, kind of 1950’s top hat.

BBP: Yes!

Sugar Ray: …And he had an eight-inch cigar; you know one of those big cigars.

BBP: Uh huh! He was a very large man. I do remember that.

Sugar Ray: A very large man. He was actually the first guy—at the end of the night, one night—he played great guitar as well—we were sitting around and he said—this is before we ever made a record or made any kind of studio recording to speak of, and he said “You guys are really good, and you need to start recording.” So that was like a catalyst, you know, to get the nod from a guy like Roosevelt Sykes, that’s a great thing.

BBP: How did you connect with him, though?

Sugar Ray: The same way we did with Big Walter and J.B. Hutto and all that. Make a phone call. We used to play at a place called the Speakeasy Café and it was a famous place for blues artists to perform. And a lot of the time—most of the time—these blues artists, like Roosevelt and like Jimmy Rogers, Big Walter, they needed a band to back them up. We were the band in those days, we were actually the house band at the Speakeasy, me and Ronnie Earl and the rest of the Bluetones. So that’s how we got hooked up.

BBP: Tell me what’s the next move for you. Where do you see yourself going now?

Sugar Ray: Well, I’m under contract with Severn Records down in Maryland to do another record. This is a three-record deal so I’ve got one more to do for them. Hopefully I’ll sign up for more after that, but—we’ll probably go in before the end of the year and make another Bluetone record. I haven’t definitively decided the direction, but I think it will be sort of the same as my last record, Evening. Just do some songwriting, keep it simple and keep it true to ourselves and our hearts and make another damn good record. That’s the next thing. And then in the meantime, I do a lot of gigs on my own as a solo artist, performing with other back-up bands, just as we backed up Big Walter, just as we backed up Roosevelt, or Otis Rush. These younger bands all over the world now that we connect with through the Internet, they ask me if they could back me up, so I’ve kind of come full circle in that way. So two weeks from now I’ll be in Frankfort, Germany being backed up by a German band, a blues band. I have bands in Italy, I have a band in Latvia, the Baltics, I have a band in Norway, it goes on and on. I’ve got a band in Finland, so I’m able to get on a plane and do three or four dates with these bands in other countries, so that always keeps things interesting, keeps me on my toes.

BBP: Wow. I guess it’s a good way to learn too because you learn what other people are doing, maybe run into styles that you haven’t encountered before…..

Sugar Ray: I have to adjust. I have to do some adjusting. But the thing is, like I say, with the beauty of the Internet and Youtube and all that, these bands are prepared when I arrive in their countries. They know my songs, they know my material, they know my approach, otherwise they wouldn’t ask me in the first place. So we’re kind of on the same page, whereas years ago you couldn’t communicate quite so easily. So now, as we speak, this band in Germany is preparing a 90-minute set to back me up. I’ve given them the songs that I want to do and they have them, and they’re rehearsing them. So it’s kind of cool.

BBP: What’s the name of the band in Germany?

Sugar Ray: Blues Blend. I’ve never heard of them. When a band I’ve never heard of asks me to play with them, there I go. I can go on Youtube, I can check them out, see them, hear them. Sometimes—it doesn’t happen too often—but a few times it’s like “Uh, no, I’d better not do this. It is not a good fit.” But most of the time, they don’t contact me unless they’ve been fans of mine and my recordings. So it works.

BBP: They’ve done their homework on you already when they approach you.

Sugar Ray: Yeah. Exactly. And a lot of times it’s—I hate to say kids—but I’ll be approaching 60 years old in a year-and-a-half and a lot of these guys that contact me are 22, 23 years old. It’s a real thrill for them to be playing with the old man (laughs), so to speak. It’s what we used to do. I used to think that Big Walter or Jimmy Rogers was an old man, but if I sit down and think about it, do some math, they were like the age I am now.

BBP: Is playing with kids different than playing with people your own age?

Sugar Ray: My observation is, years ago, there weren’t many players who could grasp the blues, the American roots music of the blues. Well that’s changed in a good way, you know. There are guys all over Europe and Scandinavia who can really play, I mean they got it. I’m floored with some of these guys that I work with: they’re really good.

BBP: Do the foreign bands play better than—I won’t say “better” than the American bands—do the foreign bands play different than the American bands? I mean is their approach different?

Sugar Ray: It used to be different in a bad way. They didn’t grasp the “feel” of the music. But all that’s changed: they really play well. I’ve played with a lot of them. I’m Italian myself, even Muddy Waters told me “Italians got soul.” (laughs)

BBP: How did that feel when he said that to you? You felt vindicated I guess.

Sugar Ray: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And he goes “and that pasta you guys eat? Soul food!” It really comes around, there are great players out there now, around the world. We got a recording from a guy named Hoppin’ Joe, I think? Anyway, he’s Japanese, harmonica player, who’s a big fan of mine and of Big Walter, too. So he sent me a couple of tunes that he recorded, that I’ve written, you know. So he covered a couple of my tunes. He sang in Japanese. What a trip that is to hear, you know!

BBP: Did you like it though, did you like what he did?

Sugar Ray: I did, yeah. He sort of like played my solos and copied them not-for-note and I always have not been a fan of doing that. But it’s a wicked compliment, you know. I grew up listening to records of Sonny Boy and Little Walter and stuff, and I know a lot of harp players will just work for hours and hours to play the exact Little Walter solo from the record. You’ve got to be good to do that but it doesn’t mean much to me. It’s already been done. I think if Little Walter were alive, and he were playing that song, he would play a different solo than he did on the record. I’m sure of that for the most part. So to copy something verbatim is not always the best approach.

BBP: Yeah, I guess it isn’t. Well another thing I was curious about was, I’ve read you apparently had some distribution problems with JSP.

Sugar Ray: Oh yeah. It was a bootleg record. It was recorded at the Knickerbocker in Rhode Island that I was speaking of earlier. So that was totally put out without authorization and obviously without payment to Walter and his family, or to anybody…it just wasn’t a cool thing.

BBP: Right. So they never made good, they never paid royalties to you guys for what you did?

Sugar Ray: No. No. We did meet up with the guy at one point, it probably says that in the story, I don’t remember—and he said “yeah, yeah, yeah, I’ll be taking care of you guys.” But we never saw nothing. It’s one of those classic blues stories where the musician gets taken advantage of. You read about it in books, but here it is. It happened to us.

BBP: Yeah, that’s why I asked you about it because it does seem to be kind of a longstanding problem with blues musicians. There are some record companies that are more honest than others. Are there a lot of unscrupulous people in the business?

Sugar Ray: Yeah, you know, yeah. As in any business, I can imagine. Just watch the news. But it’s so hard out there to make a living. I hate to see fellow musicians being taken advantage of.

BBP: Yeah. I mean what do musicians do these days for health insurance? I mean that’s a big issue.

Sugar Ray: I know I don’t have it. And I’ll go to places like Denmark, Germany, Sweden, Norway..these people really have their shit together when it comes to—they pay higher taxes, but they have free universities, education. Their health benefits…are provided for them. When I tell them I don’t have health insurance, they almost fall off the chair, like “What?” It doesn’t even compute. They say “That must be a heavy load on your shoulders.” And (I say) “Of course it is, yeah.”

BBP: Wow. You’re almost 60 years old, so…..

Sugar Ray: Yeah, it’s a terrible thing. That’s why you see so many benefit concerts and whatnot for musicians, because they probably don’t have insurance. We had to put together a special show to pay for Big Walter Horton’s gravestone. There was no money for that. That goes to show you.

BBP: Well, I know you have a lot to do. I just want to ask you one more question.

Sugar Ray: Sure…

BBP: Of all the musicians you ever played with—and I understand you played with Pinetop (Perkins) too—what was he like?

Sugar Ray: Pinetop, he was a sweetheart. He was an example of like the Eveready Battery type of thing. You know that commercial? I’ve seen him in so many different places . Probably Europe…I’ve seen Pinetop everywhere at one time or another, and he’s usually the life of the party. Staying up late, playing the piano, having cocktails and just enjoying life. Obviously, it worked for him, didn’t it?

BBP: Yeah! He lived for a long time, didn’t he?

Sugar Ray: Yeah.

BBP: And it wasn’t time spent in a nursing home, either. He was actually out there performing. …

Sugar Ray: …Right up until the end….that’s right. That’s amazing.

Sugar Ray Norcia Part 1

2012-08-17T14:40:00.001-07:00

These days, harmonica player Sugar Ray Norcia gets invitations from young musicians all over the world that want to play behind him.

“Two weeks from now, I’ll be in Frankfort, Germany, being backed up by a German band, a blues band,” he said. “I have bands in Italy, I have a band in Latvia, the Baltics, I have a band in Norway, it goes on and on. I’ve got a band in Finland, so I’m able to get on a plane and do three or four dates with these bands in other countries, so that always keeps things interesting.”

This current trend in his life reminds Norcia—now about a-year-and-a-half away shy of his 60^th birthday—of his own time as a Young Turk playing behind blues legends of the past. Over the years, Sugar Ray Norcia and the Bluetones, which will headline the D.C. Blues Society’s annual concert at Carter Barron in Washington, D.C. on September 1, have backed Roosevelt Sykes, toured the Midwest with J.B. Hutto and played in a New York City revue that included Hutto and Big Walter Horton.

A native of Stonington, Connecticut, Norcia first started to make his mark on the New England music scene in the late 1970’s through the band Sugar Ray and the Blue Stompers. He soon joined forces with guitarist Ronnie Earl to form the Bluetones, and the group began playing Sunday nights regularly as the house band at the Speakeasy in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The band took its talents on the road as well, playing clubs such as the No Fish Today in Baltimore, The West Virginian and The C&O in Charlottesville, Virginia and the Childe Herald, Desperados and Columbia Station in D.C.

In addition to its own shows, the group started to form the team-ups that would make it famous, including with Horton, whom it backed in Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts; Providence and Westerly, R.I.; New York City and Pennsylvania. A performance at the Knickerbocker Café in Westerly with Big Walter was turned into a recording on JSP Records.

The group also took its talents to more faraway venues, including two separate month-long tours of Spain, and the Midwest tour with Hutto, who had first encountered the Bluetones while looking for a band to work New England with.

One time during the tour with Hutto, the performers actually thought they saw a U.F.O. while driving on an Illinois highway.

In 1991, Norcia started a seven-year stint in Roomful of Blues. His time followed that of Ronnie Earl, who had played for the group from 1979-88.

In 1999, Norcia teamed up with harmonica players James Cotton, Billy Branch and Charlie Musselwhite for the Grammy award nominated album, Superharps.

With the Bluestones, Sugar Ray has released eight studio albums over the year, the latest, Evening in 2011 on Severn Records. The album garnered four nominations in the 2012 Blues Music Awards, including Album of the Year.

We started our interview with Norcia talking about the early days of the Bluetones:

BBP: Sugar Ray! I understand you’re from New England, the Rhode Island area, and that way-back-when you used to play with Ronnie Earl. You guys were together in the Bluetones?

Sugar Ray: In the early days, a long time ago. That’s how I met the ‘Tones really, is when I started playing with Ronnie Earl and Mudcat Ward, the bass player. I graduated from high school in 1972 so it wasn’t long after that when I met Ronnie and the boys.

BBP: And I read you guys once did a concert in Spain. You were there for a month. Or actually it was two tours.

Sugar Ray: Yeah that was in the early days too when a lot of American bands and our contemporaries were not traveling to Europe. Mudcat’s brother was going to school there and he hooked up a month-long tour twice back in those days. And you know we were really green back then. We didn’t know how to go about travelling with equipment, and so we brought all of our drums with us on the airplanes, and amps. It was kind of crazy: you don’t really do that. But we did it…we used to carry all of our equipment gig to gig. It was crazy. Those were great memories.

BBP: That’s incredible. So tell me how you and Ronnie Earl first got together. How did that happen? I understand he was playing up in the Boston, Massachusetts area and he needed someone for his band? Well, I’ll let you tell the story…

Sugar Ray: Well, yeah, I’d been playing for years and years before I met Ronnie in various bands here in Rhode Island. I live in a bordertown; I grew up in Stonington, Connecticut, which is right next to Rhode Island on the coast. I was in school, yeah, I had been playing blues, always have been playing blues, (laughs slightly) always will be playing blues. But...my drummer was called in to play with Ronnie Earl at this club in Providence, Rhode Island, and yeah, Ronnie was looking for a singer. And my drummer said hey, I’ve been working with Sugar Ray for years and to give him a call. And the rest is history..I went up there and we joined forces and what a force it was. We had a great band, great tours, ‘til Ron was called to play in Roomful of Blues years later.

BBP: And you went on to play with that band yourself after a while, I think…

Sugar Ray: And I went on to play with that band a few years after Ronnie left it. I grew up with Roomful of Blues here in my hometown of Rhode Island. A little place called the Knickerbocker Café, where Roomful played every Sunday night, I would go down there, even though I was underage at first. When I used to sneak into the Knickerbocker and see Roomful, they would bring in guest artists. And by artists I mean like Eddie ”Cleanhead” Vinson, Joe Turner, Helen Humes, Joe Houston and all of these great players. So I really got an education.

BBP: Well tell me how you got your start way-back- when in music. Were your parents musicians?

Sugar Ray: Yeah. I came from a musical family. I grew up with a band rehearsing down in the basement of my house. That would mean my two uncles, who played guitar and bass, and my brother played piano and sang. And they would rehearse down in the basement when I was just a youngster. My father was a music teacher. My mother was a jazz singer. So yeah, I was surrounded by music and once I started listening to blues when I was in high school and friends would bring me some of their blues records, that was it—I never turned back. I fell in love with it.

BBP: Wow. Tell me your father’s name? Your mother’s name?

Sugar Ray: Yeah, my father was Albert Norcia and he even wrote a book; it’s out of print now, but it was called “The Voice.” Obviously, he was a voice teacher in the public school systems and also privately at home, where I would sit in on his lessons—that’s how I got my tips on how to sing correctly. My mother, Louise Norcia, she’s still alive, God bless her. She’s 93 years old.

BBP: Wow…

Sugar Ray: Yeah…

BBP: And she lives in Rhode Island?

Sugar Ray: Lives at home in Rhode Island, and she tells me that she has a tough time singing now (laughs). But she can still sing. She’s got a sweet voice.

BBP: What made you choose the harmonica over other instruments?

Sugar Ray: Well again, my father was a great singer, but he also was a great harmonica player. From as far back as I can remember, you know, he had a Hohner harmonica in his pocket and we had a lot of picnics, family gatherings back then. Because we lived in that area where it was all aunts and uncles—Italian community—everybody built their houses close together in the same neighborhood. And so at parties and get-togethers, he would play the harmonica and everybody would just have a great time whenever he brought the harp out and I always noticed that he was like the head of the party playing around the campfire. I just wanted to do that someday. So when I took it up, I started learning from these records I was getting, I started learning how to bend notes and play blues on the harmonica, which he was not doing. He was playing straight harp, country kind of tunes, campfire tunes. So I brought it to another level.

BBP: Right. So what was his reaction when you followed in his footsteps, but in a different way?

Sugar Ray: He was all for it. He was very supportive of what I did. He was sort of living the dream through me because he never played out except for maybe his school performances with the glee clubs and the choruses. But he never got to go out and play with a band and travel musically. He warned me that it was a tough life, but he was very supportive of me. He came to my shows. He used to give me hints. It was very cool. It’s nice to have the support of your parents.

BBP: Yeah. Definitely. Wow. I understand that you were very friendly—or you had a good relationship with—Big Walter Horton. That you guys were actually playing together in Indiana, Chicago.

Sugar Ray: Yeah, that’s true. Yeah that’s one thing Ronnie did back in the early days when I was working with Ronnie. We would also, as Roomful of Blues did, feature artists that we would fly in, say from Chicago, Big Walter being one of them. And we did that quite often; we actually recorded two live CD’s with Big Walter. So it was a wonderful experience for me. I would normally start the set off playing a couple of songs, playing harp and then call Walter up and he would finish up the set. Some nights we’d play duos; that was a real treat. But we would share hotel rooms, and yeah, I got to know him quite well. Great guy.

BBP: And also, J.B. Hutto. Is that the same J.B. Hutto that’s Little Ed’s…

Sugar Ray: Yes, that would be his uncle.

BBP: Yeah, I thought that was the same person.

Sugar Ray: Yeah. Uncle J.B. We considered him a Bluetone, a member of the Bluetones at one point, because he worked with us just about every gig we did for quite a while. Hubert Sumlin was another example of someone who played guitar for us—with us—for quite some time. So we had some great—Otis Rush, we backed up quite often, Jimmy Rogers—so that was our school.

BBP: When you say “back up” you were actually playing with them on stage?

Sugar Ray: Oh absolutely, yeah. That’s another one that I did. Jimmy Rogers, we did a live recording with him, in Bremen, Germany, which you can find on DVD and also on CD. It’s a great recording.

BBP: I think you’re on your seventh or eighth recording right now? Last one was released I think about three years ago?

Sugar Ray: Yeah, something like that. No, our last release was called Evening, last year.. That’s the one that won five nominations for the Blues Music Awards this past year.

BBP: Yeah. Wow. One thing I was also curious about was: you used to tour a lot, you were on the road a lot, back in the day. That was one thing that struck me when I was doing my research about you. And there was one incident, well I wouldn’t call it an incident, but it was an encounter with the police. I think it was, you, with J.B. Hutto in the back, and there was another guy in the car, driving.

Sugar Ray: Yeah. Our drummer, Neil.

BBP: ..And the cop apparent was…you had just seen a UFO or something like that?

Sugar Ray: Yeah. Obviously you read some of Mudcat’s story there on the website.

BBP: Yeah, I did.

Sugar Ray: Yeah, that was just one of those funny things, stories. Late at night, they did think they had seen a UFO, and the funny thing was this cop stopping this car in the middle of the night and swerving all over the road….drinking wasn’t the issue, so he says “You’re all over the road.” And he (the driver) says “I swear I saw a UFO” and the cop shined the flashlight in the back seat and there was J.B. Hutto, and he was a very dark-complexioned man and he’s just sitting there with this big smile on his face. And the cop said, “Did you see the UFO, sir?” And he was like “Uh-huh! Yes sir! I saw it!” (laughs). I’ll just never forget stories like that. There are many more that we probably forgot. J.B. was quite an entertainer. He would play on his back, kick his feet up in the air. He was the one who started that tall, stovepipe type of hat that he wore. He made them himself. Homemade hats. I notice L’il Ed does the same thing, so he’s taking after his uncle.

BBP: Yeah, I have an interview with him on my blog. It’s kind of funny when you hear him talk about that.

Sugar Ray: My father used to wear a paper bag on his head, you know. He was quite a character too. When he worked in the garden or something, he’d take a paper bag that you would go grocery shopping with, and after grocery shopping and he’d throw it up and wear it as a hat. And it’d look like J.B. Hutto’s hat, to tell you the truth (laughs). It was just one of his little quirks, being funny.

BBP: You used to do that too. You wore a cowboy hat or something?

Sugar Ray: I’ve worn a lot of hats through the years. One short story: we played in New York City, Central Park—big show—I remember. And we got a picture in the New York Times, but it wasn’t a picture of the band. It was a picture of our sound man wearing a paper hat. So he got the publicity: “Sugar Ray and the Bluetones soundman wears paper hat,” and he had a picture in the New York Times.

BBP: But over the years, you’ve done a lot of touring. It must get exhausting after a while, right? Do you like to do that?

Sugar Ray: Yeah, we’ve done it quite extensively when I was young and 1991 and Roomful of Blues—I was with them seven years for the better part of the nineties—that was like 251 nighters per year. That’s a lot. That’s traveling back and forth across the country. And then the Bluetones are traveling a lot less now as we speak, but in the past years we kind of slowed down a bit. I couldn’t take that 250 days a year thing anymore. So I don’t know how many days we travel now, but these past few months, if you looked it up—our tour schedule—we would have been all over the place. Oklahoma City, California, Canada, Florida and everywhere in-between. So with this new recording that we did for Severn Records, it got quite a bit of attention. So we wanted to follow up on that—hit the road—and it’s harder now than it ever was for me. I think for a lot of people, because of the economy and that, but we are still out there doing it. It’s what I do.

BBP: Tell me a little about the new recording. Tell me about the concept you had before you put it together, changes that concept may have gone through..

Sugar Ray: The previous record we did was called My Life, My Friends, My Music and that also got nominated for Blues Music Awards. That one there, it was sort of like a Roomful of Blues alumni reunion kind of thing. I called in all of my old playing buddies from Roomful of Blues and got them all back together in the studio and did a killer record. I wanted to bring it back to the basics of what the Bluetones really represent, Chicago Blues and gutbucket blues, original ideas, original lyrics. It really was kind of an unrehearsed session, I just had lots of lyrics and ideas and just let them flow in the studio. And it seemed to really work, because we were just ourselves, we weren’t trying to be a horn band, a swing band, or a jump blues band. We were just what we’ve been doing mainly through the years and that is a four or five piece Chicago blues band. And I find that these days, it’s harder and harder to find a band that plays in such a traditional way, and so it’s almost like we have our own niche. Again, because we’re so traditional; you know I play a lot of blues festivals but I don’t see much blues…

BBP: What are you seeing?

Sugar Ray: Well I’m seeing some blues-influenced kind of singing. I’m seeing a lot of rock-blues. It reminds me on the level of something—I don’t know—but it reminds me of country. I’m a big fan of country—the country music of Hank Williams and George Jones, Merle Haggard. But country has gone, you know, to another place. And so I can’t stand turning on a country radio station. The music sucks. (laughs) I think the blues is sort of going that way too. It’s watered down—people lose focus of where the blues really came from. And that’s just one thing that we don’t do. We don’t forget about Big Walter and Little Walter and Sonny Boy and Howlin’ Wolf and these guys that created this music that I so love. So I’m just carrying that on.

We'll have part 2 of our interview with Sugar Ray Norcia tomorrow.

A Graphic Look at the Music Industry

2012-08-05T09:52:00.000-07:00

This graphic was sent to me by Sarah Thompson of MusicProductionsSchools.net. It offers a very interesting take on the current music industry:
Created by: MusicProductionSchools.net Wow. A lot of that really makes you think, huh?

Pictures that are Worth a Thousand Words....

2012-08-02T21:14:00.001-07:00

We always like getting things from readers at Beldon’s Blues Point. And the following pictures are real special. They were sent by Officer J.D. Downs, a member of the police force at the University of the District of Columbia, where I now work. In addition to keeping us safe over here, Officer Downs likes to photograph musicians. And he gets great angles. See for yourself: a picture—especially one taken by Officer Downs—is worth a thousand words.

Here's J.D.'s picture of a performance by the Atlanta-based funk/metal/rock group Mother's Finest. On stage, playing at the Kentland Park Community Center in Landover, MD are singer/co-founder Joyce "Baby Jean" Kennedy and bassist Jerry "Wizard" Seay:

And here's J.D.'s picture of the late, great, Garry Shider, long-time guitarist and musical director for George Clinton's P-Funk All-Stars:

And the next two are of Philip Bailey, singer for Earth, Wind, & Fire (as if you didn't know):

Like I said, a picture is worth a thousand words. We'd like to hear from other readers as well. Contact us at beldonsbluespoint@yahoo.com

Sweet Sounds in New Orleans

2012-07-24T21:13:00.003-07:00

Since I’ve started this blog, I have had chances to visit Chicago and Memphis, two cities that are viewed as “music cities:” And I just recently came back from a third: New Orleans. The so-called Big Easy has music in its blood. There, you’ll see impromptu groups of teen-age boys playing horns on street corners. The city’s famous brass bands play picnics, carnivals, street fairs, parades, even funerals. Considered by many as the “birthplace of jazz,” the city was home to many of that genre’s most famous figures: trumpeter Louis Armstrong, saxophonist and clarinetist Sidney Bechet, cornet player and bandleader King Oliver, pianist and composer Jelly Roll Morton and, more recently, the Marsalis family.

And not just jazz. Fats Domino was a key figure in early rock-and-roll. The Meters were important trailblazers in funk music. And Master P and Lil Wayne have helped give the Crescent City a hip-hop heritage.

The city is also known as the birthplace of “sludge metal,” a slow-tempo, pessimistic form of heavy metal played by groups such as Acid Bath and Crowbar that draws from southern sock, hardcore punk, grunge and stoner rock, among other forms. And the trumpeter-trombonist Trombone Shorty is mixing several genres to present a New Orleans style sound that is becoming more and more popular around the country.

With all of these different genres, what makes up the New Orleans sound? I figured that New Orleans saxophonist Khris Royal of Dark Matter could answer that question better than I. I talked to him in the city’s Frenchman Street music district: But the first music I had actually heard on this trip to New Orleans was not from a local performer. It was from Toronto-born rhythm-and-blues singer Melanie Fiona, who gave a private, up-close-and-personal concert to the National Association of Black Journalists, then holding its annual convention in New Orleans. The conference was the reason I was in town. Fiona whetted my appetite for live music with performances like this: and this: A few hours later, I learned from locals that you can find a venue for live music practically anywhere in New Orleans. Still, the city has certain districts that are literally packed with clubs frequently so close together that often music from one bleeds into another. My hotel was in walking distance of Frenchman Street (well, a fairly long walk to there!) and Bourbon Street, another popular music district.

Part of the French Quarter, Bourbon Street attracts tourists who like its bars, restaurants, souvenir shops and wild,seemingly out-of-control atmosphere.

Located just outside of the French Quarter, Frenchman Street is a somewhat more subdued two-block concentration of music clubs, restaurants, shops and bars that stretches from Esplanade Avenue to the Gentilly Neighborhood. Two of the city’s better known performance venues, Snug Harbor and the Maison, sit on Frenchman Street, which in general seems to attract a college-age crowd.

Drummer Walter Allen, whose Wa Wa Band regularly plays The Beach nightclub on Bourbon, said Bourbon clubs in general pay better than those on Frenchman Street. However the Bourbon bands are under more intense pressure to attract customers, he said. “Once the register stops ringing they’re going to put someone else in your place who makes the register ring,” he said. Keeping tourists in mind, Bourbon clubs encourage their bands to stick to popular cover songs, he said. And over the years , certain genres have come and gone. First, it was rhythm and blues and Motown, he said. In the air now is contemporary rock.

Musicians playing Frenchman Street earn a living—but not as much of one, he said. Still, he said, they have more artistic freedom. “On Frenchman Street, you can play your music,” he said.

Like a lot of New Orleans residents, many musicians found themselves unable to return home when Hurricane Katrina hit in August, 2005. Russell Batiste, Jr., drummer for the Funky Meters, was wrapping up a long tour and anticipating the trip home when the hurricane hit. He ended up living in Dallas for a year. “I was on tour with this band Bonerama (a funk/rock brass band based in New Orleans), we were out for about a month or so, something like that,” recalled Batiste, part of a well-known New Orleans musical family. “And the hurricane hit just about the end of our tour, about the last few days of our tour, and I’m sitting in my hotel room looking at the TV and seeing people stranded and all of that stuff they kept showing over and over—it was un-fucking-believable—and that’s when the panic may have started setting in. ‘Where’s my family? Where’s my mom. Where’s my people at? How am I going to see them? How am I going to get back to my family?’ That didn’t happen for a while. Until they cleared things out in the city of New Orleans, we weren’t able to come back.” Allen recalled that, after Katrina struck, many musicians evacuated to the Louisiana Superdome (now known as the Mercedes-Benz Superdome), infamous during those days for harrowing conditions suffered by hurricane survivors. Afterwards, many traveled to Austin, Texas, he said. Allen fled Katrina for the Texas-Arkansas border for a couple of days, then traveled to Tallahassee, Florida where he received word of how flooded New Orleans was. He lived in Tallahassee for eight months, he said. Allen said he wishes he had gone to Austin. “They gave a lot of guys work,” he said. In contrast, Tallahassee was difficult for a musician who favors blues, R&B and classic rock. A college town, it was full of musicians who played gospel or "progressive" rock, he recalled. “We don’t play Green Day and Nickelback and stuff like that,” he said. Moreover, getting the help he needed—vouchers for food and clothing and other assistance—was a “slow process” in Florida. Many musicians returning to New Orleans found life difficult, he said. Rents had doubled and sometimes even tripled from what they had been before Katrina. And there were not that many gigs, he said. Some musicians died from strokes and heart attacks, said Allen, attributing the deaths to post Katrina stress. “These were guys that I knew, that, before Katrina, they were fine,” he said. “They were here one day and gone the next.” But he said he was glad to see some people making special efforts to help musicians. For example, a group of displaced New Orleans musicians formed the New Orleans’ Musician’s Relief Fund, which provided grants, instruments and other assistance to musicians. And, buoyed by support from native musical celebrities such as Branford Marsalis and Harry Connick Jr., Habitat for Humanity created Musicians Village, a development of 72 homes anchored around a multi-million dollar performance/musical education center named for jazz pianist Ellis Marsalis. “It was a good idea, ‘cause they’re helping musicians own homes, not just rent a place,” Allen said of Musicians Village. Allen said the current trends he sees on Bourbon Street--the extra pressure on musicians to draw patrons, the emphasis on rock covers over other forms of music--have nothing to do with Katrina. He said his Wa Wa band plays everything. When I saw the group, it was playing the R & B oldie “Drowning in the Sea of Love” by Joe Simon: Other bands on Bourbon were also playing rhythm and blues. Up the block, for example, the Ka-Nection band was playing Tom Browne’s “Funkin’ For Jamaica” to a packed house at the Fat Catz music club: And at Bourbon Live, the group BRW was performing Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On.” Elsewhere on Bourbon Street, a 61-year-old trumpeter who calls himself Steamboat Willie was playing a more traditional style at a club called the New Orleans Musical Legends Park. What I heard from him was like this video someone else recorded of him about two years ago: Like Royal, Steamboat Willie talked about the New Orleans sound and what made it unique. He also spoke with me about his own life as a musician: Steamboat Willie also talked about the workings of New Orleans music communities, including Bourbon Street and Frenchman Street: Allen said that the musicians who regularly play Bourbon frequently test themselves by sitting in with bands on Frenchman. “I pretty much use Frenchman to gauge my individual talent,” he said. “’Where am I with this guy? Where am I with that guy? I like this guy’s style. Can I incorporate this guy’s style?’ And that’s what I do.” Keyboardist/guitarist David Stocker frequently plays clubs on Frenchman Street. In this interview, among many other things, he talks about what it’s like to play the district on a night when there's a band playing almost every ten feet. We also talked about "Treme," the HBO show that depicts New Orleans' musical community after Katrina: One of the better known clubs on Frenchman Street is the Blue Nile. It was there that I met Khris Royal. Being from Washington, I was tickled to hear his band play a set of D.C. Go-Go music: At the Maison—also located on Frenchman Street—Ashton Hines and the Big Easy Brawlers appeared to be generating a lot of excitement in a near-capacity crowd made up of college-age kids: From a musical point of view, my only disappointment was not catching a zydeco show. Well, maybe next time....

Beldon's Blues Points: Bob Corritore

2012-07-22T19:30:00.005-07:00

An update on the condition of Curtis Salgado is included in the latest edition of a newsletter released by noted harmonica player Bob Corritore::

Curtis Salgado Surgery. Blues/soul singer & harmonica player extraordinaire Curtis Salgado( Here's his website: http://www.curtissalgado.com/ )had successful surgery on July 18th, removing a cancerous spot on his lung. This is the second surgical procedure in the last few years for Curtis. Jake Lankheit of Intrepid Artists reports that the procedure went incredibly well and that Curtis is currently recovering in the hospital and plans to be performing again soon! Nick Moss (Curtis' close friend and blues collaborator, here's his website: http://www.nickmoss.com/) has set up an online fund to help with costs at http://curtissalgado.chipin.com/curtis-%20salgado-medical-%20fund. Curtis recently released Soul Shot on Alligator Records to much critical acclaim. Well wishes and prayers for this great artist.

Tail Dragger and the late Willie "Big Eyes" Smith receive awards in Spain! Thanks to the Hondarribia Blues Society in Spain for honoring Tail Dragger (here's an article about him: http://centerstage.net/music/whoswho/TailDragger.html ) and the late Willie "Big Eyes" Smith ( here's his website: http://www.williebigeyessmith.com/ ) last weekend with awards at the Hondarribia Blues Festival (the festival website is at http://www.blueshondarribia.com/es) in Spain . Tail Dragger was performing at the fest part of a Chicago blues package that also included Zora Young(here's her myspace page: http://www.myspace.com/zorayoung )and Eddie Shaw (here's his website: http://www.midcoast.com/~bluesman/eddie_shaw.html ). Kenny "Beedy Eyes" Smith was on hand to accept the award for his father Willie. To read the article (in Spanish) Click here: http://www.noticiasdegipuzkoa.com/2012/07/11/especiales/varios/reconocimiento-de-dos-grandes-del-blues , and for an explanation (in English) about the awards on the festival website click here: http://www.blueshondarribia.com/en/premio_hbf/ .

The Year Of Mud! An article in Argentina's Malbec & Blues online magazine (here's a link for it: http://malbecblues.blogspot.com/ ) refers to this year as "El Año De Mud" or "The Year Of Mud." The article refers to Mud Morganfield (here's his website: http://www.mudmorganfieldsite.com/ ), and his first national release Son Of The Seventh Son (for more on that, check out http://www.bobcorritore.com/photos169.html ). The article speaks of all the fanfare this CD has received with airplay, chart positions, reviews, major festival headlining slots, and the cover story of Living Blues Magazine (here's their website: http://www.livingblues.com/ ). Mud Morganfield is of course, the eldest son of Muddy Waters and bears an uncanny resemblence to his father in both look and sound. He has been taking the blues world by a storm. Mud is currently on tour in South America. To see the "Year Of Mud" article click here http://malbecblues.blogspot.com/ and scroll down the page.

T-Model Ford Documentary in Production! Chaz Geisler is currently in the process of producing a film documentary of Mississippi blues hero T-Model Ford (here's his myspace page http://www.myspace.com/tmodelford ). The film, titled Put A Stamp On It: This Is T Model Ford, will contain live performances, interviews, life on the road and at home, as well as commentary by musicians and friends such as Lightnin' Malcolm, Gravel Road, Jimbo Mathus, Dan Auerbach (Of the Black Keys), Bob Corritore, Scott Barretta, Jim O'Neal and others. The film will contain previously unreleased recordings. Look for this to be debuted at film festivals early next year. T-Model Ford is currently alive and well but is taking time off from performing to recover from a recent stroke. If anyone has footage, posters, photos or any T-Model Ford paraphernalia please contact Chaz at info@putastamponit.com. Updates will be posted on http://www.putastamponit.com/ or the film's facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/putastamponit . On a sad sidenote, Chaz reports that T-Model's longtime drummer who was affectionately called Spam, had passed away earlier this year. If we can gather enough biographical information for Spam we will present a proper obituary at a later date.

Big Pete Pearson releases new CD! Veteran blues vocalist Big Pete Pearson (here's his website: http://www.bigpeteblues.com/ )has a wonderful new CD out currently called Choose. This album features backing by The Gamblers, an Italian band with whom Big Pete does bi-annual European tours.

Bukka White on YouTube! Here is a great example of the pure power of country blues. Please enjoy Bukka White (here's his website: http://www.myspace.com/bukkawhite#! performing the Aberdeen Mississippi Blues from the 1960s. He uses his guitar for equal parts melody and percussion. Check out this video to see:

Beldon's Blues Points: Images from music's past

2012-07-13T14:17:00.000-07:00

Saw this picture on Facebook the other day and just had to share it. I don't have to say who's in it. From what I could determine, here is how it came about: It was taken by recording engineer/producer Eddie Kramer who frequently snapped informal pictures of the musicians he worked with. It was apparently Hendrix's birthday in 1969--I guess that would have been his last birthday--and he decided to spend it at Madison Square Garden where Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones were playing. The picture was taken of the two as they were chatting backstage. What makes it so cool is that Hendrix and Jagger are just sitting around as if they were regular folks, not iconic rock stars. Incidently, it recently went up for sale at a San Francisco exhibit. The price tag? $2,500.