“BLUES STORIES”

RJ Spangler and Mr. Cho were kind enough to ask me to recount a few interesting stories about blues artists I’ve met in my 32-plus years of this nutty music business.  So in Ernie Harwell “baseball story” fashion, I’ve picked three that will perhaps amuse your readers.  The first sort of concurs with this year’s 50 year observation of Jakie Robison’s breaking the color line in major league baseball in 1947.  I broke the Alligator color line in 1974 playing keyboards on Fenton Robinson’s “Somebody Loan Me A Dime” record.  Drummer Martin Gross, now of the Howling Diablos and I put a little group together to back Fenton’s appearance at the BLIND PIG in Ann Arbor and Fenton afterward hired me to play on his first record for Alligator.  But Bruce Iglauer, the president of the label, indicated he wanted only blacks on his label, then in it’s infancy.  Fenton, hearing of this, told me to keep it on the down-low, but if he couldn’t pick his own people to play on his record, he’d just as soon not do it.  I don’t know what transpired later between him and Iglauer, but I did play on that album and three years later, his second LP (“I Hear Some Blues Downstairs”) plus, thanks to Bruce, recorded two albums on ALLIGATOR for Koko Taylor in 1975 and ’76.

A very fine guitarist/vocalist named John Nicholas, now of Austin, Texas, introduced me to Muddy Waters in 1974.  Muddy was playing at a Harpo’s-type club called the Rock And Roll farm in Wayne where we were introduced, and thanks to Nicholas, I was invited on stage to play a tune.  Trying to be gracious and leave the bandstand after one song, Muddy said, “no, no.  Let’s play some more!”  and I ended up having the honor of [laying an hour set with Muddy doing all the Muddy classics from his mid-50′s CHESS recordings I enjoyed so much in my mis-guided youth.

I’m saving what I think is the best for last.  I was milling in Los Angeles in 1978 and heard Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson playing at a little dive on Santa Barbara called the Rubiat Room and when I saw him using a trio with a Hammond B-3, got up the nerve to ask him if I could play.  He invited me up to the bandstand and like many old timers, gave me the old “play something at breakneck speed to humiliate the midget trick.”  Sonny Rollins’ “oleo” was the test weapon and after I “passed,” he went on to sing several great blues, including “Hold It Right There.”  After the set, I thanked him, he grunted and said nothing, and I left, wondering if he thought I was in fact, a “kobito,” or “tsuru” (midget).  The next morning, Johnny Otis called me and said “I just got a call from Cleanhead and he said some guy from Pittsburgh was at his gig at the Rubiat last night and played his ass off!”  I replied that I was there and said, “well, we played a few but he didn’t say anything afterwards.”  “Thats typical,” Otis said, “it’s hard to get a compliment from that old bastard.”  Years later, I called him while in L.A. and found out he had died, but talked to his widow.  “You know, he mentioned some guy coming to his gig at the Rubiat and how surprised he was that he played so good.  I guess you were that guy,” she said.

This story was previously published in the Blues Notes for the Detroit Blues Society: Volume 5, Number 8  August 1997

These days it seems that every little corner tavern has some kind of blues band, unlike the 1960′s, 70′s and most of the 80′s.  Of course, very little of it is official blues, but it’s billed as blues so we’ll work from that premise.  After all, Richard E. Nixon once said: “The legacy of history depends on who writes it.”  Very likely, many of these little joints will fold, change their entertainment policy, or like many alleged jazz clubs, eject all live music playing soldiers and play CDs or tapes.  And of course, for the few with any staying power, neither the musicians or club owners will get rich.  I believe there’s a two-fold reason for why these places exist now and why they didn’t in my early years.  Number one, in the 60′s and 70′s, joints were more “specialized” in the type of music they had.  There were jazz piano clubs, jazz organ clubs, funk clubs, rock clubs, folk clubs, top 40 lounges, and so forth.  And though most of the music was silly, the people of that time “knew” the type of music they wanted to hear; and I assure you, it wasn’t requests for “Lonnies Lament” by John Coltrane.  There was a time that songs like “Proud Mary,”  “Send in the Clowns”  “Feelings,”  were not just requested by patrons and club owners, but DEMANDED.  Needless to say for anyone who knows me, I wasn’t too cooperative in learning those lounge lizard “standards,” making those trenches more down and dirty than they were in attempting to survive in this business.  Thus, the “disadvantage” factor.  But the advantage in recent years I believe is a result of the young yuppie or “gen-X-er” simply not knowing about the songs of that era.  Perhaps they’re attempting (though failing in most cases as I see it) to rise to a higher level of sophistication by letting one get away with playing “Infant Eyes” by Wayne Shorter (thought it’s certainly not as requested as “Joy to the World” or was it “Jeremiah was a gosh-darn bullfrog” was 20 years ago.  Or perhaps for the twenty-somethings that smoke cigars and talk of meeting someone on the internet are just getting tired of watching “smashing pumpkin” videos on MTV and will tolerate a nutty guy playing a minor blues.  Whatever the reason, it’s another example of “ichoitung” and if it ultimately marches my troops to victory, then play some rhythm changes and not worry about Three Dog Night classics.  And now we’ll have more stories, but first lets tune in on these words.

- Bill Heid

This story was originally published for the Detroit Blues Society  volume: 5 number: 12, december 1997

ARLINGTON, VA. – Recently, I made a four day trip to New York City which was highlighted by an organ trio gig with guitarist Peter Bernstein in Hell’s Kitchen.  The jaunt also featured doing my Ruppert Pupkin thing (“I dont mind waiting”) with record companies, consulting with local musical allied forces seeking light at the end of the tunnel in their eternal struggles, and enjoying extra moosurelli on pizza slices at Sal’s Famous where sadly, there still are no photo’s of brothers on the wall of fame.  For all the rehtoric of Mayor Giuliani’s crackdown on hentai (pervert) sex shops in Times Square and reductions in crime and new tourist-friendly Disney-like vibe in mid-town Manhattan, it felt and looked the same to me:  congested, dirty, claustrophobic, yet as always, soulful.

I made my New York debut in 1949, likely as the Giants played the Dodgers at either Ebbets Field or the Polo Grounds and Diz and Bird played “Lester Leaps In” at unknown speeds somewhere on 125th street, but as a mere one year old, was too young to savor the now-archeologicalness of it all.  My uncle had a two story wooden house built on stilts on Jamaica Bay in Broad Channel, Queens where family pilgrimages were made every summer in my fathers Buick Roadmaster through the 1950′s which now seems like a million years ago.  My first of a hundred or more hitch- hiking trips to New York began in 1966 and into the early 70′s, can recall thumbing through Queens, Brooklyn, Manhattan, and the Bronx to attend ball games in the old Yankee Stadium.  I lived there for a few month’s in 1973, working mostly organ gigs in Newark at the last chitlin clubs and played and hung with Eddie Gladden, Grachan Monchur III, Grant Green, and Larry Young, quite a musical education.  Other than a brief trip in 1977, I hadn’t returned to New York until 1992 when a heroic hitch-hike effort was made to see the new (and ugly) Yankee Stadium, then head to Harlem for an enjoyable organ gig with saxophonist Don Braden.  At that time, having spent about two years living in the massiveness of Osaka, Nippon, when I got the first panoramic view of mid-town from the New Jersey Turnpike, I remember the scene not overwhelming me as it did in the early days.  With more Nippon trips, a year and a half in Los Angeles, another trip to Singapore and Nippon again last year, last week’s visit was my first in over six years.

Linking up with my brother George and meeting with musicians from all over the U.S struggling to survive in that theatre of war made for what the Honeymooner’s Grand High Exalted Mystic Ruler would call “a great night in the history of the Racoons.”  Yet when it was over and I crossed back into New Jersey, I felt like I had made bail and was released from prison.  Many “stay behinds” as they call them at CIA in nearby Langley, urged me to join the fight, claiming I could work every night.  But no longer a nice fresh young spring chicken, at this point, it would be easier to stay in the friendly confines of Detroit, which compared to New York, feels like being on a fishing trip with Ted Williams in British Columbia.  Beyond the filth, claustrophobia, financial helicoptics, and constant aggravation in just finding a parking space, the main reason why I can’t muster up the spirit to live in that lunacy is what might be termed the “musicalizationalistical factor” itself.  That, simply put, is this: Although New York is the only game in town for finding an abundance of great musicians unsurpassed anywhere and making hopeful “contacts”, in order for the best musicians to survice, many need day jobs (something I’ve resisted all my life), or a “Rooskie-Cuba” subsidy (wife or girlfriend working or support from wealthy parents), or worse, biting off the chicken head like a circus geek.  That could mean playing society gigs (club dates), corny weddings, or backing come corny alleged female singer who concludes “The Lady Is a Tramp” sounding like an L.A.P.D. Code 3 (lights and siren) police unit chasing a suspect in 77th Division.  And all that just to pay outrageous rent on a crib that makes Travis Bickle’s “Taxi Driver” apartment feel like a mansion in Grosse Pointe Farms.

I admire those noble grunts who can stick it out, but for my gosh-darn self, i can’t envision all that agony just to say I’m part of the Big Apply music scene, though I must confess, it’s tempting to join the musical refugee column coming from everywhere to squat in the bush with Charlie and make a go of it.  Rather, for now, after my share of suffering 33 years in this degrading business and my troops quite weary, I choose to join Richard E. Nixon in seeking “peace at the center.”  Now we’ll have more blues stories, but first let’s tune in on these words.

This story was previously published in the Blues Notes, a periodical produced and published by the Detroit Blues Society.