A genial tour guide, Peter Rowan steered a Caffe Lena-full of fans Sunday through his New England childhood – “singing to the stars, listening to the ocean” as he nostalgically recalled – then in dusty-road rambles through the west. Rowan mapped those wanderings decades ago, in distinguished company.
When Rowan, Jerry Garcia, David Grisman, Vassar Clements and John Kahn formed Old & In the Way, everybody was in their 30s and 40s.
Now 81, Rowan remains among the last living links to bluegrass pioneer Bill Monroe, like his somewhat spryer contemporary Buddy Guy (87) with Chicago blues inventor Muddy Waters. “Still standing” begs the question how well can they still sing and play?
Rowan’s cozy, familiar tunes have worn well, and so has his easy-chair voice and finger-picking guitar style, despite a bandage on his fretting hand insult finger. He seldom stretched far on Sunday, though he hit a falsetto yodel at times, mainly in the more relaxed second of two sets. Banjoist (first set) and guitarist (second set) Max Wareham and bassist Chris Sartori, both tasteful and tidy, flanked him, coloring inside the lines.
Some in the packed house seemed to sport as many miles on the clock as Rowan himself, calling out for favorite songs, whooping in delight when Rowan responded. Singer-songwriter Carolyn Shapiro at the next table seemed among the youngest fans there. A quick T-shirt scan: Grateful Dead, Rowan himself, Sirsy, Doc Watson, every acoustic music festival around and some bright Alohas. Soundman Joe Deuel told me Rowan first played the Caffe when Lena herself ran the show.
Max Wareham, left, Peter Rowan, and Chris Sartori
Rowan started at the top: “Panama Red” from “Old & In the Way” and a huge hit for the Dead-adjacent New Riders of the Purple Sage. It wrapped around the even more venerable “Freight Train.” Then the music hit the road with a similar one-two of “The Hobo Song” and “Lonesome LA Cowboy.” Some sang along; Rowan didn’t need to invite anybody, and he flexed his falsetto a bit in a Doc Watson tribute, then made easy octave leaps in the next tune before wrapping with “Cold Rain and Snow” from the Dead’s 1967 debut.
Max Warham, banjo
Second-set songs stretched longer, from four or five minutes in the first set, sometimes past 10 in the second. They sang and played harder. If the first set was warm-up, it worked.
Max Wareham, guitar
Wareham switched from banjo to electric guitar and Rowan played slide to start in a bouncy, bluesy “Motherless Children.” They pressed even harder in the gospel-y “Walking in Jerusalem,” a strong highlight, before the thoughtful “I Am a Pilgrim and a Stranger.” In “Tumbleweed,” Rowan and Wareham played a tight duo break and Sartori hit his best bass solo of the night.
Chris Sartori
Chris Sartori, right, bows his bass
Later, they revisited this theme of Native American respect/lamentation in “Land of the Navajo.” Rowan spoke a wistful verse here, then Sartori’s arco bass underlined the beat and Rowan played his voice from gruff rumble to high yodel and desolate cry in his most expressive vocal of the show.
“Fetch Wood Carry Water” sailed on easy-reggae funk, and the grooves of the second set packed more muscle than earlier, even the slow waltz “Mississippi Moon” that closed in massed fingersnaps Rowan led.
The show felt comfortably loose, Rowan organizing it, if that’s the word, song by song and nodding to cue the solos, or calmly navigating them himself with deliberate, sparse fingerpicking.
The Songs
Panama Red
Freight Train
Panama Red (reprise)
The Hobo song
Lonesome LA Cowboy
It’s a Doc Watson Morning, Guitar Picking Kind of Day
Unknown (Was busier with camera than notebook here, sure I’d remember. Wrong.)
Peter Rowan’s Tom Mix-scale topper fits well; Rowan’s talent and accomplishments range so wide, stack so high. The veteran singer and picker, now 81, totes decades-deep experience onto the stage at Caffe Lena on Mother’s Day, Sunday, May 12.
He’ll lead a sub-set of his bluegrass band. That fits, too. Rowan began in bluegrass and has wound up there after numerous detours. A Zelig of string-band players, he’s played with more bands than Neil Young.
Rowan started in bluegrass at the very top.
So how would a 22-year-old Massachusetts Yankee join pioneer Bill Monroe’s Bluegrass Boys?
“I had immersed myself in his music,” Rowan told me recently, “listening to live taped shows and studying his lead singers like Jimmy Martin, Ed Mayfield, Carter Stanley, Mack Wiseman, and Del (McCoury), who proceeded me as a Bluegrass Boy.” Rowan said, “I learned all the vocal duets,” and he often wrote and sang alongside the key inventor of Appalachian up-hollow. home-made music.
As Rowan noted in his website bio, “One thing I started to like about the Monroe style was that there was a lot more blues in it than other styles of bluegrass.” Rowan said, “It was darker. It had more of an edge to it. And yet it still had the ballad tradition in it, and I loved that.”
Bill Monroe, left, and Peter Rowan
Bluegrass proved perfect for Rowan with its compelling blend of power and poignance: punch and precision in the instruments and elemental emotion in the voices.
Rowan also learned about band leading with and from Monroe.
Rowan told me Monroe was “the Boss Man.” He said that, in the Bluegrass Boys, Monroe exerted “very little correction.” He added, “But you felt it if you went too far.”
As bluegrass mutated from the traditionalist 60s into the experimental 70s, the old guard might have felt the younger players were going too far.
Not Rowan.
“There is no music police,” he asserted. “You have to really believe in the process; overcome doubt and fear.” Asked how he does this, Rowan answered, “A deep breath and let it flow.”Rowan rode a formidable flow after leaving Monroe, first forming the aggressively eclectic Earth Opera (1967-69) with David Grisman. Arguably the first Americana group with its mix of acoustic instruments and high-flying improvisation. Rowan said it was the most loose and organic of his many bands.
Earth Opera – Peter Rowan, top left; David Grisman, bottom left
When Seatrain (1969-1973) formed from the broken shards of the Blues Project, Rowan veered fast in the opposite direction; he said it was the most structured and organized of his bands. This got messy: released as a Blues Project album, “Planned Obsolescence” (1968) was actually an Earth Opera effort, although Rowan didn’t play on it.
Muleskinner (1973) with fellow Bluegrass Boy Richard Greene marked a traditional turn, and Rowan continued in this direction with Old & In the Way (1973) with Grisman (mandolin), Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia (banjo), Rowan (guitar), John Kahn (bass) and first John Hartford, then Vassar Clements (fiddle). Rowan said this bluegrass supergroup was the fastest of his bands to learn new songs, and this confident fluent efficiency helped make the band’s self-titled album (1975) one of the top-selling bluegrass releases of all time.
Old & In the Way – From left, Jerry Garcia, David Grisman, Peter Rowan, Vassar Clements. Not shown: John Kahn
Minus Garcia and Kahn, Old & In the Way reunited on “Old & In the Gray” (2002), then Rowan and Grisman (last two surviving members) played Old & In the Way songs with the String Cheese Incident at Gathering of the Vibes in 2015.
Peter Rowan, left, and David Grisman
Meanwhile, all along these musical transformations, Rowan played with brothers Lorin and Chris as the Rowans, releasing seven albums from 1972 to 1982.
Rowan also performed and recorded with bands that bear his name. He said working in bands led by Monroe, accordionist Flaco Jimenez and guitarist Tony Rice inspired him to form his own groups, which he does with gusto. He currently leads Peter Rowan Bluegrass Band, Peter Rowan’s Big Twang Theory, Peter Rowan and Crucial Reggae, Peter Rowan’s Walls of Time and Peter Rowan’s Free Mexican Airforce. Rowan explained, “Walls of Time is my main group, who are also my bluegrass band. Walls of Time is a more vast complex sound. Bluegrass for me is always straight ahead. I love to sing!”
Of working with multiple bands, Rowan observed, “It’s good to have players all over the country. It keeps things interesting with fresh ideas.”
He said his current group (double-dubbed Peter Rowan’s Bluegrass Band and Walls of Time) learn new material quickly and provide great fun in the studio and onstage.
His latest release, “Calling You From My Mountain” adds top-level guests including his brother Lorin Rowan, Tony Trischka, Jerry Douglas, Sam Bush and Ricky Skaggs.
Americana Highways hailed the album this way: “Despite the genre’s antique oeuvre, it’s loaded with modern charm. The bluegrass is fresh sounding, energetic and fueled with a tradition that obviously survives to shine yet again. No blowing dust off this artist.” The album reaches back in its track, which Rowan composed and originally sang with Bill Monroe. This resonant, full-circle, decades-deep move encapsulates his career – from bluegrass, to bluegrass, with lively stops along the way.
On this tour, Rowan may bring accompanists to Caffe Lena. “I’ll Have Max Wareham on guitar and banjo from my bluegrass band and Chris (Sartori) from Twisted Pines on acoustic bass!”
Rowan said he’ll miss his old musician friend Frank Wakefield, who played Caffe Lena often and died in Saratoga Springs on April 26 at 89.
Frank Wakefield, left, two other guys, and Peter Rowan
On previous Saratoga visits, “I loved spending time with Frank Wakefield, the late great mandolin genius,” mourned Rowan, who didn’t stay sad for long. Amiable and friendly, he even answered my every-interview question which I warned him would be dumb.
“What do you drive?” I wanted to know, noting many musicians drive Ford F-150 pickups, though jazz pianist Keith Jarrett impatiently brushed the question aside before laughing to reply, “A herd of goats! Tell everybody I’m driving a herd of goats!”
Rowan took this in, then said, “When I’m not driving myself up a tree, I like riding a horse. They are all characters who teach me a lot!”
Peter Rowan plays Sunday, May 12 at Caffe Lena (47 Phila St., Saratoga Springs). 7 p.m. $62.91, members $59.66, students and children $31.46. 518-583-0022 http://www.caffelena.org. Streaming at caffelena.tv.
About the Photos: I found these photos on Rowan’s website and Facebook posts and on Wikipedia, including the Earth Opera Elektra Records publicity shot. I contribute regularly to Wikipedia; if you use it, so should you.
This is a non-review since my Nippertown colleague Don Wilcock got the assignment and I shot photos, on Thursday, April 18, 2024
So, this is mainly to share these images, though I also have some word-thoughts, including a stab at a set-list, below.
This was a listening crowd, in a church-y space, and everybody sat to listen except a boy and girl, aged four or six, who jumped up when the music started and never stopped moving.
At first, fiddler/singer/leader Michael Doucet entertained with playful introductions in which the northeast weather, the state of Texas and a Montana fan who hailed their “Confederate music” took equal hits. Then, he increasingly stressed, though still playful, how his Cajun music honors a vulnerable minority population of immigrants. Near the end, he traced the painful history of his people as suffering marginalization and displacement, with its music-reinforced and family-based culture supplying a proud, enduring resilience.
The music etched a somewhat different dynamic arc, sounding sweet, sedate and folkloric to start and finish, but generating a ferocious head of steam mid-set with in “L’Amour ou la folie,” then “Poison Love” and “Le Chanky-Chank Francais” holding the pedal to the metal.
Stage right to left, the band was Matthew Doucet – Michael’s son, a fiddle-maker – playing some fiddle but mostly triangle. And if this sounds rudimentary, the guy is to the triangle what Steve Amedee (the subdudes) is to tambourine: Matthew made a short, emphatic metallic clank when he set the base of the triangle on his knee and struck it, but a more open, ringing tone, and higher pitch, when he raised it to strike in mid-air.
Michael Doucet proved his usual triple-threat self as fiddler, singer and talker.
Tradition shaped his rhythms and supplied venerable melodies he taffy-pulled with elastic, jazzy gusto; his tenor voice had the same clarity. His song intros and digressions would work as standup even if he set the fiddle aside; but he honored his predecessors among Cajun and zydeco pioneers, both famous and obscure.
Bill Bennett’s acoustic bass guitar competed the rhythm section, playing tastefully few notes, always in the right place, where dancers’ feet would hit.
The band’s bridge between beats and lead vocals and solos up front and strengthening everything, Chad Huval flexed Popeye-like forearms to squeeze a joyfully relentless, powerful chug from his diatonic (button-style) accordion, fingers flying around the melody.
Flat-pick guitarist David Doucet – Michael’s brother – also served up equal parts beat push and melodic merriment, and sang both leads and harmonies with relaxed command.
Together, they played as tight as the highest string on Michael Doucet’s fiddle.
The songs all felt like dance numbers though some rocked and some swung. Some of these titles represent best guesses…
Eunice Two-Step
Jolie Blon – introduced as the Louisiana national anthem
Acadian Two-Step (Dewey Balfa)
L’Amour ou la folie
Poison Love
Le Chanky-Chank Francais
Tous Les Deux Pour la Meme
Freeman Zydeco (tribute to Freeman Fontenot)
Quelle belle vie – Here a front-row older woman yelled, “That’s my FAVORITE!” in joyful, show-stopping falsetto. Doucet graciously sang it to her
Theogene Creole (by the almost unknown Barisse Chunav)
Starvation Waltz
Little Darlin’ (an audience request)
Zydeco Gris-Gris (an early Bo Diddley beat settled into two-step rhythm)
Michael Eck knows how to mark a milestone; right onto his own skin.
On Friday, hours before he introduces his new album “fermata” in an all-star show at Caffe Lena, tattoo artist Deanna Louise* will etch a fermata symbol onto his arm. The show also marks Eck’s 60th birthday, another onstage major-birthday (with zeros) musical bash. In 2020, he played a sold out show celebrating 30 years since he first played Caffe Lena.
“Fermata” may sound like a menu item in a red-sauce restaurant, but it bears a specific, if elastic, musical meaning. Merriam-Webster defines it as “a prolongation at the discretion of the performer of a musical note, chord, or rest…” Its symbol, soon to mark Eck’s arm in a design adapted by his twin grown children, arches like an eyebrow over a pupil and gives a performer permission to stretch things.
“To me, it speaks of freedom in music,” Eck wrote in the news release announcing Friday’s show. Freedom has never been a problem for the singer-songwriter and stringed-things picker who played electric guitar with a power drill in an early punk band and usually works with several bands at a time. These days, he performs with the Ramblin Jug Stompers and the Eddies-nominated Lost Radio Rounders; several other crews are on hiatus. On Friday, Eck, 2023 Eddie Award for Folk/Traditional Artist of the Year, leads a crew of longtime musical friends in vintage folk tunes, older tunes of his own and fresh fare from “fermata.”
Michael Eck onstage at the Palace Theatre in Albany. Lori Van Buren/Times Union photo
Eck’s “fermata” summarizes in 15 songs his thoughts during, then after, a pause around health issues including a stroke and COVID. Eck bridged the plague time hiatus of live shows with online workshops including songwriting exercises through the Beacon Music Factory and the Caffe Lena School of Music. The deadlines and direction each program imposed set him on a strong creative roll. Eck noted, “I’ve actually written…an album’s worth of songs since I started recording ‘fermata.’”
His news release explains, “Each of the characters singing these songs, whether myself, an addict in Kentucky, an old coin, a bereft wife, or a bullet in a revolver, has been thrown an unexpected pause” – a fermata. The songs push and probe at limits, work tension and release, sketch potential energy in destructive or healing expression.
As with his previous “your turn to shine” album (2022), Eck recorded “fermata” at WEXT studios, his players and singers creating together in the same room at the same time.
“I remain madly in love with the concept of playing live,” Eck told me Saturday. “All that dang folk music I’ve been playing was originally recorded in one take by a bunch of folks around a microphone in the first half the 20th century!” He prepped his musicians with plentiful rehearsal, and noted, “Four of my six albums have actually been live in the studio affairs.”
Eck recruited expert talent for “fermata,” both at WEXT and onstage Friday at Caffe Lena. Asked to list his one-night band mates, he explained – and here, we’ll let his own words convey his respect. “Mr. Eck sings and strums. Bob Buckley plays standup bass, piano and sings. Sten Isachsen plays guitar and mandolin, like a monster I might add. Kevin Maul couldn’t make the recording sessions, but he is flying from Florida for the show, god bless him, and playing dobro and Hawaiian guitar and singing. I’m very excited to work with him again. Finally, Rosanne Raneri** will sing and play some guitar.” In a conversation with himself, Eck marveled, “I’m sorry, did you say Rosanne Raneri? Yes, I damn well did. How cool is that!?”
Also cool: “I realized while preparing materials for this show that at least one song from each of my five preceding albums has been recorded and released by another artist,” said Eck. “As a songwriter, there is no greater feeling than that.”
Well, except possibly the joy of hearing skilled, soulful friends play and sing your songs with you onstage.
Michael Eck and Friends play Friday, April 19 at Caffe Lena (47 Phila St., Saratoga Springs) 8 p.m. $21.69, members $19.52, students and children $10.85. Ticket buyers can also add $5 donations to Caffe Lena with their purchase. 518-583-0022 www.caffelena.org. CD copies of “fermata” will be available for sale.
*Tattooist Deanna Louise earlier inscribed a drawing by the late Greg Haymes, now five years gone, onto Eck’s other arm.
**Assistant professor of Theatre Arts at Hudson Valley Community College, Rosanne Raneri has set aside music making for a time. She received the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2018.
Full disclosure: Raneri used a photo of mine in the artwork for her “Parhelion” album, Metroland magazine’s Best Local Release for 2000. The late, great Greg Haymes hailed it as “one of the finest albums ever recorded in this area.”
We defined “fermata;” might as well do “parhelion.” Merriam-Webster defines parhelion as “a bright spot, often with color, that appears on the parhelic circle on either side of the sun…also known as a sun dog.” Shown here, for reference, is the one that formed around last week’s eclipse, as seen from a farm road near Little Falls.
When this happens around the moon, it’s a “moondog” – nickname of eccentric New York composer Edward Louis Hardin whose best line is worthy of an Eck lyric: “Machines were mice and men were lions once upon a time. Now that it’s the opposite, it’s twice upon a time.”
When singer-songwriters Stephen Clair and Michael Eck shared a New Orleans apartment, they tag-teamed a two-man poetry workshop on the same typewriter. One typed by day, the other by night. A tattoo of that typewriter on Eck’s arm marks that connection.
The two will tag-team again Sunday, Feb. 25 in WAMC’s Live at the Linda Live series, a tasty two-fer for fans of incisive songwriting and post-punk performing. The shared show celebrates a decades-deep musical friendship with shared stops on America’s musical map, but different paths at times.
Both have played live on the radio, both came up in Albany’s punk-rock scene, both have recorded with bands and solo. They’ve played in each other’s bands and together often, including with their hero Pete Seeger.
Another hero, one-man rock show Hamell on Trial, inspired both to play solo in area clubs and coffeehouses in the 80s. Eck – who has played electric guitar with a power drill – calls this approach “maximum solo acoustic,” where intensity and insight combine.
Early on, Eck and Clair collaborated “only in the most ridiculous ways,” as Clair said by phone from Beacon recently. “We would jump onto one another’s shows to both complement the show and make a mess of it.”
“I don’t think we’ll be sabotaging one another’s sets at The Linda,” he said, sounding innocent but playful.
Stephen Clair – Hillary Clements Photo
Each will play solo, Eck going first since Clair has the most recent album, the all-solo “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.” Clair said, “I’m really looking forward to this show because I think it has something to do with making this record.”
Playing live on radio suits both lovers of music on the air. One of Eck’s several active bands is the Lost Radio Rounders, and he produced and hosted “Performance Place: Live Concert Radio at WAMC.” As a teenager, he eavesdropped on punk-rockers the ADs in his Slingerlands neighborhood. “When I heard the ADs on the radio, I realized these were the guys I heard playing in the basement – and they’re on the radio,” Eck told me last year. “I realized you could do this, in your community.”
In Albany’s do-it-yourself music community, Clair played briefly in Eck’s band Doubting Thomas while Eck played in Clair’s punk-rock trio Glaze. Surprisingly, Glaze landed a remarkably rare appearance on mainstream radio power-house WGY-AM which seldom paid attention to music in general, even less to local acts.
Neither Eck nor Clair stayed local. Both pilgrimaged to Austin as well as New Orleans, then their paths parted for a time. After recording his debut album “Altoona Hotel” (1997) with members of Oneonta rock band Subduing Mara, Clair earned an MFA in writing. He moved to Brooklyn and left music-making for a writer’s life. while Eck drifted back to Albany to start a family.
Clair resumed recording with “Little Radio” (2003) in Queens with friends. The album,“got what for me was a lot of attention,” he said. “WFUV started playing it in heavy rotation,” unusual attention to a completely independent album. When the New York station broadcast interviews with Clair and and live performances, “I was kind of riding high.”
Although made with a band, Clair’s “Little Radio” ride launched solo tours. In Texas, rich in stages and stations open to solo troubadours, he recalled, “Pretty much every live show I would do, I would also do a live on-air at the local radio station that day or the day before.” Playing live on radio, Clair found, “There’s the illusion of a concert in front of a live audience, physically, while also being on the radio.”
After touring with Texan Robert Earl Keen, Clair borrowed Keen’s band for “What Luck” (2007), and he worked with producer Malcolm Burn (a colleague of Daniel Lanois) on “Strange Perfume” (2019). By then he’d moved to Beacon, started a family, opened a music school and formed a regular band: Daria Grace, bass; Aaron Lapos, drums.
New geography brought a new sound. “I got away from the rootsy thing and it’s this bridge that I’ve constantly been straddling my whole life,” he said, “the singer-songwriter who’s also a little bit rootsy, but simultaneously a little bit like New York, punk rock 70s too – all rolled into one ball.”
Making his new album “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life,” he said, “took getting to the point where I felt brave enough, and had songs that were interesting enough on their own, when just laid bare like that.” He wrote 100 songs to feel confident he had 11 keepers. He recorded each song live, without edits.
“Some days I would do a dozen takes of a song, and it just wouldn’t be hitting and I’d walk away,” he said. “Then I would work on other songs for a few weeks and then I would come back to that song…Of course, no single take is perfect…These recordings have fully exposed warts – which I’m 100 percent fine with.”
Comfortable with playing solo, Clair now feels he’s reached a new level. “People come up to me and thank me for being so generous,” he said. I think it’s because I’m completely myself when I’m onstage.”
Clair added, “When you perform solo, it’s like you’re giving a talk or telling a story; those elements are more at the forefront than they are when you’re playing with a band… it’s really so pleasing and so energizing to just engage with an audience over these songs, so these songs feel almost like an excuse to be able to have that opportunity. It’s really, really great.”
When not performing, writing or recording, both Eck and Clair work musician-appropriate day-jobs.
Clair founded and runs the Beacon Music Factory; his “full-time side-hustle,” he calls it, “a music school that lives a double life.” By day, it offers private lessons, mainly to school-agers. “Then at night, there are all these adults who come in and play in these adult rock band camps, or a string chamber group or a saxophone quartet,” said Clair, proudly noting how these ad hoc bands build close friendships. “That continues to be a huge inspiration to me in running this place.”
Eck has reviewed music and drama for the Times Union, worked in publicity for the Proctors Collaborative, then wrote promotional information for a west coast instrument maker. While a stroke, COVID and other health challenges curtailed day-job work, Eck continued to perform. Sitting to play initially, he performs regularly with the Ramblin Jug Stompers, the Lost Radio Rounders, Good Things and a duo with percussionist Brian Melick that grew from the all-star band Tin Can Alley. He has also curated performance series at Caffe Lena, WAMC’s The Linda, Union College and Borders, and produced recordings by Jim Gaudet, Coal Palace Kings, the Plague and others.
Michael Eck – Lori Van Buren/Times Union photo
Eck was inducted into the Eddies Hall of Fame in 2022 and his Lost Radio Rounders (a duo with Tom Lindsay) are nominated as Folk/Traditional Artist of the Year in the 2024 Eddies Awards (awards ceremony April 21 at Proctors), honors Clair would likely have harvested if he still lived here.
Both have raised creative offspring; Eck’s are twins and older than Clair’s. Eck is delighted his daughter and her husband live in his childhood Slingerlands home, where his first bands rehearsed and down the block from where Eck eavesdropped on the ADs. Clair notes his younger child Schuyler will surpass him as a musician, or already has.
A few days after we spoke, Clair Facebooked a concise new mission statement: “Making songs filled with longing, love, chickens, drugs and flowers into records and hitting the road with a vengeance since the 90s, with more than ten studio albums, and at least that many fans.”
On that same (unnecessarily) humble note, Eck borrowed the words of Northampton area rock troubadour Ray Mason to proclaim, “I play the same show in front of four people as I would in front of seven.”
Stephen Clair and Michael Eck play solo at WAMC’s The Linda (339 Central Ave., Albany) on Sunday., Feb. 25 in the “Live at the Linda Live” series hosted by Peter Hughes, 7:30 p.m. $25. 518-465-5233 x158 www.thelinda.org
FURTHER ON, DOWN THE ROAD
Stay tuned for details on Eck’s plans for an ensemble show with guests on Friday, April 19. He’ll celebrate his 60th birthday and introduce his new album “Fermata,” his sixth. Eck recorded “Your Turn to Shine,” his previous release, live and solo in the studios of WMHT (for its “AHA” program) and WEXT.
All due respect to my brother in law Richie, a Maui resident, this is something else.
Her name and face jumped off the page.
Alphabetically the first person listed in the Times Union obituaries on December 1, she bore the unforgettable name of Aloha Coleman.
ALBANY – Aloha C. Coleman, 65 of Albany, passed away on November 17, 2022. Visitation will be held on December 3, at 10 a.m. with service to follow at 11 a.m. in the Metropolitan Baptist Church, 105 Second St., Albany.
How scanty this seems. No information on her family, her work, anything. Apart from noting that she passed at a younger age than I am now, I remembered actually, surprisingly, meeting her.
Years ago, she stopped my car on a Troy roadway. She was flagger on a busy construction crew. Dump trucks growled behind her. Some delayed drivers did, too, in their unmoving overheating cars. Whenever a driver grumbled out the window, she approached the car and spoke, low and calm, as I heard when she talked down the driver ahead of me.
She had something more than merely nice about her. She was warm and sweet, to everybody, with a glow of kindness I could see.
Maybe my eyes were extra tuned up when I saw her, as I was heading back to my PR agency office from a photo shoot. I had cameras in the car, so I asked to photograph her. She said OK, and I watched a bit as she spoke on her walkie-talkie and waved her flag. I chose a lens and started shooting. At times, she looked right through my camera, unselfconscious, at ease.
When I picked up the color slides I’d shot of her from the lab, I could see that comfort, her warmth, in the pictures. I filed them away in a storage box and inventoried them decades later in a spreadsheet my son Zak organized for me.
Her smile stayed with me even when I hadn’t seen those pictures for years.
Every time I enjoy a happy encounter with any stranger, ever after, I remember Aloha Coleman; the prototype of surprise meet-ups. I was in her company for no more than five minutes, but she became the ideal of what could happen when fine new people cross our paths, or whenever things go better than expected with anybody.
Aloha had that same warm open-ness as Ellie, whom I had the great good fortune to marry a few years before Aloha stopped my car.
Now Ellie has a term she uses for a particular kind of surprise release from some obligation, for getting off an inconvenient hook without necessarily deserving to.
She once forgot an appointment with a clothing-alteration customer and was mortified when the customer phoned. “Oh, NO!” thought Ellie, expecting anger. But, no. A nice woman named Florence, the customer had forgotten the appointment, too. Florence apologized profusely, as Ellie gratefully forgave her. Ever after, when someone else’s mistake exonerates or erases one of our own, well, we call that getting “Florence’ed.”
And it now occurs to me that a surprising encounter with any stranger, or any interaction that goes better than expected– or deserved– that is an Aloha.
When I turned the page from her sparse obituary, I found an extensive mass culture one. Christine McVie of Fleetwood Mac, born Christine Perfect and a former member of Chicken Shack, had died at 79, 14 years older than Aloha Coleman.
The names of Christine’s bands offer only the scantiest clue about how euphonious, how harmonious she was, how essential to so many, in music and in life.
With the blues band Chicken Shack, she had the sheer nerve and confident vocal chops to cover “I’d Rather Go Blind” by the R&B titan Etta James.
When you hear her on Fleetwood Mac records, her low, easy voice stands out in the mix. Onstage her power seemed clearer. Even from the the distant seats I somehow always got to see Fleetwood Mac (that’s why I have no photos of her), I could see she was the heart of things.
For all the bluesy swing of the Mick Fleetwood and John McVie rhythm section, the ethereal soaring-scarf sound of Stevie Nicks’ voice and the guitar heroics and hearty tenor of Lindsey Buckingham, Christine McVie was the band’s center of sonic and emotional gravity.
After she joined Fleetwood Mac and married John McVie– and apart from some breaks from the road and the band– she was there nearly from the beginning to the end. A guest on Fleetwood Mac’s second album in August 1968, she arguably went on to write many of the band’s best songs. Her “Show Me a Smile” is the best tune on “Future Games,” and “Say You Love Me” put the big Mac back on the charts for the first time in five years. “Over My Head” further confirmed the revived band, now (1975) featuring Buckingham and Nicks, as pop hit-makers. Two years later, “Don’t Stop” firmly steadied the band, reeling from multiple romantic break-ups, as the top-selling “Rumours” album raucously reflected.
Although she and John McVie split, and she wrote and sang about it, the noisy drama exploded elsewhere, mainly between Nicks and Buckingham. For all the emotional candor of Christine’s lyrics, she expressed herself with calm reserve. It’s class, but with courage and craft, too; and it carries such emotional heft that everything revolves around her.
Since her passing, we hear the unmixed love and admiration of fans and fellow musicians. We share in her fellow stars’ respect and love.
I love how a Facebook post nailed it a few days ago. It’s by Damhnait Doyle, whom I otherwise don’t know:
To some, Christine McVie may have been in the shadows/ but that just means she was holding the whole thing up. The structure of Fleetwood Mac was built on the back of her tremendous songs and musicianship. When your light shines that bright/ you don’t need the spotlight- the light finds you. RIP Songbird
In the music she left us, Christine McVie was an Aloha.
1966, San Angelo, Texas. Summer, or what felt like it on the sun-hammered flat wide. Late afternoon, a dive bar that mixed low-alcohol beer with Tabasco and tomato juice in its trademark “red bird.”
A bartender responded with innocent surprise when a patron remarked that dousing bowls of popcorn with chili powder revved up drinkers’ thirst. “Now, is that a fact?”
The city fathers forbade hard liquor so tipplers drove fast to the next county for the harder stuff, brilliantly effective for drunk driving. This was one of the more exciting pastimes available, along with the flashy thrills of climbing on our barracks roofs at Goodfellow Air Force Base to watch thunderstorms crash and crush.
Onstage in the bar sat a tall thin guy with a guitar and calm, twinkly charm. He was among friends; fellow military guys from Goodfellow where we trained in radio intelligence.
When applause rewarded a song, singer Woody Smith waved it off. “What I do best is pick fly shit out of pepper with boxing gloves on.”
For all the fun he has had making music and telling jokes, what he did best was at a different sort of bar. Over 40 years in court-rooms, Woody Smith was a public defender, prosecutor and judge.
Woody grew up in Carlsbad where his dad worked in the potash mines. Woody did, too, but he also waited tables in the snack bar at the famous caverns. One day, a feud with his cook erupted in the dining room to the consternation of a hungry family. The cook prepared what looked like the cheeseburgers everybody ordered. But when Woody served them, the confused dad beckoned him back and lifted his bun top. It was empty. The dad looked quizzically up at Woody as if the question was too obvious to need asking: Where were the burgers?
Woody helpfully explained, “Maybe you should have ordered the deluxe.”
Before the dad could react, Woody brought out his manager who comped the family’s cheeseburgers, fries and drinks.
After radio-spy school in Texas, we moved around the world, in uniform. I spent a year on the Black Sea coast of Turkey before I joined Woody and other pals already stationed on a Navy base between Tokyo and Yokohama. We all lived in nearby villages, graciously welcomed by our Japanese neighbors despite overloud stereos and other frat-brat misbehavior. In our “battle of the bands,” we cranked up warring stereos in different rooms.
Woody lived nearby, so we partied together some. Once Bob Brown, drunk and over-confident in his navigational skills, mistook a maternity hospital for the home he shared with Woody and other sailors. Bob made himself comfortable, climbing into a delivery-room bed with a laboring mother to be. At his court-martial, the judge told Bob the Navy “takes a dim view of sailors acting like hairy monsters.”
Woody’s post-Navy path seemed more direct than the erratic trajectory most of us followed. We mostly blundered around; Woody went to law school.
A framed motto in his home on an east Albuquerque cul-de-sac proclaims his judicial philosophy: “If it ain’t fair, it ain’t legal.”
Before his bench, as he once explained, “First I identify the ass-hole; then I use the law to make sure they don’t win.”
Sometimes this was easy.
When a woman sued a neighbor over her constantly-barking dogs, the defendant brought a box of cassette tapes to court. Judge Woody asked what was on the tapes. She said it was the sound of her dogs – not barking. Judge Woody pointed out that could be the sound of anybody’s dogs, not barking. So she called a witness. She spoke in a normal tone, and when nothing happened she gave a loud shout. “Mister MENDOZA!” Some shouts later, an old, clearly deaf man rose and headed for the witness stand.
Judgement for the plaintiff.
As a prosecutor, Woody laughed when jail inmates mooned him as he walked to his courtroom.
I only once saw him there, in action. When our fellow Navy vet John Collins, his partner Sally and I visited his courtroom years ago, he was assuring the accused that DWI is a serious offense. This observation grew increasingly ironic.
“I’ve got nothing on under this robe,” he announced, leaving the bench after the trial. He actually wore a Rolling Stones T-shirt and jeans.
We lunched at Sadie’s in a nearby bowling alley, with beers. Then, we all boarded Woody’s spacious Chrysler sedan. Worried that thirst might overtake us on our ramble, he stopped at a drive-through for a six-pack that was gone before we arrived at a bar in Bernalillo.
There we settled into lazy wet afternoon. We shot lots of pool, badly, draining pitchers of draft beers and playing the same song over and over on the jukebox – a lively Mexican polka, “La Gallina.” The guys at the bar – we bought their pitchers, too – told us it meant “The Hen;” but it also means “funk” – which makes more sense.
Woody then drove us back to Albuquerque, dropped us off for naps and a late dinner while he went home to practice, then pack up his sax.
He picked us up at dusk and drove us to our third bar of the day, if you count Sadie’s. In retrospect, I surely would.
There, he climbed onstage with his band the Tube Worms. Every seat in the place was full but a barstool held vacant by a sign memorializing Chuy, its deceased occupant.
Woody and the guys had and delivered a high old time, playing rock and roll classics loose, fast and rowdy. Time flowed fast as the riffs and I was surprised on arriving back at John and Sally’s place to find it was 2 a.m.
I don’t know if Woody had court the next day.
As busy as his docket ever got, he never gave up music. For years, he led a crew he called the Woodpeckers in bars around Albuquerque and surrounding towns. And they opened for some stars at the Kino, an art-deco movie palace downtown.
Rolling Stones saxophonist Bobby Keys played some of those gigs; as I found during a September reunion in Albuquerque with Navy vet/radio-spy friends including Judge Woody. He handed me a gleaming Virtuoso alto sax Keys had gifted him, for a magical/religious moment.
Keys played with the Stones for decades, though they fired him during the “Exile on Main Street” (released in May 1972) sessions in Keith Richards’s basement studio in the south of France. Mick Jagger took umbrage when they wanted to record a sax part but Keys couldn’t be found. He was discovered enjoying himself in a bathtub he’d filled with Dom Perignon. He and two women friends were all naked there, “nekkid,” as Woody likes to say. Richards laughed and wanted to let Keys sober up and play but Jagger insisted that Keys be booted.
Keys had previously toured with fellow Texans Buddy Holly and Buddy Knox, then with Delaney & Bonnie and Friends whose guests included Eric Clapton and George Harrison. This introduced him to top British musicians. Delaney & Bonnie bandleader Leon Russell hired Keys for Joe Cocker’s “Mad Dogs and Englishman” tour and live album.
Years later, the Stones rehired Keys. As Richards told Rolling Stone after Keys died in 2014, “…The Stones were rehearsing for another tour. This was 1980-something, and I bought Bobby a ticket and said, Just get your ass here. When we rehearse ‘Brown Sugar,’ just sneak up and do the solo, man. Once we did ‘Brown Sugar,’ Bobby hit the solo and then I looked at Mick like, You see what I mean, Mick? And Mick looked at me and says, Yeah, you can’t argue with that. Once he just played those few notes, there really was no question. So Mick relented and said, Okay, let’s get Bob back in the band.
Keys played on a dozen Stones albums and dozens more by artists from Ringo and B.B. King to Carly Simon and Leo Sayer.
When the Stones played in Albuquerque on their “A Bigger Bang” world tour (2005-06), they paid Keys $15,000 for that night’s work. Then Judge Woody picked him up, buzzed him across town to play a dive bar with the Woodpeckers.
Keys’ cut of the door money: $25.
Woody told this tale at a late-September recent reunion in Albuquerque that brought together half a dozen old-friend Navy vets, some with our wives/patient partners. Some of us hadn’t seen others of us in 40 or 50 years, and we chose Albuquerque in deference to the two vet residents: Woody and John Collins.
We shared memories of the same episodes remembered differently and vice versa; tall tales of high times, and low.
And we recalled how we’d variously bridged big gaps in time and distance – most recently last fall when five of us assembled in Newville at the Herkimer County farmstead where my wife Ellie grew up and which she and some siblings still own.
Old Vets’ Reunion – From left, me, Schmuel “Stuart” Ferency, John Collins, Steve Bouck, “Lew” (Michael Ayres) in Newville, NY; fall 2021. Ferency lives in Hull, Massachusetts, Collins in Newville or Albuquerque, Bouck in Muskegon, Michigan, and Ayres in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.
Once Steve Bouck had Amtrak’ed from Seattle across country unannounced to Schenectady where Ellie and I found him sun-bathing in Riverside Park. John Collins showed up once, also unannounced, in a new pick-up. We hung around drinking reunion beers just long enough to be in the right place at the right time to paddle my birthday-gift canoe along the Watervliet Reservoir and rescue two capsized paddlers. One was going down for what would likely have been the last time, so I felt pretty proud of us until John suggested the guy we’d saved could now fulfill his destiny as a serial killer.
Years before that, Woody and John visited me in a Hamilton Hill hippie flat where I lived with many housemates. We all went to Union College to see John McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra all but level the Memorial Chapel – one of the loudest concerts I ever heard. Woody and John were en route home from travels in the Soviet Union, including Russia, Uzbekistan, Tadzhikistan, maybe other -stans.
Some years later, I visited them both often in Albuquerque on side-trips from visiting Ellie who taught for 10 years at the Anne Hyde Institute of Design near Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado. One of her students was Kim, then-wife of rocker Steve Miller who played Red Rocks during her term and sent a limo to pick her up.
Those Albuquerque side-trips took me with son and traveling companion Zak to the Green Corn Dances at Santo Domingo Pueblo (every August 4th for hundreds of years) and other pueblo visits. We tent-camped in Chaco Canyon and on the shores of Heron Lake and enjoyed tasty times in Mexican restaurants around town. When asked my favorite meal, I still say: “A combination plate (three cheese enchiladas, a bean burrito, rice, beans and lettuce-tomato salad) at Los Cuates, an Albuquerque eatery run by twin sisters.
Once on a visit to Woody’s place, his daughter Ramona, then maybe 10 years old, told us why she’d awakened her younger sister. She said, “I accidentally screamed” – an explanation we use in our family to this day to wave off any mishap.
Recalling Ramona’s remark today reminds me that I accidentally wound up in the Navy, where I accidentally found many remarkable friends, for life.
This summer, I’ve mostly been reviewing live shows for Nippertown, several a week. http://www.nippertown.com.
But I’m talking here about a blues show Aug. 18 in Springfield: Kenny Wayne Shepherd’s Backroads Blues Festival co-starring Buddy Guy and Christone Kingfish Ingram.
My friend Dennis treated me to the show as a birthday gift. Dennis leads a posse of us fans to New Orleans for Jazz Fest and has a genius-level nose for musical fun. After seeing Robert Randolph play a New York club, for example – his first gig outside of church – Dennis told Jordie Herold about the young sacred steel player. Herold booked Randolph to play the Iron Horse in Northampton, Dennis’s town. Randolph’s career then took off: record deal, tours with Eric Clapton, the world.
Dennis at the Steinway in RCA Studio B in Nashville; we were on our way to my first Jazz Fest
So, here is that story of going to see Buddy Guy earlier this month, plus my review of a 2007 Buddy Guy show at The Egg in Albany for the Gazette, plus some back-story.
Backroads Blues Festival Aug. 18, 2022, Springfield, Mass.
Only a lout’s shout of “Freebird!” could stop the blues machine that is Christone “Kingfish” Ingram Thursday at Springfield Symphony Hall. The 23-year-old Mississippi guitarist and singer paused to laugh a bit at this intrusive “request,” then rolled on with extraordinary power and punch.
Kenny Wayne Shepherd’s Backroads Blues Festival felt upside down.
Based on superior energy and imagination, Ingram should have closed the show but instead opened. Shepherd played second and reigning blues eminence Buddy Guy closed; a classy, respectful move by Shepherd that proved ultimately unkind to Guy. The 86-year-old headliner still impressed when he played and (especially!) sang, but coasted and talked rather too much. Anyone who’s seen him in the past decade could have predicted his every-show promise to play “so funky you can smell it” and salty recollections. Last of the second generation of blues stars, Guy is the B-52 of F-bombs.
Back to Kingfish.
Hailed as THE blues prodigy of this generation, the wide young man did not disappoint. A dynamic powerhouse, he mixed the resonance of the familiar with the electric excitement of the fresh.
Early on, in fact, Ingram evoked one of Guy’s special powers: playing quietly to draw the audience deep into the song. And when he revved, he unleashed soaring flurries of cleanly articulated, fast-flying notes. It wasn’t just speed, either – his solos had form as well as force. Maybe best yet, Ingram makes blues for real, from life, and in this self-expressive, self-exploratory reality is his greatest precocious gift. Whether detonating riff storms or banking his fire in the well-crafted “Another Life Goes By,” “Too Young to Remember” or “Trouble” – which opens as all trouble seems to in the blues realm with “Woke up this morning” – Ingram made music from the soul.
He also made it with an all-aces band: bassist Paul Rogers who went all Larry Graham in his lone solo, flash keyboardist D-Vibes and deep in the pocket drummer Chris Black.
Buddy Guy and Kingfish at Buddy Guy’s Legends in Chicago Illinois, January 18, 2019. (Photo by Paul Natkin/Getty Images)…
Shepherd also brought the goods alongside and behind him: singer Noah Hunt, keyboardist Joe Krown – a New Orleans eminence most often heard with guitarist Walter Wolfman Washington – and most important of all drummer Chris “Whipper” Layton and bassist Tony Franklin. Layton played in the late, great Stevie Ray Vaughan’s band Double Trouble, and Shepherd’s own music closely echoed Vaughan’s “Texas Flood” tornado style.
Vaughan’s lone-star shuffles and his own radio hits entertained well, though with less electric dazzle than Kingfish Ingram delivered; a well-made workmanlike and crowd-pleasing show. The opener “Somehow, Somewhere, Someway” then “Everything is Broken” set the mood: a fast shuffle, then a slower one; but by three songs in – “I Want You” – they started to stretch out and the grooves rolled strong. “Kings Highway” segued beautifully with “True Lies” – both set at midnight, both plaintive accusations. But the high-momentum “Heat of the Night” drew Shepherd into his hottest solo of the set, a searing, soaring statement that used repeats to powerful effect.
Kenny Wayne Shepherd from his web site
After the star-time favorite “Blue On Black” and an authentically macho “King Bee,” the early Fleetwood Mac blues “Oh Well” hit like a surprise classic done just right.
Guy started strong with his anthem “Damn Right I Got the Blues” (title of Don Wilcock’s beautifully written and exhaustively-researched biography) and a playfully boastful “Hoochie Coochie Man.” If his dynamic guitar phrasing wowed everybody, his vocals hit even harder. And he wasn’t shy about employing such flashy tricks as plucking the strings high on the neck with his left hand, dropping in a heartbeat from full-blast to poignant whisper-riffs, then back up into deep space, sending out flaming-hot feedback shards.
But soon things started going sideways. Guy spoke with the same conviction he sang, recounting a classically poor Delta childhood for example, without running water until he was 14, chopping cotton in hot fields. At times, though, the recollections lost energy; worse, so did some of the songs. At times he simply stopped, without an ending to the tune, and this dissipated the power of his performance.
The songs were strong but Guy brought his full brilliance only sporadically to them. In “How Blue Can You Get,” he played at his quietly lyrical best, but truncated the song to slide into “Grits Ain’t Groceries,” at first strong and sharp but fading into noisy shtick as he lay his guitar on top of the speakers to play Crean’s “Sunshine of Your Love” on it with a drumstick. “Take Me to the River” also faded in a perfunctory, dismissive way.
Buddy Guy, from his web site
When Guy brought a shaper focus to the music, he imbued it with soul and skill, as in the anti-racist “Skin Deep,” with a singalong that worked.
The audience often shouted-out encouragement. Nonetheless, his set lost its shape and emotional impact, until the realization of the Hall’s curfew dawned uncomfortably onstage.
In a hurried all-star ending, both Ingram and Shepherd returned to the stage, plugged in and played together – but this felt rushed and unsatisfying.
Hats off to Shepherd – who sported a black Steve-Ray-style topper – for bringing both a venerable blues hero and a bright new blues hope on tour with him. But the thing could use some tightening or a shuffling of the sets so Guy played first, and shorter, Shepherd next and Ingram bringing down the house to close.
Buddy Guy at The Egg on Wednesday, July 18, 2007
ALBANY – Buddy Guy turned 71 this week, and he looked and sounded so strong and soulful at The Egg on Wednesday that everybody wanted whatever he’s having.
The living bridge between the first-generation Chicago giants who mentored him and the rockers who idolize him, Guy was hot right out of the gate in the Stevie Ray Vaughan rumble “Mary Had a Little Lamb, abruptly stopping to announce “I’ve got the blues; wait a minute, don’t say nothin’” and diving straight into Willie Dixon’s “Hoochie Coochie Man,” without waiting for applause but making its “Everybody knows I’m here” refrain an understatement.
Everything worked on Wednesday: the high-intensity guitar sting that Robert Cray likens to laughter from space, whispery quiet reveries, the stentorian roar or soft falsetto. Guy built towering structures or tidy miniatures with equal and astounding skill. His band more than just kept up. The sturdy undertow of Orlando Wright’s elegant bass locked with the crisp clatter of Tim Austin’s drums, a mountain of a man with the shoulders of a polar bear. Keyboardist Marty Sammon and second guitarist Cornelius Hall both supported and soloed, but when Guy said “Help me” to launch a Hall solo, it was a compliment, not a plea.
Guy pleaded for love, howled his pain and worked hard to entertain – with a showy foray into the crowd in “Drowning on Dry Land” and flashy guitar echoes of John Lee Hooker (“Boom Boom Boom”), Eric Clapton (“Strange Brew” and Jimi Hendrix (“Voodoo Chile”). Impressive and crowd-pleasing as these emulations were, Guy was at his best immersing himself in the soulful message of “I’ve Got Dreams to Remember” and “Feels Like Rain.”
His tricks were fun – playing with just his left hand, over his head, with his teeth, and strumming blinding fast or sparsely picking perfectly chosen soft notes. However, the way he combined guitar heroics with soulful singing united his great gifts at their richest. A bluesman for the ages, he lives intensely and impulsively the moment, but relishes and earns his place in tradition with the flair of a master at the top of his game.
“How about the band, everybody?” called Tom Hambridge, pointing to versatile guitarist Rocky Rollins, the only player onstage with him. A resourceful songwriter, producer and performer best known lately for penning country hits, Hambridge didn’t need much accompaniment since he had bluesy and fun tunes, impressive snare-drum skills, a fine voice and all the charm in the world. He and “the band” had no trouble driving the punchy “Trying to Get Off” down the tracks, conjuring a chunky vamp on “The Fixer,” written for George Thorogood, or going deep into the blues on two tunes written for Susan Tedeschi. His best songs were “19,” mourning a man who wore that number playing football and was that age when he died in Iraq, and its polar opposites, the playful “Rachel” about putting his baby daughter to bed and “Trouble in the Henhouse” in which he made the audience crow “Cock-a-doodle-doo!” on cue, just as they finger-snapped in an earlier number.
DAMN RIGHT I’VE GOT THE BLUES
Rolling back now, a bit further…
When Buddy Guy’s manager phoned me to offer an interview with the blues star before a show hereabouts in the late 1990’s, I accepted only reluctantly.
Although I’d been impressed – knocked out, actually – seeing Buddy play with longtime band mate harmonica ace Junior Wells in sweaty, rocking, deep-funk shows at J.B. Scotts in downtown Albany, I’d recently struggled through interviews with other bluesmen of similar vintage. These were rough rides via long distance phone through faded memories and bruised bravado.
Not Buddy, though.
He was razor-sharp lucid, engagingly humble and entertainingly funny. We seemed to enjoy the conversation about equally. His manager confirmed this when he surprised me by phoning back a few minutes later. Buddy’s team was toying with the idea of a biography, recognizing both his unique place in blues history and his unprecedented ability to tell that story with clarity and humble humor. They liked how the interview went and offered me the job.
Wow, I wondered: Can I do this?
Every writer, at least every writer I knew, had a book project in mind. And this opportunity had fallen into my lap – offered out of the blue by guys who thought I could do it since I’d achieved an easy rapport with Buddy in the interview.
They, thought I could do it, and readers of my Gazette stories had asked for years, “Where’s your book?”
Could this be it?
After a few days of fence-sitting, I realized the sad truth: No, no I couldn’t. Even for weekly Gazette columns, I would over-research, re-write several times and generally agonize over getting things right. I loved music that much that I’d break my ass to write about it.
If I pulled my hair out struggling with 500-1000-word columns I published every week, I just knew I’d surely over-research this project.
So, I phoned my friend Don Wilcock, my first editor at the defunct-by-then music weekly Kite (successor to the Washington Park Spirit, predecessor to Metroland) that he published while working full time publishing magazines for GE. Don specialized in the blues and I thought his full-time gig would afford him the financial security to tackle a book project at the same time.
He enthusiastically accepted this challenge-opportunity, I put him in touch with Buddy Guy’s team and the thing took off. By which I mean that Don did exactly what I would have – and which I’d have gone broke doing.
Don buzzed around interviewing sources in music and the music business. He went to Chicago and took photographer Rick Siciliano with him. They also flew to London, interviewed Rolling Stone bassist Bill Wyman and wound up drinking with Bill and some royal Beefeater guards in the Tower of London.
And, he struggled with writing the thing, prodded by his publisher to produce more dirt, on a notably non-dirty artist. A protracted struggle of push then push-back finally yielded an acceptable draft. “Damn Right I’ve Got the Blues,” Don’s insightful examination of Buddy Guy’s life and career, beautifully illustrated with Rick’s photos, hit the bookstores in its first printing in June 7, 1999 by Duane Press.
Don gratefully thanked me for the opportunity in a generous introduction, and he inscribed for me the first copy off the press.
Already a leading authority in the blues, Don’s “Damn Right I’ve Got the Blues” burnished his reputation and brought new respect. He’d been on the map before, but this opened new real estate in blues publications and personal appearances doing presentations and running seminars at blues festivals across the south.
Ever since, Don has introduced me as his conduit to expanded recognition as a blues journalist, just as I introduce him as my first editor.
Fast forward a few years, when I got an email from Bill Wallace – as unexpected as the offer to write Buddy Guy’s biography.
Bill was a friend long, long ago, a fellow music fan I met in Japan where we were both stationed by the U.S. Navy in the late 1960s. He and his wife, appropriately named Margot Bliss, were from tiny Placierville in California gold country. They were frequent guests at the stereo-filled home I shared with friends in the village of Tsuruma. There, we pooled our record collections and annoyed the neighbors with our “Battle of the Bands” – crank up the amps in different rooms to see if Mountain’s “Mississippi Queen” could drown out Cream’s “I’m So Glad.”
Bill knew a lot about the blues and R&B. He could mimic Bo Diddley’s growl, running the litany of Bo’s band-mates in his stage intros. Grimacing vividly, Bill would announce “the Duchess!” – Bo’s longtime guitarist, born Norma-Jean Wofford.
Bill and I returned to the states on leaving the Navy in 1970-71, and immediately lost track of each other as he settled in California’s Bay Area and I returned to Schenectady.
Decades passed, then Bill emailed me in early 2000, asking if I were the same Michael Hochanadel who’d lived in Japan in late-1969/mid-1970. I was, I emailed back, and he told me how he’d found me.
Shopping for a birthday gift for Bill, his son was rummaging among music tomes in a Berkeley used-book shop and bought Don’s “Damn Right I’ve Got the Blues,” wrapped it and gave it to his dad. Bill found my name in Don’s introduction.
Bill was then an investigative reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle and knew how to find people, even in those early days of internet searches.
So, Bill searched, found me and we stayed in touch until he died about a year ago.
In one of his emails, he thanked me for some music we shared:
“…for many years I have felt I owed you a major league debt of gratitude,
Mike. I doubt you recall this, but you let me tape your Taj Majal
double album, “The Old Folks At Home/Take A Giant Step,” and
Albert King’s “Born Under A Bad Sign” (as well as some Earl
Hooker, James Cotton, Fleetwood Mac and Champion Jack Dupree)
while you were living at Chez Otis (our house in Tsuruma bore a sign:
“Otis B. Driftwood” after a Groucho Marx character), and those two records in
particular have always been among my favorites. When I first
listened to King playing “Cross Cut Saw,” I could finally
understand what some friends had said about Eric Clapton
copying his solo note for note for Cream’s “Strange Brew.”
I long ago wore out my reel-to-reel recording of both discs, but
was able to score a foreign reissue of the King record on vinyl at
Arhoolie Records in El Cerritto in the early 1980s. I own about six
or seven of his albums now, and this week I picked up the “In
Session” sides with Albert backed up by Stevie Ray Vaughn. It
isn’t the best Albert King or Stevie Ray work I have ever heard, but
it is a treat to hear the old master playing with the (at-the-time) up
and coming SRV.
As for Taj, he lives up in Marin County, but the first time I ever
heard him play in person was last summer. He was appearing at
the Shoreline in Mountain View as one of the opening acts for B.B.
King (or, as I call him, “The OTHER King”) and Kenny Wayne
Shepherd. He had a cooking group behind him — about eight guys —
and they were so tight you couldn’t have slipped a Riz La in
between them. A totally great set, way down at the bottom of the
card! My son just loved the whole show. I keep looking for a re-
issue of “Take A Giant Step,” which had one of the greatest
versions of “Good Morning Little School Girl” I have ever heard.
Just wanted you to know: If we ever get together again, I will
be sure to bring you a bottle of Jameson Irish whisky as a very,
very partial repayment for comping me to one of my most
memorable musical experiences more than 29 years ago.”
Sadly, Bill and I never met up again. I never knew he was there, on my several visits to San Francisco over the decades. I thanked Don for putting my name in his book, just as he thanks me, still, for connecting him with this life-changing, or at least, career-enhancing opportunity.
These days, I think of Bill Wallace whenever I hear blues for real, played the way we heard it on batting stereos in Japan. I remembered him last week, seeing Buddy Guy, Kenny Wayne Shepherd and Christone Kingfish Ingram with my friend Dennis.
And I realized how permanent are the bonds music makes when it thrills us together.
When music buddy Stephen-in-the-Adirondacks asked about Warren Zevon last week, memories and music ganged up on me, starting with a 1978 Page Hall show – and not just because he jumped off the piano.
He climbed to his feet slowly then, with painful effort. “I think I hurt myself, doing that Michael Jackson shit,” he rued.
Zevon had leaped off the piano, hoping, I think, to land in a split but instead crashing in an awkward heap.
He was hot then, more than he was hurt. His star-making third album “Excitable Boy” had just hit, dragging listeners through dusty back alleys of LA, out of the sun and into the gloom – a grown up record, in other words, and quite perfect.
So was his band, including Waddy Wachtel – has ANYBODY ever looked more like a rock-star guitar hero than Waddy? – also bassist Bob Glaub, second guitarist Michael Landau, a drummer and a keyboardist – maybe Russ Kunkel and Kenny Edwards. Waddy’s website lists the album credits: http://waddywachtelinfo.com/WarrenZevon2.html. All those players orbited around Linda Ronstadt who recorded many Zevon songs, helping him become known.
The student concert board ran Page Hall then, a jewel-box theater on the old uptown campus in the Pine Hills student ghetto. The board aimed big bucks that semester at rock acts with big futures including Elvis Costello, Talking Heads, and Zevon, whose partial set-list here sparkles with trenchant tunes writ very large by his killer band and his hard-edged voice.
He came back around, a few times; but as his records fell short of “Excitable Boy,” he had to let the band go and become a solo performer, a “mobile gestalt unit” he dubbed himself. His life, his music and his career traced ups and downs tall as the Alps, deep as Grand Canyon: divorce, drink, drugs, being dropped by record labels.
Stephen sent me this link to a pretty good profile.
Before one tour, I did a phone interview with him. He answered candidly: humbly relating his oblique associations with Igor Stravinsky and the Everly Brothers. But then, something he said made me think of a book I’d just read.
“The Songlines,” by Bruce Chatwin, an explorer-writer of lapidary, micro-precise prose, tells of Australian aborigines’ belief that songs describe in detail the geography of the entire continent from end to end. Each tribal band’s folk-lore takes up the tale from the last so a traveler could chart the entire physical reality of that vast island by the songs. Moreover, and here’s where things got magical and Zevon became fascinated with the idea, the aborigines believe not only that the songs describe the land in its physical features, but the songs maintain its very existence. The songs make the land live.
So, I bought him a copy.
As it happened, his local stop on that tour coincided with another show that I had to see, in preference to his – probably NRBQ. So, I gift-wrapped “The Songlines,” wrote a note expressing my regrets at missing Zevon’s show and had a fellow music writer deliver it to him backstage.
Warren Zevon at Saratoga Winners. Michael Hochanadel Photo
Time passed, bringing more Zevon albums and tours, and an interview or two.
The next time we spoke, he started the interview saying, “The Songlines.” Confused at first – I’d actually forgotten giving him the book by remote control – I marveled that he had remembered it.
My last Warren Zevon show was in the winter of 1991 at Saratoga Winners, a sizable road house on Rt. 9 north of Albany and south of Saratoga Springs that has since burned down.
Warren Zevon at Saratoga Winners. Michael Hochanadel Photo
In an interview before that show, Zevon said he was excited about making a new album, that he had found the producer he wanted: Gurf Morlix.
I thought he’d made up the name until I found Gurf in the Austin phone book. Like New Orleans musicians who remain unknown out of town because they never play elsewhere, Morlix is an Austin guy who at first seems an unlikely choice, their vocal styles are so different. Bold and brassy, Zevon all but shouts, while Morlix murmurs or half-whispers in a morose moan. What unites them is a straightforward guitar rock sound and a dangerous wit, as on my favorite Morlix album, “Finds the Present Tense.”
Zevon died before he could make the album, in September 2003.
A documentary on him (included that interview on Letterman’s “Late Show” where he advises “Enjoy every sandwich,” also a lunch with Carl Hiassen. Zevon was already deep into the cancer that would soon kill him, way too soon. As he pulled a vial of morphine from his pocket, Barry remarked, “I admire a man who brings his morphine right to the table.”
Zevon could have used some of that when he jumped off the piano at Page Hall, back in his drinking days.
But his songs brought everything to the table.
In the songs on his 15 albums (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Zevon_discography – and the two-CD 1996 compilation “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead,” Zevon stepped bravely in front of a mirror that revealed himself, in all his failings and strengths, unashamed as an X-ray. He looked around at the world with the same fearless candor and a film-maker’s eye that sketched characters as vivid as Tom Waits’ or Harry Crews’.
Hoke's Jukebox 