BLUESMEN

A couple of weekends ago, I played three shows in Carteret County(Morehead City / Beaufort), two and a half hours to the north. My partner, guitarist and good friend for the past several years, "Dangerous Dave" Thompson, picked me and some equipment up early Friday evening and we drove up to a fleabag motel in Morehead City in order to be ready for our 10am Saturday Beaufort Music Festival duo show as "Makin' Whoopie," specializing in "hip tunes from the hip flask era," then our HighRollers R & B quintet show at 12:30pm and, finally, the duo HighRollers nightclub show 10pm Saturday - 2am Sunday.

In the live blues game, you don't solve problems; you just trade them in. If playing the blues isn't trouble, then it isn't playing the blues. That weekend was typical. The drummer called me 3pm Friday from his car phone to tell me that he'd just been in a wreck and hurt his hand, so he was out. Finding someone else in Wilmington who would drive 2.5 hours for $70 would have been impossible. Thank God for free long distance from the church on Fridays. I called some musician friends in Carteret County, got in touch with a substitute drummer, and wheedled him into doing the show with us sight unseen.

At about the time Dave and I were pulling into a convenience store in Morehead City for some beer, that drummer fell off of a festival bandstand and dislocated his knee. Near the end of our duo show Saturday morning, another stranger approached the bandstand and told us he'd been recruited by the second injured drummer to play with us. Par for the course.

The bassist arrived on time, as did the Carteret native keyboard player who was filling in for our Wilmington saxman, who had taken a higher-paying gig some weeks earlier because he needs every penny to deal with upcoming leukemia surgery. Before the drummer showed up, we were joined by Al Liverman, head of the DownEast Blues Society in New Bern. Dave and I had stayed at Al's trailer earlier in the month while playing a New Bern Festival, and Al had been uncharacteristically lucid throughout our visit, but out-of-town drinking habits were with him in Beaufort. Shortly after our band show, which went better than we could possibly have hoped, Al passed out on a sidewalk near our party's outdoor cafe table, and a waitress accidentally stepped on his face. It had to hurt, but Al's a trooper when it comes to being a burden to himself and others.

Three thirty-ish, it was time for me and Dave to stop by the nightclub, set up the P.A., and go back to the shitpit motel for a nap before show time. Al woke up and crawled out from under Dave's van to tell us that he was on his own pending his girlfriend's arrival at the club around 10:30pm. Since we had stayed with him earlier in the month, we felt obliged to deal with him, but had no intention of letting him interfere with our mandatory shut-eye before the show. He passed out on the motel room floor and we drifted off to sleep.

Dave's a lighter sleeper than I am, which is why he insists that I take Ni-Quil along on the road to block snoring, and Al woke him up using the phone for some idiotic phone call to his girlfriend, complete with detailed, repeated directions to the club and a request that she bring some chips along, a rather tacky wish considering that the club was attached to a restaurant. As I slumbered peacefully, Dave cussed Al out for disturbing him and then went back to a fitful sleep.

The second Al / Dave interaction woke me up with a loud crash, which was Al hitting the wall. He had awakened, still drunk, disoriented, and sans coke bottle glasses, and staggered through the steps that in his own home would have taken him to the bathroom, and started to pee on Dave's suitcase. Dave had awakened, ascertained the situation, launched himself from his bed and kicked Al into the corner with both feet. It was uncomfortable, but Dave told me later that he'd remembered me saying that I regret everything I've ever done in anger and that that had kept him from pursuing the matter. This is the kind of bizarreness that comes with the blues.

When I got involved in this music, some of the great representatives of previous generations of blues performers were still active, and I've seen some blues events. Once, I was sitting in a nice Wilmington restaurant with Richard "Big Boy" Henry, a Beaufort native who first recorded in 1947, then hooked into the Greenwich Village coffee house circuit with Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, and today appears on the cover of Block, the Dutch blues magazine, when he tours Europe, while B.B. King is relegated to page 36. Big Boy was telling me a story about drinking moonshine with Sonny and Brownie and losing Sonny Terry, who was blind, on the subways of Manhattan when dinner arrived. Now you have to understand that Big Boy and Sonny Terry's generation was a very loose, wide open generation of bluesmen. They were marked men and women, radically different from and freer than their peers. As an example, let me relate an anecdote I heard from longtime Columbia Records executive John Hammond, who discovered Bessie Smith, Benny Goodman, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springstein, Aretha Franklin, and not me, though I did sit next to him at a couple of bigtime Republican fundraisers when I was a teenager(another story).

While hunting talent for the legendary 1938 "Spirituals to Swing" concert, Hammond went to Durham, North Carolina in search of blues guitarist / vocalist Blind Boy Fuller. Fuller couldn't be booked for the show because he was in jail, charged with shooting at his wife. An inquisitive man, Hammond had to ask the incarcerated blind man exactly how he had managed this attempted felony. Blind Boy explained that he had stood in the center of a room turning slowly and firing intermittently, missing the woman who should have been able to find an iron skillet or something and come out on top in such a confrontation, but who instead had just run around the perimeter of the room hollering, "Jesus, please help me!"

In any event, John Hammond thought that Blind Boy Fuller was too nasal and whiny to start with, and so was content to go to his neighbor, Sonny Terry, and book him for the show instead. Given the fact that Terry and Fuller were neighbors, one has to wonder whether Durham had an entire block or neighborhood reserved for blind blues musicians at the time, and to picture the nightlife, gardens, and other features of said neighborhood before returning to the object, Sonny Terry, and his friend of later years, Big Boy Henry, who shared that table at Roy's Riverboat Landing with me around 1991.

As we prepared to eat, I noticed that the arthritic Big Boy had to use his left hand to close the fingers of his right hand around his fork. As explanation, Big Boy peered at me from under his fisherman's cap through those weak eyes and thick, horn rim glasses and said, "Lord have mercy, LoveWhip; this arthritis got me stiffed up every place but one."

Guitarist / Vocalist Walter "Lightnin' Bug" Rhodes, also known as "Little Red Walter" and "The Brown Bomber" was a frequent visitor to Wilmington before his terminal heart attack at age 50 in the early '90s. Bug, whose theme song, "Lightnin' Bug," had been written for him ( "... if you hear me buzzin', cousin, heist your window up /  I'm gonna shine my light /  Put some lovin' in your cup ...") by Don Covay("Do the Pony," "Long Tall Shorty," "Chain of Fools," "Sookie, Sookie," etc.), had peaked as lead guitarist for Wilson Pickett on the tours that introduced "In the Midnight Hour" to the world. A Southerner, he was subject to ancestor worship, and had given up the road to take care of an aging mother, after whose death he too care of a half gallon of vodka every day for three years, virtually destroying his liver before hitting bottom. On the way back up, he found his third wife, who traveled with him in his last years on the road and answered, logically, to the name, "Honey Bee."

In those days, Blues Society of the Lower Cape Fear members hosted road players in order to make it possible for clubs in our little town to be able to afford their performances, for the hotel accommodations which would otherwise have been necessary were beyond the reasonable budgets for local venues. Bug and Honey Bee always stayed with Ed and JoAnne Crowe out in the suburbs at Silver Lake, where Bug was able to indulge his three main passions-fishing, smoking pot and playing the blues. They'd come into the bus station with a boom box and a cardboard suitcase and call my office, and I'd get somebody to pick them up and start looking for a guitar for Bug to use during that night's show, for his own instrument was usually in the pawnshop back in Hamlet, North Carolina. Within a couple of hours, he'd be out on the Crowe's dock with a cane pole, hook baited with a piece of hot dog, catfish on his mind, a reefer in the corner of his mouth and an extension cord running from the garage into the guitar amp by his side.

By this time in the visit, Honey Bee would be in the kitchen helping JoAnne Crowe get dinner ready, a major undertaking because the Crows always invited the whole Blues Society over for a jam session and Maryland crab boil when Lightnin' Bug came to town. Once, I was over at the Crows' house during a Bug / Bee weekend, and I went over to the kitchen sink to inquire of Honey Bee as to the health of Walter's uncle, a wizened old gentleman I'd met once in Hamlet who answered, of course, to the name, "Uncle Bug."

"Honey Bee, how's Uncle Bug gettin' along?," I politely asked in mildly Sandhills-inflected patois.

She heaved a mighty sigh into the dishwashing suds and replied, "Well, LoveWhip, we had to put Walter's uncle in the home last week ... that man love to dig."

I stood the silence as long as I could, but Eternity was never mine to command. "He loved to dig? Was he looking for something? Was he trying to hide something? What was he digging for?"

A dramatic pause long enough for three plates to be rinsed preceded Honey Bee's explanation. "Naw. He was just diggin'. He dug up all my flowers, and he'd dig holes close to the house and Walter would fall in 'em, and sometimes he'd put some of the kerosene in 'em and set fire to it and wander off. One day last week, I looked out the trailer window just like I'm doing right here in this kitchen, and I said, 'Walter, we gonna hafta put yo' uncle in the home. He out there diggin' again and he ain't even usin' a shovel!'"

They thought Walter "Lightnin' Bug" Rhodes had drowned at first, because they found his body floating in a hotel swimming pool in Hamlet a couple of days after his 50th birthday. The autopsy revealed that there was no water in his lungs, though, meaning that the heart attack killed him before he hit the water. He and Honey Bee had left the trailer and checked into the air conditioned hotel for a couple of days' rest just before what was to have been his big comeback tour.

Drink Small was the patriarch of electric blues guitar in this region as long as he wanted the title. He'd been voted the nation's second best gospel guitarist in 1958 and had practiced quite a bit by the time I met him around the beginning of this decade. In addition to being a great guitarist, Drink is a great performer, wearing nice suits onstage and whipping crowds into frenzies whenever he feels like it. Admittedly, he goes through periods of laziness during which his shows become relatively lackluster, but we can't expect all bluesmen to be overachievers, now can we?

I don't know how he ended up with the unique name of "Drink Small." I always meant to ask his parents, Jigger and Shot Glass, but never got around to it. Just kidding. Anyway, Drink's from a small South Carolina town called Bishopville, and he's as superstitious as a gentleman of color born in that place at that time (early '30s) would naturally be. In 1994, he was honored with some sort of national folklife award by the Smithsonian, and he and his rhythm section, Jim Herring (drums) and Blind Jimmy (keyboard bass) attended a cocktail party with the Smithsonian Board of Directors.

There are two basic kinds of magic-Homeopathic and sympathetic. Homeopathic magic is based on the notion that similar items are related and will be similarly effected by ritual actions consciously performed. Voodoo dolls, replicas of the intended victim of a curse or conjuring, provide a good example. Sympathetic magic relies on the theory that items once connected remain connected. Drink Small's habit of hiding his urine to keep bad-intentioned folks from using it to work a charm against him serves as a good case in point.

... So there was Drink Small, walking around the directors' lounge in the Smithsonian Institute with a surreptitious beer can brimming with his urine in the pocket of his white suit coat when a big fan from the board came up and slapped him on the back in congratulations for the award ...

The late Johnny Shines stayed at my house once. Johnny Shines shared with Robert Jr. Lockwood the distinction of having actually rambled around the Delta and beyond as a performance partner to Robert Johnson. Robert Johnson is important. Robert Johnson was the first Delta bluesman to write songs with recording in mind, and he laid the earliest foundation for the blues, R & B and rock & roll singles that dominated jukebox and home record buying markets through the seventies. A phenomenal guitarist and apocalyptic vocalist as well, he credited his abilities to a deal made with Satan at a lonely Delta crossroads, where he traded his soul for his musical abilities. Several of his predecessors like Petie Wheatstraw, who billed himself as "The Devil's Son-in-Law" and the "High Sheriff of Hell," made similar claims in rural, Southern black versions of the "Dr. Faustus" tale, but none had so convincing a musical style as Johnson, who also predicted the date of his own death and died under extremely cloudy circumstances ... and Johnny Shines had been his friend.

Mr. Shines was appearing here in Wilmington with a white guitarist named Kent DuChaine, who had cajoled him into absolute trust and out of retirement by falsely claiming to have the same birthday as Shines, an avid believer in astrology. Unfortunately, Shines had been right to retire when he had, because his body was worn out, and he died on tour a few months after I met him.

We were talking at the bar before his show, and I remember Johnny Shines pointing at the neat row of white, ceramic coffee cups lined up on a shelf behind the counter. "You know, when I was travelin' with Robert, we wouldn't play in a joint that had them ol' mugs," he said. "That's what the folks would pour their homemade whiskey in, and they'd get drunk and tear each others' head up with them things."

While still in awe of Robert Johnson's uncanny abilities both as a musician and a dapper man who could sleep in a muddy ditch and wake up spotless with trouser creases intact, Mr. Shines' real blues hero was Howlin' Wolf(Chester Burnette, aka Bigfoot Chester, aka 300 Pounds of Heavenly Joy), whose primitive power and explosive performance seemed more human yet somehow larger than even Johnson's.

I did a show with Bo Diddley once in Richmond. He was touring without a band in those days, picking up local backing acts via his management agency. We arrived three hours before show time to set up, sound check, rehearse and get instructions from the master, but he didn't share our concerns. After all, he was Bo Diddley, the inventor of rock & roll, and if we didn't know his songs by heart, then we weren't worth a damn and weren't going to be worth a damn in any three hours, no matter what. We sat in the dressing room with him, making small talk, checking our watches, and getting wound tighter and tighter. He told a lot of ancient jokes and advised me that if I wanted to get along with women, I should drink Grand Marnier and not smell like a goat.

Finally, 45 minutes before the first show, for which 300 people were paying $8 - $10 apiece to see and hear, I asked him whether we should go out and go over a couple of numbers. He looked as insulted and angry as any fat, middle aged man in thick horn rim glasses and a sequined cowboy hat could look and explained, "This is the way it works. The drummer should watch my hips and the bass player should watch my shoulders." With no more instruction than that, we went out and did two packed shows, figuring out on our own that all of the slow tunes were in E and all of the Bo Diddley beat tunes were in G.

Chuck Berry hated me. Chosen by the same circuit agency that had hooked us up with Bo Diddley to play with the other self-proclaimed inventor of rock & roll from the old Chess label, we showed up on time and ready to open for Berry and then back him, but he didn't see any reason to pay a harmonica player, since there was no such creature on his hit records. Well, I was the lead singer in my band, and we couldn't open for him without my participation, so resolution required rational men, and I don't think Chuck Berry was a rational man that night. We opened for him, I laid back a lot while playing with him, and I've played the traditional Chuck Berry opening riff where required on harmonica instead of relying on guitarists ever since.

The greatest thrill of my blues life, with the possible exception of being chased through the ghetto by an irate husband at three in the morning (ref. my song, "Catching the Creeper") was working with Willie Dixon on "BluesAmerica," a radio series done on spec with syndication in mind. Willie Dixon arranged the first recording sessions for Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry, wrote half of the songs made famous by Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf, played bass on a huge percentage of the blues hits that came out of Chess Records in Chicago during its heyday in the '50s and '60s, and was my friend. We worked together long distance, with him in Los Angeles and me in Richmond, to create 26 hours of blues radio programming. The shows were themed, with one focusing on "The Magic in the Music," another on "Chicago Blues," one on "British Blues," etc. I wrote the scripts, then Willie went into a studio in California, did his bit with an interviewer out there and sent me the resultant reel. Within the general heading of "scripting," I was responsible for choosing the right tunes for the variously-themed shows, and for defining "blues" in the narrative portion of the first program. I defined blues to the satisfaction of Willie Dixon, and that's all the test anyone ever needs to pass. I said that blues was "first person, singular, involved music ... as in, 'I'm hungry,' or 'I'm happy.' By contrast, jazz is created and performed from the second person, plural, detached viewpoint, as in, 'Let's talk about the concept of hunger.' Folk music is first person, singular, detached, as in 'I saw someone who was happy.' Classical is 'someone was hungry 200 years ago,' rock is 'I'm hungry, let's kill someone,' reggae is 'I'm hungry, let's kill someone white,' etc.

Once I received Willie's tapes, I dubbed in my own voice, some commercials and the songs we'd agreed to feature from my record collection, and sent cassette copies to radio stations and likely sponsors trying to sell the damn thing. Eventually, I got sick of the sales pitches, never a favorite activity. Shortly thereafter, the whole country jumped on the blues radio bandwagon. I think a lot of people had the same ideas about a blues resurgence at the same time; no one stole any of my ideas regarding blues radio. In the course of the project, though, Willie Dixon sent me a draft copy of the script for a movie that he'd been asked to consult on, telling me at the same time that he'd sent the film folks copies of some of my radio scripts for their opinions. Oddly enough, Crossroads came out a couple of years later with several plot elements and details lifted directly out of one of my radio scripts.

Willie Dixon and I had frequent phone conversations about the progress of our syndication project, and the man spoke the blues. I was telling him during one call that the U.S. Army hadn't signed anything yet, but that they seemed interested in sponsoring the series. "Just because it cloud up don't mean it's gonna rain," interjected one of the top lyricists of postwar Chicago blues. He was something. He told me the story of a late night songwriting session, trying to come up with a song about how important even a small quantity of affection could be, and the song, ordered by Leonard and Marshall Chess, was supposed to be recorded first thing the next morning by the gargantuan Howlin' Wolf. It was pushing two in the morning and Willie Dixon hadn't come up with even a title for the song, so he decided to have another cup of coffee. He spooned in some sugar and stirred reflectively, and it came to him-"Could be a spoonful of sugar / Could be a spoonful of gold /  Just a little spoon of your precious love /  Satisfies my soul"-and "Spoonful" went on to be one of his most highly regarded numbers.

The man spoke the blues and saw the blues all around all the time. He'd successfully sued heavy metal rockers Led Zeppelin three times by the time I met him, and he cut one of our phone calls short one day, explaining, "I gotta go to court with those Zeppelin boys again."

"What's it about this time, Willie?"

"They say it's about 'Whole Lotta Love," but I wrote the song, and I know it's about 'Whole Lotta Lovin', 'cause that's what I named it." I was never a big Led Zeppelin fan. "Why don't you do the world a favor this time and, instead of asking for cash compensation, ask for Robert Plant's tongue, so that he'll never be able to sing like that again," I helpfully suggested. Willie Dixon chuckled. "I know what you mean. Man, I know what you mean."

At eighteen, armed with fake credentials from some throwaway Norfolk entertainment weekly, I got backstage at a Rolling Stones concert and met the greatest rock & roll band in the world. At eighteen, I was only able to grin uncontrollably and inanely, but I still have the bellbottom trousers I wore to that show. One day, I intend to mail them to Keith Richards with a note stating, "You probably remember these from the Hampton Roads show in '75 ..." I never get tired of these people.