At the end of the day, everything is an image. Nothing is real. Even the "real blues artists" It's like the infighting between rappers, once you have your millions of dollars, all you can say is "I'll be hood forever man." That is just an image, yeah right your still selling crack after you have millions of dollars? Your a rich person now, still selling an image. That's all it is. At the end the only thing matters: do you like the sound and does it move you?
@Tuckster: IIRC, Rick has said that when Muddy tried to ask Rick, Rick was having a lost fortnight with some woman and nobody knew where to reach him. Muddy needed somebody pretty quickly and Rick didn't hear about the offer until it was too late.
@Ev630: Did Rick Estrin or Junior Watson mention those details in public interviews? If not, I think it would be more respectful of all concerned not to divulge them in a public forum, and you ought to edit your post. It's not a matter of pretending things didn't happen, but rather treating them with proper seriousness if they didn't happen to us.
'Fess-Thanks for that info. I always wondered. Obviously Rick has conquered his demons. I'm sure he's not proud of some of the things he's done,but I'll bet he takes responsibility for them.
I don't know Rick. I've only met him once. He and I have a lot of mutual friends. From what they tell me, he is a constantly cracking jokes and a pretty funny guy. That seems to come out in his stage show. It is, who he is. At least, he's coming across as himself.
Here is a link to an interesting article about Rick Estrin that was in a recent newsletter produced by the Golden Gate Blues Society.
John Nemeth is a friend of mine. I met him shortly after he moved to the Bay Area. He's far too young to have hung with old school Blues players personally and Idaho isn't a Blues mecca. I would bet if you asked him, he wouldn't claim to be a blues man.
The man has enormous talent as a singer and he's a damn fine harp player, too. His music has become pretty uptown. He dresses the part. He's also got a pretty good sense of humor. He's not trying to be black. He's not trying to be anything but himself.
He writes some of his own tunes. Some of those songs are very good. He covers other people's tunes that he digs. He likes Junior Wells, Otis Rush, Sonny Boy and BB King. He can sing the shit out of them, too. Where's the rub?
He's just a guy out trying to have some fun while he is out making a living. John works his ass off. He tours almost constantly. He's trying to entertain an audience. He's a down to earth guy. He's a really honest and personable person. He treats everyone he comes across with respect.
It's pretty amazing how quickly people can jump to conclusions about a person from watching a couple of videos without really knowing a damn thing about the person.
All of these details have appeared in print in interviews with Rick and Jnr Watson. I think the Blues Revue material is reprinted in the book, "Children of the Blues". Rick has recounted many times the story of how he was sitting in a laundromat on a methadone program and saw a guy playing harp on the TV. He said, "I can do that" and the guy he was with said, "you are so full of shit." It was then, as Estrin recounts, that he decided to get his shit in a pile and get on with life. He got cleaned up, met Charlie Baty and the rest, as they say...
I'll edit my post if you think it needs it but I am in no way disrespecting the man. It's a story he has recounted. I imagine all reading will likewise respect his courage.
Last Edited by on May 18, 2010 10:50 AM
Rick Estrin is the frontman, harp player, songwriter, singer, and character extraordinaire for Little Charlie and the Nightcats for over 30 years. Estrin has definitely had Nine Lives (the title of Rick and Little Charlie Baty's brand new CD), since we first met. At the time we met he was on a methadone program to kick heroin. I first met Rick in the early seventies when he had just returned to San Francisco from Chicago. I'd heard about this really great harp player with a really bad reputation. I'd just moved from Los Angeles to the San Francisco Bay Area and I was looking for a gig. I read an ad in a local paper looking for a harp player. I called the guy and he tells me he just hired someone, I asked who and he says the harp player's name is Rick Estrin. So I go down to their gig that night in the Mission district of San Francisco at a really seedy bar where the guy is playing really loud Jimi Hendrix style guitar and Rick is almost inaudible thru the PA.
The band has a washtub for tips going, that's all they're getting paid. I walk up to Rick, who's wearing an eye patch and an Army jacket and tell him I'm a harp player, too. Estrin then asks if I want to go out front and have a smoke. He picks up his harps, goes up to the washtub on his way out and scoops up all the bills and coins he can fit in his Army coat, and we go out front. We blew our harps out front for awhile, then went across the street to the donut shop and talked till 3 a.m., after which I drove Rick home to wherever he was crashing. I saw him again right after he and Little Charlie hooked up a year or two later. This time he says, "I heard what you were saying about me and I don't dig it." I say, "I don't know what you're talking about?" sounding freaked out, to which he responds, "I was just fuckin with ya!" So begin my friendship with Rick, way back when. Enjoy Part Two (to read Part One click HERE to read it in our ARCHIVES)!
Mark Hummel for BluesWax: How did you hook up with Little Charlie? What did you think of Charlie as a harp player before the guitar became his main instrument?
Rick Estrin: I had met Little Charlie when he was at U.C. Berkeley. He had a band called the Charles Baty Blues Band. I would see that name in the club listings in the paper and I used to think, "Wonder if that's a harp player?" Back then the scene was so tiny and so competitive you sort of knew, or knew of, everybody out there. Anyway, I was back in San Francisco, probably around 1973, I wasn't doing much and I got a phone call, it's this guy Charles Baty and he wants to come over and meet me. He had heard about me from Gary Smith.
The bait he used was that he said he'd bring me a '45 of "Tonight With A Fool" b/w "Don't Have To Hunt No More," - which at that time was this mysterious Little Walter record that nobody had ever heard! Somehow, he had gotten a bootleg copy of this '45! So, he came over, played the record, which is great of course, but can you imagine hearing something like that for the first time? I mean this record had previously been like a myth or something - and we talked.
I told him that I hadn't even been playing much since I'd been back from Chicago. Told him it just seemed like there wasn't any scene and nobody knew how to play behind a harp anyway, generally just bitching and making excuses. He told me that he knew how to back a harp on guitar. He had learned this stuff so that he could show guitar players what he wanted to hear behind him, when he was playing harp! And looking back, I can see now that he always was the type of guy to take the initiative, ya know, make shit happen...whereas I was always more of a dreamer, the kind of motherfucker that just sort of fell in to the next thing that came up. Anyway, he said maybe someday we could try playing together...just threw it out there.
After that I saw him maybe a couple times. One time that I remember I ran into Charlie over at Keystone Berkeley. Muddy was playing, Jerry [Portnoy] was in the band by this time and Muddy called me up to sit in along with John Lee Hooker! Now that was cool! I'm up there blowing, standing in between Muddy and John Lee and they're trading verses on "Boom Boom Boom"! Then, after John Lee sat down, Muddy kept me up there to finish the set with him. Really made me feel good that he obviously still dug my playing. After that, I think I moved to Chicago again one last time and when I came back to California, I went out to a club to see Luther Tucker and Gary Smith. They were playing a place in San Francisco called the Savoy Tivoli. I went there on sort of like a double date with a guitar player, good friend of mine and yours, Mark, the late Sonny Lane, and two of Little Walter's sisters, Sylvia and Lula. I ran into Little Charlie again at that show and he told me he had moved to Sacramento and had started a band up there. He gave me his phone number and said that maybe in about six months he'd be ready to try playing together. I took the phone number, but I didn't think anything would really come of it. Then, fast forward six months, I was in San Francisco living in the Tenderloin with a hooker. I don't want you to get the wrong idea either; this was no glamorous pimp-type situation. This was some low-level shit! I was on methadone maintenance. In those days I had a small recurring drug problem as well. Just in general, you could say I wasn't doing too good.
One day, I looked in my wallet and I saw this piece of paper with Charlie Baty's phone number on it, and I thought, "Nothin' from nothin'...hell, I ain't doin' shit around here." I called him up and he said we could try it. At the time, he had a couple of funky little gigs lined up. I rode up there on the Greyhound two or three times and it seemed to be working, so I relocated to Sacramento. I had never really heard Charlie blow harp until I went to Sacramento and started working with him. We had a second guitar player at the time, so the way the show would go in those days was, Charlie would play harp on the first set and after that, he'd switch to guitar. You know this, Mark, 'cause you heard him back then. That sucker was a hell of a harmonica player! That same kind of fire and imagination that he has on guitar, he had that on the harp! I heard him and it really made me re-focus on getting my shit together as a player, as a performer, and in general 'cause I could see, some half-way effort just wasn't gonna get it!
---------------------- Have you been to the ARCHIVES lately? Be sure to check out everything in the BACKSTAGE area Including the PHOTO PAGE featuring the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival! ----------------------
BW: How did you first start writing songs and what inspired you to do that?
RE: For some reason I always believed I could write and then, when I got with Rodger Collins he would always encourage me to try to write. He'd constantly talk to me about songwriting and he kind of drilled into me certain principles, gave me basically like a check list to see if a lyric can stand up. Like, is it interesting? Is the story worth telling? Does it make sense? Is a rhyme too obvious? Are you telegraphing? Is what you're saying clear? Is it fairly conversational? In other words, would this person really talk like that? Does the meter match up well enough? Is there a rhythmic pocket to the meter? Is it singable? He used to say, "It's many things, Rick," and he sure was right! He also set a good example for me as far as showing me what it was to be a real professional. He was always thinking...wracking his brain, always editing and trying to improve whatever song it was he was working on. Always listening for song ideas in everyday life. He showed me so much stuff, man! He put me on shows with him when I was basically of no value to him, but he could see I was serious about learning so he tried to help me improve as a performer. He'd explain to me why certain things were effective. Little subtle shit that makes a big difference! I really owe a lot to Rodger Collins!
A lot of the stuff he showed me, I couldn't even use back then, but years later, when I was ready, I was able to apply those principles in telling my own story, in my songs and also in my performances. Percy Mayfield too, he really encouraged me. Not by giving me specific pointers or anything, but just by being complimentary about my work. He really made me feel like I had something legitimate to say and that I had the talent and the skills to get it across! I really miss that guy too. He was one cool and classy cat. I wish I could've spent a lot more time with him.
BW: How have you and Charlie worked it out to work together so long? It's very difficult to play with another musician for almost thirty years without getting on each other's nerves or driving each other crazy. Does two vehicles when you tour make the difference, among many things? I know you have huge respect for Charlie, musically.
RE: Getting on each other's nerves used to be a recurring theme in the really early years, but things have smoothed out a lot since then. There's rarely any friction now days. We respect each other's space and over time, our roles on and off the bandstand just sort of naturally defined themselves. He's much more of a detail person, a natural organizer, and I'm more of a dreamer. It's a combination that works. What can I say? I'm sure two vehicles help some, but ours is kind of a unique situation. Charlie likes to keep his own schedule. Likes to get up early, leave the hotels early, get wherever he's going early. The rest of us like to take our time when we can, check out the scene wherever we happen to be. So the two-vehicle arrangement definitely helps.
As far as my respect for Charlie as musician goes...awe is probably a better word for the way I feel about his talent and skills and creativity. Plus, his playing still surprises me every night! He can generate so much excitement with a guitar that being on the bandstand with him is just never boring...never!
Hey, I just thought of something that would probably help relations within any band way more than two vehicles is single motel rooms! We figured that one out a long time ago. Think about it...you gotta be stuck in a van together all day, then you gotta work together on the bandstand all night, and then you're expected to go back to a motel room and be cellmates, too! I don't care how much you might like each other or whatever, but over an extended period of time, that's gonna wear on anybody! Separate rooms!
BW: What is the typical time it takes to record a CD? To write a song? What's a typical process on either, from idea to completion?
RE: Usually, we'll record for about four days. There really is no typical time that it takes me to write a song. I've had songs that I've struggled with for weeks. I've had songs that have started as some fragment, a couple of lines or a hook and didn't get written for years, and then I've had some that I call, "getting a free one" where the whole thing, beginning to end, just came to me at once...where I'm just hoping I can get it written down before it disappears. The "free ones" are a pretty rare occurrence and they generally only happen when I've already been wracking my brain, working trying to solve a problem with another song. Somebody once asked Yip Harberg, the Tin Pan Alley lyricist who wrote all the lyrics for The Wizard of Oz, wrote "Brother Can You Spare A Dime," and lots of other old standards, about his process and he said something like, "Nothin' to it...I just stare at a blank piece of paper until blood comes out of my forehead." That about sums it up pretty well.
BW: How much input does Jerry Hall have in the studio when he produces?
RE: Jerry's our engineer so he's not producing, but he has an awful lot to do with the way things sound. He's got amazing ears. He's the one that makes it sound like a record. What mikes to use, where to place them, and all kinds of other technical shit that I couldn't even begin to explain. Jerry's also been real helpful to me in a production sort of way on songs where I end up overdubbing the vocal. I think because I'm doing brand new songs, where there's no template, no established way of singing the song...like sometimes I might've just written it and haven't had a lot of bandstand time to really settle on my approach or my delivery...Jerry is great for guidance in those situations. Jerry's got great ears plus he's really calm and has tons of experience.
BW: How do you decide who solos, you or Charlie or both? Genre, style? It seems you played a little less harp on the Nine Lives CD?
RE: To me the song itself makes those kind of decisions. We try to do whatever seems right for each song. After we were done with the record Charlie brought up the point that maybe there wasn't as much harp as there was on some of our previous records, but that's just how it turned out. I feel like you should serve the song...almost like subordinate yourself to the song. To me, with a lot of Blues today, I sense an attitude like "Ok, let's get this other shit - the song - out of the way so I can get to the solo, really show what I can do!" I can tell you that is definitely not my approach. I'm trying to tell a specific story with each song so the arrangement and which instrument takes a solo and even the message of the solo is hopefully going to reflect whatever that particular song is trying to put across.
BW: What's your main goal on stage with an audience, on how to affect them, emotionally or otherwise? Has it changed over the years?
RE: Well, first of all, emotionally is about the only way a performer can affect an audience...I mean I'm not really looking to educate anybody. There's a whole range of human emotions that can be affected by music, by a performance, but it basically boils down to this...you can turn 'em on or you can turn 'em off! The longer I do this job the more I see that if you can just be yourself and if you feel what you're doing people will respond.
htownfess... let's just say I share some history with Rick Estrin: violence, adiction, jail, rehab, and redemption.
Being in jail does not make your persona any more authentic than being a stock broker or a college professor. That is a hoary old myth. Rick Estrin is who he is regardless of (and likely in spite of) jail. I seriously doubt he developed that patter inside. It ain't like the movies. The key to survival is invisibility.
I could give a rats ass where Rick Estrin got his shtick. The guy is GOOD. No need to mythologize or reduce him to a cliche.
When somebody is wearing heavy gold chains and a heavy fubu sweatsuit while running around on stage, or a classic suit in the HOT HOT portland summers, it's an image and act. Regardless of their background. Somebody who's real would take their clothes off and be free. But those performers are not, they have an image they want to project in their minds. Look at the audience clothes: shorts and t-shirts. Band: suits? In the end, it doesn't matter though, it's fun great music and the audience enjoys it, regardless of what it means or doesn't mean. At the very least, it's something to get high and drunk to and meet hot women.
I think his advice at the end can mean something for all of us: get off your ass and go do something! lol
Last Edited by on May 18, 2010 5:03 PM
"This is the one you are looking for. First time I wanted to post it I didn't because I thought there were things Estrin did better than Rice. Now I've changed my mind, although Estrin is technically better hands off, but RM is cooler and more musical and deeper."
I think Rick is a great player. I gave him a 14 hole marine band in C when we were jamming one night in my 63 caddy back in northern Ca circa 1982. He was really intrigued with that harp. He does a great SBWII but like anyone that is going to copy someone else, it never comes across as good as the original to my ears. It makes you think to copy. The original was flow, their personality. The copier is trying to forget themselves and become the original. That is what I hear as the difference with people doing covers vs. the original. Walter
---------- walter tore's spontobeat - a real one man band and over 1 million spontaneously created songs and growing. I record about 300 full length cds a year. " No one can control anyone, but anyone can let someone control them"
"I would say that rick originally included a comic element in his blues because he couldn't take the idea of a white person playing the blues with any seriousness, but he is now playing the blues like a bluesman, it was just a matter of time in his evolution."
I don't know if that's true, but it fits - very interesting observation. ---------- /Greg
Cray and Salgado may have inspired Belushi to dream up a comedy routine about two VERY serious young musicans, they sure weren't hammin' it up, they were all business about the music. Saw them many times when they were playing every little joint from Portland to Bellingham. BTW, neither of them tried putting on that they were black or street either. Not much of a fan, but it's always cool to see the local guys make it.
MAL, Estrin comes from a tradition where the band dresses UP, no matter how much the audience dresses DOWN. In that sense, sure, it's all part of the act. It's show business.
If you want to read more into it than that, implying it's some sort of a fraud, go right ahead.
Walter Tore wrote: "The original was flow, their personality. The copier is trying to forget themselves and become the original. That is what I hear as the difference with people doing covers vs. the original. Walter"
I think that's a huge & subsequently erroneous generalisation...many covers have become the definitive versions of songs as far as the general populace is concerned.
Muddy's cover of "I Got My Mojo Workin'", BB King's cover of "The Thrill Is Gone", Bill Haley's Cover of "See You Later Alligator", Marvin Gaye's Cover of "I Heard it Through The Grapevine", Soft Cell's cover of "Tainted Love", PP Arnold's cover of "First Cut Is The Deepest", Tony Tribe's cover of "Red, Red, Wine"...hands up who has even heard Charley Segar's version of "Key To The Highway"? How many times have you heard a band introduce a "Hendrix" number & rip into a Dylan song?...I could be here all day...
Last Edited by on May 19, 2010 2:54 AM
Mark - spot on. Besides, a lot of the great cats were covering covers of covers. Varying them sometimes... (Sweet Black Angel, Sweet Little Angel).
For those harp players here of the "modern" tribe, I can highly recommend the podcast on iTunes called "Blues Unlimited". I think it's a radio show out of Kansas that then goes to the net. For those who haven't listened or read widely, it's an eye-opening experience. The DJ has great, eclectic taste grounded in the classics and will help school some of you guys.
I agreed with MAL's original post. And kinda his second, except for this:
Being 'real' is just as much of an image as projecting an image, and has no additional value over it.
For instance:
You are looking to saddle up to a lady. You don't walk up and say, "hey, lets have sex. I like sex alot." No, you project an image. Doesn't make you less real.
Or
You go to a job interview, its hot out. Do you wear a tank top? Doubt it.
Or
You wear a tux for an onstage performance. This is done by thousands of performers every year. Concertmaster of the CSO doesn't turn to the audience and say 'whew, it's hot in here, mind if I take off my jacket?'
Or
One of you patients is being a total jackass to you. You don't say to him, 'shut the hell up old man, your a sick old man and I aint putting up with your crap.'
Image is a huge part of everything. Its fun to poke holes in it because we all know about it, but at the end of the day, you have be able to project an image, almost always. Image is so huge that its negation implies its presence.
@Ev: "What you appear not to realise, Adam, is that Rick learned the shtick (including the wild clothes) playing and mc-ing (and surviving) in black clubs in the 60s. It's been written about in Blues Revue and Blues Access (now defunct I think) and other places. He comes from a real black club scene, rather than drifting into the blues via Butter or whatever."
Precisely. You underestimate me, Ev. I know where Rick comes from. I've read all those interviews, and they're part of what tilted my thinking about his shtick in a different direction.
John Nemeth probably had a harder time finding that sort of black club scene in Boise, Idaho, but as I get older I've learned that the world is always more complex than it seems and I'm sure there's an interesting story there, too.
@htownfess: Eloquently put. I agree and am happy that you're here to offer your thoughts and testimony. I don't know Rick well, but I consider us friends. We've met several times--most recently at King Biscuit in Helena two years ago--and that last time we sat together on a couch and visited for a while. He's a sweet, real guy--a little zany, but who isn't? I told him how I was blown away by "Coastin' Hank" and we talked about that. Later he sent me his harp instructional video and I thought it was great.
@JoeL: I haven't jumped to any conclusions about John Nemeth, except to say a lot of nice things about his singing and harp chops and also to note that he's made a particular kind of choice about what sort of stage-image to put across and that, on certain songs, it involves a kind of theatricality that is heavily invested in singing "black." I'm sure he's a terrifically nice guy and has absolutely no idea that there's a long history of blackface performance that stands squarely, if obscurely, back behind his performances. In this respect he's merely one representative of what I see as a larger trend within white blues performance. What's important is that white blues peformers do NOT all make the same choice--as htownfess notes. There's a wide spectrum. Tab Benoit, Eric Clapton, Chris Smither, Charlie Musselwhite, any number of white blues performers, dispense with the shtick. They....just sing, if you will. But the issues are more complicated than this, and I'm not condemning Nemeth. I'm just pointing out that he's made an aesthetic choice. Singing "Sweet Home Chicago" on the streets of Harlem, I made a different choice--I tried to sing as nakedly, as un-theatrically as possible: white boy with his heart on his sleeve. That, too, was a choice. We all make choices. I'm interested in them.
"Singing "Sweet Home Chicago" on the streets of Harlem, I made a different choice--I tried to sing as nakedly, as un-theatrically as possible: white boy with his heart on his sleeve."
Happily, lol... everything else would have been comically absurd. It really all depends on the environment that you start out off. I think that most people have gone with the choice that met their environment best... otherwise they would never have made it. ---------- YT
Last Edited by on May 19, 2010 5:07 AM
@ Adam "@JoeL: I haven't jumped to any conclusions about John Nemeth, except to say a lot of nice things about his singing and harp chops and also to note that he's made a particular kind of choice about what sort of stage-image to put across and that, on certain songs, it involves a kind of theatricality that is heavily invested in singing "black." I'm sure he's a terrifically nice guy and has absolutely no idea that there's a long history of blackface performance that stands squarely, if obscurely, back behind his performances."
Well you have jumped to one conclusion, that John intends the woman in the song to be thought of as black...I'm not sure that everyone would necessarily have come to that conclusion...how would you suggest that his countrified, hi pitched, female comedy voice could be made more "white"?
As to whether John played black blues clubs in Boise, Idaho...I neither know nor care...frankly I can't imagine black blues clubs run by guys of John's generation are particularly widespread & popular ANYWHERE?
I did write a loooong post last night on this subject, but abandoned it in the hope that the issue would die away, as my post might have been seen by some as overly contentious...but "black" & "white" basically are not intrinsically related to an accent, or a way of speaking...you bring a lot of that to the table with you. Accents & a particular way of speaking are entirely nurture, not nature.
There have, at various periods been criticisms of various white singers in the jazz, soul & blues fields, that they have made concerted efforts to "sound black", but let's not forget that A) Some artists were categorised that way BECAUSE of how they sounded (especially prior to the advent of the pop video) & B) that these are genres of music that were originated by black, working class, Americans...if you sound too preppy/OxBridge it doesn't fit...not that you have to sound "black" as such, just not so "Ivy league"?
Singing a blues song, say with James Earl Jones's, plummy, perfect diction would be odd, as would president Obama making a speech in a faux Jamaican accent...as would singing a London cockney knees-up song in a white Russian accent...my point is basically that people sound how they sound, initially because of their environment & how their parents/friends/local community speak...there is often, as we grow, an aspirational element ...I know people with regional accents that had elecution lessons so that they would be taken more seriously in business & in other regions. Likewise, rap & hip hop, like it or not, are in many areas THE music of the young generation...irrespective of colour, many teenagers use "urban" rap inspired street talk simply because they are used to their idols speaking like that...it seems normal to them...even if they live in an area with few black people. It has been that way since as far back as I can remember in the inner cities, with cable & sattelite etc. & increased access to music of black origin it has spread more to the suburbs & everywhere else.
Of course, Adam, you and I are too old to be concerned with hanging with the teenagers & adopting their ways...but if the kids round my way are so concerned with sounding "black" why don't they want to sound like Nelson Mandela, Trevor MacDonald (black British newsreader), Baroness Scotland (black British peer)? Because it's not about colour, it's about current popular music & it's influence.
I once went to a stag night at a hotel/conference centre, that just happened to coincide with a sci-fi convention (my story & I'm sticking to it). I was immediately perplexed as to why a white guy had dressed up as a black Klingon...on thinking about it further, it was nothing to do with trying/wanting to be black, but about associating with a well known & loved character who happened to be black (let's remember that Klingons, as far as we know anyway, are fictional). The fact that here is a guy dressed as a make believe alien seemed at first to be perfectly understandable, but Whoa! ...dressed like a black alien that's just absurd!... getting my drift as to how nonsensical this is?
I'm not so niaive as to think that there might not be black, or white, people who might have found that behaviour odd/unwelcome/innapropriate...but sometimes we have to just look at the way things are presented & take them at face value...not constantly prevaricate & pontificate about "percieved" intentions.
Some people will always see what they want to see. Warren Mitchell played a comedy character on British TV (Alf Garnet), who was xenophobic...the joke was that no one could take this racist old coot seriously and that they should see how daft he was...however Mitchell used get furious at soccer matches because fans of the show would come up & congratulate him on the views of the character! - "You bloody idiot, you just don't get do you?" would be a typical response.
I have shared my home with black people for years, there is no one "black" voice/accent, no one way that black people speak, people sound like they do mainly because of where they come from and...believe it, or not, not all black people come from the USA...trust me on that...Africa actually has quite few! And I see things from the other side of the coin, black people stating that this/that black singer sounds "white" because their voice is too high pitched...there is a quick & easy test to determine what colour someone is - look at their skin, that tells you all you need to know, anything else is bullshit.
Sometimes, when people are young, they modify the way they speak to fit in with their percieved peers...like Rick E, Steve G, Paul O *may* have done...(just like European blues/country/rock'n'roll singers can Americanise their voice) it's just as "real" in their case, as in any other. If a white person can sound black & a black person sound white...that proves that there is no distinct sound associated with a particular skin colour. Timi Yuro, Bobby Charles, Rick Astley (believe it or not), Chuck Berry, Charlie Rich, Leonard Chess (just off the top of my head - I can undoubtedly come up with a much, much longer list)...have all been mistaken for people of a different skin colour, purely based on the way they sound.
Personally, this is a non-subject as far as I am concerned. It's go nothing to do with the facts about people of different races, it is about pre-conceived ideas and people's inability to break away from commonly held misconceptions.
To my mind, to hold to the idea that black, white, brown, yellow people are intrinsically "different" (beyond the visibly obvious), whether positively, or negatively, is the essence of what racism is all about.
What is more concerning to me is that Clarence Henry never lived in a pond, never had his relatives collected up as spawn by local school kids for show & tell & then flushed down the toilet...he never had a period, or a smear test but he had the damn cheek to mock amphibians and women in the same song! :-)
Last Edited by on May 19, 2010 8:08 AM
I thought of a yt-cook when I read your post (yes I watch cooking recipes on youtube.... :) Everytime I show him to people, they ask me if it's just a show/shtick - but, no...
The ending, startin [5:05] is awesome!
---------- YT
Last Edited by on May 19, 2010 7:28 AM
So I just went back and watched the Nemeth video. Of course, it's Rice Miller's hilarious song "Wake Up, Baby". The whole thing is meant to be a fucking joke. What's he supposed to do, sing it straight? That's not what SBWII intended. Anyone who thinks he's being racist instead of celebrating the GENIUS of Rice Miller needs to stop drinking the Kool-Aid.
So now I hope that Nemeth reads this and sings Miller's other comedy classics, "Santa Claus" ("the po-lice caught me rambling through my baby's dresser draws, but I said I was just trying to find what she got me for Santy Claus") and "The Goat".
Lighten up ladies. When you've composed yourself and finished the dishes, you may join the men in the traditional blues player's lounge.
"To my mind, to hold to the idea that black, white, brown, yellow people are intrinsically "different" (beyond the visibly obvious), whether positively, or negatively, is the essence of what racism is all about."
Completely agree.
Most of the positive discrimination going on here is far more damaging and racist than anything Rick or John have done in their videos.
Music doesn't have a colour. Its either good or bad. ----------
""To my mind, to hold to the idea that black, white, brown, yellow people are intrinsically "different" (beyond the visibly obvious), whether positively, or negatively, is the essence of what racism is all about.""
I 100% completely agree with you there Mark.
7LimitJi hit's it on the head when he says "Music doesn't have a colour. Its either good or bad".
/7LimitJi hit's it on the head when he says "Music doesn't have a colour. Its either good or bad"./
Seems to me that "music" can be used in (at least!) two ways:
(1) Meaningful sounds that human beings make for other human beings.
(2) A socio-cultural phenomenon that is inextricably intertwined with other socio-cultural phenomena.
For (1), like Kingley, I'm with 7LimitJI.
For (2) though, it's another matter...
That being said...
Although (2) is very important indeed, I can't help but feel a sad sense of loss (loss of innocence, perhaps?) whenever (2) seems to get in the way of (1).
EDIT: come to think of it, though, "meaningful" could well be meaningless if separated from socio-cultural context. Maybe I'm feeling sad about the way society and culture have gone (and continue to go)...
Hmmmm...
Maudlin mid-week blues, I wonder?
@Rick Davis:
Perhaps the thread title is tipping a nod to Heidegger?
EDIT: Somehow managed to neglect saying...
Rick Estrin's playing is bloody brilliant! So much character...
From what I've been told, Belushi was in Eugene, OR.,the Cray bands hometown, filming "Animal House", when he met Robert and Curtis. In fact, Robert is playing guitar in "Otis Day and the Nights" band in Animal house. Its a moment in history I believe Salgado wishes to forget.
right, and salgado and cray owe a huge dept in their style and delivery to Paul De Lay, who was a founder of the portland blues scene those guys came out of. the chain of influence with respect to race and performance is a bit muddy with respect to where the blues brothers got their act.
Walter, I'm not sure its accurate to say De Lay was the founder of the blues scene in Portland. Curtis was at it in the early 70's as well. Here are three links to their respective early bands. http://pnwbands.com/nighthawksor.html http://pnwbands.com/brownsugar.html http://pnwbands.com/pauldelayband.html http://pnwbands.com/foghornleghorn.html
Funny thread! No, Ev, it's clear that John Nemeth was supposed to sing that song exactly as he sang it. It's a fucking joke, yes. That's my point. Thanks, Dr. Freud: sublimated aggression is indeed worth talking about. And the audience is there for Nemeth, clearly. Not my cup of tea, but hey: that's also my point. To each his own. My day gig as a teacher of cultural history quite naturally leads me to ask questions about the way in which race, performance context, audience expectations, and the history of specific aesthetic forms (such as burlesque) factor into blues performance; I've tried to raise what seems to me like an important issue here, but I'm not doctrinaire about it, as I say, because the answers are complex, not simple. If black blues artists, as an earlier post suggest, have sometimes criticized each other (James Cotton!?) for shucking and jiving, it's probably a good thing that we're having this discussion. Heck, it probably means we've finally lost our innocence, and that's a very good thing indeed. Authenticity starts there.
This is assuming, of course, that people come to the blues because they want an authentic confrontation with the facts of life, not a fantasy-world in which they're free to frolic innocently and try on alternate identities. My experience tells me, however, that some people who show up in our blues world actually think that the hat and sunglasses confer bluesiness--and license. Blues, brews, and BBQ. Hey baby, GET on down! Confronted with that sort of thing, I see it as my job--one of my jobs--to raise uncomfortable questions that may, in the long run, dispel a small bit of the fantasy.
@5F6H: "there is no one 'black' voice/accent, no one way that black people speak, people sound like they do mainly because of where they come from." Of course you're right. I couldn't agree more. That's why I put the word in quotes. My black wife has two or three different voices that subtly shade into each other and she deploys them depending on context. Many black Americans have several variant voices, as you know: a "white" voice for the white/mainstream/work world, a regular voice for back home. My wife's twin sister has one voice, as far as I can tell, and it's more working-class than my wife's, but both of them have versions of the south Dallas sound. Under their influence, I have occasionally been known to drop the terminal "s" from certain verbs when I'm speaking quickly, and draw laughs from them when that happens. It wouldn't occur to me, however, to burlesque the way they talk for public consumption--in a blues song, for example--because we're family. America is a big and complex place.
You also wrote: "Singing a blues song, say with James Earl Jones's, plummy, perfect diction would be odd, as would president Obama making a speech in a faux Jamaican accent." Actually, that's how Joe Williams sings, and how Brook Benton sings: hard-swinging, but with plummy, perfect diction. Maybe that's why I like them, and have (in an extremely modest way) been influenced by them. But again: to each his own.
Last Edited by on May 19, 2010 10:54 AM
Adam, funny what you mention in the 2nd paragraph of your last post because that is exactly what Jimmy Rogers talked about with me as far as using a different voice and just by personal observation, it's true and part of that is the way whites interact with blacks for years (and this is NOT trying to sound racist) because, from my own personal observations, white people have more easily related to a black person if they sound "less white," AKA using fewer of the so called "ebonics." Ditto with whites with Asians or any other race. This is NOT entirely true for all, but from observing people like a hawk, there is some truth to it.
Dressing to the nines is the way you always had to do whenever you'd play in black music clubs for generations (tho a lot less among the hiphop crowd, where it is more of a "dress down" thing now) and when the old school black musicians played for black audiences, they always dressed up well, and a classic example of doing that not only for black audiences but for white auidences as well is BB King.
During the 70's, Cotton began dressing for a long while more like what his white audiences and musicians were dressing, t-shirts, jeans, etc., (sometimes looking like he just got kicked out of bed or like your local neighborhood plumber), which was the way those audiences often dressed and it was a way to relate to that crowd, which once he got on that circuit, was a much better paying circuit for him than most black clubs were paying at the time.
Your last paragraph describes the more "uptown sound" of black blues peerformances and you could include a jump singer like Roy Brown or Wynonie Harris in that mix or Junior Parker for that matter as well. ---------- Sincerely, Barbeque Bob Maglinte Boston, MA http://www.barbequebob.com CD available at http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/bbmaglinte
Thanks, BBQ. Your comments are always enlightening, and they're particularly enlightening on these points. I've noticed for a long time that Cotton dressed kind of....well, sloppily when he made that audience shift. T-shirts and bluejeans. But it's possible that the country boy from Tunica, Mississippi just felt more comfortable dressing like that all along, and that he appreciated the laid-back vibe of his new audience and the fact that it allowed him to perform in that casual getup. (I'm not contradicting you, just adding a possible reason for this phenomenon, which doesn't usually get talked about.)
Junior Parker was also a big influence on me. (And John Nemeth, I understand. Bravo! The man has taste.)
Last Edited by on May 19, 2010 11:00 AM
I remember when I first saw the old guys play. They had rings on most of their fingers, gold teeth, cool hats, hair perfect, suits/shoes that defied description, cadillac out front, and a woman at their table that complimented them big time. She was equally dressed to the nines. Those guys had lots of colonge on too. It made me stare at them as much when they were offstage as onstage. A singer from Oakland, Curtis (forget his last name) was the king of dressing. He had a closet full of dresses, wraps, jewelery that perfectly complimented his suits. He would find beautiful women that fit the dresses and wanted to hang out on the performers side of the club scene. He was something to watch. The whole person of those guys was something to experience. A video never conveys this stuff. You have to be there.
That way of presenting yourself in a performance really hooked me and from that point on, I have always dressed to the nines when I play. I played a festival a few years ago in Seattle for the Washington state blues society. It was a rare 100 degree day. People were nonstop telling me how could I wear such a suit in that weather. I laughed and said I did the same in the Texas, louisiana clubs, in the dead heat of summer and the clubs weren't airconditioned. I remember those old guys dressed to the nines in that heat and it never seemed to bother them. They taught you how to live on the road cheap, make your suits that were often on the edge of falling apart look good, use vasilene on old shoes to give them a sparkling shine onstage.......... I learned a lot about how to be a musician from them. Rick also did! Walter
I think cotton and buddy guy look a lot better dressed to the nines vs. their gardening attire.
---------- walter tore's spontobeat - a real one man band and over 1 million spontaneously created songs and growing. I record about 300 full length cds a year. " No one can control anyone, but anyone can let someone control them"
FWIW, I remember seeing Cotton dressed in three piece suits during the 1980's playing at bars around Chicago quite frequently.
At the time, he was fronting the big band led by Michael Coleman. He was sweating so hard that he sweat right through the suit. During the break, he changed into a different suit. Two weeks later, he could be seen wearing jeans and a T-shirt playing traditional Blues with Sammy Lawhorn.
Both of the audiences were white. (Lots of the same people were in attendance.) The cover charge was the same. The size of the venues were similar. The clubs were a few miles apart.
This situation occurred frequently enough to not think it was an outlier.
I found 56FH's entry (or argument or whatever you want to call it) brilliantly conceived, really well-written and I agree with all of it, but he conveniently ignored one crucial point that Adam brought up early in the thread—and that he hints at again along with BBQ Bob—that of the large looming minstrel show history of "whites" imitating "blacks" for chuckles, and possibly even to somehow relate. You can argue till your face turns blue about Rick Estrin's "street cred", his life story and motivations, and his sublime skill, but the fact is that on a "modern blues harmonica" forum the whole "talkin' jive for laughs" thing is a legitimate issue to bring up. It's certainly not modern blues by any stretch that I can see, and to a casual observer unaware of Estrin's talent or history, it may be an uncomfortable watch/listen. Sometime ago I took my wife to see a Paul Oscher show. It was an incredible performance, but she had no idea of Oscher's history (and no one has more "white guy traditional blues street cred" than Oscher), and she found Paul's whole Brooklyn guy meets countrified jive talk a little off-putting, despite his hilarious between song stories and patter. I loved it...Paul was "authentic" to me. In her eyes it diminished the music, not added to it, and she would not have the same feelings if she saw, say, Delbert McClinton or Paul DeLay in performance...or Kim Wilson, Charlie Musselwhite (we've seen him together)etc. etc. Like just about everyone has stated—it's complicated. Having said that, I really enjoy Estrin and realize he is a master but the personae cannot be ignored, it's in your face and it is definitely a "backward-looking" take on blues harp performance, in my opinion.
Yep. And Yo Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman, Jascha Heifetz, Leonard Bernstein have performed music written even before the blues we listen to, and they do their very best to perform it the way they believe it was intended to be performed when written - they don't put their "modern" spin on it. (Although Bernstein and Ma, in particular, do that with SOME of their music.) And people still pay big bucks to see that.
Just sayin' - I LOVE modern interpretation and new spin. But to me it isn't a REQUIREMENT to "be cool" or to be "authentic". It IS a requirement to be entertaining, assuming one wants or needs to make a living with their music. And when it comes to entertainment, Rick is definitely at the top of his game. ---------- /Greg
Well, Tomaxe, you can call it backward, but from my own personal experience playing in front of a largely black blues audience in my early years, you NEVER hit the bandstand looking like a slob and for them, you just couldn't just stand there and do nothing (AKA "dignified," and that's even a stretch), you also HAD to to something called ENTERTAIN and showmanship counted in a MAJOR way and the stuff like playing a guitar behind your back, playing harp with no hands, etc., was something you had to do and when they had those cutting contests, they were out for blood and you had to use every edge in the world and what most of you see, basically playing for white audiences, is so blatantly tame by comparison.
Waltertore's description of things is really very spot on about dressing on the bandstand, especially with the old school black blues musicians because looking like a drunk old country boy with a whiskey flask sticking out of your back pocket was the last thing they neeeded to see. When it came to really dressing well on the bandstand, for me, the ultimate model of that was Junior Wells.
If you go to Paul Oscher's website and read the stories of how some of things that were happening with many of the old guys in those rough ghetto neighborhoods AKA "the 'hood, it's not far off (actually not much different) from the stories of violence with many hiphop artists' environment and the average white blyes audience today has an overly romanticized view of things and there are stories I know of some very well known black blues artists I will not mention on the internet (out of respect for those older black blues musicians) that may sound like what to most white audiences, belong to hiphop/rap and many whites would be too scared out of their skivvies to even think of seeing those black blues men in their original audiences, be it in the juke joints or the seedy ghetto bars.
Hell, when jump blues singer Roy Brown started out, his diction for a black vocalist was unusually clear for a black vocalist in his day and he originally started out as a black Bing Crosby clone before he eventually got into and later reshaped the sound of jump blues and his vocal influence can be heard with many blues singers, especially black singers from Jackie Wilson, Little Milton, Bobby Blue Bland, BB King, Junior Parker, and that's a short list.
In some ways, the drive to modernize sometimes loses things, but I'm not gonna go and say that as a blanket cover statement for everything because that would be far from the truth. ---------- Sincerely, Barbeque Bob Maglinte Boston, MA http://www.barbequebob.com CD available at http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/bbmaglinte
Last Edited by on May 19, 2010 1:23 PM
I am not some champion of strictly "modern blues harmonica"—whatever that is—I was responding mainly to 5F6H's post which was definitely a worthwhile and interesting post in which he went into a long explanation about diction and mimicry and different cultures and so on—but to me he danced around the potent, hard to ignore back story of white burlesque-style imitation of blacks for laughs or even for 'credibility"...and how that can be either appealing or off-putting to an audience and certainly creates a context that to me, is old fashioned. Is it bad, good? I dunno, but he made a scholarly argument and conveniently side-stepped the whole "puttin' on a zoot zoot, sunglasses, and "playin' da blooze!"" thing that SOME people, however PC it may sound, might NOT say "Hell Yeah!" to. I completely understand BBQ Bob's point—I'd rather be entertained by a showman than not, and I know that this is the way it used to be for ALL popular entertainment—and I agree with Greg as well—being "authentic" or having something brand new to say every single second is not a requirement — but I think that when you do the "Rick Estrin Thing" TODAY in 2010 you are creating a context that deals with some sticky issues, for better or worse. He's still one of the best harp players I've ever heard, technique-wise!
@ness: I like the sentence the guitarist who turned me on to the Nightcats a couple decades ago used: "Rick Estrin is a significant blues harp player."
@Ev630: As I said at the time, if those involved have mentioned it, never mind, it's all good.
@Rick Davis: Thanks for sharing. You missed my point, but I see no use in my trying to pursue that with someone with a demonstrated inability to engage with what I'm saying or concede that I have a point about anything.
@kudzurunner: If you've got Guralnick's Feel Like Going Home handy--somebody I haven't seen since 1999 has (or had) my copy--what I'm referring to is in the Howlin' Wolf chapter, that great scene where Guralnick is sitting with Wolf and Wolf has someone in his entourage read Guralnick's newspaper review of Wolf's previous show out loud . . . and Wolf even loves the parts about "elephantine grace" or whatever, but gets really fired up in agreeing that "the Wolf doesn't jive" and proceeds to go onstage and tear the house down to demonstrate that. Anyway, I'm pretty sure Wells was one artist Guralnick had named for contrast, but not at all sure about the other, Cotton was a guess.
@Pluto,In regards to Robert Cray's home town. Robert graduated from highschool in Tacoma WASHINGTON, in 1969, where Albert Collins (who was living around here at that time) played either his graduation party or prom, I forget which. But, Eugene and Animal House came later. Robert was playing blues in the Seattle Tacoma area around the same time Delay and Mesi formed 'Brown Sugar' but long before the Paul Delay band, which was mid to later 70's. I'm sure the specifics are out there, this is from memory. Now whether Robert ever lived in Eugene I'm not sure, but I do know he primarlily grew up in Tacoma, where we have a couple of mutual friends. I know less about Curtis, but he was in and out of Cray's band as I remember. You'd see them with Curtis fronting the band, the next time no Curtis, and the last time I saw Curtis with Cray, he just played harp and Robert did all the singing, they were opening for Bonnie Raitt. About 1979 I think. In the early days Cray used to do some killer covers of Magic Sam.
Last Edited by on May 19, 2010 7:18 PM
I've got a lot on my mind, with Hill Country incoming in about 48 hours, but I'll say this for the record: everything that Waltertore and BBQBob say in their posts above is the gospel truth, and you young guys better realize that we're lucky indeed to have them talking this honestly, from deep experience, about the musicians they have known.
My own experience is somewhat different, but it would be accurate to say that the three of us, more or less from the same era (I was born in 1958), had versions of the same experience, significant apprenticeships with older bluesmen, and the lessons they communicated, explicitly and implicitly, are complicated--sometimes very in-your-face, sometimes extremely delicate and tactful, but always about teaching a younger person a way of living powerfully and gracefully in the world. This is important stuff.
I've often told my wife about how Sterling used to counsel me when we'd be driving somewhere on the road, I'd be at the wheel, and somebody would blow by me and do something stupid. If it was clear to The Bluesman that I was "engaging" with the aggressive driver in any way, he'd immediately put his hand up and say, "Mr. Adam, PLEASE let that son of a gun go on his way. Let that trouble get on AWAY from us, young man!" He was a Buddhist, in his own strange way: recognize the power of desire and learn how to master it in order to preserve your life. I don't think that lesson is generally understood as part of the blues life, and yet, in my opinion, it is THE lesson that the old guys have learned and want to teach: figure out a way of staying alive. The point that doesn't need to be made explicitly is: because the world has a thousand ways of killing your ass dead. That's a black man's lesson. White boys need to be taught that, because it doesn't come naturally to most of them. But that is the point Sterling Magee tried to teach me in a dozen different ways--and it manifested quite pointedly out on the road. Since the world was trying hard to kill us, at bare minimum we had to avoid responding to in in a dis-mannerable, foolishly ego-driven way that might land us in a ditch. HE certainly wasn't going to let MY foolish driving kill HIM.
If it seems that I'm talking an awful lot about death: yes. There's a lot of death back behind the blues. Paul Oscher knows that.
And here's the funny thing about Paul: he's married to one of the foremost black American playwrights, Suzan Lori Parks:
She is one conscious woman, no matter how you slice it. So if his jive-talk is so old-school, why on earth did she decide that he was THE guy? I've seen them together. That is a match made in heaven.
Love is a funny thing. America is a complex place. None of us has all the answers.
Last Edited by on May 19, 2010 6:54 PM
