Friday May 26th, 2006 @ 9:08 PM
It’s a Long Climb Up a Five Foot Stage.
I wonder how many bands are in America? My guess is about one hundred and forty thousand, or fifty bands for every hundred thousand people. The town where I grew up in Wyoming, only had about twenty thousand people, but it always had at least ten bands going at the same time. Often there were more than ten, seldom less. The ratio if applied to the United States population of 280 million gets my 140 grand estimate. That’s a lot of bands. If one includes garage bands who are afraid or unable to play in public, another 140 grand could be added.
All these bands want to play festivals. Think of a dog lurking in the corner at a Thanksgiving Dinner. The dog will study each bite as it travels from plate to fork to the mouth of a diner who made the mistake of tossing the animal a tidbit. At times the dog will shift anxiously from foot to foot as it sits, drool falls from its mouth, and now and then a pleading little whine or moan is emitted.
The dog’s focus is complete. You can try distracting the dog with an offer to scratch its ears, pet its tummy, or throw a Frisbee. Nothing works. Sex with a pink-ribboned, pedicured, poodle has no appeal. The dog’s head goes slowly back and forth following the flight of the fork.
It is with this same laser-focused-lust that musicians eye the invitations from the country’s leading music festivals. At smaller festivals as few as half-a-dozen bands provide the entire line-up, at large festivals as many as forty or fifty bands are hired. Either way, about 139,950 plus bands are left out of any given festival. Most of them think they are as good or better than the bands who were invited.
Bands fall into two broad categories. Those whom the festivals’ want, and those who want the festivals. The former is a small and elite group. The latter is like a mammoth kennel of yapping and wagging dogs willing to roll over, sit up, or chase a stick to land a spot on the big stage.
Confining the rest of this piece to Blues festivals only, realize they all want the icons of the genre like B.B. King, Buddy Guy, and Johnny-come-lately-Lang. If they are unavailable or unaffordable, there is a standard wish-list. I don’t have to write it out for you, just look at the line-ups of festivals all over the country and you will see the same names cropping up with the ubiquity of a pro-wrestling cavalcade. It’s almost as though they all live together in back of the stage on mean street.
Getting to mean street is no easy task. To begin with each band faces the almost spermicidal struggle through all the other bands to the metaphorical blues egg. This can take years. It can take decades. The main glut of wiggling and striving bands falls by the wayside early on. Bobby Rush told me it took nineteen years of struggling before he got his first real payday in music. In his autobiography, B.B. King tells of decades of perseverance and hardship. As few as twenty years ago I was watching B.B. King in Lake Tahoe where I lived at the time, at Harrah’s Casino, playing three shows a night as a lounge act. The cover was a measly two-drink minimum. He was in his mid-fifties.
Why do bands want to play festivals so badly? I’ll give you four reasons, the last of which is disproportionately motivating: the money, the time, the reputation, and the audience.
Our band has a rule of thumb that is more accurate than a barometer on a Coast Guard vessel: the longer you play the less you get paid and the shorter you play, the more you get paid.
Clubs that can’t afford to pay bands, keep them playing all night to extract every dime out of those who will stay around as long as the music is playing. These gigs seem longer than a marriage to a nagging wife. Like as not the TVs are tuned into some ESPN channel and pool tables are going and the few drunks who notice the band are requesting Lynard Skynard. At the end of the night the owner tries to make us feel guilty by dumping out the quarters from a pool table to help make our meager wage.
By contrast, a band can book a whole tour around festival wages. We are onstage for one glorious hour or so, and thousands of people are out front and actually paying attention. The maxim is that one experience like that makes up for ten bar gigs. Now some bar gigs are better than others, but none match the exhilaration of a good festival.
Once a musician experiences the thrill of hanging ten on a five-foot-high stage with hundreds of hands reaching up to him, and looking out at several thousand eye-balls gleaming with the glint of admiration, it becomes a drug that must be repeated, again and again. A band will walk barefoot on coals to get there.
I have owned a nightclub and a Roadhouse and I have organized and booked festivals. I was always amazed at the amount of band promo kits I received in these ventures. Most of them went into the garbage unopened. I know it sounds heartless, but I couldn’t even fit the bands that I knew made me money into my schedule like they deserved. And there were so many bands! After awhile I begin to hate them. They all said they were the greatest thing since talking movies and they turned out more boring than a visit from in-laws. I soon didn’t believe the hype or anything else they said.
New bands keep trying. They are Salmon swimming upstream, leaping up waterfalls, and slipping through the fishermen, and moving ever onward as their fellows fall by the way. A few find their way to the big stage every year. Seldom do they realize that sometimes their great victory has an executioner’s ax hanging overhead during the performance. They gleefully dance about like mice on a snake’s head, unaware that they may be swallowed whole and never heard from again. While festivals offer great rewards, and can help vault a newcomer into stardom, they can also serve as a ritual for sacrificing virgins on the altar before the masses.
Big festivals are salted with industry VIPs and it is a small world after all, as the song goes. Writers, agents, labels, magazines, and other festival executives mingle in their circles and compare notes. If a band didn’t create a buzz, then they could be out of biz. Its back to another decade of cheap bar gigs or off to “get a haircut and get a real job.”
So when you see these performers come in off Mean Street and onto the stage, realize most of them have paid some incredible dues to get there and they aren’t going to give up their spot come hell or high water. Unless the performer is young Johnny Lang, in whose throat God installed a high torque ratchet instead of vocal chords, the bands you hear and watch have employed the perseverance of a badger latching his teeth on your leather boot.
Festivals need to make money. No one is going to throw a party of that size out of his wallet. Not for long anyway. Famous musicians draw people and their money to the festival. Festival directors know this only too well. Getting famous enough to be on the Festival wish list can be one of the hardest games to play and extremely competitive. Few festivals can afford to hire top drawing entertainers across the board so they have to take some chances on the lesser known and unknowns.
But besides drawing a crowd, the festival director must make that crowd happy with what they hear. They’ve all been burned by bands who got stage fright and huddled together like sheep, nervously lighting cigarettes and turning their backs to the audience, trying to decide what song to play and how to start it.
Some bands are more fun than a tickling Uncle in their hometown bar, but a stage as big as a baseball infield in front of a few thousand strange faces turns them into pants wetters. Blues audiences want their heroes to be bold, brave, and badass, like Luther Allison was. They can sense lack of confidence like a dogpack smells fear.
Another dread the festival director has with an unknown band is that they do come off bold and brave and then deliver cheese like a Wisconsin Milk Maid to the embarrassment of everyone. “I didn’t know they were going to bring out a smoke machine and stilt shoes…”
That’s why setting foot on the stage of a Big Time Festival is an accomplishment in itself. Counting the garage guys who really don’t believe they have a chance, there are approximately a quarter of a million bands wishing they were there instead of whoever is, hoping the new guy fails like a drug addict with a urine sample, so they can move up in the ranks.
So, while you are watching the bands, conjure up some sympathy for the new guys, and some admiration for the old salts, because you are seeing a survival of the toughest, not just the talented. As Stevie Ray Vaughn says at the end of Cold Shot: “Never make your move too soon.”-Carl Gustafson
Byline: Carl Gustafson is the front man for Blinddog Smokin’, one of the most traveled road bands in America. He is also the author of the internet column Tales Told Well.
Posted by Carl
Wednesday April 26th, 2006 @ 9:09 PM
Never Picked No Cotton Blues
Could a Mormon Eagle Scout living in Montpelier, Idaho, who gets straight A’s and belongs to the chess club, and whose mother looks like either of the wives of the two Presidents Bush, play the blues?
Can a person who uses proper grammar play blues? How about if they read books by Wayne Dwyer? What if their middle name is their mom’s maiden name, like Effingham? Can a virgin play the blues? How about a guy with freckles and red hair? If a person really digs William F. Buckley Jr., could he still play the blues?
Can a guy be a true blues man if he’s never been divorced? Would he have to get beat up real bad before he could play the blues? Or lose money gambling? Or grow up picking cotton? What if you never had your car repossessed or your wife stolen by another man-a man you particularly can’t stand?
What if a guy has all his teeth and they don’t have any cavities and are straight? Does this indicate that his life hasn’t been down and out enough to play the blues? How down does a person have to be to qualify?
A few years ago it was the rage to be agog over the latest youth who could supposedly play blues. First it was seventeen-year-olds, then thirteen, then eleven. It even got down to a three-year-old on one talk show I was watching.
I don’t know. Maybe there is a point beyond which we shouldn’t go with this. There’s something about a guy whose mommy is still unzipping his pants and aiming his wee-wee that doesn’t strike me as bluesy. Actually, teen-agers lamenting in song about working five long years for one woman who had the nerve to throw me out, isn’t lighting the bulb on the truth meter either.
But that’s just me. I’m seeking some truth here in this article and there is a rather ambiguous set of standards that limns into view when blues music is analyzed. It is based on the hypothesis that blues came out of slavery as the dark side of Negro spirituals and therefore was born out of pain and suffering.
Now many of the first real blues folk performed music for money to avoid pain and suffering, and so they wouldn’t have to pick cotton, drive tractors, and work for the company store. More than a few of them were rascals who drank and partied, hanky-panked with good men’s wives, and sneaked out of town. But be that as it may some atavistic white men decided somewhere along the line that real blues could only be genuinely performed by certain stereotypes of their designing. No one really knows who these guys were for sure, and by whose authority they made this declaration, but they have inspired legions of priests whose task it is to preserve the stereotypes and to administer judgement upon the blues sinners who by deduction are pretenders and charlatans.
George Carlin, the famous comedian, is one of those priests and said in an HBO special that only black people have the right to sing the blues and all the bald headed, pot-bellied white guys with a fedora should shut the blank up and get off the stage. To this he got much laughter and a round of applause.
Now, either George is wrong, or I’m a fraud and a hypocrite, and so are a lot of other people. I’m mostly Swedish, yet retained freckles from my mom’s Scotch-Irish blood. I grew up at seven thousand feet in elevation in Wyoming so the closest thing I saw to cotton was sheep’s wool. I was never a slave and I had a Tinker Toy set with six hundred pieces when I was a kid. For a blues man, I guess that constitutes a handicapped beginning.
My dad had a statue of Beethoven on his piano. He told me Blues was devil’s music. I was a confused kid because though I feared the devil something awful, I really dug his music.
Of course we since learned that real Devil’s music was played by the Charlie Daniels band with a violin, but how was my dad to know that back in the fifties?
The first blues men played whatever kind of music it took to get paid. You could get Turkey in the Straw and She’ll be Comin’ Around the Mountain out of them just as easily as a rudimentary twelve bar. Some of them could really play and others were just awful. That is still true today.
Not all old guys from Mississippi who claim to be blues men can play. Some can, some can’t. The point is: fitting one of the stereotypes doesn’t necessarily produce good blues.
I met one well-hyped blues man at four in the morning in Arkansas a few years ago. We talked blues for a few minutes, exchanged CDs, filled up our cars with gas, and went our separate ways. This guy was in demand at blues festivals, had some good reviews in magazines, and had been given a few meritorious blues awards here and there. I listened to his CD. It was worse than awful. Awful to me means that it has enough semblance of musical form to still be recognized as an attempt at music-at least enough to label it awful. This pathetic man would have sounded better recording his stomach growling or his dog howling or his wife bonking him on the head. I am not making this up.
It was then that I fully realized how influenced people are by stereotypes and that they are prepared to throw out all natural judgement and wisdom once the premise is accepted. I’ll give you a guideline here that you can apply to all blues music: If it sounds like crap to you, it probably is.
Three years ago I went to a concert performed by some highly promoted dork who I immediately dubbed Mr. B, for boring. All around me people were fighting sleep. This guy brought with him his own field of gravity. He was a white guy who had somehow gotten the official stamp of the blues police, and he was square as a Rubik’s cube. Square in musical terms is a bad thing. It means predictable and without style or phrasing. He had the personality of a lizard sunning on a rock. Yet some aficionados were enthusiastically applauding after his songs and looking at their “expert” buddies and nodding with self-righteous satisfaction-that knowing smirk that elevates them above us: the poor dumb proletariat.
One little girl a few seats over from me tugged on her mother’s dress and declared, “Let’s go, mommy, this guy sucks.” Guess what? In her childhood innocence, she became the true expert.
That’s the bottom line, folks, if it moves or inspires you, or makes you not care if your neighbor sees you bouncing and jiving, then it must be working, no matter who is playing it. If you feel like you just had an outbreak of shingles seizing your skull, or you catch yourself staring at the exit sign, or you have the urge to confess crimes you didn’t do, then the little girl is right, it sucks.
I once stopped along Highway 49 down in the Delta and picked some Cotton. One bole and I got stuck and bled. Then I quit. I have a genuine nation bag, and a mojo bag. I’ve been divorced, had two cars repossessed and a truck stolen from me. I once had a tooth drilled deep with no novocaine. I have done the midnight creepin’, been the backdoor man, and woke up hung over in strange places. I’ve come a long way down the stereotypical blues trail from my tinker toy times. Did my bad days and reckless ways turn me into a blues man? I don’t think it made me anything but a jerk. Glad they’re behind me.
When all is said and done, I came to this conclusion. The best blues men are the natural storytellers. Whether told with vocals, guitar, harp, or other instruments, they have the desire and ability to convey emotion. There is an inherent verve, an intensity, a purity to their expression. Because it comes out of their culture, black people arguably have the most and the best blues storytellers, but they aren’t the only ones. I saw a Japanese blues man at BB King’s one time who brought down the house. He came complete with two cameras and a cell phone.
There’s a blues man from Oklahoma who I saw in one of his debut gigs ten years ago. He was raw as a pumpkinseed. He had an Elvis look about him and talked like a bumpkin. But as soon as he started to sing and play guitar, I knew he was the real deal. As inexperienced and amateur as he was, he had more soul than a Fijian tribal dancer at a grog festival.
I don’t think it is something that can be practiced or contrived. It can be enhanced and perfected, but the qualities are there or they are not. I think Johnny Lang is a perfect example. My band played the same festival as his last year in Tulsa. I was prepared to scoff at him and even hate him if he proved to be the marketing freak I suspected he would be. I had my mind set on not accepting this kid as a sincere blues player.
Boy, was I wrong! It was then I learned that age nor race nor origin has much to do with what works and what doesn’t. Apparently sin and degradation doesn’t really count for much either. This kid was from North Dakota for crying out loud, ranked in the bottom three non-bluesiest states, along with Wyoming and Nebraska, although Vermont seems like it would hang right in there. It doesn’t seem like a fellow could even sin in North Dakota. But this kid had soul-in every damned note he sang or played. And just as you declare him one of those rare old souls he turns around giggling and throws apples at his brother between songs. Doesn’t matter. The kid emotes.
Now don’t write me with admonitions about real bluesmen using a broken bottleneck on a broom handle wire to give voice to the sores on their backs from the whipping “massa” gave them. I know all the history, probably more than you do. I’ve read the books, been to the gravesites, traveled the roads, played the jukes. My heroes are black bluesmen-I even had Sonny Boy’s life-sized bust in my wedding lineup.
I submit that blues music is a beautiful cure for the weary soul and it can be and is shared by all God’s children. You can honor the modern Shamans who let it live and grow in them today, without dishonoring those who created it yesteryear, or polluting the genre. One way it will pollute is if it is made to stagnate.
A true test happened to me one time when I witnessed a battle of the blues bands performed anonymously behind a curtain. Neither the judges nor the audience knew who was back there-three songs each. We couldn’t tell if the players were black or white, young or old, dressed like Muddy Waters or Elwood and Jake. We didn’t know if the players were famous or garage, rich or poor, handsome or ugly. All we could judge was the music-things like phrasing, tone, melody, dynamics, ideas, intensity, and feelings of soul. At the end we simply decided whether or not we felt good or were bored. It is amazing what taking the eyes and prejudgment out of sound will do.
Bobby Rush and I are planning on doing some gigs and tours together. Guess why? To demonstrate to black and white audiences that blues music is a universal healer-born in the black culture as a gift to all human beings, to be shared, loved, and understood. We humans are confined to this little globe we ride together through the vastness of outer space. We all have forms of pain and suffering. It’s mysterious and scary if you put it in perspective. Shouldn’t we give each other all the joy and comfort we can? That’s the story blues musicians tell in their songs so that the rest of us can relate and feel that someone understands and that we are not alone.
That’s the solace I received at a festival in 1998 when I heard Charles Brown sing just before his death, Dark Night is Falling. I hear you brother, and I thank you, it will fall for me too.
Posted by Carl
Saturday April 1st, 2006 @ 9:02 PM
A Face and Folded Chairs
If you gaze at a photograph of my wedding lineup, one face seems out of place, though hauntingly familiar. Upon a tilted head a derby tilts still further, while goatee and twinkle-eye suggest a rapscallion, bemused with moonshine. ‘Tis the ghost of Sonny Boy’, says the looker.
Indeed. The face still sits upon its forlorn perch five years hence. The wedding hall is quiet, and without the revelry-dreary, like a beggared mausoleum for this peculiar solitaire. Folded chairs imply a long time betwixt dust and derriere. Walls erratically bedecked in yellowed posters of pomaded bluesmen, conjure a vision when yesternights froze time in mirth and music.
No one comes here. Few care. For years it watered the good ‘ol boys of an evening under a dim light in the back, but they became old and tired like their stories, their wives, their lives. Spiders, unencumbered now, silently weave their reticulum, and light ventures down the ghostly tendrils through dusty panes of glass. Here on a corner, in a town replete with derelict buildings and the late eve suggestion of spooks and specters, sits the forlorn museum of Sonny Boy Williamson.
My marriage proposal was conditional upon a ceremony in this inelegant hall. I drove my puzzled fiancé 1300 miles in our band bus to stand before a judge with the bust of Sonny Boy held next to the best man. I often wondered what possessed me to do that.
It was as though I was called to this journey. By whom? My soul, I guess—who I am. And who then am I? The sum of my experiences spun into values, genetically guided, and tempered with habits. We are then, I suppose, drawn to intriguing areas within this matrix of values we have become. So why did I seek this forsaken Riverboat town and its abandoned museum as a Mecca?
The answer goes to the heart of the blues culture. It is why festivals are attended and pilgrimages are made. Life is simplified for us in this culture to its basic elements, like a Picasso drawing in his minimalist period. He would draw what appeared to be a triangle with a stick on the bottom and call it a tree.
Our national culture has become complicated and dishonest. We lie to each other in every way a lie can be told: never before offered…once in a lifetime sale…world’s largest drugstore…smoke cigarettes and be a macho cowboy…drink our beer and women will gather around you…take this pill and cure what ails you…wear these clothes…drive this car…take this vacation… Do these things and you’ll be rich and famous, attractive and happy, and better than the other poor dumb bastards. We function around cell phones, computers, video crap, and a thousand marvels of technology. Our vaunted women are decked out in fake eyelashes, botox, cosmetic surgery, implants, tummy tucks, sunless tanning, hair extensions, makeup, lasered hair removal, and more piercings than a cannibal in a Tarzan movie. The only thing real about them is their fur coat for which a few families of minks were electrocuted.
We can’t even talk to a real person on the telephone anymore when these complicated lives get fouled up and cause us extreme stress. That’s why the blues culture seems so rejuvenating. It breaks life down to simple truths and simple rhythms: Today, I lost the best friend I ever had…says the singer in a voice so devoid of contrivance that it brings tears of compassion, because losing a beloved mother or father torque’s your soul until existence becomes simplified to your love and the absence of its object.
I ain’t fattnin’no more frogs for snakes…says Sonny Boy. In essence: I tell the truth and they sell it with lies and give me nothing in return. That pitiable museum stands in my eyes as a metaphor of the impotent blues culture. Rap and rock, pop and hip-hop, grunge and modern blow-dried country, take the money and the glory and hog the TV screen like whores in an upstairs window. The roots music heroes like Sonny Boy, whose history is more colorful and rich than tales from Olympus, languish in the dark background with a museum of one meager bust, a few posters, a volunteered wall painting, and a few pilgrims who have found their way through the maze of jangling, clanging, marketing cacophony seeking simple stories about life from the heart.
Posted by Carl