Blinddog Smokin’ began its fifteenth year in August, 2007, playing their Summer Tour throughout the Midwest. Check the photo section.

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The site will continue to improve and grow, offering more to see, read, and buy, and we will keep it changing over time.

Carl, Chuck, and Roland are still living in California. Gino Matteo and Mo Beeks have joined the band recently and Oli Brown continues to impress the crowds. Thanks for checking out the site, we hope you enjoy everything we have to offer!

He may be sitting next to you acting normal. He may have a business card, pictures of his kids, and a firm handshake. He has learned to adapt to his environment and blends in to a blues audience like a J.C. Penny’s clerk at a banality convention. It takes a seasoned pro to spot him, like in the movie, Ghostbusters.

Now the scariest thing about this guy is that he doesn’t realize he is the monster every band fears. Not a behemoth, Cyclops, type monster with fire-breath and claws, but one of those goofy, little, green, wiggly, types that irritate the hell out of you. They don’t know they are so dreaded because they are immersed to their little green gills in self-deception. They look in the mirror and see one “swell guy.”

Now here comes the part that should send shivers down the backs of some of you reading this column: you may be that guy, or could become him. Not even your wife knows who you really are, in fact she may be a collusionist monster who helps you scare, haunt, and instill heebee jeebees in blues bands. Even worse is that she may be a true believer and not self-deceived like you are. This can lead her to become a zealot for your cause and to be deeply offended by those who lack her vision, namely the poor band she has chosen to haunt.

It begins like this: from the stage I notice a gleam in her eye, slightly brighter than the intensity in the eye of the monster. She is hopeful, he is serious. They are seemingly deep into the music and applaud vigorously at the end of each solo and song. The applause is a faade, needed to ingratiate the monster with the band. In reality the monster cares almost nothing about any band. The monster has a mission.

Alcohol fuels him and gets his sugar high going. He feels brave now. Delusions of grandeur pump through his visionary faculties in a kaleidoscopic phantasmagoria. Mr. Hyde is bulging out of his festival T-shirt and we have very little time to trigger our band’s defenses.

Then it happens. The wife makes the initial approach and does a slight genuflection at the stage as though approaching a high priest or a statue of the crucifix. Her next words are slurred slightly from three or four vodka tonics: “yougizergreat.” Of course we know that she wouldn’t know a great band from a band of pigeons shitting on a gargoyle.

Now we already know that the monster plays a musical instrument or sings. We’re about to find out which: “Hey Carl, you play a great harp.”

So it’s the harp her husband plays. I wonder if he plays a “great harp” or just whatever’s on sale like I buy. Here it comes: “My husband plays a great harp too.”

It’s a pet peeve of mine that people can’t think of any compliment more discriminating than “great.” I think of God as being great, and in the mundane, guys like Alexander the, and Muhammad Ali, and the Wizard of Oz, but not her husband for some reason, maybe it’s the pretzel salt stuck on the corners of his mouth, I don’t know.

Now in their world, at this moment I would say to her: “No kidding! Gosh, do you think he’d come up and sit-in with us? I’m sure the fans would love it and maybe I could learn something from him.” But it’s not their world, it’s just sober reality that stares back at her and says nothing. If it was my world, a giant cookoo clock would strike twelve and a six-foot, two-hundred pound cookoo bird would emerge and start banging her and her husband over the head with a wooden hammer the size of a roto-tiller.

After a moment of silence, she continues: “If you’d like, I could get him to come up and sit-in a few songs with you? He’s played with all the greats, like Albert Collins.”

I fell for that once: the old Albert Collins name dropping ploy. If that guy had really sat in with Albert Collins, the band would have shot him and tossed his body in the dumpster that holds the deep fry grease.

Actually, every band has to learn the hard way. At first they try to be nice and let the guy sit-in. It took me years to harden my heart to the block of lead that it is now. They finally started bribing me. One guy in Nebraska offered to let the band have a peek at his wife’s breasts. They were huge-shade-makers. Third world countries should hire her to suckle their starving masses. This gal was Gaea, Mother Earth personified. Later on when one of our band members was seriously injured in a car accident, the guy sent photos of his wife’s breasts to help in the recovery. I hope to be filleted and eaten by cannibals if he didn’t.
Another guy offered us a hundred dollars per song if we let him sit in. We took two hundred dollars worth of his harp playing. It was so bad the audience started taking up a collection so we would give him his money back and get him off the stage.

We could endure one song from some of these guys, but getting them off the stage is often harder than getting your neighbor’s cat to quit making deposits in your kid’s sandbox. We resorted to taking an early break to get one guy off and he stayed onstage during the entire break fussing with his amp knobs.

Not all of these guys are clever enough to appear incognito. One guy in Denver dresses up in Stevie Ray’s guitar-slinger outfit and walks in with his guitar case in one hand and amp in the other. He even changed his last name to “Blue.” There is no doubt what he wants.

A truck driver from Illinois who shows up all over the country, wears an open shirt with a giant harmonica tattooed on his chest. A sax player from Montana wears a long black trench coat and keeps his saxophone under it.

But those are guys without wives or diehard girlfriends. The ladies serve as emissaries using sweet, sexy, charm to disarm the band. But after being turned down two or three different ways by the band, the wife resorts to pleading and begging. She will actually fold her hands like a supplicant and make tears pop out of her eyes: “Please let him sit in. He’s so good. Everybody will love him. He has a fifty-foot cord so he can leave the stage during Mustang Sally and get down with the audience in the chorus. Puuuleeeeeeese?”

Now, I have learned from having seen this hundreds of times, that the next stage after pleading and begging, is cursing and screaming. What started out with genuflection is now going to be genuine flecks of spit flying from her horrid tongue like pigmy darts. “YOUGIZESUCK!” She says from a mouth hissing and snarling like that of a viper with its tail being stepped on. “My husband is ten times the musicians you are. We’re never coming to see you again and we’re telling all our friends.”

The husband, who realizes he has been found out and turned down, stands up in the audience and gives us the finger. The monster’s friends who have been duped into coming to hear him play, are bewildered at the transformation, but they leave with their friends out of neighborly allegiance, embarrassed and crestfallen.

Despite the ugly scene, we in the band are happy with our position. It is much better than having this guy onstage sweating nervously and stomping all over the vocals and guitar solos while his wife is popping flashbulbs and asking us to get out of the way.

From what primordial soup do these personalities ferment into the volatile human cocktails they have become? I had one guy at the King Biscuit Blues festival in 1997, ask to play with us on the main stage. Now we had given up our day jobs, invested our savings, written original songs, recorded CDs, traveled together in most states and many countries, gotten tight over years of gigs, left wives and girlfriends, sacrificed money and security, slept in the van and on the floors of strangers, and overall adapted to a life of paucity, highways, and mechanical breakdowns, just to get an opportunity like the King Biscuit Blues Festival. This guy thinks we should do all that just so he can walk up on stage stand in the spotlight while we support and applaud him. Doesn’t he think the festival director might want a say in this? How about our fans? The torque and twist on these kinds of egos always frightens me a little. That particular guy, after being turned down, chose to stand in front of the stage during our performance, pointing his finger at me and laughing. This is why I call them little, green, wiggly, monsters.

I think this whole mentality might be the result of Karaoke bars. It has bred a mutated form of musician who craves his moment in the sun like a hallucinogenic drug. In Karoke one never learns how to play with a band. He doesn’t understand the dynamics and arrangements and professional courtesies. He only sees a vision of an audience applauding and cheering.

Don’t be that guy.

If you suspect that maybe you are that guy, like if you play a harmonica in the audience while the band is performing, here is a rule of thumb to help save you from embarrassment and mental warp: if you are truly good at your instrument to the degree that the band would be made better by your presence, they will ask you to sit in. It is that simple.

How does the band know if you are that good? Because you have been in other bands or attend jam nights where the whole object is to sit-in. If they don’t ask you it is most likely because they don’t want you. Now if you can just convince your wife.

What do you do when you love blues festivals and your mate doesn’t? I received an e-mail recently that addressed this issue. I’m going to quote liberally from the letter because this gentleman uses a unique voice that I think you deserve to read unfettered. I will remove only the subject matter that doesn’t apply to the purpose of this column. Unfortunately I have to tame some of the language as he was quite profane, but in a fun and colorful manner. I’ll try to leave the flavor of his prose.

“…anyways, Mr. Carl, I’m an old hippie with a bald head and a gray pony tail. Bad part is I got friggin’ freckles on my old noggin’ and pinkish hide around the freckles so I can’t look cool shaved like the black dudes do. That’s why I leave my ponytail intact, because it distracts people’s attention off my sufferin’ scalp. I usually wear a baseball cap out in public because my wife confessed to me that the lumps on my skull embarrass her when we see our friends. She says my ponytail is out of style, like I suppose a freckled lumpy head would be in style if it didn’t have a pony tail.

“When we were young and she wore flowers in her hair and had morals like she’d been snorting catnip (you know, the late sixties and early seventies), we sort of had the same degree of attractiveness. I had abs and could see my noodle when I looked down-and she had legs like a sprinter. They were hairy legs in those days, but you remember how ‘natural’ was supposed to be sexy back then?

“But nowadays, gravity has set in on my body and I have eye wrinkles like some wizard cursed me with petrifaction. She though, thinks she is Ginger Rogers. She wears four-inch stiletto heels and gossamer dresses, and with shaved legs and panty hose, she cuts quite a figure for an old gal, and she loves to dance.

“The problem we have is that I love the blues and she doesn’t. Going to festivals is my idea of heaven. I’m serious as testicular cancer when I say I’d rather be at a blues festival than in heaven itself. I bring a parasoled lawn chair and a thermos full of scotch and orange juice and plant my butt in much the same manner movers set down a grand piano. You get the idea that I ain’t goin’ nowhere.

“My Myrna can’t sit still for a damned second. She jumps around like she has fleas. Gadabouts, we used to call the likes of her. She thinks blues is boring and says you can’t dance to it. She likes that damned synthesizer crap with drum machines and disco beats.

“Anyway, we came to a compromise years back, that if she came to my blues festivals, I’d go to her Mary Kay conventions. Yeah, you heard me. She went from hairy armpits to wearing makeup like every day was Halloween. I went to one convention in some suburb of Minneapolis and they wouldn’t let me in the meetings, so I sat in the motel and watched TV with a bag of Fritos, and hated life. My wife learned that none of the gals brought their husbands and had way more fun without them, so we changed the agreement. She would come to the blues festivals if I promised to stay home during the Mary Kay conventions.

“I thought that was the best deal I ever heard of until she kept her promise and never missed a blues festival. She talks on her cell phone all through the performances and keeps giving me the phone so Peewee or Sheila can talk to their grandpa. Hell, I can’t even understand them when there isn’t a band playing. She even called a radio talk show shrink one year and the host insisted I come to the phone to “give account of myself.” I told the son-of-bitch to kiss-off, I was listening to James “friggin’” Cotton.

“We’ve been attending blues festivals for the last eighteen years together and she can’t remember the name of one blues star. She told her friend that we saw Jerry Garcia (she thinks she’s a big Grateful Dead fan). When I pointed out that Jerry was dead, she proved me wrong by going to the program and showing me a photo of Bob Margolin. That’s as close as she gets.

“Somehow, though, she can remember the names of fans that we see every year. ‘You remember Felina and Ralph, don’t you? They’re the ones with the Basset hound named ‘Horrible Herb’, you know the one with the splayed paws?’ How can she not remember Luther Allison and can remember Horrible Herb and his friggin’ paws? And we call this a marriage?

“In other aspects it is a good marriage. I mean how can I complain, when a woman looking something within the realm of Ginger Rogers still wants to jump these old bones? I look more like Fred Mertz than Fred Astaire. I guess I could get by without complaining if she just wouldn’t make me dance.

“She says ‘I didn’t drive in that blankity-blank camper truck of yours with no air-conditioning, all the way to Arkansas, just so you won’t dance with me.’

“Well, me dancing is just plain stupid. I have swollen ankles and a sour stomach. I wear coveralls over Red Wing work boots, for crying-out-loud. They feel good on my bunions. Hell, I have a railing on our bathtub. In fourth grade the music teacher couldn’t find anything I could do for the school program, so she made me be a cricket with some other pathetic nerds. All we had to do was snap our fingers. To this day I have never figured out how. So they made me be a tree and I had to wear a green lampshade on my head with leaves stuck to it.

“My wife, now, she’s another story. She’s one of those leaping creatures. I stand there like the mob has encased me to the ankles in cement, about to be thrown in Lake Michigan. She leaps around me like she took dance lessons from Spiderman. The only things lower than my spirits when this occurs are the corners of my mouth.

“Blues is not the kind of music one leaps to. Myrna doesn’t leap like she used to anyway. She thinks she does, but her breasts have become ponderous and much too heavy to elevate with any kind of grace. She still has the small waist and long athletic legs, but her feet seem to have grown long, or her shoes are too big or something. Anyway, her leaping resembles lunging in my husbandly opinion. But how do you tell that to Ginger Rogers?

“So there we are, listening to the Thrill is Gone, me doing a little hemoroidal bounce in my cement shoes, and my wife cavorting all over the room like an old ballerina occasionally stopping by my post to smile brightly and say “wheeeeee…” Somehow it just doesn’t strike me as bluesy…”

So what do we do when our mate isn’t into the blues festival? I have these suggested guidelines:
1) If your mate drinks, keep him or her drunk. You then have a good chance that the music will sound great to them, and the blues fans will turn into their “best friends”, or they will pass out.
2) If your mate doesn’t drink, then you be the one to stay drunk. That way the music will sound good, even if it isn’t, and you won’t be aware that there is bitching going on.
3) In the event that neither of you drink, then you must divide the strategy into male and female categories.
A) For the male who doesn’t like the blues, bring along a five inch TV with a sports schedule. Dogs, cats, and male humans all get mesmorized by balls being tossed or kicked around. Or:
B) give him lots of physical loving and tell him it is the blues that is turning you on. The only other solution for a man is:
C) Feed him. A smiling man on the verge of belching is always more amenable to your point of view.
4) For the female who doesn’t like the blues, you, the husband, can do either the obvious, or the subtle:
A) Get a new credit card you dub the “blues card” and set her loose in the shopping district. Or:
B) Don’t make advances toward her, and tell her it’s because the blues keep you revved and satisfied, kind of like a hot sports car. She’ll then be motivated to keep you listening to the blues, so you’ll leave her alone.
For you couples who share a love of blues festivals. Count your blessings.