Adam Gussow – Blues Harmonica, Books & The Meaning of It All

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Before rock and roll, before pop, before everything,
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there was the blues, the music of struggle, triumph,
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and truth. Welcome to Talking Blues, where we
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honor the legends and tell the stories that shape
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modern music. Here's your host, Matt Cooper.
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Our guest today is Adam Gusso. He's a blues harmonica
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player with decades under his belt and a professor
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of English and Southern Studies at the University
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of Mississippi, where he's been teaching the
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blues music, culture and literature for close
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to 15 years now. In terms of blues street cred.
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Adam spent 25 years playing with Sterling, Mr.
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Satan McGee. Some of you might remember from
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the Sidewalks of Harlem, tearing it up in the
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80s and early 90s on the festival stages. That
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kind of partnership leaves a mark. When Adam
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talks about the blues, he's not quoting, he's
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remembering. Adam's written three award -winning
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books on the blues. His latest, My Family and
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I, is what I'm listening to right now on Audible.
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It's raw. It's personal. It's honest in a way
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that only someone who's walked through the fire
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can really share with you. Now, here's the big
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picture, guys. If you're old enough to remember
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Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream of a beloved
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community where the content of their character
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judges people, not the color of their skin. Adam
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has been trying to live that out on stage and
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off for 40 plus years now. We're going to talk
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about that, about his latest book, and about
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the long, hard, beautiful road of a blues man.
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Please welcome Adam Gussow. Thank you, Matt.
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It's great to be here. Really great to be here
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on Talking Blues. Great to have you here. And
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I was you were talking a little bit about over
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email about the latest book. And I was sharing
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with you how it kind of upset me and illuminated
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my thinking all at once. I don't want to spoil
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it for anybody. But you're also saying to me
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during the email that some of your friends said,
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you know, Adam, maybe he shouldn't put this out.
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But you did give me some insight into how you
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finally came to say, OK, it's time to put this
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on paper. Yeah, well, and of course, I should
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I'm sure you'll do something like this, but I
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should I should share the cover photo, which
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is me and my my wife now of 21 years and our
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son. At that point, he was about two months old
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named Sean. So the folks who said you shouldn't
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do this, that was not about the book per se,
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but it was about a sort of long prologue, which
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is something I wrote back in 2021. I'm trying
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to think about the best way of framing this.
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So you might assume that as somebody interracially
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married and living in Mississippi, raising the
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son that my wife and I have had, call him biracial,
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call him just an American kid, Mississippi boy.
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a black boy from Mississippi like Richard Wright.
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I mean, all those different names, you might
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assume then that I'm hard left and that I'm actually
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hard woke. And the truth is I'm an old school
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liberal. And you framed it when you talked about
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beloved or beloved community, because that's
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what my book is about. I'm an old school liberal
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who at a certain point in recent American history,
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and I know that you Canadians have had their
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own challenges with this. felt that the left
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liberal coalition that I was a part of, I felt
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that it had suddenly drifted or swerved hard
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left. In a way, I come from a family that was
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progressive. My father was a delegate for George
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McGovern. He worked for Bobby Kennedy in Oregon
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in 1968. We were all heartbroken when... King
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and then Kennedy were assassinated. So I come
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from that kind of a family, a family that is
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naturally aligned with, I'd say, broadly progressive
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values. And obviously, I want a world where my
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wife and my son and I can all live and pursue
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our happiness, the sort of Declaration of Independence
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ideal. And what I found at a certain point was
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that the American left had... sort of gone in
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the opposite direction. And instead of saying,
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we're going to try to get to a place that's egalitarian,
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that is, what's the word, where we're just all
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in a fraternity, in a sort of broadly based multiracial
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coalition. What they did was basically say, white
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folks are there, black folks are there. We're
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going to capitalize B, capitalize W. If you ever
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thought there was a chance of getting it together
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in a transracial way, which had been my life
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with Mr. Satan. It had been my life in this marriage,
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a transracial love and alliance and creative
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partnership. What I found was the left was saying,
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basically, no, we're going to sort you guys into
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that category on the basis of your immutable
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characteristic, which is to say, we think of
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you as white, even though I think of myself as
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a half Lithuanian, Russian, Jewish, half Scotch,
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Irish, Dutch, mutt, right? You're white. You're
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black with a capital B. Your son, well, we're
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not sure which room we're going to send him to
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when we have the reeducation thing, which is
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how we're going to transform American culture
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by hyper racializing everybody. And what I wanted
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to do was have that moment where the record drags
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across the groove, that kind of. That's how my
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book begins. That's the prologue with that, which,
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I mean, we can talk about this and unpack it,
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but that's where I'm coming from is as an old
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school liberal who truly believes in creating
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a multiracial world. I'm living it. I've been
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living it for a long time and who felt that the
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left had left me behind. But of course, we live
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in a very different moment right now. We have
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a very different president than I imagined we
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might have when we were about to publish the
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book. So let's have the conversation. Matt, I
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really would like to do that. But that's sort
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of that's the initial dump. That's where my book
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is coming from. And there's a lot else in it.
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But that's where it starts with what doesn't
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work, what doesn't work. You can pick up your
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copy on Amazon. Like I say, I've got it on Audible.
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And, Adam, I was going through some of your papers
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as well as you share with your students, and
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I came across a concept that I don't know anybody
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else that I can ask this question of and get
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the kind of answer that I'm looking for for our
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listeners. All right. I came across this quote,
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and it's the concept that even amongst black
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intellectual circles, there's a range of opinions
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about what the blues are and where they came
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from. And I'm wondering if you can give us some
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insights in terms of the black nationalist perspective
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versus the blues universalist perspective on
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the blues. Sure. So. Actually, what we're talking
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about is kind of the last book that I published
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before my family and I, which was called Who's
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Blues? I said, in a sense, there's two ideologies
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that in the current moment seem to govern the
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way that people talk about blues when they argue
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about blues, as opposed to when they just sip
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a little scotch or bourbon and listen to blues
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and dance to blues. And the two ideologies are
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what I call blues universalism and black bluesism.
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So blues universalism would be caricatured with
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the phrase, no white, no black, just the blues.
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And I talk about the problematics of that in
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that book. What's the problematics? Well, if
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you say no white, no black, I understand you're
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trying to get to that transracial world. But
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some people hear no black, especially in Mississippi,
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where - you know, all, many of the greatest,
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uh, blues performers of all time who happened
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to almost all of them, except for Charlie muscle
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white, maybe happened to be black. Um, and they
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hear no black, like you're trying to erase blackness
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from the blues and that doesn't work. So it's,
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it's sort of misheard by people on the other
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side. And I, I, um, Corey, Corey, uh, Corey Harris.
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Yeah, yeah. Why am I blocking on his name? Because
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I'm thinking about this other book. So it's just
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my 67 -year -old brain. The author of Down Home,
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Sophisticate, wonderful player. But he was like,
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the moment white folks come anywhere near the
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blues, there's a problem. They're always trying
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to rip us off. They can't play it. They can't
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sing it. They're trying to make money off it.
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They're making it into a joke like the Blues
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Brothers. And so blues is black music with a
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capital B. What's the problem with that? And
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I sort of talk in Who's Blues about the problematics
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of that, which is if you think that white folks
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got into the blues in the 60s and like for the
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first time, you're missing all kinds of interesting
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stories. The fact that in fact, white performers
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were recorded, they recorded blues in the teens
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before black performers got to be recorded. The
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fact that there were white and black songwriting,
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blue songwriting teams early on. And of course,
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in the 50s, yakety yak, don't talk back. You
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know, you had Lieber and Stoller. You're sort
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of missing a whole part of the conversation.
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So again, you're missing the fact that Buddy
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Guy is covering cream, right? Covering sunshine
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of your love. you miss the fact, so white song,
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white blue songwriters are a big deal. You're
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missing the fact that there are some white people
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who make a joke out of blues, but on the other
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hand, there's some like Bonnie Raitt who never
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did. And in fact, spent her career trying to
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lift up people she learned from the, the furry
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Lewis's and, and Sippy Wallace's of the world.
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So that it would be fair to say that what I'm
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trying to do in that book was I was trying to
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kind of complicate the story about the blues.
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I don't know if that answers your question, but
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maybe it gets an answer going. You'll tell me.
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Well, certainly starts the conversation, sir.
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And I want to touch also on your your latest
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book, because that's had quite an impact on me.
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And I like to think that I am a bit of an armchair
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musicologist slash historian. Nothing official,
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of course. But, you know, I'm fascinated by black
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history and I don't want to go down a rabbit
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hole, although I live down a rabbit hole. The
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book really freaked me out, Adam. Let's talk
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about... Well, it freaked me out. I don't know
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how many spoilers I want to give. Give a few.
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Okay, how about trading black genitals in fruit
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jars? That kind of blew me off this chair there.
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I can't even fathom that kind of thinking. I
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don't know if you want to talk anymore about
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that. Go ahead. Yeah. So that actually, that
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particular image, it was in the framework of,
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I was talking about my education as a guy who,
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you know, college and a MA degree, and then I
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was a street musician in Harlem. And then I went
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back to graduate school and sort of remanufactured
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myself into a blues scholar. And one of the things
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that happened early on in my education, I was
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a PhD candidate at... Princeton in 94, 95, in
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one of my very first seminars, which was about
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the Harlem Renaissance, I became aware of the
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whole history of lynching in America, which is
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something that should have been a part of my
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history, right? It shouldn't have had to wait
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until I was 10 years out of undergraduate before
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I heard about this. But it was a period of time,
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the mid to late 90s, when more people were writing
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about this. And what I got interested in, interested
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is the wrong word, I became kind of obsessed
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with, transfixed with, was the idea that there
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had been this period in American history, starting
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in the 1890s, with Mississippi, Texas, and Georgia
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being three of the worst places, where you not
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only had... lynching per se, like stringing somebody
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up, usually a black man for various reasons,
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often on a pretext. The sort of rape, raping
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a white woman charge was usually a pretext, not
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always. Killing a sheriff, sometimes they did
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kill white sheriffs, but there were lots of getting
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too uppity, right? But not only did that happen.
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But that it happened before large crowds. It
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happened before crowds of 10 ,000 people. White
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people would come out and take excursion trains
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and have a picnic. And they would watch a guy
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be tortured for hours in some cases. They thought
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that was appropriate for their kids. So this
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chapter of American history, terribly, it's a
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grievous chapter. To the extent that we had a
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period of wokeness in America, I'm all in favor
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of the fact that we need to know that this history
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is out there. And it sounds like this history
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may have been something you hadn't seen before.
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It's something that I dealt with, again, for
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a period of time. And I ended up trying to connect
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the emergence of what was called spectacle lynching.
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With the emergence of the blues. Now, I had a
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lot of blues fans, aficionados, when I would
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share some ideas about this online in those early
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discussion rooms. There were people who would
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say, oh, you're crazy. You're crazy. And then
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there were two, what's the word, like missing
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links. It's a bad phrase, but there were two
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things that convinced me that I was on the right
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track. One of them was B .B. King. who in 1968,
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when he was really starting to ride really high,
00:13:54.019 --> 00:13:57.299
he had crossed over in 68. There was a quote
00:13:57.299 --> 00:13:59.100
that I found from B .B. King in an interview.
00:13:59.179 --> 00:14:00.799
And he said, you know, back where I come from
00:14:00.799 --> 00:14:03.299
in Mississippi, my people have been killed so
00:14:03.299 --> 00:14:06.379
many ways, so many ways. He said that, you know,
00:14:06.460 --> 00:14:09.360
it really, it makes you afraid. He said, and
00:14:09.360 --> 00:14:11.139
then you'll think about that. And he was talking
00:14:11.139 --> 00:14:14.220
about lynching. You'll think about that in the
00:14:14.220 --> 00:14:17.110
back of your mind. And he said, it'll really
00:14:17.110 --> 00:14:19.870
get to you. And he said, that's where my blues
00:14:19.870 --> 00:14:22.509
comes from. He goes, the next most important
00:14:22.509 --> 00:14:26.529
thing is your woman. There's a whole lot of blues
00:14:26.529 --> 00:14:30.190
fans. You and I both, in my case, it was failed
00:14:30.190 --> 00:14:32.509
love that sort of plunged me into the blues.
00:14:32.570 --> 00:14:34.710
So it's easy for most of us to say, yeah, if
00:14:34.710 --> 00:14:37.950
you have a terrible breakup, you love that woman.
00:14:38.009 --> 00:14:39.769
She's with somebody else. I mean, that's the
00:14:39.769 --> 00:14:42.779
foundation of the blues. B .B. King was saying,
00:14:42.820 --> 00:14:44.620
well, I sing about that stuff. I don't really
00:14:44.620 --> 00:14:46.960
sing about the lynching, except in one case of
00:14:46.960 --> 00:14:51.620
why I sing the blues. He did that one song, which
00:14:51.620 --> 00:14:54.679
sort of hints at a lot of black collective troubles,
00:14:54.820 --> 00:14:57.159
slavery and everything else. But I think that.
00:14:57.470 --> 00:14:59.190
That convinced me there was something there.
00:14:59.309 --> 00:15:01.570
And I went into it and researched it deeply.
00:15:01.669 --> 00:15:03.470
And that became my first, it became my dissertation.
00:15:03.529 --> 00:15:06.269
It became my first book, which was called Seems
00:15:06.269 --> 00:15:09.029
Like Murder Here, Southern Violence and the Blues
00:15:09.029 --> 00:15:12.470
Tradition. So I'm glad that this book put some
00:15:12.470 --> 00:15:15.350
of that in your corner. Maybe, I mean, I can,
00:15:15.470 --> 00:15:17.490
there are other books that one might read, but.
00:15:17.960 --> 00:15:19.759
Going back to my first seems like murder here
00:15:19.759 --> 00:15:22.539
would be a good one. Yeah, it sounds like it.
00:15:22.600 --> 00:15:26.820
And revisionist history has been painted over
00:15:26.820 --> 00:15:30.220
the reality to the extent where people are blind
00:15:30.220 --> 00:15:35.000
to it. And, you know, I'm grateful to you for
00:15:35.000 --> 00:15:36.860
bringing this kind of thing out because people
00:15:36.860 --> 00:15:40.929
need to know. And what brings to mind immediately
00:15:40.929 --> 00:15:43.649
is a conversation I had with the great Bob Margolin,
00:15:43.809 --> 00:15:46.169
Muddy Waters, right hand guitar player, just
00:15:46.169 --> 00:15:48.950
a few days ago, had Bob on the show. Really?
00:15:49.009 --> 00:15:51.570
And Bob was talking, reminiscing about some of
00:15:51.570 --> 00:15:53.450
the times he had with Muddy and how Muddy would
00:15:53.450 --> 00:15:55.909
be traveling the Chitlin circuit back south when
00:15:55.909 --> 00:15:58.789
he was touring. And it was common knowledge that,
00:15:58.830 --> 00:16:01.350
you know, when you were on that circuit, when
00:16:01.350 --> 00:16:03.250
you were stopping in a town, you'd want to stop
00:16:03.250 --> 00:16:07.120
where other black folks were. Safety in numbers.
00:16:07.299 --> 00:16:10.039
And Muddy would recall a quick story, Bob tells
00:16:10.039 --> 00:16:12.360
it better than I do, where Muddy would walk up
00:16:12.360 --> 00:16:16.539
to a gentleman and said, sir, where do all the
00:16:16.539 --> 00:16:19.740
black folks hang out? And the gentleman said,
00:16:19.940 --> 00:16:27.480
right under that tree. There's a story that Johnny
00:16:27.480 --> 00:16:33.929
Shines tells that's in my book. where he said
00:16:33.929 --> 00:16:36.029
he was trying to he was saying, you know, I didn't
00:16:36.029 --> 00:16:39.049
want to I didn't want to be in Mississippi. I
00:16:39.049 --> 00:16:41.350
met a woman when I came down from Memphis to
00:16:41.350 --> 00:16:42.809
into Mississippi. And she goes, I don't want
00:16:42.809 --> 00:16:44.629
you hanging around my place. And he said, thank
00:16:44.629 --> 00:16:48.210
you, ma 'am. Thank you, ma 'am. And, you know,
00:16:48.210 --> 00:16:50.570
I don't want you hanging out around my place.
00:16:50.629 --> 00:16:52.029
Right. But I don't want you hanging around my
00:16:52.029 --> 00:16:53.629
place. It's like, oh, thank you, ma 'am. Thank
00:16:53.629 --> 00:16:55.309
you. It's a white lady who doesn't want me to
00:16:55.309 --> 00:16:58.299
be lynched. So. So one of the things that blues
00:16:58.299 --> 00:17:00.919
people did, it's important, this is deep in the
00:17:00.919 --> 00:17:04.220
blues, which is they use humor against that horrible
00:17:04.220 --> 00:17:07.160
thing. Right. And that's something that I've
00:17:07.160 --> 00:17:09.400
been really interested in is, you know, it's
00:17:09.400 --> 00:17:14.799
not just pure abjection. It's not just. we're
00:17:14.799 --> 00:17:17.680
helpless here. It's, we got to find strategies
00:17:17.680 --> 00:17:19.819
for survival. And I do think that a lot of the
00:17:19.819 --> 00:17:22.960
blues traces back to those strategies for survival,
00:17:23.079 --> 00:17:25.420
including my own long -term partner, Mr. Satan,
00:17:25.480 --> 00:17:29.000
Sterling McGee, who used to, when I would complain
00:17:29.000 --> 00:17:31.980
about a, like a girlfriend that didn't work out
00:17:31.980 --> 00:17:35.140
and he'd say, hell, I've had so many wives die
00:17:35.140 --> 00:17:37.400
on me. I was thinking of opening a funeral parlor.
00:17:38.200 --> 00:17:40.539
And then he'd sort of have this harsh laugh.
00:17:40.700 --> 00:17:43.039
And it was that harsh laugh that taught me something.
00:17:43.789 --> 00:17:45.990
Right. It's because I knew, look, this is a man
00:17:45.990 --> 00:17:48.549
who had been so broken up. People told me in
00:17:48.549 --> 00:17:50.349
Harlem when I was hanging out, they go, well,
00:17:50.390 --> 00:17:52.569
you know, man, he had a wife. She was really
00:17:52.569 --> 00:17:54.910
beautiful. They'd make their hands like she was
00:17:54.910 --> 00:17:59.410
curvy. And she died of cancer and he was there
00:17:59.410 --> 00:18:01.170
and then he went crazy. And that's when he changed
00:18:01.170 --> 00:18:04.329
his name from Sterling McGee to Satan. So I knew
00:18:04.329 --> 00:18:06.809
the backstory that he'd really cared about this
00:18:06.809 --> 00:18:09.250
woman named Betty. I saw a photo of her much
00:18:09.250 --> 00:18:13.640
later, but I didn't. But I thought instead of
00:18:13.640 --> 00:18:16.500
complaining about that, he's laughing it off.
00:18:16.539 --> 00:18:19.180
He's slapping it away. That's the blues way.
00:18:19.339 --> 00:18:21.859
And I do think that kind of part of what I call
00:18:21.859 --> 00:18:24.200
the blues ethos when I teach the blues, you know,
00:18:24.220 --> 00:18:29.440
the philosophy of life. Yeah. And if you want
00:18:29.440 --> 00:18:32.559
to learn more about the blues, you do well to
00:18:32.559 --> 00:18:36.339
study Adam's work. Get over to Amazon or wherever
00:18:36.339 --> 00:18:39.940
it is that you buy great literature. We've got
00:18:39.940 --> 00:18:43.940
a lot of blues harp discussion coming up, but
00:18:43.940 --> 00:18:46.160
I want to take you back a little bit, folks,
00:18:46.240 --> 00:18:50.759
to downstate New York, late 50s when Adam came
00:18:50.759 --> 00:18:54.299
across the planet. And your dad, as you mentioned,
00:18:54.420 --> 00:18:58.279
Alan Gusso, great painter. And I understand Killer
00:18:58.279 --> 00:19:02.279
Record Collection that he used to sort of steer
00:19:02.279 --> 00:19:04.440
you towards when you'd be sort of bugging him
00:19:04.440 --> 00:19:07.900
in his studio. Kind of tuned to be hearing Bob
00:19:07.900 --> 00:19:12.400
Dylan, jazz. I understand Sgt. Pepper was one
00:19:12.400 --> 00:19:16.680
of the first copies hit your street in 67. Tell
00:19:16.680 --> 00:19:18.940
us about some of those tunes and the influences
00:19:18.940 --> 00:19:24.839
there. You know, so my dad was a wonderful artist,
00:19:24.940 --> 00:19:26.519
and I've been going through his work actually
00:19:26.519 --> 00:19:28.599
in the process of clearing out my late mother's
00:19:28.599 --> 00:19:32.099
house. It's in Piermont now, which is the county
00:19:32.099 --> 00:19:34.539
just north of New York, west of the Hudson. That's
00:19:34.539 --> 00:19:36.400
where I'm from. I'm from Congers, a little town.
00:19:36.960 --> 00:19:40.720
My dad, he was kind of a jazz record collector,
00:19:40.819 --> 00:19:43.640
but he had incredibly wide taste. So Charles
00:19:43.640 --> 00:19:45.519
Ives, I've been going through his records too,
00:19:45.599 --> 00:19:48.700
all this classical stuff. Ravi Shankar, again,
00:19:48.799 --> 00:19:51.059
the Beatles, Bob Dylan, the freewheeling Bob
00:19:51.059 --> 00:19:53.839
Dylan, which is one of the records that I remember
00:19:53.839 --> 00:19:56.700
distinctly. He just played the hell out of that
00:19:56.700 --> 00:19:59.059
thing. And in fact, that's where I first heard
00:19:59.059 --> 00:20:02.099
the song Oxford Town, Oxford Town, all because
00:20:02.099 --> 00:20:05.059
color of skin is brown, right? I mean, like I
00:20:05.059 --> 00:20:07.279
had never. Didn't know what Oxford town meant.
00:20:07.359 --> 00:20:10.839
It meant 1962, James Meredith, the big riot that
00:20:10.839 --> 00:20:12.900
was at the university where I spent 23 years,
00:20:12.980 --> 00:20:15.759
right? And my family, my son is going to Oxford.
00:20:15.880 --> 00:20:17.079
He's going to the University of Mississippi.
00:20:17.759 --> 00:20:19.240
That's about the University of Mississippi. Well,
00:20:19.259 --> 00:20:21.079
all of that history is encoded in the records.
00:20:21.240 --> 00:20:24.720
But what I heard was this thing called a harmonica.
00:20:24.880 --> 00:20:27.859
And then I heard a lot of blues of the sort of
00:20:27.859 --> 00:20:31.400
Count Basie, Boogie Woogie, James P. Johnson,
00:20:31.700 --> 00:20:34.160
that sort of old stride piano, Boogie Woogie
00:20:34.160 --> 00:20:36.660
piano from the old Southern juke joints. There
00:20:36.660 --> 00:20:40.880
was a lot of that. Bessie Smith, Fletcher Henderson,
00:20:41.180 --> 00:20:43.019
a lot of Fletcher Henderson. That was the kind
00:20:43.019 --> 00:20:45.960
of jazz stuff my dad collected. I didn't really
00:20:45.960 --> 00:20:50.599
get any... sense of sort of racial difference
00:20:50.599 --> 00:20:53.519
in the music. Although every now and then he'd
00:20:53.519 --> 00:20:57.640
talk about myth mole, myth mole. And he'd say,
00:20:57.700 --> 00:21:00.339
that's kind of corny. So to the extent that there
00:21:00.339 --> 00:21:03.500
was, but Benny Goodman, he loved, right? So it's
00:21:03.500 --> 00:21:05.380
not like all white musicians who played this
00:21:05.380 --> 00:21:08.000
music were corny, but I did get some sense that
00:21:08.000 --> 00:21:12.470
there was that category of stuff. At one point,
00:21:12.490 --> 00:21:16.809
I took about 10 of my dad's jazz 78s. It's a
00:21:16.809 --> 00:21:20.710
big stack. And he had some country, so he listened
00:21:20.710 --> 00:21:23.950
a lot to Jimmy Rogers, the singing brakeman from
00:21:23.950 --> 00:21:26.730
Meridian, Mississippi, who did sort of blues
00:21:26.730 --> 00:21:29.309
that was country music in a sense, early country.
00:21:29.450 --> 00:21:31.569
And Doc Watson, my dad had great taste. He had
00:21:31.569 --> 00:21:34.359
a lot of Doc Watson. And I took a stack of 10
00:21:34.359 --> 00:21:36.099
records and I brought them downstairs. I had
00:21:36.099 --> 00:21:38.140
an old turntable. We were really into like old
00:21:38.140 --> 00:21:40.619
technology in my house. He had a wire recorder,
00:21:40.880 --> 00:21:43.859
the prelude to the tape recorder, which is a
00:21:43.859 --> 00:21:46.380
very strange thing. We would record ourselves
00:21:46.380 --> 00:21:48.880
on it. I took it down and I played that stack
00:21:48.880 --> 00:21:52.259
of records through, turn it over, play all 10
00:21:52.259 --> 00:21:55.140
again, do it again. It was like 10 records at
00:21:55.140 --> 00:21:56.900
a time. It's like, what's that? Half an hour
00:21:56.900 --> 00:22:01.059
of music. Just played it forever. And that, I
00:22:01.059 --> 00:22:05.319
think, put that boogie woogie beat in me. Now,
00:22:05.339 --> 00:22:07.160
I grew up in a non -religious family, so there
00:22:07.160 --> 00:22:08.960
was never any sense that this is the devil's
00:22:08.960 --> 00:22:10.779
music. It was just music. It was just what was
00:22:10.779 --> 00:22:15.720
there, along with some 78s, some 33, some Louis
00:22:15.720 --> 00:22:19.339
Armstrong records and that kind of stuff. And
00:22:19.339 --> 00:22:23.240
that's where it all started. My background as
00:22:23.240 --> 00:22:25.400
a musician was I played a little bit of piano.
00:22:25.440 --> 00:22:29.269
My mom We had an old upright piano. She put tacks
00:22:29.269 --> 00:22:31.109
on the keys to make it sound like a harpsichord
00:22:31.109 --> 00:22:33.910
and she would play Bach sometimes. I play Turkey
00:22:33.910 --> 00:22:36.430
in the Straw, which now I recognize was a blackface
00:22:36.430 --> 00:22:40.150
minstrel song from back in the day. But that's
00:22:40.150 --> 00:22:42.970
where I learned a little counterpoint. But it
00:22:42.970 --> 00:22:46.009
all faded away. The flutophone faded away and
00:22:46.009 --> 00:22:48.829
that was it. I had no musical instrument really
00:22:48.829 --> 00:22:51.880
until, and we're going to get into the... the
00:22:51.880 --> 00:22:55.599
harmonica thing until the fall of 1974. When
00:22:55.599 --> 00:22:58.279
I was a senior, I was a skipped ahead. So I was
00:22:58.279 --> 00:23:01.619
a smart ass young kind of senior. When I said
00:23:01.619 --> 00:23:04.279
everybody in school loves this, the Jay Giles
00:23:04.279 --> 00:23:06.980
band, they love that album called Jay Giles band
00:23:06.980 --> 00:23:09.819
live full house. They love the song called whammer
00:23:09.819 --> 00:23:18.599
jammer. And I said, I didn't know how to do that,
00:23:18.619 --> 00:23:22.130
but I said, I am going to use my brains and I'm
00:23:22.130 --> 00:23:25.569
going to up my status in this class. I was thought
00:23:25.569 --> 00:23:30.089
of as the smart, clueless guy, right? Would not
00:23:30.089 --> 00:23:31.930
know that kind of music, but I had developed
00:23:31.930 --> 00:23:34.349
a secret love for this music. So I went to a
00:23:34.349 --> 00:23:38.329
local mall, the Nanuet Mall in Nanuet, New York.
00:23:38.470 --> 00:23:42.089
And back then in 74, what could you get? I got
00:23:42.089 --> 00:23:45.690
an Arnie Blackie Schachner how to play harmonica.
00:23:45.690 --> 00:23:50.490
Then I got... The album, the Tony Little Sun
00:23:50.490 --> 00:23:53.349
Glover blues harp, which had a sort of wild looking
00:23:53.349 --> 00:23:55.210
black eye on the cover. It might've had a headband
00:23:55.210 --> 00:23:57.769
or it was the guy with glasses who, you know,
00:23:57.769 --> 00:24:00.069
it was really Reverend Dan Smith sunglasses.
00:24:00.630 --> 00:24:03.630
But it was, and that was like, wow, that voice,
00:24:03.670 --> 00:24:06.349
right? The voice that he had. And I got a couple
00:24:06.349 --> 00:24:08.549
of harmonicas. I got at least a C, maybe a C
00:24:08.549 --> 00:24:10.769
and an A. I knew, I realized I needed the A because
00:24:10.769 --> 00:24:13.329
that's what Whammer Jammer was on. And I began
00:24:13.329 --> 00:24:16.809
to try to teach myself. And that's how it started.
00:24:16.970 --> 00:24:19.210
It was just me and the records. And then eventually
00:24:19.210 --> 00:24:22.529
bit by bit, I managed to kind of glom on to...
00:24:23.279 --> 00:24:25.920
to records that people had, like a drama teacher
00:24:25.920 --> 00:24:29.420
gave me Mississippi Mandolin, Johnny Young with
00:24:29.420 --> 00:24:32.039
Paul Osher on harp. So it's interesting that
00:24:32.039 --> 00:24:35.759
who I came to know, Paul Osher, who was the first
00:24:35.759 --> 00:24:37.640
white guy to play with Muddy Waters. I had no
00:24:37.640 --> 00:24:40.319
idea. He's just on this Johnny Young album and
00:24:40.319 --> 00:24:44.059
his stuff was simple. So I could train fair out
00:24:44.059 --> 00:24:46.180
of town and I would just jam along with it. And
00:24:46.180 --> 00:24:48.980
that's sort of how it worked. And try to make
00:24:48.980 --> 00:24:51.960
sense of Tony Glover, whose tabs didn't really...
00:24:52.220 --> 00:24:54.599
quite work for me, but the voice that he had.
00:24:55.200 --> 00:24:58.500
And I have to say that the, the ear that he had
00:24:58.500 --> 00:25:01.500
for the good music for like Sonny Boy Williamson,
00:25:01.500 --> 00:25:04.779
meaning Rice Miller and Jimmy Reed, he mentioned
00:25:04.779 --> 00:25:07.319
James Cotton. There were a few other key people,
00:25:07.420 --> 00:25:10.299
Sonny Terry, right? So that's, it also, and so
00:25:10.299 --> 00:25:11.940
then I'm going looking for the albums that he's
00:25:11.940 --> 00:25:13.440
talking about or the artists he's talking about.
00:25:13.480 --> 00:25:16.359
So I went and got Sonny Terry. And I, yes, I
00:25:16.359 --> 00:25:18.720
will play a little bit of the first Sonny Terry
00:25:18.720 --> 00:25:20.859
song I ever learned how to play if you want.
00:25:21.500 --> 00:25:26.299
But that's how it started. So it's Magic Dick's
00:25:26.299 --> 00:25:29.059
harp that kind of catches you right off the bat
00:25:29.059 --> 00:25:32.740
with Whammy Jam. Okay. And then safe to say that
00:25:32.740 --> 00:25:35.640
you're kind of focusing on the Three Kings at
00:25:35.640 --> 00:25:38.180
the same time. Yeah, Albert, Bebe, and Freddie?
00:25:39.279 --> 00:25:41.539
I was playing guitar at the same time. So yeah,
00:25:41.619 --> 00:25:43.700
I was going and learning how to play, trying
00:25:43.700 --> 00:25:45.799
to teach myself how to play blues guitar from
00:25:45.799 --> 00:25:49.619
the albums, basically. Yeah. So here's the thing.
00:25:49.720 --> 00:25:53.339
The thing that fascinated me was the blue note,
00:25:53.500 --> 00:25:56.740
you know, that blues tonality. Now I've learned
00:25:56.740 --> 00:25:59.259
through the years, I mean, I'll talk about this
00:25:59.259 --> 00:26:02.019
in my class. You can say, well, it's sort of...
00:26:02.599 --> 00:26:05.539
It's not major, it's not minor. It's actually,
00:26:05.579 --> 00:26:08.579
if you think about what I call the blue third,
00:26:08.640 --> 00:26:11.460
and I'm going to get to the difference between
00:26:11.460 --> 00:26:14.279
guitar playing and harmonica playing, but basically
00:26:14.279 --> 00:26:17.140
guitar players and harmonica players each found
00:26:17.140 --> 00:26:20.519
their own way of finding that note that was halfway
00:26:20.519 --> 00:26:23.000
in between major and minor. So if I were to,
00:26:23.079 --> 00:26:25.660
when I demonstrate, I might say the first three
00:26:25.660 --> 00:26:34.450
lines for an American audience. Oh, say. Fifth,
00:26:34.450 --> 00:26:38.390
third, root, and that third is a major third.
00:26:38.769 --> 00:26:44.990
Imagine that same thing with a minor third. Very
00:26:44.990 --> 00:26:47.230
different sound, right? What the blues does,
00:26:47.309 --> 00:26:50.190
and what I do is I flatted the harmonica down
00:26:50.190 --> 00:26:58.609
from a major to a minor. What blues does is take
00:26:58.609 --> 00:27:01.859
the note in between minor and major. Playing
00:27:01.859 --> 00:27:04.039
blues guitar, the way you produce that note is
00:27:04.039 --> 00:27:06.119
you hit a minor third, which is very visible
00:27:06.119 --> 00:27:09.220
on the fretboard, and then you squeeze it up.
00:27:09.599 --> 00:27:11.920
And we didn't have YouTube, so I didn't get to
00:27:11.920 --> 00:27:14.440
see people do that. But I realized that they
00:27:14.440 --> 00:27:16.740
would talk about it in the instructional book
00:27:16.740 --> 00:27:20.339
that I had. You sort of push it up. You know,
00:27:20.380 --> 00:27:39.980
that's the kind of muddy waters. So the, trying
00:27:39.980 --> 00:27:43.240
to find that note and trying to learn how to
00:27:43.240 --> 00:27:45.319
bend and then learn how to control the bend with
00:27:45.319 --> 00:27:47.720
something that you can spend a lifetime on. What
00:27:47.720 --> 00:27:49.500
I would say is that the guitar players taught
00:27:49.500 --> 00:27:53.000
me where it was because I'd push my, that minor
00:27:53.000 --> 00:27:55.079
third up a little, squeeze it up a little. So
00:27:55.079 --> 00:27:57.519
anybody who said, well, they would say the blue
00:27:57.519 --> 00:28:06.940
scale is like. And they'd say it's the minor
00:28:06.940 --> 00:28:09.140
third on the guitar, but then if they were honest,
00:28:09.220 --> 00:28:11.160
they'd say, but you sort of squeeze it up. And
00:28:11.160 --> 00:28:12.839
you can do that with almost every note is sort
00:28:12.839 --> 00:28:16.119
of manipulate the microtone. The harmonica is
00:28:16.119 --> 00:28:18.420
the same thing. And I think it really made it
00:28:18.420 --> 00:28:21.680
easier for me to think about working with those
00:28:21.680 --> 00:28:24.200
two things together, except that on the harmonica,
00:28:24.259 --> 00:28:26.279
you're pulling it down. On the guitar, you're
00:28:26.279 --> 00:28:28.259
squeezing it up. You're squeezing the minor third
00:28:28.259 --> 00:28:30.099
up a little. On the harmonica, you're pulling
00:28:30.099 --> 00:28:32.640
the major third down a little. And that's what
00:28:32.640 --> 00:28:37.269
makes it tricky. Fascinating stuff. And we're
00:28:37.269 --> 00:28:38.950
going to talk more about your Harmonica channel
00:28:38.950 --> 00:28:42.190
and your affiliation with Hohner. You know, can
00:28:42.190 --> 00:28:44.950
we skip ahead a little bit just after Princeton
00:28:44.950 --> 00:28:47.769
to Nat Riddles? You know, because Nat kind of
00:28:47.769 --> 00:28:51.289
came into the scene before you met Satan. And
00:28:51.289 --> 00:28:54.950
kind of a good timing, too, because Nat played
00:28:54.950 --> 00:28:57.710
kind of a key role in your development there.
00:28:58.009 --> 00:29:01.170
Let's talk about Nat Riddles and, you know, the
00:29:01.170 --> 00:29:02.930
effect he had on you. He's a very unique guy.
00:29:03.849 --> 00:29:07.990
So Nat Riddles was my harmonica teacher. I had
00:29:07.990 --> 00:29:11.410
gone 10 years from fall of 74 into the spring
00:29:11.410 --> 00:29:17.069
of 85 without really ever taking a harmonica
00:29:17.069 --> 00:29:19.910
lesson and without really being in the presence
00:29:19.910 --> 00:29:22.009
of somebody who could potentially be my harmonica
00:29:22.009 --> 00:29:26.500
teacher. So I tell the story in Mr. Satan's Apprentice.
00:29:26.500 --> 00:29:32.579
Nat was driving a cab down Amsterdam Avenue where
00:29:32.579 --> 00:29:35.019
the front gates of Columbia University that are
00:29:35.019 --> 00:29:37.299
now locked to the public. He was kind of driving
00:29:37.299 --> 00:29:39.400
there and I had jammed with some band on campus
00:29:39.400 --> 00:29:41.839
at night and I was walking down the street doing
00:29:41.839 --> 00:29:50.880
the thing that I did, which was sort of. Sort
00:29:50.880 --> 00:29:52.960
of moving all over the harp, kind of bebop, a
00:29:52.960 --> 00:29:55.519
little bebop -y kind of stuff. And Nat heard
00:29:55.519 --> 00:29:58.279
me through his cab door and kind of came around
00:29:58.279 --> 00:30:01.359
and pulled up next to me. And he leaned over,
00:30:01.460 --> 00:30:04.619
very dark skin, black New Yorker with New York
00:30:04.619 --> 00:30:07.119
accent. Hey, man, is that you? And I said, yeah.
00:30:07.259 --> 00:30:09.859
He goes, well, I thought it was good. I thought
00:30:09.859 --> 00:30:12.619
I ought to see who it was. Well, Nat at that
00:30:12.619 --> 00:30:14.319
point had had a whole career playing with Larry
00:30:14.319 --> 00:30:18.410
Johnson, with Odetta. playing in all the Gerdes
00:30:18.410 --> 00:30:20.410
Folk City, all the New York downtown places.
00:30:20.490 --> 00:30:23.009
He'd recorded. Horst Lippmann had brought him
00:30:23.009 --> 00:30:25.809
over with Larry to record in Germany. Horst is
00:30:25.809 --> 00:30:28.190
the guy who did the American Folk Blues Festival.
00:30:28.589 --> 00:30:30.769
I knew none of this. And so there he was sort
00:30:30.769 --> 00:30:34.829
of moonlighting as a cabbie. And he got out of
00:30:34.829 --> 00:30:38.950
his car and he had like a toolkit. He sort of
00:30:38.950 --> 00:30:41.930
opened the toolkit and there is harps. And he
00:30:41.930 --> 00:31:00.970
did something like this. And I'm like, what the
00:31:00.970 --> 00:31:03.289
hell is that? That's the real thing. I've been
00:31:03.289 --> 00:31:04.829
listening to the records. He's like a record
00:31:04.829 --> 00:31:09.970
come to life. And so I began, we became friends.
00:31:10.309 --> 00:31:13.009
He was my teacher. I only had a couple of formal
00:31:13.009 --> 00:31:16.829
lessons, which I paid him 25 bucks. He was the
00:31:16.829 --> 00:31:19.009
one who sort of said, open your hands, open your
00:31:19.009 --> 00:31:22.130
hands. You know, when he first came to my apartment,
00:31:22.369 --> 00:31:27.920
I followed him all summer. 1985. I was a dropout
00:31:27.920 --> 00:31:30.220
from Columbia, from grad school at Columbia.
00:31:30.220 --> 00:31:32.619
I had a master's. My girlfriend ran off with
00:31:32.619 --> 00:31:34.380
a guy that I knew in graduate school. So you
00:31:34.380 --> 00:31:37.119
can say, oh, that's George Carlin would roast
00:31:37.119 --> 00:31:40.400
me. He'd go, oh, sounds horrible. That's the
00:31:40.400 --> 00:31:44.819
white blues. Graduate school. Oh, fair enough.
00:31:45.059 --> 00:31:47.319
Fair enough. But I still was determined to learn
00:31:47.319 --> 00:31:50.059
the music, you know? And I followed Nat. He had
00:31:50.059 --> 00:31:53.430
a mouse amp like I did. And he would gig on the
00:31:53.430 --> 00:31:55.329
streets of New York. I actually, at one point,
00:31:55.369 --> 00:32:00.150
I taped him somewhat later, 1989, 1990. And I've
00:32:00.150 --> 00:32:02.190
released that. There's a whole sort of Nat Riddle's
00:32:02.190 --> 00:32:04.430
double LP of street recordings that I got from
00:32:04.430 --> 00:32:07.789
him. But Nat, what Nat had, first of all, he
00:32:07.789 --> 00:32:10.210
had incredible tone. He had what I didn't have,
00:32:10.369 --> 00:32:12.549
which is he had a much broader knowledge of the
00:32:12.549 --> 00:32:16.380
tradition. So I had never, I had seen. James
00:32:16.380 --> 00:32:18.700
Cotton opened for the Jay Giles Band in the spring
00:32:18.700 --> 00:32:21.779
of 75. I'd seen a little bit of pro harp here
00:32:21.779 --> 00:32:25.240
and there, but not a lot. And I had never heard
00:32:25.240 --> 00:32:27.920
of Big Walter Horton. I'd never heard of Sugar
00:32:27.920 --> 00:32:31.180
Blue. And he was like, well, you got Sugar Blue
00:32:31.180 --> 00:32:33.480
is the man. I mean, and I'd never heard of Kim
00:32:33.480 --> 00:32:44.039
Wilson. And he would do. All of the stuff that
00:32:44.039 --> 00:32:46.119
he had gotten from Kim is interesting. He used
00:32:46.119 --> 00:32:50.380
to go and see Kim Wilson in like 82. He would
00:32:50.380 --> 00:32:51.980
see him at the Beacon. He talked to me about
00:32:51.980 --> 00:32:55.259
Kim. So what do I get from that? Number one is
00:32:55.259 --> 00:32:56.819
he doesn't care if you're white or black. If
00:32:56.819 --> 00:32:58.480
you can really play, if you can really throw
00:32:58.480 --> 00:33:00.960
down, whether you're Kim Wilson or Sugar Blue,
00:33:01.039 --> 00:33:02.940
it doesn't matter. If you can really play, that's
00:33:02.940 --> 00:33:04.359
what he's interested in. And that's what he's
00:33:04.359 --> 00:33:08.539
pushing at me. So my whole transracial brotherhood
00:33:08.539 --> 00:33:11.970
in the blues and elsewhere. thing in part, it
00:33:11.970 --> 00:33:15.289
was very much stimulated by Nat, who was, he
00:33:15.289 --> 00:33:17.849
was just, he'd learned from Jewish guys. He learned
00:33:17.849 --> 00:33:20.890
from Bob Shatkin and Lenny Rabinovitz. He would
00:33:20.890 --> 00:33:22.549
talk about these guys, like they were legends
00:33:22.549 --> 00:33:25.970
too. And Danny Russo, who recorded on the Spivey
00:33:25.970 --> 00:33:28.730
record label in the late seventies. I, later
00:33:28.730 --> 00:33:31.069
I got to know Len Kunstadt, who was the guy who
00:33:31.069 --> 00:33:35.170
owned Spivey and, and, and, and, um, what's her
00:33:35.170 --> 00:33:37.609
name? Married, uh, uh, oh, the blues singer,
00:33:37.710 --> 00:33:41.279
the blues singer from the twenties. Um, Victoria
00:33:41.279 --> 00:33:43.880
Spivey. Spivey. I don't know if it's Spivey or
00:33:43.880 --> 00:33:47.819
Spivey. Yeah. So that's what I got from Ned.
00:33:47.920 --> 00:33:51.440
He taught me that summer. I went down and watched
00:33:51.440 --> 00:33:55.619
him perform with Charlie Hilbert, his guitar
00:33:55.619 --> 00:33:58.059
player, who I later teamed up with. I watched
00:33:58.059 --> 00:34:01.240
him busk. And I was trying to write a novel,
00:34:01.359 --> 00:34:03.980
believe it or not, about how the busking life
00:34:03.980 --> 00:34:08.670
in Europe had changed me. helped heal me and
00:34:08.670 --> 00:34:11.050
helped open me to a whole different world there.
00:34:11.190 --> 00:34:13.989
And so like, but there was the guy, I mean, that
00:34:13.989 --> 00:34:16.650
was a God. He would talk about El Cafe Street.
00:34:16.750 --> 00:34:18.989
There is no cover. There's no minimum. He had
00:34:18.989 --> 00:34:20.949
his way of preaching to the public. He was a
00:34:20.949 --> 00:34:23.889
gifted communicator and a gifted musician, a
00:34:23.889 --> 00:34:26.289
gifted harmonica player, not a gifted singer.
00:34:27.280 --> 00:34:30.539
An okay singer, but he wasn't a great singer,
00:34:30.639 --> 00:34:33.119
but he could put a song across. And I wrote about
00:34:33.119 --> 00:34:35.039
him a lot in Mr. Satan's Apprentice and a little
00:34:35.039 --> 00:34:38.760
bit in My Family and I. Both books you should
00:34:38.760 --> 00:34:43.199
be picking up. And so Nat Riddles gave you really
00:34:43.199 --> 00:34:47.539
your first authentic harmonic instruction and
00:34:47.539 --> 00:34:50.840
also opened you up to Transrational Brotherhood,
00:34:50.840 --> 00:34:53.500
which was a beautiful introduction to meeting
00:34:53.500 --> 00:34:56.969
Satan. which happened a little bit later. I'm
00:34:56.969 --> 00:35:01.389
thinking that would be 86, 87. Yeah. So the funny
00:35:01.389 --> 00:35:05.090
thing is, and you probably get to this at some
00:35:05.090 --> 00:35:09.750
point, a documentary came out in 2019, 2018,
00:35:09.989 --> 00:35:12.389
but it was on Netflix here in the States for
00:35:12.389 --> 00:35:15.230
a couple of years, 2019 to 2021 called Satan
00:35:15.230 --> 00:35:18.150
and Adam. It was something I'm really happy is
00:35:18.150 --> 00:35:20.150
out there. It was not my creation, but I was
00:35:20.150 --> 00:35:22.670
interviewed a number of times and the filmmaker,
00:35:22.849 --> 00:35:26.469
Scott Belseric, sort of assembled all of this
00:35:26.469 --> 00:35:28.389
stuff. So we sort of gave the public a sense
00:35:28.389 --> 00:35:32.670
of our story. Where was I going with that? I
00:35:32.670 --> 00:35:34.909
was going with something. Oh, okay. The one thing
00:35:34.909 --> 00:35:36.889
I'll say about the film, it gives a slightly
00:35:36.889 --> 00:35:41.429
misleading idea of how I came into Harlem because
00:35:41.429 --> 00:35:43.829
it makes it sound like one moment, this grad
00:35:43.829 --> 00:35:45.889
student has his heart broken. Next moment, he's
00:35:45.889 --> 00:35:47.730
wandering around Harlem, hoping black people
00:35:47.730 --> 00:35:49.909
will heal his soul. And he runs into this Mr.
00:35:50.070 --> 00:35:52.780
Satan. There was two and a half years. between
00:35:52.780 --> 00:35:57.119
the breakup in grad school and running into Mr.
00:35:57.300 --> 00:36:01.199
Satan in October of 86. In the middle of that
00:36:01.199 --> 00:36:05.300
was the summer of 85 when I followed Nat and
00:36:05.300 --> 00:36:07.320
when I took lessons from Nat. Nat's not mentioned
00:36:07.320 --> 00:36:10.380
in the film, my teacher. So that's a sort of
00:36:10.380 --> 00:36:13.219
something that's missing. If it hadn't been for
00:36:13.219 --> 00:36:16.849
Nat, I wouldn't have gone back to Europe. in
00:36:16.849 --> 00:36:19.530
the summer of 86 for a couple of months and played
00:36:19.530 --> 00:36:22.130
all over, including solo. I played with several
00:36:22.130 --> 00:36:25.230
different guitar players and then came back to
00:36:25.230 --> 00:36:27.469
America, said it's time to put the busking life
00:36:27.469 --> 00:36:30.150
behind. And I got a straight job tutoring writing
00:36:30.150 --> 00:36:33.329
in the South Bronx. And I'm driving through Harlem
00:36:33.329 --> 00:36:36.130
where I had played in the jazz clubs a little.
00:36:36.190 --> 00:36:39.130
And I write about that in my family and I. I'd
00:36:39.130 --> 00:36:41.909
actually broken in in the jazz clubs. I was kind
00:36:41.909 --> 00:36:44.849
of this little, this white guy sensation because
00:36:44.849 --> 00:36:47.809
nobody There were no other white guys coming
00:36:47.809 --> 00:36:51.050
in with harmonica who could play somewhat, sitting
00:36:51.050 --> 00:36:53.829
in with the players they had, the jazz players
00:36:53.829 --> 00:36:56.250
and the soul players. So I'd had that background.
00:36:56.289 --> 00:36:58.889
I went to Europe. Then I come home and I'm driving
00:36:58.889 --> 00:37:02.070
through Harlem. And that's when I saw, they said,
00:37:02.110 --> 00:37:04.590
that's Satan. Everybody in Harlem knows Satan.
00:37:04.829 --> 00:37:07.670
When I asked who it was. And that's when the
00:37:07.670 --> 00:37:11.090
rest of my life really started. But if it hadn't
00:37:11.090 --> 00:37:13.650
been for Nat teaching me how to tongue block,
00:37:14.360 --> 00:37:16.400
telling me to go who I should be listening to,
00:37:16.539 --> 00:37:19.340
I wouldn't have really had what it took, which
00:37:19.340 --> 00:37:22.119
was just enough. After all of that experience,
00:37:22.460 --> 00:37:26.079
all of that mileage, as Ralph Macchio, you know,
00:37:26.079 --> 00:37:28.500
Lightning Boy says in the movie Crossroads, I'd
00:37:28.500 --> 00:37:30.760
gotten two and a half years of mileage on my
00:37:30.760 --> 00:37:33.480
own and with Nat's help and with others. I'd
00:37:33.480 --> 00:37:35.760
been around the world. So Harlem is in my city.
00:37:36.460 --> 00:37:40.019
But of course, in 86, it's 99 % black. It's not
00:37:40.019 --> 00:37:43.809
a place white people hang out. And yet there
00:37:43.809 --> 00:37:47.090
I was just last night, I should tell you, Matt,
00:37:47.250 --> 00:37:50.150
I've been going through the possessions of my
00:37:50.150 --> 00:37:52.389
mom and I found a video and it said Satan and
00:37:52.389 --> 00:37:57.429
Adam 4 -12 -89. It's a full length. It's like
00:37:57.429 --> 00:37:59.469
a full set from the street with a full interview
00:37:59.469 --> 00:38:02.530
with me at 31. It was very weird for my 19 -year
00:38:02.530 --> 00:38:04.369
-old kids. Like, Dad, that's you? You got red
00:38:04.369 --> 00:38:10.150
hair. That was after two and a half years of
00:38:10.150 --> 00:38:14.010
playing with Mr. Satan. Summer of 89. That's
00:38:14.010 --> 00:38:17.030
before we went and recorded Harlem Blues in the
00:38:17.030 --> 00:38:21.369
beginning in February of 1990. But like we have
00:38:21.369 --> 00:38:23.610
a sound that's developed that's really pretty
00:38:23.610 --> 00:38:26.230
close to what ended up on Harlem Blues. And it
00:38:26.230 --> 00:38:29.329
was very strange to see that and to realize it
00:38:29.329 --> 00:38:31.769
was like my wife who'd heard a lot about this
00:38:31.769 --> 00:38:33.489
and has seen the documentary. But like there
00:38:33.489 --> 00:38:37.340
was Mr. Satan at length playing his stuff. doing
00:38:37.340 --> 00:38:40.219
his incredibly charismatic thing. He would grimace
00:38:40.219 --> 00:38:43.300
and move. It's just, he was into the music. He
00:38:43.300 --> 00:38:46.920
gave off joy. And there I am looking kind of
00:38:46.920 --> 00:38:49.480
preppy. It was weird. Everybody back then in
00:38:49.480 --> 00:38:51.659
sort of light blue jeans, you know, and it's
00:38:51.659 --> 00:38:54.280
a cool day in Harlem in early April. And I'm
00:38:54.280 --> 00:38:57.340
wearing a, you know, a pullover, black pullover
00:38:57.340 --> 00:39:00.420
sweater. I just like, we were an odd couple.
00:39:00.639 --> 00:39:04.690
And yet there we were. And The guy who taught,
00:39:04.750 --> 00:39:06.969
I don't know where the video came from, but it
00:39:06.969 --> 00:39:09.010
was a black interviewer. So clearly that's who
00:39:09.010 --> 00:39:11.329
photographed us at length and then interviewed
00:39:11.329 --> 00:39:13.849
me at length. Pretty strange. But anyway, there
00:39:13.849 --> 00:39:17.550
was four years on the street in Harlem where
00:39:17.550 --> 00:39:21.849
we got our sound together. And then we hit the
00:39:21.849 --> 00:39:26.150
big time. And we can talk about that. But yeah,
00:39:26.309 --> 00:39:28.269
lots to talk about with the Harlem experience,
00:39:28.469 --> 00:39:33.510
I think. And very volatile streets in New York,
00:39:33.630 --> 00:39:37.250
85, 86, 87, a lot of racial tension going on.
00:39:37.289 --> 00:39:39.929
I mean, there has been for years, but as I recall,
00:39:40.050 --> 00:39:44.010
those were very trying times. And another kind
00:39:44.010 --> 00:39:47.849
of interesting development of that. In addition
00:39:47.849 --> 00:39:52.070
to the fact that your building blocks were built
00:39:52.070 --> 00:39:55.750
by Nat, that the student was ready, the teacher
00:39:55.750 --> 00:39:58.550
appeared, that was a natural progression for
00:39:58.550 --> 00:40:00.750
you, that if that hadn't happened, the future
00:40:00.750 --> 00:40:03.670
would not have unfolded that way. But it did.
00:40:04.230 --> 00:40:07.010
And so you're busy. You and Mr. Satan are busy.
00:40:07.130 --> 00:40:10.070
And then Bono and the Edge walk up and go, hey,
00:40:10.190 --> 00:40:12.860
these guys are like the real deal here. because
00:40:12.860 --> 00:40:14.579
they were busy filming Rattle and Hum around
00:40:14.579 --> 00:40:17.780
the corner. That was right after the Joshua Tree
00:40:17.780 --> 00:40:22.340
release, I believe, in 87. Right. Give us a little
00:40:22.340 --> 00:40:27.059
bit of insight. You're rocking away, and you
00:40:27.059 --> 00:40:29.980
look over, and there's the edge, digging what
00:40:29.980 --> 00:40:32.880
you're doing. Can you give us some insight into
00:40:32.880 --> 00:40:37.900
that memory? Well, so I don't have much of a
00:40:37.900 --> 00:40:41.300
memory. I have some, but it's – so the thing
00:40:41.300 --> 00:40:45.199
to understand about me is that I vaguely – after
00:40:45.199 --> 00:40:46.639
it happened, somebody said, you know who that
00:40:46.639 --> 00:40:49.039
was? That was U2. And I said, well, they're like
00:40:49.039 --> 00:40:51.059
a big rock group, right? In other words, that
00:40:51.059 --> 00:40:54.139
was the limit of my knowledge. I have heard of
00:40:54.139 --> 00:40:56.460
them. I didn't have any of their albums. I didn't
00:40:56.460 --> 00:40:58.059
really understand that they were just about the
00:40:58.059 --> 00:41:00.960
biggest damn thing in the world in 87. They were
00:41:00.960 --> 00:41:03.880
a very – Very big group. What I can tell you
00:41:03.880 --> 00:41:05.840
is that we were playing whatever day it was.
00:41:05.880 --> 00:41:09.239
It was the spring of 87. So we'd only been together
00:41:09.239 --> 00:41:13.260
for less than a year. And I was still sitting,
00:41:13.300 --> 00:41:15.599
sitting because after later I stood up. But at
00:41:15.599 --> 00:41:18.219
first it seemed politically unwise to be standing
00:41:18.219 --> 00:41:20.940
when he was sitting. So at first I sat in a chair.
00:41:21.059 --> 00:41:22.920
I think I think I had a cowboy hat early on.
00:41:23.980 --> 00:41:27.929
And what I remember vaguely is that. You didn't
00:41:27.929 --> 00:41:29.969
see many white people in Harlem. We were right
00:41:29.969 --> 00:41:32.110
next door, though, to the Studio Museum in Harlem.
00:41:32.190 --> 00:41:34.469
And sometimes buses would pull up while we were
00:41:34.469 --> 00:41:36.230
playing and a whole bunch of white folks would
00:41:36.230 --> 00:41:39.090
get out. But by and large, you didn't see white
00:41:39.090 --> 00:41:41.849
people very much at all. And there were a couple
00:41:41.849 --> 00:41:44.590
of guys kind of in my frame of view. I'm in the
00:41:44.590 --> 00:41:46.630
music. I think any musician in your audience
00:41:46.630 --> 00:41:49.409
can imagine. You're playing harmonica. We're
00:41:49.409 --> 00:41:52.090
not always looking out and paying a lot of attention.
00:41:52.269 --> 00:41:55.960
So I have a vague sense as I play. that there's
00:41:55.960 --> 00:41:57.519
a couple of guys out there. I don't recognize
00:41:57.519 --> 00:42:00.699
them. So I don't go, Oh my God, it's, Oh my God,
00:42:00.780 --> 00:42:03.139
it's you too. I'm hearing like Dave Chappelle
00:42:03.139 --> 00:42:07.400
voice. Oh my God. Oh my God. Um, I had no idea
00:42:07.400 --> 00:42:10.539
who it was. They, they were there for about two
00:42:10.539 --> 00:42:13.159
minutes as far as I could tell. And then they're
00:42:13.159 --> 00:42:18.030
gone. And when we took a break, Bobby Robinson,
00:42:18.150 --> 00:42:22.809
see, who was sort of informal or de facto kind
00:42:22.809 --> 00:42:25.869
of manager for Mr. Satan. Bobby Robinson is a
00:42:25.869 --> 00:42:29.570
legend in the world of certainly of black blues
00:42:29.570 --> 00:42:33.289
record men. He was one of the guys, the Fire
00:42:33.289 --> 00:42:35.750
and Fury labels. He was the one who recorded
00:42:35.750 --> 00:42:38.090
Wilbert Harrison doing Kansas City. He told me
00:42:38.090 --> 00:42:41.230
that story and I retell it in Mr. Satan's. Bobby
00:42:41.230 --> 00:42:44.230
Robinson was there and apparently Bobby had taken
00:42:44.230 --> 00:42:48.050
a card from these guys. And he was the one who
00:42:48.050 --> 00:42:49.610
sort of said, well, let me, I'll see what they
00:42:49.610 --> 00:42:52.550
want. I'll see what they want. And what ended
00:42:52.550 --> 00:42:54.730
up happening, here's how the story goes. It's
00:42:54.730 --> 00:42:58.409
a sort of strange story is that it got back to
00:42:58.409 --> 00:43:00.650
me that they had said, hey, we'd like to put
00:43:00.650 --> 00:43:04.429
these guys, your guys, we were not known as Satan
00:43:04.429 --> 00:43:07.449
and Adam. We were Mr. Satan and the white boy
00:43:07.449 --> 00:43:10.449
who plays with him, Adam, that's Adam. But it
00:43:10.449 --> 00:43:13.199
was not Satan and Adam until. We had to call
00:43:13.199 --> 00:43:15.659
our first demo something in the summer of 1990.
00:43:16.219 --> 00:43:18.239
We were not Satan, Adam. We were just, we had
00:43:18.239 --> 00:43:20.420
an unnamed act. They said, we'd like to put your
00:43:20.420 --> 00:43:22.880
guys in the movie. It'll be great promo for them.
00:43:22.900 --> 00:43:27.199
We can't afford to pay you. And they said, apparently
00:43:27.199 --> 00:43:29.159
Bobby said, well, if you can't afford to pay
00:43:29.159 --> 00:43:32.059
us, we can't afford to be used. And I thank him
00:43:32.059 --> 00:43:39.170
for that. And what ended up happening? And we
00:43:39.170 --> 00:43:41.469
ended up getting a thousand dollars each for
00:43:41.469 --> 00:43:44.250
the rights sort of in perpetuity to use us in
00:43:44.250 --> 00:43:48.690
the film. So they used us in the film. And that's
00:43:48.690 --> 00:43:51.070
all I ever got. I don't know what Sterling got,
00:43:51.170 --> 00:43:53.090
but I think he got a bit more eventually. But
00:43:53.090 --> 00:43:56.130
that's all we ever got. Years later, I'm just
00:43:56.130 --> 00:43:58.309
going to tell you, years later, I heard a story
00:43:58.309 --> 00:44:01.710
about that involved tens of thousands of dollars
00:44:01.710 --> 00:44:07.079
of cash. And I never saw anything more than that
00:44:07.079 --> 00:44:10.260
thousand dollars for my, I should just say the
00:44:10.260 --> 00:44:42.980
song that we played. Freedom for my people. That
00:44:42.980 --> 00:44:44.960
was the harmonica part that I came up with to
00:44:44.960 --> 00:44:47.360
go with the wonderful song that he wrote and
00:44:47.360 --> 00:44:52.300
the guitar part that he was playing. But again,
00:44:52.420 --> 00:44:54.500
there was a story about lots and lots of money
00:44:54.500 --> 00:44:57.739
changing hands, none of which I ever saw. So,
00:44:57.739 --> 00:45:02.360
you know, it seems like everybody involved in
00:45:02.360 --> 00:45:04.099
the blues at some point has a story about being
00:45:04.099 --> 00:45:07.619
ripped off. I don't know whether... I don't know
00:45:07.619 --> 00:45:10.380
what happened. I'm in good terms with Bobby Robinson's
00:45:10.380 --> 00:45:12.739
daughter, though, Denise. So I'll just say we
00:45:12.739 --> 00:45:18.320
kind of had it out. But lately, actually, in
00:45:18.320 --> 00:45:22.340
my new trio, Sir Rod and the Blues Doctors, we
00:45:22.340 --> 00:45:26.099
did a cover of Freedom for My People. And it
00:45:26.099 --> 00:45:30.019
was wonderful to have our lead singer, Rod Patterson,
00:45:30.079 --> 00:45:32.539
is Sterling McGee's nephew. So that's a story
00:45:32.539 --> 00:45:34.940
of its own. But he re -sang his uncle's song
00:45:34.940 --> 00:45:38.530
in a beautiful way. So Sir Rod the Blues Doctor,
00:45:38.650 --> 00:45:41.929
we've got Sir Rod on vocals, percussion. He's
00:45:41.929 --> 00:45:45.170
the front man. Yourself on harmonica, your musical
00:45:45.170 --> 00:45:48.030
director. Kind of really the driving force behind
00:45:48.030 --> 00:45:50.349
the sound. Plus we've got Alan Gross on drums.
00:45:51.469 --> 00:45:55.829
No, no, no, no. Alan's on guitar. Okay, okay.
00:45:55.889 --> 00:45:58.900
I need to correct you. I'm playing harmonica
00:45:58.900 --> 00:46:02.320
and drums. Alan's playing guitar. So one of the
00:46:02.320 --> 00:46:08.400
interesting things is in 2009, 2010, I became
00:46:08.400 --> 00:46:11.599
a one -man band for a while and was doing percussion
00:46:11.599 --> 00:46:13.719
very much the way Sterling did, although a very
00:46:13.719 --> 00:46:15.960
different kind of setup. But I've done that.
00:46:16.059 --> 00:46:19.360
So I am the rhythm section, basically. I'm the
00:46:19.360 --> 00:46:22.639
drummer with Sir Rod and the Blues Doctors. Gotcha.
00:46:23.280 --> 00:46:25.860
Booth, you want to check your facts on that one
00:46:25.860 --> 00:46:30.559
next time, buddy? Yeah. Hey, notable album from
00:46:30.559 --> 00:46:33.480
you guys recently, Keeping It In The Family 2022,
00:46:34.039 --> 00:46:37.300
kind of a legacy tribute where the blues lives.
00:46:37.400 --> 00:46:42.400
Yeah. Yeah. Kind of, it was a live album that
00:46:42.400 --> 00:46:44.519
we wanted to give people a sense of what it's
00:46:44.519 --> 00:46:48.679
like to do the kind of music we play. It's kind
00:46:48.679 --> 00:46:51.199
of some of its legacy stuff, some of its originals.
00:46:52.260 --> 00:46:54.599
We have a song called Brother Sterling. In fact,
00:46:54.679 --> 00:46:57.659
your blues audience might appreciate if I'd show
00:46:57.659 --> 00:47:00.920
them the rhythm part on harp that I worked out.
00:47:02.079 --> 00:47:04.980
Which is to say, this is an original harp part,
00:47:05.079 --> 00:47:08.079
but the idea that I had with this was I wanted
00:47:08.079 --> 00:47:09.559
it to sound like it had been around forever.
00:47:10.019 --> 00:47:12.739
It doesn't quite sound like... It doesn't sound
00:47:12.739 --> 00:47:14.750
like... It sounds like something you know you've
00:47:14.750 --> 00:47:16.929
heard before, but you haven't, I don't think.
00:47:16.969 --> 00:47:48.530
Let me show you what I do. And then it, you know,
00:47:48.550 --> 00:47:52.650
it stops. Brother Sterling and Rod comes in.
00:47:52.750 --> 00:47:56.789
So that's the kind of groove I think Sir Rod
00:47:56.789 --> 00:47:58.949
and the Blues Doctors are keeping alive, the
00:47:58.949 --> 00:48:02.409
Satan and Adam groove. And there's no question
00:48:02.409 --> 00:48:06.210
that Rod Patterson on lead vocals, he doesn't
00:48:06.210 --> 00:48:07.829
do anything but lead vocals, which means he's
00:48:07.829 --> 00:48:12.309
a dancer too. So he's out there. We have a wonderful
00:48:12.309 --> 00:48:18.269
show. But he has a little bit of his, his uncle's
00:48:18.269 --> 00:48:22.869
sound, but he has, he has the same charisma.
00:48:22.869 --> 00:48:26.750
It's almost like there's this McGee thing. And
00:48:26.750 --> 00:48:29.570
Rod is the daughter of Sterling McGee's older
00:48:29.570 --> 00:48:34.210
sister. There's a McGee. It's hard to describe.
00:48:34.349 --> 00:48:36.809
It's just, it's charisma. It's that thing that
00:48:36.809 --> 00:48:39.900
makes you, it's that. There was a film years
00:48:39.900 --> 00:48:42.639
ago about Steve Prefontaine and, and the guy
00:48:42.639 --> 00:48:44.780
at the beginning says, some people have, you
00:48:44.780 --> 00:48:46.320
know, there's, there's a thing. Some people have
00:48:46.320 --> 00:48:48.119
a lot of it. Some people have a little Steve
00:48:48.119 --> 00:48:50.000
Prefontaine had a whole lot of it. Well, it's
00:48:50.000 --> 00:48:52.699
like Rod Patterson and Mr. Satan had a whole,
00:48:52.699 --> 00:48:55.679
whole lot of that thing that makes you, that
00:48:55.679 --> 00:48:58.840
makes them compulsory. Somebody you just want
00:48:58.840 --> 00:49:01.820
to watch. They've just got the thing that mesmerizes
00:49:01.820 --> 00:49:05.309
you. I think they both have it. So it's a very
00:49:05.309 --> 00:49:08.389
physical performance. And I'm thinking back to
00:49:08.389 --> 00:49:10.590
Sterling McGee and the footage that I've seen.
00:49:10.710 --> 00:49:14.150
And it kind of ties into some of your harmonica
00:49:14.150 --> 00:49:17.090
lessons in as much as you say, hey, you know,
00:49:17.130 --> 00:49:18.989
you're moving back and forth, but you're also
00:49:18.989 --> 00:49:22.389
moving side to side. I couldn't help but feel
00:49:22.389 --> 00:49:25.880
that correlation. Did I get that right? Yeah,
00:49:26.019 --> 00:49:29.099
well, years ago, I remember talking about the
00:49:29.099 --> 00:49:31.659
dance of blues harmonica. I was struck by the
00:49:31.659 --> 00:49:33.940
way that Kim Wilson moved. He has beautiful,
00:49:34.099 --> 00:49:37.539
almost like ballet, balletic, you know, and I
00:49:37.539 --> 00:49:40.340
think if you watch some harp players who are
00:49:40.340 --> 00:49:44.000
really into it, they'll just get down and they're
00:49:44.000 --> 00:49:46.579
sort of conducting energies. And I think guitar
00:49:46.579 --> 00:49:48.579
players do the same thing. I'm not talking about
00:49:48.579 --> 00:49:52.960
being stagey, right? I'm not talking about Steve
00:49:52.960 --> 00:49:57.500
Vai in Crossroads. The whole point of, if your
00:49:57.500 --> 00:49:59.679
audience knows that movie, the whole point of
00:49:59.679 --> 00:50:04.039
Steve Vai playing, what's his name? I got a white
00:50:04.039 --> 00:50:06.079
boy of my own, Willie Brown. What's his name?
00:50:08.440 --> 00:50:12.780
And Steve Vai in that movie is playing kind of,
00:50:12.780 --> 00:50:19.860
what's the word? Like metalized blues rock. in
00:50:19.860 --> 00:50:23.320
the mid eighties, right? With all kinds of contorted
00:50:23.320 --> 00:50:25.119
things that aren't real at all. They're just
00:50:25.119 --> 00:50:28.000
in totally stagey. What you want, I think what
00:50:28.000 --> 00:50:30.320
all of us want out of our blues players is if
00:50:30.320 --> 00:50:32.539
they're going to grimace, if they're going to,
00:50:32.539 --> 00:50:35.260
you want to look like they're, you want them
00:50:35.260 --> 00:50:37.800
to look like they're pulling something real that's
00:50:37.800 --> 00:50:44.190
alive right now out of themselves. A little artifice
00:50:44.190 --> 00:50:46.809
is okay, but really what you want is you want
00:50:46.809 --> 00:50:49.210
to know that the blues are active in somebody
00:50:49.210 --> 00:50:52.190
and that they're conducting them out with the
00:50:52.190 --> 00:50:58.590
help of the music. And I would say the side to
00:50:58.590 --> 00:51:00.690
side thing, the back and forth, it's not something
00:51:00.690 --> 00:51:04.570
you can force, but it's good to acknowledge that
00:51:04.570 --> 00:51:08.309
those energies, how you carry yourself as a musician
00:51:08.309 --> 00:51:11.260
makes a difference. When I was looking at myself
00:51:11.260 --> 00:51:14.199
in the video from 1989, what I was conscious
00:51:14.199 --> 00:51:17.619
of was I'm not moving a lot. And you know one
00:51:17.619 --> 00:51:20.369
thing I'll say? I'll take it back to something
00:51:20.369 --> 00:51:22.070
you said earlier, because this is one of the
00:51:22.070 --> 00:51:24.690
themes of my family and I. When I talk about
00:51:24.690 --> 00:51:26.869
what it was like to play in Harlem in the mid
00:51:26.869 --> 00:51:30.230
to late 80s, it was a period of racial violence.
00:51:30.269 --> 00:51:33.369
It was a period of polarization in New York City.
00:51:33.570 --> 00:51:36.949
And I talk about Howard Beach. There was a killing
00:51:36.949 --> 00:51:40.389
of a couple of black guys who went into a pizzeria
00:51:40.389 --> 00:51:44.349
in mob country in Queens and got chased out and
00:51:44.349 --> 00:51:47.699
one got killed by a car. We were out there in
00:51:47.699 --> 00:51:50.840
Harlem during that whole, like the whole aftermath.
00:51:51.260 --> 00:51:55.659
I was not personally indicted by the people who
00:51:55.659 --> 00:51:58.519
walked by. There was a moment, though, two weeks
00:51:58.519 --> 00:52:00.699
after Do the Right Thing came out in the summer
00:52:00.699 --> 00:52:07.980
of 1989, in which I was challenged. What I would
00:52:07.980 --> 00:52:10.380
say is that I'm taking it back to your movement
00:52:10.380 --> 00:52:13.840
thing. I was very conscious, even though I...
00:52:14.250 --> 00:52:17.130
I was comfortable more or less playing with Sterling
00:52:17.130 --> 00:52:19.429
after a couple of years, playing by his side,
00:52:19.530 --> 00:52:22.969
almost like unconsciously. I also was not, I
00:52:22.969 --> 00:52:24.789
didn't want to be demonstrative. The last thing
00:52:24.789 --> 00:52:26.809
in the world I would have been was a hot dog.
00:52:27.429 --> 00:52:29.829
A white boy being a hot dog on the streets of
00:52:29.829 --> 00:52:33.070
Harlem, you'd have to be crazy. That was my feeling.
00:52:33.210 --> 00:52:35.530
So I think I held myself back. One thing that
00:52:35.530 --> 00:52:38.150
happened is as he and I moved from the streets,
00:52:38.329 --> 00:52:43.320
suddenly we got a manager. who put us on tour
00:52:43.320 --> 00:52:45.699
with Bo Diddley in Europe, on 10 cities in Europe,
00:52:45.800 --> 00:52:48.320
summer of 91. And suddenly we were a national
00:52:48.320 --> 00:52:51.539
touring act in America. And I mean, we came to
00:52:51.539 --> 00:52:55.639
Montreal a couple of times and Toronto at least
00:52:55.639 --> 00:52:58.159
once. There's a blues festival in an island near
00:52:58.159 --> 00:53:00.199
Toronto. I remember playing that. I forget what
00:53:00.199 --> 00:53:03.599
it's called. My point is, once we moved out and
00:53:03.599 --> 00:53:05.820
the audience we were playing for were much more
00:53:05.820 --> 00:53:09.239
white than all black. They were sort of mainstream
00:53:09.239 --> 00:53:13.110
blues audience. Then I became much more comfortable
00:53:13.110 --> 00:53:17.610
in my skin in a way and was moving more. But
00:53:17.610 --> 00:53:20.170
I noticed that I wasn't doing that in Harlem
00:53:20.170 --> 00:53:23.869
as much. So that international exposure gave
00:53:23.869 --> 00:53:27.010
you more freedom of expression. And that really
00:53:27.010 --> 00:53:29.010
comes across for the audience. You're giving
00:53:29.010 --> 00:53:31.190
it off. They're feeling it. The whole experience
00:53:31.190 --> 00:53:35.690
is more real, more visceral. Yeah. Really. Just
00:53:35.690 --> 00:53:37.289
want to wrap up a quick comment you made about
00:53:37.289 --> 00:53:40.380
the crossroads. The Crossroads movie because
00:53:40.380 --> 00:53:44.119
we had a very special guest, Tim Russ, who's
00:53:44.119 --> 00:53:47.619
a great bluesman. Lots of folks know him as Tuvok
00:53:47.619 --> 00:53:50.340
from Star Trek, but he's a fantastic bluesman
00:53:50.340 --> 00:53:52.380
as well. Music very important to him all his
00:53:52.380 --> 00:53:55.690
life. He played the Robert Johnson role. in Crossroads,
00:53:55.750 --> 00:53:58.150
a little dream sequence that features Robert
00:53:58.150 --> 00:54:01.570
Johnson. And he was chatting with Tim. He was
00:54:01.570 --> 00:54:03.469
on the show. We're talking about him taking lessons
00:54:03.469 --> 00:54:06.110
from Roy Cooter to get the Crossroads right.
00:54:06.150 --> 00:54:07.929
But Tim had been playing guitar since the Beatles
00:54:07.929 --> 00:54:10.929
had broken up. So he was no stranger to it. One
00:54:10.929 --> 00:54:13.769
of the guys that's portrayed Robert Johnson,
00:54:13.889 --> 00:54:16.750
in addition to Keb Moe, that can actually play
00:54:16.750 --> 00:54:19.650
like Robert Johnson. So just a little quick familial
00:54:19.650 --> 00:54:21.630
tie. I just wanted to wrap up with your Crossroads
00:54:21.630 --> 00:54:24.320
mention there. Blues Harmonica Teaching Online.
00:54:24.460 --> 00:54:27.179
I was at your YouTube site last night. I'm having
00:54:27.179 --> 00:54:29.480
a lot of fun there, and I'm enjoying the harp
00:54:29.480 --> 00:54:32.579
lessons from the front seat. And I got the feeling,
00:54:32.599 --> 00:54:34.239
and you explained it somewhere. I can't remember
00:54:34.239 --> 00:54:36.480
where, but it's kind of like that's where you're
00:54:36.480 --> 00:54:38.889
comfortable. And it kind of makes the viewer
00:54:38.889 --> 00:54:40.409
feel comfortable. It's like we're sitting in
00:54:40.409 --> 00:54:43.210
your car there and you give them like a real
00:54:43.210 --> 00:54:45.670
lesson as opposed to some formal kind of, you
00:54:45.670 --> 00:54:48.050
know, play the notes. So I am enjoying that.
00:54:48.090 --> 00:54:50.369
I can imagine harp players would too. What's
00:54:50.369 --> 00:54:53.809
the big bad habit that harp players pick up early,
00:54:53.989 --> 00:54:58.010
would you say? You're welcome. Yeah. So I think
00:54:58.010 --> 00:55:01.489
there's maybe two. There's a couple of habits.
00:55:01.610 --> 00:55:05.719
One would be that I think. It's so important
00:55:05.719 --> 00:55:09.539
to have a clear, strong, single -note embouchure.
00:55:09.760 --> 00:55:12.679
So I can tell somebody who's been playing for
00:55:12.679 --> 00:55:15.039
six months because they don't have that in almost
00:55:15.039 --> 00:55:17.320
every case. In fact, if they do have a good embouchure,
00:55:17.320 --> 00:55:20.199
then either – occasionally I run across somebody
00:55:20.199 --> 00:55:23.159
who started with my videos and they've actually
00:55:23.159 --> 00:55:24.760
got the embouchure and it's like, I learned it
00:55:24.760 --> 00:55:28.039
from you. So it is that important though. And
00:55:28.039 --> 00:55:31.059
they have kind of mush mouth. So instead of going
00:55:31.059 --> 00:55:37.860
– Which would be single notes. They go. Right.
00:55:37.960 --> 00:55:46.480
It would be all of that kind of. That's one thing.
00:55:46.519 --> 00:55:49.519
Now, along with that, the shape of their mouth
00:55:49.519 --> 00:55:54.500
isn't quite right. So there I have my tongue
00:55:54.500 --> 00:55:57.179
way forward. But it's really important that the
00:55:57.179 --> 00:56:00.980
that to create a resonating cavity in your mouth.
00:56:01.039 --> 00:56:03.989
Let me give you an example. Here's a bad player
00:56:03.989 --> 00:56:10.449
playing the one -hole draw on an A harp. Here's
00:56:10.449 --> 00:56:18.630
a good player. So all I did to go from is I dropped
00:56:18.630 --> 00:56:25.789
my jaw. If I add vibrato to it, now that's what
00:56:25.789 --> 00:56:27.889
Nat Riddles did. And that's when you start to
00:56:27.889 --> 00:56:31.400
get something that sounds right. Not being conscious
00:56:31.400 --> 00:56:34.820
of how important it is to, especially on the
00:56:34.820 --> 00:56:38.920
low notes, to shape your mouth, to create a resonating
00:56:38.920 --> 00:56:45.320
chamber. In combination. So that's what I sounded
00:56:45.320 --> 00:56:47.820
like probably in six months when I was playing.
00:56:50.699 --> 00:56:57.889
Now I'd be. I'd add a little vibrato. I'd have
00:56:57.889 --> 00:57:06.789
a resonating cavity. And the third and final
00:57:06.789 --> 00:57:10.389
thing would be not having any control over pitch
00:57:10.389 --> 00:57:13.690
when they bend. So sometimes you'll hear people,
00:57:13.789 --> 00:57:20.050
they'll say, okay, I'm bending a note. Now that's
00:57:20.050 --> 00:57:23.309
a three hole and the person has no control over
00:57:23.309 --> 00:57:34.690
that pitch. So instead of going, I used to joke
00:57:34.690 --> 00:57:36.909
and say, no, you don't want Middle Eastern Mary
00:57:36.909 --> 00:57:45.690
Had a Little Lamb. No, that's too far. Right.
00:57:46.210 --> 00:57:48.730
It's a different scale. That's not blues. That's
00:57:48.730 --> 00:57:51.949
not major scale. So getting some control over
00:57:51.949 --> 00:57:56.349
the pitches and really understanding where the
00:57:56.349 --> 00:58:02.349
blues pitches hide out. So sometimes I'll have
00:58:02.349 --> 00:58:07.710
people all go, baby, please don't go. Baby, please
00:58:07.710 --> 00:58:13.449
don't go. I've long been fascinated by kind of
00:58:13.449 --> 00:58:16.869
where that bluesiness hides out in pitch terms.
00:58:19.610 --> 00:58:24.130
Baby, please don't go. And what I'm really doing.
00:58:24.809 --> 00:58:26.489
because I've listened really hard to good blues
00:58:26.489 --> 00:58:30.329
singers. And one thing, one takeaway is it's
00:58:30.329 --> 00:58:32.989
not just a pitch halfway between major and minor,
00:58:33.010 --> 00:58:35.690
but it's kind of a, there's a little rising edge,
00:58:35.730 --> 00:58:46.829
right? There's a little... Not... That's overdoing
00:58:46.829 --> 00:58:51.090
it. So finding the, you know, the perfect...
00:58:51.550 --> 00:58:54.869
Zone is so important melodically as a blues player.
00:58:55.150 --> 00:59:01.949
And so if I had one takeaway exercise for a harmonica
00:59:01.949 --> 00:59:05.730
player, every day, take a couple of harps and
00:59:05.730 --> 00:59:16.289
play the blues scale on it. Go up and down. And
00:59:16.289 --> 00:59:26.139
then do it on your A harp. And make that last
00:59:26.139 --> 00:59:29.679
boom, that blues pitch sound good. If you do
00:59:29.679 --> 00:59:32.280
those things, you'll be a better player than
00:59:32.280 --> 00:59:35.440
you were. Just do them every day. Try your hardest.
00:59:35.500 --> 00:59:37.400
And within a couple of weeks, you'll sound better
00:59:37.400 --> 00:59:40.860
than you were. You'll find all of the links to
00:59:40.860 --> 00:59:43.699
learn from Adam, to buy his books, to buy his
00:59:43.699 --> 00:59:48.019
audio books in the liner notes here. A couple
00:59:48.019 --> 00:59:50.239
of wild card questions for you, Adam, before
00:59:50.239 --> 00:59:54.039
we let you go. Sure. How about... Your weirdest
00:59:54.039 --> 00:59:58.239
gig memory that still makes you chuckle when
00:59:58.239 --> 01:00:05.460
you're up at 2 a .m.? Well, it involves two things.
01:00:05.519 --> 01:00:07.760
It involves almost not getting paid, and it involves
01:00:07.760 --> 01:00:10.139
playing the race card in a strange way. So let
01:00:10.139 --> 01:00:12.840
me tell you this story. We had an unusual gig
01:00:12.840 --> 01:00:16.639
at a restaurant. It was kind of a gourmet restaurant
01:00:16.639 --> 01:00:19.679
run by a guy. The guy who ran it was also the
01:00:19.679 --> 01:00:22.480
chef. And it was somewhere like in Columbia County,
01:00:22.659 --> 01:00:25.820
New York. It was sort of not far upstate, but
01:00:25.820 --> 01:00:27.219
it was sort of on the way from New York City
01:00:27.219 --> 01:00:29.480
to Syracuse, kind of out in the boonies a little
01:00:29.480 --> 01:00:34.000
bit. And it was booked by our agency. And we
01:00:34.000 --> 01:00:36.480
had a full house. We played a, God, Sterling
01:00:36.480 --> 01:00:39.400
played a two and a quarter hour set. It was like
01:00:39.400 --> 01:00:42.420
one endless set. He would just, he drove me to
01:00:42.420 --> 01:00:44.320
the ground, which is to say we earned our money.
01:00:44.480 --> 01:00:47.039
And we had a great meal. We earned our money.
01:00:47.119 --> 01:00:50.849
And the people who paid, Many of them pay with
01:00:50.849 --> 01:00:52.929
a credit card. Now, you know, if you're booking
01:00:52.929 --> 01:00:55.230
a band, you're always supposed to have cash on
01:00:55.230 --> 01:00:57.289
hand to pay the band. That's what we were paid
01:00:57.289 --> 01:00:59.329
in, cash. It was stipulated in the contract.
01:00:59.969 --> 01:01:02.630
And the guy, I went back to collect the money
01:01:02.630 --> 01:01:04.969
when the show was over. Again, having played,
01:01:05.090 --> 01:01:07.170
I was exhausted, right? But I knew we'd given
01:01:07.170 --> 01:01:09.690
him good value of that full house. And he says,
01:01:09.789 --> 01:01:13.570
well, he says, I'll need to give you a check.
01:01:13.789 --> 01:01:15.769
We didn't take checks. We were paid with cash.
01:01:16.630 --> 01:01:20.599
And I said, I pointed that out. And then I said,
01:01:20.639 --> 01:01:23.260
I got up to the guy and I said, I got to be honest,
01:01:23.599 --> 01:01:26.679
Mr. Satan's not going to be happy if you try
01:01:26.679 --> 01:01:30.380
to pay us with a check. Like, I've got my black
01:01:30.380 --> 01:01:32.380
partner in there and he's like, who knows what
01:01:32.380 --> 01:01:35.820
Mr. Satan might do? This guy from Harlem. I didn't
01:01:35.820 --> 01:01:37.699
have to say any of it. I just said, Mr. Satan's
01:01:37.699 --> 01:01:41.000
not going to be happy. And he borrowed from his
01:01:41.000 --> 01:01:43.420
employees and he paid me in cash and we got out
01:01:43.420 --> 01:01:46.320
of there. I felt bad. I felt bad that I had to
01:01:46.320 --> 01:01:50.719
suggest potentially that, I mean, it wasn't his
01:01:50.719 --> 01:01:52.460
blackness. It was the fact that who knows what
01:01:52.460 --> 01:01:54.719
a guy named Mr. Satan is capable of doing. My
01:01:54.719 --> 01:01:57.380
point is, I used that card, which I had never
01:01:57.380 --> 01:02:00.320
been forced to play, and we got paid. Now, when
01:02:00.320 --> 01:02:02.599
I talked to Sterling about it, or Mr. Satan,
01:02:02.639 --> 01:02:04.780
as I called him, I talked about it. He said,
01:02:04.860 --> 01:02:07.820
oh, man, he told me stories, the kind of story
01:02:07.820 --> 01:02:10.260
that those old blues guys will tell you. It's
01:02:10.260 --> 01:02:12.440
like the time you're in a club, and it doesn't
01:02:12.440 --> 01:02:15.150
matter if it's a white guy or a black guy. sitting
01:02:15.150 --> 01:02:18.929
and he puts the boots up on the desk and lays
01:02:18.929 --> 01:02:22.610
a Luger or some kind of six shooter right down
01:02:22.610 --> 01:02:24.510
and says, I'm sorry, we can't pay you everything
01:02:24.510 --> 01:02:27.250
tonight. Sorry, we just didn't make the money
01:02:27.250 --> 01:02:31.170
we hoped to make. Those old day stories when
01:02:31.170 --> 01:02:33.250
you're not going to get paid and when they clearly
01:02:33.250 --> 01:02:35.010
did make the money, the guy's just not going
01:02:35.010 --> 01:02:38.349
to pay you. Sterling said, hell, I always assume
01:02:38.349 --> 01:02:40.570
I'm not going to get paid. It was so funny. His
01:02:40.570 --> 01:02:44.010
attitude was like. That's one of those things
01:02:44.010 --> 01:02:46.250
that happens. I was still kind of a straight
01:02:46.250 --> 01:02:49.570
shooter. This guy wasn't unethical. This guy
01:02:49.570 --> 01:02:53.409
was actually in over his head. The chef owner,
01:02:53.670 --> 01:02:57.090
he hadn't had much live music. That's all it
01:02:57.090 --> 01:03:01.170
was. So I felt bad that I pushed him that way.
01:03:03.630 --> 01:03:07.670
You played the race card, buddy. Hey, you had
01:03:07.670 --> 01:03:12.019
a good excuse. Who knows? Who knows what Mr.
01:03:12.119 --> 01:03:14.559
Satan might do? I mean, that's all I had to say.
01:03:14.699 --> 01:03:18.860
And you could see him getting nervous. He was
01:03:18.860 --> 01:03:22.960
nervous. And Mr. Satan was a peaceful guy. He
01:03:22.960 --> 01:03:26.159
did not carry weapons. You're welcome. You're
01:03:26.159 --> 01:03:29.280
welcome. Thanks, man. Sorry to cut you off there.
01:03:29.820 --> 01:03:32.300
It's such a pleasure having you here and hearing
01:03:32.300 --> 01:03:35.019
your stories. Really appreciate it. We'd love
01:03:35.019 --> 01:03:38.639
to have you back for another round at your leisure.
01:03:38.840 --> 01:03:41.820
Thank you very much. Thanks, Matt. I've got more
01:03:41.820 --> 01:03:44.340
stories up my sleeve. So next time, take care.
01:03:49.000 --> 01:03:52.800
That's a wrap on Talking Blues. If the blues
01:03:52.800 --> 01:03:56.519
speaks to you, hit subscribe, share the show,
01:03:56.739 --> 01:04:00.239
and let's keep the tradition alive. Until next
01:04:00.239 --> 01:04:02.940
time, keep it raw, keep it real.