|
{PART I} A couple of weekends ago, I played three shows in Carteret County(Morehead City/Beaufort), two and a half hours to the north. My partner, guitarist and good friend for the past several years, "Dangerous Dave" Thompson, picked me and some equipment up early Friday evening and we drove up to a fleabag motel in Morehead City in order to be ready for our 10am Saturday Beaufort Music Festival duo show as "Makin' Whoopie," specializing in "hip tunes from the hip flask era," then our HighRollers R & B quintet show at 12:30pm and, finally, the duo HighRollers nightclub show 10pm Saturday - 2am Sunday. In the live blues game, you don't solve problems; you just trade them in. If playing the blues isn't trouble, then it isn't playing the blues. That weekend was typical. The drummer called me 3pm Friday from his car phone to tell me that he'd just been in a wreck and hurt his hand, so he was out. Finding someone else in Wilmington who would drive 2.5 hours for $70 would have been impossible. Thank God for free long distance from the church on Fridays. I called some musician friends in Carteret County, got in touch with a substitute drummer, and wheedled him into doing the show with us sight unseen. At about the time Dave and I were pulling into a convenience store in Morehead City for some beer, that drummer fell off of a festival bandstand and dislocated his knee. Near the end of our duo show Saturday morning, another stranger approached the bandstand and told us he'd been recruited by the second injured drummer to play with us. Par for the course. The bassist arrived on time, as did the Carteret native keyboard player who was filling in for our Wilmington saxman, who had taken a higher-paying gig some weeks earlier because he needs every penny to deal with upcoming leukemia surgery. Before the drummer showed up, we were joined by Al Liverman, head of the DownEast Blues Society in New Bern. Dave and I had stayed at Al's trailer earlier in the month while playing a New Bern Festival, and Al had been uncharacteristically lucid throughout our visit, but out-of-town drinking habits were with him in Beaufort. Shortly after our band show, which went better than we could possibly have hoped, Al passed out on a sidewalk near our party's outdoor cafe table, and a waitress accidentally stepped on his face. It had to hurt, but Al's a trooper when it comes to being a burden to himself and others. Three thirty-ish, it was time for me and Dave to stop by the nightclub, set up the P.A., and go back to the shitpit motel for a nap before showtime. Al woke up and crawled out from under Dave's van to tell us that he was on his own pending his girlfriend's arrival at the club around 10:30pm. Since we had stayed with him earlier in the month, we felt obliged to deal with him, but had no intention of letting him interfere with our mandatory shut-eye before the show. He passed out on the motel room floor and we drifted off to sleep. Dave's a lighter sleeper than I am, which is why he insists that I take Ni-Quil along on the road to block snoring, and Al woke him up using the phone for some idiotic phone call to his girlfriend, complete with detailed, repeated directions to the club and a request that she bring some chips along, a rather tacky wish considering that the club was attached to a restaurant. As I slumbered peacefully, Dave cussed Al out for disturbing him and then went back to a fitful sleep. The second Al/Dave interaction woke me up with a loud crash, which was Al hitting the wall. He had awakened, still drunk, disoriented, and sans coke bottle glasses, and staggered through the steps that in his own home would have taken him to the bathroom, and started to pee on Dave's suitcase. Dave had awakened, ascertained the situation, launched himself from his bed and kicked Al into the corner with both feet. It was uncomfortable, but Dave told me later that he'd remembered me saying that I regret everything I've ever done in anger and that that had kept him from pursuing the matter. This is the kind of bizarreness that comes with the blues. When I got involved in this music, some of the great representatives of previous generations of blues performers were still active, and I've seen some blues events. Once, I was sitting in a nice Wilmington restaurant with Richard "Big Boy" Henry, a Beaufort native who first recorded in 1947, then hooked into the Greenwich Village coffee house circuit with Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, and today appears on the cover of Block, the Dutch blues magazine, when he tours Europe, while B.B. King is relegated to page 36. Big Boy was telling me a story about drinking moonshine with Sonny and Brownie and losing Sonny Terry, who was blind, on the subways of Manhattan when dinner arrived. Now you have to understand that Big Boy and Sonny Terry's generation was a very loose, wide open generation of bluesmen. They were marked men and women, radically different from and freer than their peers. As an example, let me relate an anecdote I heard from longtime Columbia Records executive John Hammond, who discovered Bessie Smith, Benny Goodman, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springstein, Aretha Franklin, and not me, though I did sit next to him at a couple of bigtime Republican fundraisers when I was a teenager(another story). While hunting talent for the legendary 1938 "Spirituals to Swing" concert, Hammond went to Durham, North Carolina in search of blues guitarist/vocalist Blind Boy Fuller. Fuller couldn't be booked for the show because he was in jail, charged with shooting at his wife. An inquisitive man, Hammond had to ask the incarcerated blind man exactly how he had managed this attempted felony. Blind Boy explained that he had stood in the center of a room turning slowly and firing intermittently, missing the woman who should have been able to find an iron skillet or something and come out on top in such a confrontation, but who instead had just run around the perimeter of the room hollering, "Jesus, please help me!" In any event, John Hammond thought that Blind Boy Fuller was too nasal and whiny to start with, and so was content to go to his neighbor, Sonny Terry, and book him for the show instead. Given the fact that Terry and Fuller were neighbors, one has to wonder whether Durham had an entire block or neighborhood reserved for blind blues musicians at the time, and to picture the nightlife, gardens, and other features of said neighborhood before returning to the object, Sonny Terry, and his friend of later years, Big Boy Henry, who shared that table at Roy's Riverboat Landing with me around 1991. As we prepared to eat, I noticed that the arthritic Big Boy had to use his left hand to close the fingers of his right hand around his fork. As explanation, Big Boy peered at me from under his fisherman's cap through those weak eyes and thick, hornrim glasses and said, "Lord have mercy, Lovewhip; this arthritis got me stiffed up every place but one." {To Be Continued} Written By: Arthur "Love Whip" Shuey |