The Highway 99 Blues Club, Seattle’s top blues and r&b venue for many years, is closing up for good—New Year’s Eve will be the last night for music in the fabled room there on the Seattle waterfront.
The music business is full of comings and goings, but this is tough news. When a music venue shuts its doors, that’s a bad thing. When a blues venue closes up shop, that’s a really bad thing—blues clubs are an endangered species. When one of the best blues venues on the West Coast packs it in, well, that’s a genuine tragedy.
When the Highway 99 opened, I was pretty much out of the music scene. I hadn’t had a band in years, and the unsolicited calls from other musicians and from venues to get out and play had become few and far between. I had other, more important priorities during that time, but I was creatively frustrated and really feeling the urge to make a comeback. But I wanted to resurface with a genuinely great blues band, made up of younger players I had never worked with before, that delivered an entertaining, tight show and played original material. That seemed like a very tall order, but that’s when the Highway 99 showed me the way.
In May of 2006 the Highway 99 hosted a medical-expenses benefit for Curtis Salgado. Lots of great players, most of whom I had known for years, showed up to play and show their support. When I got up to do a couple of numbers, two young guitarists who I only vaguely knew, Eric Daw and Steve Yonck, were set up behind me. As we started playing, I found myself listening to them—how they quickly found complimentary parts, how great they were playing, and how they each had different but totally legitimate blues guitar sounds.
A week later I had built a band around Eric and Steve—the first incarnation of the Mighty Titans of Tone. We pulled the band together by playing a regular weeknight gig at the Highway 99 for a couple of months, and then the club gave us the opportunity to headline on the weekends. We established ourselves at the Highway 99 and even recorded a live album there.
Five years later, I realized another major bucket-list goal of mine—being in a topflight country and western band. The phenomenal singer and guitarist Lisa Theo had come to me with an offer I couldn't refuse—to join her in a band that she was putting together that would pay tribute to the great male/female country music duet singing tradition. We branded ourselves the Titans of Twang. Once again I approached the Highway 99, and they got behind us. We did our first gigs there and then were off to the races for a very successful two-year run.
For the past several years the Highway 99 has let me host my Big Blue Revue shows there two or three times a year. These have featured the Mighty Titans of Tone, the Emerald City horns, and a parade of world-class guest artists, and they have been some of the most fun shows that I’ve ever been a part of. I’ve also had the thrill to have been invited to share the Highway 99 stage with a slew of great artists, including Magic Dick, Lee Oskar, Bob Corritore, and Rockin’ Johnny Burgin.
But what made the Highway 99 Blues Club a truly rare venue were its co-owners, Ed Maloney and Steve Sarkowsky, and their team. These guys genuinely love roots music, and they have worked their asses off to make the Highway 99 Blues Club at top national venue. They are known throughout the worldwide community of musicians for their passion, their professionalism, their integrity, their commitment to treating musicians as artists, their great employees, and for being a lot of fun to hang with. There is no way of telling how many lucky people have had their lives changed thanks to the Highway 99 Blues Club, but I can tell you that I am one of them.
Thank you for everything, Ed and Steve. Love you guys. If I can ever be of help to you, just ask. Hope to get the chance to work with you again down the road.
Otis Rush
I remember the first time I heard Otis Rush's "I Can't Quit You Baby." Few recordings have ever stunned me like that one. In the late 1980s the Slamhound Hunters, the band I was in, had the awesome privilege to open for and back up Otis for a three nights at the Fabulous Rainbow in Seattle. For me, standing three feet from Otis when he sang and played his upside-down guitar was a thrill of a lifetime. He was incredibly nice during the entire run and his performances were really joyful and musically cosmic. Otis Rush was born to play the blues, that is for sure. RIP.
Chicago Blues
Spent the afternoon in Chicago with a couple of heavy hitters and very fine people—Richard Shurman and the legendary Bill Boy Arnold—and then the evening with another great talent, Martin Lang. A great day!
BluesHarmonica.com
On a recent trip to the Bay Area, I had the pleasure of finally meeting David Barrett, a great harmonica player who is the genius behind BluesHarmonica.com, a phenomenal resource for players of the world's finest instrument. Had the honor of sitting down with David for a filmed discussion about the harp. Tons of fun. Here's a snippet that David posted to YouTube today.
Austin
When I lived in Austin back in the day, it seemed like the blues capitol of the world. It's still pretty heavy, decades later. Over the past two days I have been entertained by Kim Wilson, Rick Estrin, Jimmie Vaughan, Bob Corritore, Annie Raines, Sue Foley, Angela Strehli, Lou Ann Barton, Bob Margolin, Mud Morganfield, Lazy Lester, Marcia Ball, Emily Gimble, Derek O'Brien, Sarah Brown, Johnny Moeller, Jay Moeller, Kyle Rowland, and Mike Keller, among others. That's in just two days! This afternoon I guested at a really fun recording session with Kathy Murray, Bill Jones, and keyboard wizard Floyd Domino. Tonight it's back to Antone's for the great Barbara Lynn, and tomorrow I'll be at a table near the stage for the fabulous Paul Oscher's regular weekly gig at C-Boys. Whew!
30th annual waterfront blues festival
Thrilled to be part of the 30th annual Waterfront Blues Festival this July 4th in my new home of Portland. I'll be playing and singing in Bill Rhoades' 16th Annual Harmonica Blowoff, along with heavy harpers Mark DuFresne, Hank Shreve, Mike Moothart, and Mr. Rhoades himself. Many thanks to Bill and Peter Dammann for the opportunity. We play just before the huge fireworks spectacular, which is only appropriate. Excited about seeing many great shows at the West Coast's premier blues festival, including the Paul deLay tribute and the return of the always amazing Curtis Salgado.
Walter Horton
Today is the birthday of Walter Horton, one of the musicians who had the biggest influence on me. Walter grew up in Horn Lake, Mississippi and by the time he was a teenager he had moved a few miles north to Memphis. His childhood friend, bluesman Johnny Shines, told writer Peter Guralnick about meeting Horton when they were both youngsters in Mississippi:
“Walter would be sitting on the porch, blowing in tin cans, you know, he’d blow in tin cans, and he’d get sounds out of these things. You see, this harmonica blowing is really a mark for Walter, it’s not something he picked up—he was born to do it. And he’s gonna do that. I believe he’d crack tomorrow with a harp in his hand and he’d keep it in his hand. And probably you could never take that harp away from him.”
If you ever heard Horton blow the harp, you would have no problem believing that he could get music out of a tin can. Walter had a unique, very melodic approach to the blues harp that showed the strong influence of the amazing collection of great jug band harmonica players like Noah Lewis and Will Shade who were active in Memphis in the ‘20s and ‘30s. Walter claimed to have recorded with the Memphis Jug Band when he was nine years old; he definitely backed Little Buddy Doyle on that singer’s 1939 recordings. He worked outside of music through most of the 1940s, but in 1952 legendary producer Sam Phillips recorded several sides for Sun Records with Horton. One of them, “Easy,” is a bona fide blues harp masterpiece.
Horton moved to Chicago not long after and quickly became top harp man in a city loaded with harmonica players. Horton made many brilliant recordings of his own and contributed stellar harmonica work to sessions with Muddy Waters, Johnny Shines, Otis Rush, Jimmy Rogers, Sunnyland Slim, Otis Spann, and Robert Nighthawk, among others.
When I was going to college in NYC, I hitchhiked up to Boston several times to see Horton play at Joe’s Place, where he was backed up by Johnny Nicholas and his great band. Those shows were a total revelation to me—Horton’s sound was huge and gorgeous, and he greatly expanded my notion of what was possible on the harmonica. I also able to spend time with Walter at his table between sets. Walter was by nature a shy person, but after a few drinks he would let out with all kinds of outrageous statements. He gave me his address in Chicago and told me the amazing experience that would be mine if I ever showed up for a lesson. “I got a motherf----n’ x-ray machine, man, and I will slap that f----r up against my face and you will see EVERYTHING.” I did a show with him at the Rainbow Tavern in Seattle and he invited me to join him onstage for his last set, which no doubt will always stand as my most amazing musical experience. Walter was really something else.
Muddy Waters
MMuddy Waters turns 104 today.
The standard story behind the blues is that it was the acoustic folk music of the black field hands in Mississippi delta—with strong African and gospel antecedents—that spread from there to Memphis and Helena and St. Louis and then to Chicago, where southern-born black musicians created an urbanized version of the blues that served as the basis for rock and roll.
That’s all accurate. It also describes Muddy Water’s life journey.
He was born on a Mississippi plantation and raised by his grandmother, who called him “Muddy” because of his childhood habit of playing in the creek. He sang in church and played the harmonica. He grew to manhood and became a field hand on the Stovall Plantation near Clarksdale, where he fell under the spell of local bluesmen Charley Patton and Son House. Muddy was sharp and he was ambitious, and he soon had a profitable sideline outside of his field work selling moonshine and turning his cabin into the local juke joint and gambling house on the weekends.
He was restless, too. He visited Memphis and St. Louis, but always returned. Folkorist Alan Lomax recorded Muddy at his cabin in 1941 and 1942. He paid Muddy $10 a side and sent him two copies of a 78 record. When Muddy heard his own voice and guitar on the local jukebox, he was galvanized. “I just played it and played it and said, 'I can do it, I can do it.'" [When his plantation boss refused to give Waters a raise from 22-1/2 cents an hour to 27-1/2 cents, Muddy said goodbye to his grandmother and caught the train to Chicago, where a sister lived.
Within five years he was a mainstay of the Chicago blues scene and had formed a band—with Jimmy Rogers on guitar, Baby Face Leroy on drums, and Little Walter Jacobs on harp—that was perfecting an amplified, urban update of the patterns that Muddy had mastered as a young man. In 1948 Muddy recorded a tune for Aristocrat Records that Alan Lomax had waxed on him seven years earlier, but this time Waters’ slide guitar was amplified and Big Crawford added a loping acoustic bass part. “I Can’t Be Satisfied” was a surprise, monster hit. Aristocrat changed its name to Chess Records, and the Chicago blues sound was born.
Muddy is almost everyone’s favorite bluesman. He had incredible nuance and subtlety in his singing and playing, he carried himself onstage with profound authority, he assembled stellar bands, and his music had intensity. “His stuff had pep,” is how Willie Dixon put it. Waters’ legacy is a unique, soulful music that bridged the fields and the city and set the standard that, for better and sometimes worse, inspired an entire generation of rock and roll musicians.
Muddy Waters wasn’t just a bluesman. He literally WAS the blues.
James Cotton
I was seventeen the night I walked up the ramps at Eagles Auditorium in downtown Seattle to catch the James Cotton Blues Band. This was the (justifiably) legendary early Cotton band, with Luther Tucker on guitar, Francis Clay on drums, Alberto Gianquinto on piano, and Bobby Anderson on bass. I had been playing the trumpet in school bands for seven years, but in terms of live music, I was green, with a pair of fresh ears that were wide open. Looking back, I can’t believe how lucky I was to walk into that show at such a tender age when I was in no way prepared for the experience.
Cotton was only in his mid-thirties then, but he already had done a lifetime of gigs. Born in Tunica, Mississippi, Cotton moved in with Rice (Sonny Boy Williamson) Miller at the age of nine (!), and he inherited Miller’s band six years later when Miller moved to Chicago. He spent a half dozen years as part of the thriving Memphis blues scene, along with Howlin’ Wolf, Bobby Bland, Junior Parker and B.B. King, and he made his first recordings there for Sun Records. Then came a twelve-year stint with Muddy Waters. Cotton developed into not only a master harp player, but a truly great singer and showman as well. He was the whole package.
The night I saw him, Cotton had just recently formed his own band and gone out on his own. The young James was a fountain of energy onstage, pacing relentlessly back and forth throughout the entire set. Cotton somehow pulled off “The Creeper,” his complex, tour de force harp instrumental, while doing somersaults. He was the first performer I saw do the sixty-foot-cord stunt, and when he walked right past me popping that harp in and out of his mouth, I was a goner.
That showmanship and physicality ensured that I would never forget that Eagles show, but it was Cotton’s harp sound that changed my life. I had never heard amplified harp before. My trumpet playing had made me a confirmed wind-instrument player, and I did know a few things about tone, breath control, and phrasing, but I had never heard a sound like the one Cotton got out of those Marine Bands. In the middle of the show Cotton stepped on the reverb pedal and served up an impossibly deep slow blues in the echo chamber, a number he recorded as “Blues In My Sleep.” It was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard in my young life. It made me literally weak in the knees, and it left me determined to get on the trail to track it down. I went to the music store the next day and bought a C Marine Band, and I’ve been trying, for the most part fruitlessly, to figure out Cotton’s magical sound ever since.
I got to see him many, many times in a multitude of settings, cities, and venues. I got to open for him on a few occasions, and I was able to spend some time in his presence and to hear some of his stories. Such a privilege. I once opened for him at the Backstage in Seattle. I was excited not only because I was on the bill with me hero, but because Luther Tucker had rejoined James this tour of the West Coast. I got to hear them recreate some of that magic that whipped me so badly that night at Eagles Auditorium. That night, talking in the “dressing room” between sets I asked James if he’d do me a favor and let me get a photo of the two of us. Cotton was relaxing on a couch, and he good naturedly said “Sure, but I ain’t gettin’ up off of this damn sofa to do it.” So I slid in next to him and made myself comfortable, too.
A few years back tapes of a live gig in Montreal by the same Cotton band I heard that night at Eagles were issued on a pair of CDs. I love those recordings because when I put them on I’m instantly right back there, listening with fresh ears. In a few minutes, after I get some dinner, I’ll be settling down in another couch to listen to them again. Thanks for the energy, the soulfulness, and that beautiful sound, James.
