****this article reminded of my old stompin' grounds in the hills of Quebec's Eastern Towmships. Makes me positively homesick!









Delta Force



The dishevelled duo behind the Fat Possum label have fought to bring old bluesmen to a new, young audience. But it's even harder keeping their battle-scarred artists alive. Richard Grant reports from deepest Mississippi



Sunday November 16, 2003

The Observer



The offices of Fat Possum Records are located with wild incongruity between a police station and a Baptist church in the small, god- fearing town of Water Valley, Mississippi, where the lawns are deep and green and possession of beer is a criminal offence. I walk through the unmarked front door and past two weasel pelts on a hat rack and ask how things have been going. 'No worse than usual,' says Matthew Johnson, 34, the dishevelled, hard-drinking, fiercely iconoclastic founder of Fat Possum. He is limping around with two pins sticking out of his toes, having lost his temper, kicked a wall, broken two toes, ignored them as they healed crooked, then finally gone to hospital to have them re-broken and pinned, with little yellow plastic balls on the pinheads.



'We've signed this new guy Charles "Cadillac" Caldwell and we're real excited about him.' Trouble is, he's been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. 'A touch of the pancreatic,' is how he puts it. 'It's so fucking sad. He's only 60.'



Paul 'Wine' Jones, another of the ageing Mississippi bluesmen to whom Fat Possum's fortunes are tied, has been jailed for drunk driving again, halting the production of his new album. 'At least he didn't kill anybody,' says Bruce Watson, 39, the other half of Fat Possum, an irreverent preacher's son who produces most of the records and keeps a hand grenade by his desk. Two of Fat Possum's best-known artists, R.L. Burnside and T-Model Ford, have gone to prison for killing people and T-Model served his time on a chain gang.



Johnny Farmer killed his wife but that was an accident; he was trying to shoot a deer. He is refusing to record any more songs because blues is the devil's music. It brings a curse on everyone who plays it and then you burn in hell.



'T-Model Ford got robbed for 2,000 dollars the other day,' says Johnson. 'Then someone threw a brick through his window. Then the 88- year-old white woman who was teaching him how to read and write got raped and beaten to death. This all went down in Greenville (Mississippi), which is one of the worst shitholes in America for violence and crack and degenerate goddamn madness. We'd like to get T- Model out of there but he won't leave.'



What about R.L. Burnside? From the very beginning, Fat Possum has operated amid chaos and disaster, racking up terrible debts, going through hideous legal wrangles and distribution nightmares, and all the while dealing with a troublesome, mutinous crew of musicians. R.L. Burnside is no slouch when it comes to trouble - Johnson has lost count of how many cars he has destroyed, for example, or the number of times he has failed to show up at the recording studio - but as their bestselling artist Burnside has done more than anyone to keep the leaky, listing vessel Fat Possum afloat.



Come On In, an album of Burnside's blues remixed with hip-hop beats, sold 180,000 worldwide and furnished a very lucrative song to The Sopranos soundtrack album. Ass Pocket of Whiskey, a Burnside collaboration with the young, punk-influenced rockers the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion sold more than 100,000 and opened up a whole new audience - young, white and hip - for the kind of raw, stomping, electrified Mississippi blues played by the old black men on Fat Possum. 'R.L. doesn't want to do any more tours, or learn any new songs, or write any new songs, or basically even pick up a guitar. But if I drive up to his house he might sing a few lines into a tape recorder,' says Watson. 'I can't blame him. He's 76 years old, he had a heart attack eight months ago and he's making good money just sitting on his front porch - way better money than he's ever made in his life.'



Nor is R.L. Burnside eager to talk to any more journalists, but Johnson and Watson have considered my request and come up with a plan. They hand me an envelope containing $2,000 in cash and a map to Burnside's house. 'This is his latest royalty payment,' says Watson. 'I'll call him and say you're going to deliver it and you'd like to talk to him. He may talk, he may not, but whatever you do, make sure you give him the money personally. If any of his kids say they'll give it to him, you hold on to the money and find R.L. In fact, I wouldn't even mention to any of his kids that you've got two grand in your pocket.'



R.L. Burnside's total earnings were in the low six figures last year. In the past 10 years he has earned well over half a million dollars. The entrance to his property is marked by two 50-gallon oil drums spilling over with rubbish and forming a small lake of rubbish about 10 feet wide. Elsewhere, in the front yard, there are stray beer cans and dirty nappies floating in mud puddles, mangy dogs and prowling cats, seven vehicles in various states of disrepair, and in the thick, steamy summer heat the whole place is buzzing with flies.



The Burnside clan, about 15 or 20 of them, and sometimes upwards of 25, live in two trailers on a quarter acre of weeds and bare, coppery earth in the backwoods hill country near Chulahoma, Mississippi. The larger trailer is grimy but sturdy-looking, with a solid wooden front porch. The smaller trailer is cracked, mouldering and swaybacked, connected for electricity by an orange extension cord snaking across the yard.



Leaning against one of the cars are three young men with jheri curls and baseball caps, drinking big 40-ounce bottles of Cobra malt liquor at 9.30 in the morning. I nod and say hello. They scowl back and say nothing. A little girl scampers up from under the porch and runs into the big trailer shouting, 'White man here!'



R.L. comes lumbering out onto the porch, looking old and tired, wearing mud-smeared trousers held up with braces and a checked shirt fraying at the collar. His eyes are bloodshot. The pupils have a thin outer rim of blue. Big, dark liver spots extend back from his cheekbones to his ears. 'Bruce called me,' he growls. 'Two thousand, right?' 'That's right. Have you got time to talk?' 'Little bit I reckon.'



I hand over the money and get him to sign a hand-written receipt. 'Has Fat Possum been paying you right?' I ask. 'Yeah, they done right by me, I reckon, but the money goes quick. I got 12 kids and you need a damn computer to count my grandkids. Then we got all these second cousins showing up and every one of them needs money.'



'Do any of your kids have jobs?'



'Ain't much work around here. One of my sons plays a little music.'



'Which one of these vehicles are you driving?'



'That van over there except it needs a new fuel pump. Only one of these that runs is my grandson's over there.'



>From inside the trailer comes a terrible racket of screaming

children, barking dogs, a man and a woman yelling at the children and each other, making liberal use of the oedipal noun, and a television game show turned up full blast. R.L. Burnside sits on his plastic porch chair as calm and motionless as a stone Buddha, then his hand flashes out to swat a fly on his leg. I remember something Bruce Watson told me about Burnside and lethal snakes. 'I heard you used to grab rattlesnakes and copperheads by the tail and snap them like a whip to break their necks.'



He brightens and smiles. 'Man, I was hell on them snakes,' he says. 'One time a copperhead got under my son's bed. I told him to go and grab it. He said, "Daddy, is it poisonous?" I told him, "No son, that's just an old blacksnake. He won't hurt you. You go in there and grab him behind the head." So he went on and grabbed up that snake and threw it out. Then I told him, "That was a copperhead!"' He laughs his deep, deep chuckle, heh heh heh, repeats the punchline and laughs some more.



How old was his son was at the time? 'Oh he was up around 13, 14 years old. I got him good with that one.'



I ask him about the man he killed and he gives a variation of his standard response: 'I didn't mean to kill nobody. I just meant to shoot the sonofabitch in the head and two times in the chest. Him dying was between him and the Lord.'



It happened at a dice game long ago; Burnside had beaten the man out of $400. In court he claimed self-defence, although one of the bullets entered the back of the victim's head. Burnside was working for a powerful white plantation owner at the time, driving a tractor. His boss wanted him back at work so he fixed things with the judge and R.L. ended up serving only six months.



As a young man, as part of the great black migration away from sharecropping, lynching parties and Jim Crow laws, Burnside went north to Chicago. Muddy Waters had married his first cousin and he would go over to their house two or three times a week and play the blues with Muddy. He left Chicago because five family members, including his father and two brothers, were murdered there in eight months. He came back down to Mississippi and worked various farm jobs for 40 years, playing the blues at house parties, juke joints and local festivals, until Matthew Johnson heard him one night and decided to record him.



Now he has toured all over America and the world, appeared on television, earned a small fortune, and none of it seems to have changed him in the slightest. Has he enjoyed his musical success? 'Well, there's a lot of travelling and fussing around but I can always use money around here.'



After his heart attack he gave up drinking on doctor's orders. At first he couldn't imagine life without alcohol but now he doesn't miss it. Nor does he miss playing music, an activity that was intimately connected with drinking. He tried playing a little recently, for the first time in more than a year, and it felt like he had to learn all over again. 'I'm getting too old for all that,' he says and gets to his feet, signalling that the interview is over.



One last question: how does he like the remixes of his music that Fat Possum has put out? 'At first I didn't like them too much,' he says. 'Then I saw how much money they were making and I got to liking them pretty well.'



Matthew Johnson is driving the country roads around Water Valley in his big, dented, Chevrolet pick-up truck, sipping on a cocktail, rolling through the woods and fields and swamps with no destination in mind and the stereo turned up loud. To really hear a piece of music he has to take it for a test drive. For the third time he plays a new song Fat Possum has been working on, a collaboration between R.L. Burnside and Kid Rock, the white hard-rock rapper from Detroit who has sold 17 million records in four years. Burnside's guitar and vocals have been sampled and mixed with a beat, some overdubs and a verse and chorus from Kid Rock. Neither artist gave them much to work with but the styles blend in an ear-catching way and song is full of energy and attitude. 'Fuck yeah,' says Johnson. 'It sounds good, doesn't it? Working with R.L. has taught us all about squeezing out the last piece of toothpaste from the tube.'



When Johnson and Watson first started doing rock and hip hop collaborations with Burnside they came under heavy attack from purists. It gave Johnson great pleasure to outrage the 'blues geeks', as he calls them, but that wasn't his motivation. For the label to survive it was essential to put out new music by its best-known artist, and R.L. was not learning or writing any new songs. Johnson was also looking for a way to make the blues relevant to a young audience, by framing its essential feeling in a modern context. 'I was never in this as an archivist or a folklorist, recording these guys for posterity. It was the energy and intensity that attracted me.'



In 1991 Matthew Johnson was 22 years old, drinking like a maniac, getting into crazy scrapes, doing a lot of hard drugs with loaded pistols and vodka bottles strewn across the table. He was also attending the University of Mississippi on an occasional basis and had written some reviews for a blues magazine - 'all these crappy bands from Sweden and New Jersey, doing covers of "Sweet Home Chicago".'



One Sunday he drove out to Junior Kimbrough's juke joint, a rough- hewn saloon and dance shack out in the woods, where R.L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough played the blues until dawn to a moonshine-swilling crowd. Johnson was blown away by the raw power of the music and decided immediately that it needed recording. He had a $400 student loan cheque coming in and that was how Fat Possum began.



Now he is 34 and looks closer to 43, with a weary, distracted, slightly deranged air and a deep, dark, razor-cutting sense of humour, although not half as dark as R.L. Burnside's. A sensible man would have given up long ago. A less scrappy, tenacious and resourceful one would have been put under by bankers and lawyers. By the mid-1990s Fat Possum was a million dollars in debt. One year Johnson's bank charged him $14,000 in bounced cheque fees alone, at $17 per cheque. For two years Fat Possum was unable to release any music because of a legal battle with its distributor, Capricorn Records.



Junior Kimbrough, perhaps Fat Possum's greatest discovery, a man who reconfigured the blues into a kind of lo-fi, backwoods trance music, was the first artist to die. He left 36 children, many of whom were convinced Fat Possum owed them money. Then Asie Payton died, after only one recording session, and Johnny Farmer quit, and R.L. Burnside went into retirement, and so on.



The only new discovery they've made in years is Charles 'Cadillac' Caldwell, a retired factory worker and hound breeder who still sings the rough, old-time blues, with a moaning, shouting, spine-chilling vocal style, but it looks as though his first album will be his last. 'Basically the blues was dying when we started and now it's over,' says Johnson. 'The only guy we've got who's still running strong is T-Model Ford. There's some weird Dorian Gray shit happening with him. He's 80 now and he just keeps getting stronger.'



Last year T-Model Ford recorded a new album and played 150 shows. Towards the end of the tour he was complaining of blood in his urine and everyone assumed it was prostate cancer. They took him to the doctor who made an inspection and announced that T-Model, at the age of 79, had managed to contract gonorrhea.



Walking with a cane and his tall, gap-toothed, mentally impaired drummer Spam following, T-Model Ford makes a grand entrance into the Fat Possum offices, flashing his false teeth in a big, charismatic smile.



'I'm the Taildragger from Greenville, Muz-sippi! Ooo-weee, I make the pretty womens jump and shout! They took my gun but I got my knife and I'll cut a motherfucker too. Can't read, can't write, I don't argue with folks about the Bible but I love the womens! I love 'em cause of that little split they got. I got three womens right now and they won't let ol' T-Model alone. I'm a bad man! I can't get around like I used to but if I can reach a motherfucker, look out! I knocked out that Winehead Jones with this.'



He raises up his clenched right fist and bicep, which look as though they belong to a strong man in his fifties. He did indeed knock Paul 'Wine' Jones unconscious with one blow, during a squabble over whose white woman belonged to whom. Tomorrow T-Model is scheduled to play at a festival in Canada, a country he pronounces variously as 'Canna', 'Canny' and 'Can'. Last time he went there, he got up on stage and said, 'Hey, it's great to be overseas in Germany. I love the womens over here.' He also speaks highly of 'the little white women from Jay-pan'. T-Model never went to school, can't read a map or a roadsign and has no geographical sense whatsoever.



Before Fat Possum found him, he had spent his life in Deep South logging camps and on the chain gang for killing a man with a 25-cent pocketknife in a bar-room altercation. He fathered 26 children and started playing the guitar on the night his fifth wife left him, at the age of 58.



I ask T-Model if I can hear him play. 'Let's go,' he says and we get into his big blue 1979 Lincoln Continental and drive across the railroad tracks to a corner house in a part of Water Valley I have never seen before. An old man with one eye and no teeth is in a wheelchair on a rotting front porch, trying to attach a prosthetic leg to his stump. 'Hey Pete!' yells T-Model. 'Y'all got any elec- quickery up in there? We fixin' to play a little music.'



'Hey bluesman, you come on. We got electric,' says Pete and then his leg falls off with a clatter. 'I ain't never gonna get used to this damn fool leg.'



T-Model gets out his guitar and amp and the bottle of Jack and sets himself up on a chair on the porch. The music and the whiskey soon draw a crowd of afternoon drunks and a few curious mothers and small children. T-Model is flashing his smile, playing his rough, eccentric blues with raucous exuberance: 'I wanna rock you baby, till I drop dead in your arms.' There is violence and strangeness in his music, but no hint of the sadness or pain traditional in the blues. Matthew Johnson describes him as 'a happy-go-lucky psychopath'.



T-Model's life reads like a horror story. At the age of eight, his father beat him so badly between the legs with a piece of firewood that he lost a testicle. His ankles are scarred from the chain gang. His neck is scarred where one of his wives slashed his throat. He has been shot, stabbed, pinned under a fallen tree with a broken ribcage, beaten unconscious with a metal chair. He watched his first wife go off with his own father, watched another die after she drank poison to try and induce a miscarriage. The only woman he ever really loved poisoned him at the breakfast table; he woke up in hospital that afternoon and never saw her again.



'I play the blues,' he says during a whiskey break. 'But I don't ever get the blues. After my sister died I prayed to God to please let me live like a tree. Tree don't care if them other trees is dyin'. Tree don't care about nothin'. When they raped and killed that white lady, I felt bad - she was a good old white lady - but I didn't let it get me down. I don't let nothin' get me down.' Most people can't do this - stay happy because they've decided to be happy, no matter what - but it seems to work for T-Model.



As the sun goes down, three men are inside T-Model's Lincoln, rifling it for something to steal. Vehicles are drawing up to buy crack from a young man in a 'Jesus' T-shirt. An old man with a bowler hat and mad yellow eyes is coming towards me, trying to polish a peach on his leg as if it were an apple and leaving long smears of juice on his red slacks. He grabs at my shirt and demands money for gin. Another man is threatening Spam with a wine bottle, and T-Model is yelling, 'Get your hand out my pocket, motherfucker, I already give you two dollar!'



I pack up the gear, get T-Model behind the wheel, Spam in the back and we scramble out of there with everyone yelling and grabbing at the car. 'Man, they some beggin' motherfuckers around here,' says T- Model. He drops me off at the Fat Possum offices and drives off towards the trailer at the recording studio, where he and Spam are staying.



An hour later, I recount this to Matthew Johnson and he says, 'So you don't know for sure that T-Model is in the trailer? We'd better drive out there and check.' There's no sign of T-Model at the trailer or at the Texaco station where he has been courting a woman.



'I can't believe he'd go back to that porch,' I say.



'Are you kidding?' says Johnson. 'That's his normal, everyday reality. I'll bet he's back there, happy as a clam.' And sure enough, there he is, about three-quarters drunk and playing to a bigger crowd.



What does a blues label do when the blues is over? With the help of parent company, Epitaph, who saved them from bankruptcy in 1996, Fat Possum managed to get Solomon Burke, the great deep soul singer, to record a collection of songs written for him by Bob Dylan, Tom Waits, Elvis Costello, Van Morrison, Brian Wilson and others. The album, Don't Give up on Me , won a Grammy and has sold 300,000 worldwide.



Johnson also managed to sign The Black Keys, a lo-fi punk blues band, akin to The White Stripes. Last year was Fat Possum's most successful but it didn't furnish them with much confidence. Solomon Burke was a once-in-a-lifetime coup, they almost lost The Black Keys - and nothing else they released made any real money.



Matthew Johnson and Bruce Watson spend their days scrambling and hustling, trying to cook up new schemes to stay in business. Having released every scrap of music recorded by the late Junior Kimbrough, they are now trying to put together a Kimbrough tribute album. Johnson is trying to persuade the RZA, the hip hop producer from Wu- Tang Clan, to contribute to the new R.L. Burnside remix project, and coax a little more out of Kid Rock. Fat Possum has signed Grandpa Boy, a new band formed by Paul Westerberg from The Replacements. From a bankrupt record label, they have bought a vault of southern rural 1960s blues, so Fat Possum can keep putting out great blues.



'I saw a guy on TV juggling a meat cleaver, a tomato and a bowling ball,' says Johnson. 'That's how I feel most of the time but what else am I going to do? When I started out, I didn't know what I was doing. Now I don't know how to do anything else. I don't have any choice but to carry on and hope a meat cleaver doesn't slice off my toes.'



· While this issue was going to press, Charles 'Cadillac' Caldwell died.

Hello Grandfather. I know I should be spending more time on my music, and I'm glad to report I had the rare treat of playing music with a long-time collaborator on Saturday night. There aren't a lot of people around that I was playing with thirty years ago. Butch Coulter comes from Lennoxville, the next town down from our home town, Sherbrooke. He was passing through Toronto from his home in Hamburg, Germany and we did a little house concert at the Downtown Jazz office.



It was just like the duo gigs we did in Czech Republic and Germany last year (I'm going to try to do that again with Butch in April or May). We had a small but very appreciative audience. I'd rather have a small crowd that was listening than a big crowd that wasn't. These folks came to hear music (and, as Elaine Overholt said, who want to love you). Thank goodness Butch brought a gang.



There were no music industry honchos as we had the last couple of times though somebody said Gord Downie was going to come. He didn't. But we had, I'm sure, a few people who do not necessarily care for blues, walk out of there grinning from ear to ear. Actually there was one guy in the audience I'll never forget. Mory the Sockman. He's promoting a big blues "Superbowl" extravaganza on Jan 31 and he was wanting me to promote his event, which I'm glad to do. It's my mandate, though the only events I have trouble promoting are my own. What a character! He was giving the ladies socks with their astrological sign embroidered. It turns out he's a super blues fan who's been keeping the feet of local bluesguys warm for years - starting with Downchild. And he had a great compliment for me - he said wouldn't normally enjoy just a guitar and harmonica (he like a rockin' blues band) but that he thoroughly enjoyed our show.



On Monday night I hooked up with Butch at the Orbit Room. Kevin Breitt was playing with Sisters Euclid with John Dickie as special guest. A little bird told me that they've recorded an album to be released on NorthernBlues just before mine. That's a good thing, I think, because if any reviewers might have thought that my album isn't mainstream blues enough, I think this work will remind people that there are many kinds of blues. Kevin is playing like he always does - on the edge, and that's what people love about him. John Dickie sang three songs - I guess they're all on the album. Can't wait to hear it. Rod Phillips was there - I only wish he'd been up on stage playing that B3. It's a "house organ," and every organist in town wants to play a club that has a great B3. Rod and I (with Mike Fitzpatrick) have done a lot of gigs together and I always feel bad for Rod moving around that huge Leslie and a not-so-small organ. I'll always remember the summer I played the jazz festival and had two nights in the small tent with organ supplied. Rod looked so smug as the rest of us were loading in and he had nothing but a briefcase. But now that I think of it, the Leslie never worked properly. One night it wouldn't change speeds and the next night it wouldn't spin at all. Rod still sounded great.



I always try to includes some kind of TIP for musicians when I post a blog, and I may have passed this along already but I was told at the OCFF conference that the best time to call a local radio show host before you play in their town is two weeks in advance. That's to set up an in-studio interview or at least to remind them to play a track and promote your show. Speaking of tips for musicians, this is a goldmine.

Los Straightjackets come to town

Hello Grandfather. You would not believe the show I just came from at the Horseshoe Tavern. This was a surf band playing instrumental versions of the corniest Christmas songs. They are called Los Staightjackets and they were hillarious! Surf music is this loud, twangy sound that wasn't invented till long after you had passed from this mortal coil. The fellow introducing the songs spoke an unrecognizable, vaguely spanish, dialect ...except when he came to the English words, they would sound completely normal.



The band wore rubber masks like some professional wrestlers do these days (wrestling, also, has changed considerably from what you may remember). Then, as the band plays the surf version of "Frosty The Snowman," three scantily-clad dancers strut onto the stage and feign a snowball fight then pull out a cardboard cut-out of a big saw and cut down a Christmas tree and take it home to decorate. They come back with the tree wrapped in tinsel and they re-appear every few songs with increasingly revealing outfits. As the girls began to bare all you noticed that a couple of them had gotten really carried away at the tattoo parlour (yes, women get tattoos nowadays).



I figured you would enjoy hearing about some of the great bands that pass through Toronto, but things have changed a lot since you arrived in Sherbrooke, Quebec in 1918 as a musician, bandleader and then theatre-owner. I wish I had known you in those days, but all I remember is a frail old man, dying of prostate cancer and suffering considerably. Do you know the medical establishment has come to the conclusion that anything they do to treat this disease will not prolong your life much longer than it would take to die from the disease. All the various treatments did was put you through a lot of unnecessary misery in your final days. Best to just let it take its course. I can only imagine what kind of surgery and/or treatments you went through.



One of my loyal readers has asked why I've started with the "grandfather thing." I used to just write the occasional journal entry about my struggles in the music scene, trying to make a record, etc. But I was rambling on and on, showing off all the important people I knew or saw - sometimes passing along some good tips for people that might be on the same journey as me, but mostly blowing my own horn. I needed to be a bit more *serious* (not my nature). Then I came upon a great photo of you lately and want to scan it and make a nice big print and give it to my sister for Christmas. The photo shows you in a very jovial mood - I'm very anxious to show it to the rest of the family, too. Then, right around the same time, I was at the Aboriginal Music Awards. It took place in a big fancy theatre and they began the evening with a prayer...and the prayer was directed to "Grandfather". It was a very moving prayer and it made a big impression on me. I needed to have a little more respect for my elders. And you certainly commanded respect - if not fear. Amazing how things come together like that. I think adressing my late-night ramblings to you will force a little clarity and brevity. I know you did not suffer fools gladly. This will be a good thing to keep me focused.



So what else have I done lately. Well, on Saturday night I went to see Duke Robillard. He is a guitar player's guitar player. And his band was so tight! You only get this tight when you rehearse a lot or you play all the time (and I don't know anybody over 20 who rehearses a lot). These guys are just continuously on the road. I was introduced to Duke on the break but he was not very talkative. I found out tonight that he was not happy about the booming bass that was leaking through the floor from the club downstairs. Still, he played great and I was making mental notes about how he had worked out the intros to some songs and other arrangement ideas. He'll be back in town as our special guest at the Maple Blues Awards. He's won a couple already and he's once again nominated for "International Artist of the Year". Doug James played some amazing sax, though I still miss Duke's other sax player, Gordon Beadle (Sax Gordon) who is one of those musicians that when he starts into a solo, it's a comittment - his promise to you, the listener, that this solo is going to go someplace. And it always does, usually building to a high sustained climax that brings an audience to their feet.



Hey I promised in my last post that I was going to do some music everyday between now and December 22 (which is when I'm supposed to be finished this album). But not tonight. Time for some zzzzzzzzzzz's. Goodnight, Granpa

November 2003 Update

Hello Grandfather. It's been a very busy month but I'm ashamed to say not much of it spent on my own music. My R.C.P. (Record Company President) is trekking about in Southeast Asia and I've promised him a finished (if not mixed) album when he gets back on December 22. I promise starting Monday I will work on the album *every* day - note that I didn't specify how much time every day.



Still, I shouldn't be discouraged because we are progressing. I just had a mild disagreement with my son Joel as he is is installing MIDI drivers so that he can work on a remix of one of my tunes. That was one of the things I had hoped I might include on this album. If he wants to be a producer re-mixer, who better to remix than his own dad??? Actually, I'm probably not his first choice of candidates for remixing and he'd hate it if he knew I was talking about him but not to worry, he'll never be up here reading this. The other thing I wanted to do was have an instrumental track and I don't yet. Well, maybe. I wanted to do an instrumental version of "God Bless the Child" with Harry Manx on mohan veena but in the end, I ended up singing on it. I should listen to it without a vocal and see...



Hey, Joel just called me back to figure out the MIDI configuration and I fired up "God Bless", turned off the vocal and It sounded pretty sweet - I could record another guitar over that and it might work! I'll let you know how it turned out.



I haven't spent hardly any time on the recording in the last month, and haven't been hustling gigs either. But on Monday, I got to play with a fabulous group of musicians - I had Ken Whiteley, Mark "Bird" Stafford, Chris Murphy, Gary Kendall, Lily Sazz and the irrepressible Bucky Berger on drums. He's the drummer that's always smiling ear to ear, and I told him at the end what a great honour it was to be on the same stage as his smiling face. Likewise for many of the other players. The only other time I played with Ken was a hotel room in Sudbury.



A strange thing happened when I was standing at the door of the Silver Dollar. A street person was talking to Linda Turu and when I came up, he asked me what size pants I wore. Trying to be friendly, I said "40" and he said "well these are 42 but they look like they'll fit you. Ten dollars." I looked at the pants and they were brand new - looked like a sample with tags but no label. Nice thick material, too. Some might think it's bad karma or something but I look at it as a gift from the gods. I've been needing a new pair of pants for months (some friends might say years) and I just had a good feeling about these pants. Here's the really weird thing: As he walks away with my $10, I say "what's in the box?" and he runs back and says "CDs - you can have them for five dollars" I look in the box and there's about ten or twelve Jay Douglas CDs (did I mention I had just shared the stage with Jay Douglas, too!). I walked down Spadina with the homeless guy and Derek Andrews, "raison d'etre" of the gig at the Dollar, to find the spot where he picked up the box. We expected to find a car broken into, but there was nothing. Next day, we found out Jay probably left his car unlocked. The homeless guy came back at the very end of the evening, as we were packing up, and now he wanted to sell me a bottle of perfume and he was relentless. He would not stop until I was about to drive away, then he turned away in disgust. I told him "you already got fifteen bucks from me!" (I had given him another five for the CD's). Anyway, did I mention the pants fit perfectly.



Enough about me - let's talk about some of the great music I got to hear this month. Starting with last night, I was at the Thee-a-tah - more your style, Grandpere...balconies all around. This theatre is recent construction, I think, but with great respect for theatre tradition. It's called the Bluma Appel Theatre. The show was "Cookin' at the Cookery" a musical about the life of Alberta Adams. Jackie Richardson is the name immediately associated with it but I was equally and surprisingly knocked out by her co-star, Montego Glover.



After the show I dropped in at The Reservoir Lounge to see my old buddy Scott Cushnie, "Professor Piano." He was playing those old swing favourites with Bradley and the Bouncers (they play every Wednedsday and they pack the place). Scott was in good form - wants me to hear his soon-to-be released CD. I asked him to come and do an evening with me at the Downtown Jazz House Concert. We can only fit 30 or so, but it's perfect because it has a little PA system and a real piano.



COMMERCIAL: If the date isn't past by the time you read this...Saturday, Dec 13 my guest is harp player Butch Coulter. He's come all the way from Hamburg Germany and plays all over Europe with Long John Baldry. One time he got me to sub for Papa John King backing up Baldry at a club in Ornageville, I think. I didn't get to meet the Tall Guy until we hit the stage and the first thing he said to me after we'd played a couple of tunes was "You'll have to turn down there, Brian" - in a big booming voice. This is still the commercial, anyway. Don't forget, 82 Bleecker St, one block east of Sherbourne just north of Carleton. Show is 8-11pm. Reservations appreciated 416-928-2033.



Did I mention I've become a peace activist, grandfather. Well, not activist - but at least supporting those that are doing the real work by giving then a little entertainment and disversion. I played a benefit concert for Project Ploughshares in Hamilton. It was a beautiful gig - in a cathedral, no less. Michelle & Lily backed me up. There was a fabulous young jazz band there called the Hamilton All-Stars or something like that.



Last week I dropped in to Healeys (where I will be hosting the Toronto Blues Society Guitar Workshop on Sunday Afternoon, February 29.) It was Jeff Healey's regular Thursday Night and his special guest was James Cotton. I arrived pretty late and I've got the feeling that the energy was winding down instead of up. I didn't hear much, really



I finished my last post saying I was heading out to hear Popa Chubby and that I would be playing a couple of dates in Stratford with Harry Manx. Well I never got to see Popa Chubby (I'm so embarrased to say why - I didn't realize it was an early show and I got there late). I did however have a great time spending the next few days with Harry Manx, in a luxurious "boutique" style hotel called the Mercer Hall Inn. The audiences were great and I received the nicest compliment from a great singer called Ally who lives out that way. She said "I could name every song in your set and could tell what the story was for each one - that doesn't happen to me very often". Boy they treated us great up there.



A few nights later, Harry arrived at my place in Toronto and I had a couple of comps for a Ricky Lee Jones show at the Phoenix - I was hung up at a co-op meeting and so we didn't get there till the encore - it was gorgeaous, though and when I commented that the usually noisy Phoenix crowd had dropped dead silent Harry said "She must have won them over early in the show." It was just her and her guitar for one slow song but it really gave a complete picture of the energy and vibe of theis gal.



Who else did I see in Nov? (*I may add to this)

End of October

Signing off for October. What a music-filled month. Last night, to cap it off, I went down to the Senator to see a guitarist called Doug Wambal. He can do it all, and he gives the audience a taste of everything.



The night before was my first house concert at Downtown Jazz this year (I'm doing two more - Nov 20 and Dec 13). I've got to promote these a little better. There wasn't more than 20 people - a small but illustrious audience including the head of the music section at the Canada Council, a pioneer music publicist, head of a benevolent trust for musicians and artistic directors of five Canadian jazz festivals including my own boss, Pat Taylor of Downtown Jazz. This was totally unplanned, but it turned out the house concert was the same day that all these AD's were in Toronto for the big Sponsor announcement. I was at the media launch at the Design Exchange - when they rolled out the new logo, they had bright lights, loud noises and the room filled with confetti. After they picked the confetti out of the piano, Molly Johnson did a couple of tunes. One festival director from the prairies couldn't wait to get out of Toronto, so I didn't expect to see her.



Lily and I had a great time playing the house concert, but I won't expect any of those festival guys to remember too much. They were mostly talking in the kitchen, - they were not "on duty" - in fact, they were distiinctly "off duty". I captured some footage of one of the guys trying to play "Stairway to Heaven" on my guitar - I thought it might make good blackmail material if I ever need a gig in his town.



On the 29th, I had the pleasure of opening for Harry Manx at Hugh's Room. Harry is getting amazing media coverage these days - everytime I see him, he's juggling interviews. That may have something to do with the fact that he's playing in a different town every night - and each one of those towns has a paper that wants a story. One interview that was apparently right down to the wire went on and on - I couldn't believe how long they talked. Somebody's going to have to edit that!



As I was setting up I was chatting with a couple of CBC guys who were there to interview Harry for "The Blues" radio series. Harry left his harmonica rack back at my place and had to drive across town to get it - he probably had two phone interviews while he did the run.



I heard a little preview of Harry's next album, and it is quite phenomenal...meanwhile, I'm still working on my album, hoping to wrap it up for a Feb release - having fun doing guitar overdubs and brightening it up a bit. Still don't know how we're going to deal with the mixing and mastering.



This little flurry of gigs reminded that my guitar playing gets easier and sharper when I've had the chance to play for a couple days in a row.



Tonight I'm off to see David Rotundo at Grossman's and Popa Chubby at the Silver Dollar. Monday I head to Stratford for a couple of dates with Harry... and November here we come!

Just back from the Ontario Council of Folk Festivals conference in Sudbury where I had a great old time even though (whine, whine) I was not selected to showcase and the song I submitted did not win the "Song from the Heart" contest.



As we were driving up, my travelling companion Michael Wrycraft mentions that he was on the selection committee...Whaaat! ...and it turns out I know all of the damn committee! Once again, proof positive that it's *not* "who you know."



Paul came by this afternoon to get my studio set up - I added a couple of new devices and trying to get them "in the loop". He's been on the road non stop so I was glad to have him here for a couple of hours to straighten out a few things. He helped me get the MIDI running too, though I'm sure he thinks it's just another vehicle to enable my "fear of completion."



While I was out, he ran a couple of the tunes through some mastering tools to show me how the sound could be improved. It sounds pretty good already, but this did make it a little less boxy. Now I can play these tracks on some different sound systems and make sure my monitors are not hyping us. Bax (my producer) sent a "how's it goin?" email. Fred (my record company) hasn't been in touch lately and everytime he calls me from the 401 and asks me to meet him, I'm sure that he's about to tell me that the deal is off, but so far, he's been very supportive. I'm sure he has his limit, but we all agree that there's no point releasing an album before I have some gigs in place, so we're now looking at a February release. I definitely want some copies to distribute at the Blues Summit at the end of January. For the OCFF conference, I burned a few with 4 songs each, two with original mixes and two re-worked versions



Back to the conference, I'm still intent on playing for the folk audience rather than the hard-core blues audience. There was some blues at the conference and Harrison Kennedy was one blues guy that made a big impression. His showcase seemed quite short, he started with a work song singing and playing a shaker. After that he did something on guitar then quickly went back to a blues "sing-a-long" with harmonica accompaniment. Then it was over - he got a great reaction. Other showcasing artists who knocked me out were Chris Demeanour and a lady called Allana (both from Manitoba, I think)



We had our own little blues enclave in 221. Lily had her piano set up and I brought a bass - and glad I did! The first night I was jamming with a high-energy kid called Dan Frechette. He brought a mandolin and played the hell out of it - I found out later from his manager, the legendary Mitch Podolak, that he's only been playing mandolin for a few months. Amazing.



Podolak was the founder of the Winnipeg Folk Festival and I found myself around a lot of Winnipeg folks. I asked them all if they had ever heard about an RCMP narcotics officer who had infiltrated the Winnipeg Music scene in the seventies by playing in a band and had then busted half the rock musicians in town. Nobody could verify that legend - too bad, because I've got a tune I wrote back then called "Winnipeg Nark" and I'd like to know if there's any truth to it. I'm sure I didn't just make up the story. I'm one of those rare songwriters who does his research *after* he writes the song. Ken W chided me when he heard one of my songs that starts with the line "In Nineteen Thirty-Five or Six"...Can't you nail that down?



I had a great time playing with Harrison Kennedy himself, Mo Kauffey, Doc McLean, Ken Whiteley and even Paul James dropped by. Flo saw him playing at a bar in Downtown Sudbury and invited him back to the hotel. He'd never seen a "music conference." We got busted on the second night - boyish, but burly, security guard walked into the room and asked. "Smokin up in here???" Everybody held their breath. Then he asked if we would please keep the windows open!!! Sure, no problem.



The most fun I had was when the London group Mosaic dropped by our room and launched into some amazing harmonies and I found myself (scat)singing along. I *never* do that, but I must be changed forever by that vocal workshop I did with Elaine Overholt a couple of weeks ago. I was finally ready to just let my voice pour out - and it did.



I also had a little session with Liam Titcomb, who is on the fast track to the big time, and who's grown musically as the entire folk community watched (his dad is Brent Titcomb, a veritable guru of the folk scene - and his mom happens to be my Reiki Master). I lured him to my room with a song idea and we jammed a bit with it - now I have to follow up and have another session with him. That will be tricky knowing his schedule, but we'll see.



What did I get out of this conference? Well, let me pass along a few "tips":



When you head into an interview, you should have three things in mind that you want to get across, whether or not you are asked.



Radio guys like to have a CD sized insert that gives a short description of each song - nor do they want to receive an entire press kit. A CD and a little sheet as described above is all they care about.



Call the local radio show two weeks before an appearance in their town to set up an interview, or at least to get something played



When you plan out your showcase set, also plan what you're going to say and when you're going to say it. (That's advice I'll have trouble following)



The day after we got back, The Toronto Blues Society announced the nominees for the Maple Blues Awards and the dates for the Blues Summit. If you're interested in either visit www.torontobluessociety.com Congratulations to all the nominees.



Yesterday, Harry Manx came through town on his way to Montreal. He stopped at the house long enough to re-dress the wiring in his rack - he bought a new preamp - and I left him in my kitchen as I took off to a "casino party" at my agent's office. They had rented all kinds of gambling equipment and everybody that arrived got $10,000 in funny money, which we then used to buy chips. I learned a lot about playing blackjack but I did better at roulette. They've gotten me a lot of work at the Woodbine Racetrack (their biggest client, I discover) but for all the times I've been, I've never made a bet...



So what else have I been up to since my last post???



I've booked a series of house concerts at the Downtown Jazz office - I did this before and it was a very nice setup - there's a built in PA system and a piano, too. When you push aside the big board table there's room for 30 or so. Tomorrow I'll be doing a "preview" concert but after this I play Oct 30 with Lily Sazz, Nov 20 with Paul Reddick and Dec 13 with Butch Coulter who'll be visiting from Germany. Next Thursday (Oct 29), I open for Harry at Hugh's Room and I do a couple more gigs with him. Hoping to keep up the momentum by scoring a few more concerts. Anybody out there interested in having Brian Blain entertaining them in their own living room??? Just ask.

September is winding down fast and I had promised the overdubs would be done by the end of the month. But it's been an incredible flurry of musical activity for me to cover as the resident media mooch. I just got in from sitting in with a great musician from England, Steve Payne. Michael Pickett did a feature set as did a young woman called Sara. And, considering my luck at jams, I should be thankful that I got on at all. but I grabbed my guitar as the evening was winding down and did a couple of tunes with Steve.



I was trying to make up my mind which tune I would sing, but after we were into it for a little bit, i got the feeling that the only way I was going to sing is if I jump right in. Lucky for me, I had some lyrics that fit with the groove we were playing so I just started singing "Girlfriend Blues". I don't know if Steve was planning to launch into a vocal himself, after all, it was him that started playing that groove. Anyway, he seemed cool about it. I was glad that I made it down for his last appearance in Canada, but it reminded me why I don't go to these jams. This time I had been invited by Steve himself and I barely got to play. It is the assertive ones who get to play in these jams. But, on the other hand, I must be prepared. This time, I couldn't even decide which song(s) I should play. I should at least have a few tunes at hand, hopefully something people can play-along - maybe even sing along. That will come in handy since I just made arrangements to attend the Ontario Council of Folk Fetivals conference in Sudbury. I had a great time last time I attended one of these - non-stop jammin in the hallways of the hotel (on dedicated "music" floors)



One more obstacle between me and a finished album - but a wise move for the career. Too bad I'll have to pass on opening for Harry Manx at Readers Cafe in Dunville. I will be opening some other dates for him, though. Well, we'll press up some "preview" CDs to hand out to artisitic directors and whoever else. I hope I get invited to a couple of folk festivals next summer. It's always great to see someone who didn't think they would like the blues, but after hearing my version of the blues, they now loved the blues.

Saturday Afternoon: When I left off on the last post, I was hoping I might schmooze my way into the film, "Festival Express" and at the last minute it worked out and I headed downtown at 2:30 in the afternoon. I was trying to think of the cheapest way to park but as I cruised along Shuter St, I saw the point where the free street parkling ended and the metered street parking began - Jarvis Street! So I walked 4 or 5 blocks then at the theatre, there's a huge lineup. I go to the front of the line to get my ticket from media gal Jane Harbury, but then I have to go back to the end of the line to wait. As I'm walking back I say hi to Ray Blake who I had chatted with at the party the previous night. He was part of Mashmakhan, a very big band in Montreal in the 70s - less known in Toronto. At the party, I had introduced him to Toronto music historian/musicologist/archivist Bill Munson who surprised him by telling him he owned several obscure 45s that Ray appeared on.



When the movie starts up, the first band to play is Mashmakhan, and there is Ray in his 70's glory. Looking very dapper. It must have been a great moment for him. I wonder how it was for some of the other "stakeholders" at that premiere. At one point in his remarks, the director said "To the guy that put it all together, wherever you are, Ken Walker...." and just then several people a few rows in front of me stand up and shout "He's right here" pointing to Ken Walker in the aisle seat. He takes a little bow, but as the producers walk back upo the aisle, I notice there is no contact as they walk right by him. No "hi-fives" here. I hear later from Rob Bowman that it's been a lot of struggles getting it out - all the footage for the Toronto concert had been stolen, and I just had the feeling that there was a lot of sour grapes still - after 30 years. Maybe some of them will recover the money they lost 30 years ago. The other partner, Thor Eaton, probably doesn't need the money.



The performances by Janis Joplin in the film are close-up, gritty, full-tilt Janis. The Band casts their spell and the look like they just drove up from Big Pink. The Grateful Dead are stars of the show - especially when they agree to put a couple of flat-bed trucks together outside the stadium and give a free concert to quell a riot. But where were Bonnie & Delaney? We see them jammin' on the train, but was the stage performance too rough? Traffic was also cut out because their songs were way too long and they wouldn't allow them to be edited.



Tuesday 5:30, The Rivoli: It's the CD Launch for the Gordon Lightfoot tribute album, and the house is stunned when Gordon himself is introduced from the stage by Grit Laskin. Word is he's not well, and he looks a little gaunt but he hung in right to the end - even going up to the stage to shake hands with Aengus Finnan who performed an original composition about Lightfoot and told how it helped him understand Canada (he came from U.K) James Keelaghan played a live rendition of the Canadian Railroad Trilogy - imagine doing that with Lightfoot himself in the audience. He pulled it off great. Interespersed between the live performances they played tracks from the album. It's hard enough to get the attention of a media schmooze audience when you're playing live - it's even harder to get them to shut up and listen to recorded music, even if it's a first like the Cowboy Junkies or Bruce Cockburn doing a Lightfoot song.



10:30 After attending two board meetings (my co-op and the end of the Blues Society meeting) I still have enough steam head up to the Iridescent Music Anniversary party. There's sure to be some great folks playing. I drive up with Lily Sazz and Matt, the new TBS admin guy. When I walk in, Blue Willow is playing. They're the only band that ever fired me - but I deserved it. I was so overcomitted doing all these newsletters that I would miss rehearsals and often be late for gigs. Five years later, the girls are still at it and sounding great!



I start talking to London sax player Chris Murphy about the last discussion at the board meeting - the dying blues venmues in Toronto. He travels a lot and sees this happening in many other towns. He said something interesting, though. In his travels in ther States, he founf the really succesful blues bars had a few things in common: They were in the suburbs with lost of free parking, a safe clean environment, good food - establishmenst that did very well all day as restaurants. And the audience was well-heeled professionals who livbed in the area. Well, yuppies deserve the blues, too.



The stage changes over and we're listening to Johnny Wright, one of the finest R&B singers to come out of this town. Michael Fonfara is playing keyboards and Joe Mavety is on guitar. There's another guitar player, short blond hair, very youthful looking - turns out it's the legendary Danny Weiss, moved back to Toronto. Gary Kendall says to me me "That's the guy who's supposed to play on your album" - and I remembered telling him that Frazier M. had offered to remake my album for $1500. and the first thing he said was he was going to get Danny Weiss to play guitar. That was a deal buster. No reflection on Danny - he's a phenomenal musician - but the guitar star on my album has got to be *me*. Producer David Baxter saiud "you hire a guitar player to produce your album then you don't let him play!" Maybe it was a big mistake, Davis is a real creative guita4r player, probably more suited to my songs than a Danny Weiss. But it's up to me now, time to get back to those overdubs.

It's the day after my birthday and even though I know I should be home overdubbing guitar parts on my forthcoming CD (see previous posts) I'm at big party at the Palais Royale. It's a movie release party, a much bigger deal than the CD release parties I'm used to. Little food stations all around the place. A couple of guys shucking oysters here, smoked salmon there, another area serving jambalaya and cornbread, outside they had corn-on-the-cob and turkey. Lots of other goodies, all dished out by fresh-faced servers in cute uniforms - cruise ship might have been the motif.



And there on stage, fronting the Full-Tilt Boogie Band - mostly original members - was Bonnie Bramlett, invoking the spirit of Janis as she tore into a searing version of "Piece of My Heart." Then she did a tune that she wrote especially for Janis - she said Janis asked for a shuffle, but never lived long enough to perform it. Bonnie is nothing short of a spectacular vocalist. It was great hearing John Till play - the last time I saw him play was at the Coq D'Or in the sixties. Richard Bell was doing double duty - stretched between the organ and piano - he said afterwards he was glad that Lou Pomanti was able to jump in on some of the tunes. Ken Pearson couldn't make it. Sylvia Tyson and Lorraine Segatto joined in for a rousing jam of CC Rider.



Bernie Leadon of the Flying Burrito Brothers was flown up for the occasion and did a great set but when Bill King tried to get him up for the big finale, Bernie waved off the invitation. I wouldn't be surprised if he was a little miffed that the crowd never shut up for the three tunes he did solo. Sylvia, who was in Great Speckled Bird with then-hubby Ian, had also been part of the Festival Express, sang an a capella tune to kick off the proceedings. Garth Hudson played a couple of Band classics with his wife Maud doing the vocals.



You had to be close to the stage hear the music. As the evening progressed, it seems that the crowd got more attentive. It was such a beautifully managed party, it might have been managed a bit more in favour of the musicians if they had asked people who insisted on carrying on a conversation to step out to the patio. Who am I to talk? - I was blabbing away with lots of people - most of them asking when the hell I'm going to release that CD of mine. And then I found myself face to face with David Baxter who is the producer-of-record for this album but who doesn't ask that question anymore.



As soon as I've done two more CD release parties in the next week, I will start to spend all-day (yikes) working on the CD. I promised the label I'd have therse overdubs done by the end of the month. David's eyes rolled when I told him i've been adding some MIDI tracks. This may just be another waste of time diversion, but I'm going to record MIDI as well as the regular guitar sound and then decide - keep them both, or one of them or none.



Oh, did I mention the film is called "Festival Express." I may yet get to see it, but for now all I can say is they give a great party. I comisserated with other (younger) bachelors how these film festival parties attract large numbers of stunning women. I guess they're all actresses and models. And also some not-so-young but equally attractive ladies of a certain age - the ones that were there for the original Festival Express



The Dexters started off the evening and closed it out with some special guests, Jeff Martin of Tea Party played some very credible blues. The Dexters horn section was Perry White and Steve Donald - tenor and trombone. What a great honkin sound. Amazing evening.

September allready and I didn't make a single post in August. I aplogize to the two or three of you who were looking for more chapters in my ongoing saga. Since we advertised the release of my CD for September 03 September, and since it's September now and it's still not released, I guess I owe an explanation.



It all started a couple of years ago when Fred Litwin of Northern Blues offered me a contract to lease my indie CD (made five years ago at Puck's Farm). With Bill Garret in my corner, we convinced Fred to let me record a new album. I spent a few months recording my new tunes in my home-studio, set up and operated by Paul Benedict.



The solo acoustic thang did not get them very excited but we had a straict deadline so I called in a couple of players I knew well and we laid down some solid tracks, but I still wanted a "quiet" album - because I find the first one too raucus.



Well, now I find it *too* quiet and now I'm at the stage where I'm overdubbing some gritty electric guitar on some of the tracks. I may re-do a couple of vocals then we're gonna mix the sucker and get it out there. I've got the old Strat out and I'm even using a pick!



Had a nice break visiting the Eastern Townships and Cape Cod. I was happy to visit the Singfield Brothers who I played with in the Seventies. I played them the track I recorded called "Terrace Inn", named after the club we worked at every summer when I was playing bass in their band, Oliver Klaus. Then in Provincetown, I found myself having dinner at Alice Brock's - this is the Alice who has been immortalized in the song "Alice's Restaurant". I was playing a few tunes at the dining-room table and Alice told me that was the table where Arlo wrote that folk classic. I can only imagine some of the other formidable musicians who sat around that table. It's a round oak dining table and looks almost new, but Alice explained that it's quite old but that it is a "self-healing" table. Many a cigarette had burned a mark at the edge but they all faded away - not to mention a lot of spilled red wine, I'm sure. She showed me a crack in the table that had been a major gash where a knife had been plunged into it, but it was now practically closed up. On the drive back to Toronto, we stopped at the original Alice's Restaurant in upper Mass - it's now called the Guthrie Center and presents music regularly.



I haven't been hustling for gigs during the summer - I guess I thought I'd get invited back to a few festivals as I was last year, but ...wrong! Time to get on the phone. Harry Manx was in town for a couple of gigs and invited me to open for him at Hugh's Room but when I got there, it turns out that another opening act had been booked, unbeknownst to anyone. Her name was Heather Horak and she had driven all the way from Ottawa so we worked out a way for both of us to play. I did a couple of tunes then brought her up for a short set. I got to be the M.C for the evening and that was a lot of fun. I was up with Harry till 4:30 the next morning putzing around with my MIDI guitar setup.



I love bass players (maybe that's because I started as a bass player) and this month I played with a couple of greats. Terry Wilkins played with me at Chicago's (along with Michelle Josef on drums and Lily Sazz on piano) and although I generally prefer string bass, he played electric on that gig and it was the same solid groove that I'm usewd toi from his gut-bucket bass. Then a few days later I played with Ka-Cheung Liu, who is making a name for himself on the jazz scene but who really kicks ass with the blues - hope I get to play with him again.



Meanwhile, I've been totally distracted by lots of "other people's music." The Toronto Star Bluesfest brought an incredible array of talent. I was out of town but made it for the Saturday night and Sunday performances. My highlight was David Lindley. I've heard lots of great lap slide lately, and he had that "low-end" that is an essential part of Harry manx' sound, but he brought something else - funny lyrics, for one thing. The site was great, three stages in close proximity. Based, I'm told, on a floor plan developed when the CNE was being considered as a venue for the jazz festival. I didn't even take advantage of my media pass to get into the backstage or VIP area (Gary Kendall thought it was the best backstage buffet of any festival he's attended).



I only had one media pass but Jacquie Houston and I walked right through the gate and straight to the stage area where Rick Fines was playing (playing great, I might add). Then a very earnest volunteer tapped me on the shoulder and said "We saw your pass but we didn't see hers," Busted! Jacquie had a couple of tickets in her purse anyway, but it shows they had pretty good security. At one point, a security person signalled that I should be leaning on the barricade. I heard the volunteers were very well treated, except for the transportation co-ordinator who quit halfway through the festival (another thing I heard behind the scenes).



I got to see Anson Funderburgh - my man on guitar. But this week-end featured a procession of great guitarists - Tommy Castro, Robert Cray, Kelley Joe Phelps, John Mooney, even Richard Thomson. I saw Big Ben Richardson pulling a double shift playing with Tony D then playing with John Mooney. Later David GoGo was ragging on him that he had wanted him for his set, too.



There was one off-the-wall performer named Howard Gelb (sp) who I never "got." He would stop in the middle of a song to play a clip of Ellington on a CD player. Go figure. Somebody even called the Blues Society office complaining about him - not that we had anything to do with it.



The Bluesfest was put on by the same group that does the Ottawa Bluesfest, a phenomenally successful event in Ottawa, and I hope their coffers were filled because they lost their shirt in Toronto.



A few weeks later, it's the Southside Shuffle in Port Credit - a very different kettle of fish. They've got the audience - the streets were packed with throngs of people, I bet most of whom never get out to a blues show. But no big bucks for talent here - mostly local bands playing and no signs of big sponsors. The closest I got to the main stage was looking through the chain-link fence by the porta-potties with a generator blasting. On the street I got to hear some bands I've never heard - Wayne Buttery and the Groove Project, a big 8-piece classic R&B unit. Nice to meet someone in person after you've been reading their emails for years. And The Livin Blues Band had a special guest, Maria Aurigema, a great singer-guitarist from upper state NY. And there was a great young singer called Larissa, I think, playing on the street. (She also had a fine bass player, there I go again about bass players) Who was that young woman playing bass? If anybody has contact info for her, write me at brian@blain.com - and I'll know that there's somebody out there reading these rambling blogs.

I see that I finished my last post with the words "Hey, maybe we'll play a little modern jazz!" Famous last words.



As I've been focused entirely on the recording, I haven't been hustling any gigs so I was happy that one trickled down to me in the Downtown Jazz festival. I didn't have a band in place so I put together something "completely different." Caspar Project is Peter Hasek and an arsenal of synths and samplers. We needed a third (the club owner had asked - as I discovered later - for a "jazz trio"). So for a third, we brought in Lowell Lybarger, a world-class tabla player and what a virtuoso he was. He asked if he could bring along his dijeridoo and when he pulled that out, it was amazing - the sound was being sent through Peter's processing gear. It was fucking amazing! ...at least I though so. The club owner thought otherwise and we were fired...I should have known this would not work in a sports bar.



Meanwhile I've still got a record to finish. Now that I've got my Strat set up with a MIDI pickup, I'm going to do a last pass of guitar overdubs. I've got to get a little more energy into it - I know I told everybody I wanted a laid-back record but now I find that it's *too* laid back. We'll punch it up a bit. I know I shouldn't be talking about this in public - I"ve been told I "planted the seeds of doubt". Well, regardless of what everybody else says, I'm not going to put this out until i have no doubts.









SO WHAT ELSE HAVE I BEEN UP TO?







As I write this, the Toronto Rocks concert is taking place in my town. My friend Dan even offered me a ticket but here I am watching the webcast in a little window on my computer. I was almost ready to go for it, but last night I started to write a new tune and I haven't hardly touched my guitar in weeks and I just decided that I was not going to go watch somebody else's music - even the Stones - I'm going to stay and work on my own (this song better be good so I can tell people that I missed the most historic music event of my generation - or is it the next generation?



So what's the update, you ask? (I know you're out there because every once in a while somebody tells me they've been reading my blog)



Listening to Dan Aykroyd saying this is "a piece of History"... ooops the webcast just reached its capacity and I've been knocked off. Oh well, I'm just going to have to go someplace where there's a TV - but not till 9:00 o'clock.



Now I've turned on the radio and they seem to be doing a live broadcast (the webcast was not live but rather assembled highlights...no the announcer just said that was a previously recorded Justin Timberlake ("Can you hear the sound of the projectiles being thrown at the stage" he says)

Freddie Roulette is in town - some say for the first time - and he's doing a week at Top 'O The Senator. I caught the opening night and was floored by his virtuosity on the lap slide guitar. I haven't seen too many musicians that are in such complete control of their instrument. He had it jumping through hoops, making sound effects and "talking" noises. I've seen Sonny Rhodes do his thing on the lap slide but this was way beyond that - and I got the feeling that he was sticking to the simpler blues tunes because he was working with a pick-up band of local musos. Howard Willett was playing harmonica, Mitch Lewis on guitar and a great rhythm section of Bucky Berger and Dennis Pinhorn. Terry Wilkins dropped in later in the evening and he told me he had been working with Mitch all day, so if they did any rehearsing it must have been at the sound check. I guess they just had to learn the material from the CD's and that's fine as long as the artist still does the tune the way he did it when he recorded it.



I wouldn't want a back up band learning my stuff from CDs because songs have changed so much since I recorded them. I swore after that first CD that the next time I make a CD I will put together the band first, work up the new material in front of an audience and *then* record. Oh well, once again the pressure was on to get the project happeing, so I did the next best thing, call in a rhythm section that had worked a lot with me, but still it was all new material.



We had a nice little BBQ on Tuesday and I had a chance to socialize with some of the players outside the stress of the recording situation. Still some overdubs to do and perhaps a couple of vocals. when will this end?

Just recorded two new tunes for the album - I hope the fact that we recorded a couple of tracks with different players and no producer (same engineer, though) will not give the impression that we were unhappy with what we had achieved already. When we started this project, I told everybody I wanted to make a "quiet" album and that's what they delivered. I have a few issues about my own performance but I'll skip the self-flaggelation for now. My first album is so raucus that I would rarely have an occasion to put it on, so I was intent on producing an album that I will be able to listen to and enjoy for years to come. Well, now it's *too* quiet - so we're adding a couple of electric tracks...but as it turns out, they're not that "electric" after all, but they will pick up the energy of the album. We remade the computer song as a blues shuffle and I was delighted to have my old buddy Mike Fitzpatrick at the kit. He is the shuffle meister and I seem to recall when we were making the first album he said "this is the first blues album I've ever made without a single shuffle". Well, this one will have a shuffle!



I would still like to record a solo instrumental for this album, but that's looking less likely because I haven't even started to write that. That was another item I had on my "wish list." I was fortified being around Harry Manx last year when he was going through the same sort of thing - going over the album with a fine-tooth comb, tightening it up and making it as good as it can possibly be. We are surrounded by people who just want to put out the first thing you record - "It perfect just like that." I was actually relieved to have the record company come back and ask for some things to be improved because there were a few things I wanted to add, including a song I just wrote. Even though the timing wasn't the greatest, we did get Harry Manx on one track (overdubbed in my home studio) and we did send some tracks to Germany so my buddy Butch Coulter could overdub some tracks.



I found it great to work at home and even if I did not record there, at least to edit the tracks so that when they go to be mixed - or, in this case, remixed, I will have removed anything I didn't ever want to hear again. Fred has asked for a remix and he would like to hear some of the vocals re-done. I'm very curious to hear somebody else try to make something out of this album. We recorded is right off the floor with everybody playing in the same room - just like blues albums should be recorded, and now we're stuck with sound leakage in all the mics - Any mixing will be quite challenging as it is mostly about getting a sound while compensating for the leakage.



I don't have the budget to re-mix anyway, I will be cutting into the mastering budget and then into the design budget. One of the songs we just did is a remake of the computer song on my last album. Fred had asked for this song to be re-recorded all along, but nobody paid him any heed. Finally when the opportunity presented itself at a gig with Gary Kendall, I did another spontaneous thing and booked the Downchild rhythm section (Kendall, Fonfara and Fitzpatrick) for a session the following Monday. We'll I still hadn't decided on a new groove for the computer song (now called Hi-Tech Blues 2.0) and I wasn't nearly finished the other song I wanted to record. So here I am in the same boat again - I'm going to record a song I just wrote the night before (which is the opposite of what I know I should do, which is play the tunes with the people who are going to record them - preferably at live gigs (consider it getting paid to rehearse). So that song wasn't ready but we worked on it together and got something. The lyrics were not right, though I spent another 24 hours trying to make them sound OK - especially since they described the triumphs and tragedy of Loreena McKennitt's life. I hope she doesn't hate me for writing this.



When will I get to make a record when they do more than put a mic in front of me and get me sounding exactly like I do? I guess I was looking to sound *better* (different?) than I do...but who can fault an acoustic solo recording where you close your eyes and it's like the singer is sitting across from you? We had the songs sounding *that* good on the first round before we brought in any producer. We were recording at my place on my old beige G3 Mac. But Fred was underwhelmed with the solo acoustic effort and wanted something a little more produced. I chose my first producer because he had a reputation as a song-fixer. He did have some ideas for improving the songs and even tried to show me some more appropriate chord changes, and pasing chords, etc. Anyway, I couldn't play hardly anything that he suggested. I would try, but it just didn't come naturally. Other things like repeating a little tag in one tune, I remember long enough to record that way, but playing live I bet you anything I will revert to the original arrangement.



Speaking of reverting, my engineer had suggested that one of the tunes was dragging at the beginning so we should cut the first verse in half to get to chorus quicker. I was able to remember the change and we recorded it that way. Then a few weeks later I arrive at the studio and engineer and producetr are working on that same song - and they have edited back a long double verse at the beginning because it "sets the narrative." ?!?!! I was speechless but made a mental note to just stick to my arrangements the way I first write them.



I started this project with the intention of doing it in my own studio. Paul Benedict sold me some converters and got me set up and we spent about six months trying stuff at my place. We ended up recording most of the album at his place but we did the most recent stuff here and I hope that at least some of the next album will be done here, too. Both producer David Baxter and myself received a valuable crash-course in Cubase because Paul was very generous in taking time to explain stuff and even letting us get "hands-on" (though he lived to regret that).



Quote of the day: "An amateur practices until he gets it right. A professional practices until he can't get it wrong."





Seen about town: The Toronto Blues Society had a special evening at Hugh's Room and I decided to go "all out" and have a nice meal there - the most expensive piece of chicken I've had in a long time - but worth it.



The first performer up was was the wonderful Morgan Davis - he got us immediately into the blues zone. I love the sound he gets with his solid body guitar and small amp. He keeps getting nominated as "Acoustic Artist of the Year" but I've never yet seen him playing an acoustic guitar. On the other hand...



Jack De Keyzer had his trusty Yamaha flat-top to finish off the evening with Al Lerman. It has no pick-up so must be mic'd. He was using that guitar when He played a short set for the media launch of the new Toronto Star Bluesfest taking place at the CNE. They have mega stars and an very reasonable ticket price. I met Mark Monahan and some other luminaries of the Ottawa Bluesfest but do you think I would have thought to bring a package to pitch some gigs for myself? Naw! Consequently I have no festival gigs this summer - except for Downtown Jazz who found me a spot in a little sports bar called Brass Taps. Well it really is a "sports bar". When I went to check it out I was shoved back out the entrance by two guys with hockey sticks and equipments bags who were coming the other way.

Anyway, I've decided that if they're going to be a loud inattentive audience I'm going to play some even louder music that doesn't require attention and to this end I have engaged Caspar Project to collaborate with me on these shows. This will mark my first foray into MIDI since I arrived in Toronto over ten years ago.

I was one of the first people (in my area) who ever heard of MIDI - and see how it's been integrated into the larget musical world now. I'm going to pull out my old MIDI guitar controller and my MIDI pedalboard and see how much information I can throw at Caspar Project (ak Peter Hasek), because he's got amazing tools to manipulate the sound. Hey, maybe we'll play a little modern jazz!

Hey Russ, I hope you enjoyed hearing the first mixes of my new CD. Some people hate it and some people love it - that's always a good sign. I'm still trying to address all the coments from "Make the vocal louder" to "Put the vocal back in the track". Andrew, my next door neighbour said he really enjoyed the "spare" guitar playing. It is plenty spacious - maybe because I was planning on overdubbing more guitar but in fact we took off most of what we had overdubbed, so it's still quite spare and understated. That's me!



The gig with Gary went great - I played the new arrangement (upgrade) of my computer song and tried a new one out of the blue. We had some killer grooves goin. So I end up asking him to get together with his Downchild rhythm section, Michael Fonafara (whom I've never played with) and Mike Fitzpatrick who played drums on my first CD. Fonfara was the producer for a band I played with, Blue Willow. I'll always remember when they brought in Carlos del Junco to do some harmonica parts and at first they played him the track with the guitar solo, then they just pulled out the guitar so it wouldn't distract him. Well Carlos nailed a solo and that was the end of my guitar solo. Anyway, I'm going to lay down a couple of electric blues numbers with these boys so we can liven up the album.

Well, Gary, last night when I should have been rehearsing for our gig, I decided at the last minute to head over to the Silver Dollar and catch the first set of Junior Watson. Larry Garner was down at Healey's too, so I though maybe I'd end up there, but Junior was irresistible. I had to stay till the final encore (at 1:30 or so). Junior put on a great show, better, I thought, than when I saw him at the BBQ Festival last summer. Beyond his playing though, there was the wonderful Sax Gordon Beadle playing with him - my favourite all time sax player! I've seen him with Luther Guitar Junior, then many times with Duke Robillard - He tells me he's playing on the new Toni Lynn Washington album which Duke produced. Another pleasant surprise was to see Tom Bona on the drums - it seems their regular drummer couldn't get across the border. Tom did an amazing job - it was something to watch as he tried to feel his way into the groove within a bar or two - but he does it no problem. He is a groove-meister. Raoul and Terry got up to do a couple of tunes - I was amazewd to hear Terry speaking positively about the amplified bass sound - something he usually hates! We chatted a bit - he is a good mentor. As we talked about digital versus analogue recording he kept saying there was no "aya" in the digital recording. After he said it a few times I figured out he meant "air". The city's cruelest reviewer was in the house, I'll be interested to see what he writes about the evening. I remember one time you wanted to bring me over and introduce me to him and I said "I don't think I need to meet a guy who, one day, is going to have to say some bad things about me."

More feedback from the label and I guess we're going to go back into the studio! Yea! Well, conseidering it's not my favourite thing to do, I think I'm looking forward to adding something a little more "peppy" to the album. Fred has always wanted me to re-record Computer Club Queen, which is a track off my last album which he put on last summer's sampler (because I hadn't yet finished anything from the new album - in fact, I hadn't even started the new album). So I've got a new version of that - I had to upgrade the song - the original line was "That girl's got a giga - she's got 40 meg of RAM" - (seemed like a lot back then...) I've also got a new tune that I'm going to lay down - it's really a pretty sad story but I'm going to give it an upbeat treatment - because I want it on this album and because this album can't handle another slow song.



Then we have to remix several tunes to get them sounding as good as the best ones. Interesting to note that the best sounding one is the last one we mixed. I had been bugging Paul to refer back to previous mixes to make sure we had some continuity in the sound but both he and Bax go on on on about how they need to treat each tune separately and get the best they can out of each. Well now they're going to have to go back anyway - I wish there was a way to load up each song into the same mixer but we can't do that easily because we used different inputs/tracks from one session to the next. Part of me would like to have the whole album all lined up in the same file, with all the vocals on the same track so that (presumable) the vocal would sound the same from one tune to another - though I'm sure I'd be proven wrong again.

I worked a little on the new tune last night. I had intended to go to Mark Stafford's CD Launch at RD's, then I was going to try to drop by at Hugh's and catch the last set of the Jesse Winchester show. I haven't seen Jesse since that day that day in 1972 when he told me he was going back to Montreal and leaving me to produce the Fraser and DeBolt album (to be called "With Pleasure"). on my own. He was the only reason I was on the gig, because Columbia records didn't want some unknown kid from an ad agency producing the follow up to a ground breaking critically acclaimed (really) album. They had wanted a guy called Todd Rundgren to produce it but none of us had ever heard of him but we all agreed on Jesse since he had just made an album with Todd. In fact, I think they both had the same manager, Albert Grossman, and I think it was Albert on the other end of the line when Jesse yelled at me from a phone booth that he was packing it in and going home.



I have to admit it was not great chemistry. Jesse was into the cognac and everybody else was tripping on mescaline. He must have felt a little out of place. We did preproduction for a week or so at F & deB's farm in the Eastern Townships with a bunch of local musicians. It sounded pretty good on mescaline but when we got to Toronto it fell apart. One of the engineers knew a Toronto band that could jump in and pull it all together so we decided to try it with them - Simon Caine was there name. Dennis Pendrith, John Savage, Bruce Pennycook and Patrick Godfrey - and Joe Medelson came by and played some harp. In fact, that's they day I went back with him and auditioned to be Mainline's bass player. I think I told this story in another blog. If I find it, I'll link it.



So I didn't go see Mark, and I didn't go see Jesse, but by 12:30, I had worked enough on the song, and also taken care of a little business so I shot down to the Silver Dollar to hear Mem Shannon and am I glad I did! This was funk heaven, not a real blues show but this is what the people in New Orleans were coming out to hear and it was great playing - fabulous drummer, very young - keyboard player using losts of that chunk clavinet sound. And Mem playing all those classic funk guitar rhythms. I got to hear the last 45 minutes and I wish I'd been there all night. This man belongs on the big stage.



Tonight I stayeg home again (all week end I've been organizing my CDs - somebody gave me a big shelving unit so I've been gathering them from various stacks and boxes and putting the all in one place, alphabetically. Very enjoyable doing that (feeding my Virgo nature, I guess). I've got over 600 CDs and I'd be hard presssed to find any that I've bought for myself. There's one Japanese import of Gatemouth Brown and that was a big mistake! These are all promo copies I've received in my capacity as editor or MapleBlues & Downtown Jazz. You only have to gaze through my collection to get a quick idea of which blues artists are good at promoting themselves or have someone to do it for them. Also being a judge for JUNO's and INDIES really builds up the collection with the best of Canadian releases. Now I see that I've got some doubles and I think I'll go down to some CD trader and pick out some new music. I've never sold or traded promo copies before, that's illegal isn't it?



Tonight I worked on the new tune for a while and then tuned in Saturday Night Blues where they played a live concert by Savoy Brown. Just a couple of months ago, I dropped by the Dollar on my "rounds" and I arrive just in time to hear the very loud ending of the last song of their first set. The audience was very different than the usual Dollar crowd, obvious all old fans of the band in the Seventies. I didn't know much about them but at that moment I decided I wasn't going to hang around for a long break and then probably too-loud blues rock, so I didn't stay. After hearing this live recording I sure wish I had. It's the real deal.

Just back from seeing an old musical buddy (I use the term advisedly, he came to stay with me in Montreal thirty years ago and seduced one of my back-up singers - the one I was seducing!) His name is Alan Gerber, he's opening for Jesse Winchester at Hugh's tomorrow night. Real high energy - puts on a great show, multi-instrumentalist. I haven't seen him in 30 years and I don't think the show has changed a whole lot. They love him in Quebec.



He was saying he get's a lot of work from the Folk Alliance Conferences. Maybe I'll break down and invest in the next one. I have been to a few, usually on my Media Credentials - once when I was on a panel on creating a web presence for yourself. I'm sure Alan is successful because he is such a good "salesman". Meanwhile I haven't gotten a single festival invitation for this summer (not counting Downtown Jazz who I work for). The Downtown Jazz gig is in a noisy bar on the Danforth so no wait I'm going to take in my laid back country blues. I'm going in with a guy called Caspar Project, doing electronic ambient/groove sounds on synths, sequencers and a MIDI wind controller. We only had one rehearsal so far but I can tell already this is going to be a lot of fun. And I won't have to worry about the audience being more noisy than me!



No matter, the CD won't be out till September - Street Date September 9, Fred says. And in order to do it right, he needs finished product reday to go by mid-June. Yikes! I just gave him the final mixes last night. He called this morning with some feedback... loved the last song... move the first song...Harry Manx is not loud enough...more comments to come, I'm sure. I told him it was going to be laid back and it is - this is an album I'm going to enjoy putting on for many years to come - something I couldn't say about the last one.



Now we have to decide about mastering. I have heard so many comments about mastering voodoo and you would not believe the extremes...from "there's nobody in all Toronto that has the toys or the ears" to "so-and-so" will do a great job for $300. The producer recomends one place then somebody tells me their equipment is fucked - that they took all the transformers out of their Neve board and put in ICs (thus eliminating that elusive "warmth".



I always thought the trick to mastering was to not lose what you got in the mix (come to think of it, the trick to mixing is not to lose what you got in the tracks). This will be the album that took TWO DAYS to record, TWO MONTHS to all all kinds of shit and another TWO WEEKS to take it all off again - most of it anyway. Less is more, eh?



What do you think of the title "Cold Country Blues" instead of "Overqualified for the Blues"? Or Frazier says I should just call it "Brian Blain".



Fred wants me to make a CD Launch Party but I've been a little negative on that idea. It's so hard to get people out in Toronto - not to mention getting any attention from the media... anyway I'm going to give it some thought. Considering I know so many of the media and "industry" types, I think I am living proof that it's *not* "who" you know...Bye for now

The CD was supposed to be mixed this week, but we took a breather. Getting back into it tomorrow.



What I did when I should have been mixing:



Sat - Saw a great film called Amandla, about the importance of music to the South African struggle against apartheid (free showing at Harbourfront)

Sun - My first show at the legendary Elgin Theatre. What an impressive place, and an amazing "folk opera" of Bible Stories from a South African opera company.

Mon - An advance screening of the movie "A Mighty Wind" a hilarious spoof 60s folk phenomenon at its worst. Side-splittingly funny but even before the movie started we were entertained by a goofy trio led by Steven Ambrose (not exactly a folk fixture). Terry Wilkins was playing bass. They were snging in the upstairs foyer of the Paramount (a real state-of-the-art megaplex) and then they actually took to the stage in the theatre, trailers flashing behind them (obviously no one told the projectionist there were going to be musicians in frront of his screen). They looked so small - a little minitature trio playing in front of that giant screen.

The humour of the film is so close to truth that I'm told some folkies didn't find it funny, but I thought it was a gas (don't know if it'll make a big popular hit...)

Tues - The Funk Brothers - Standing in the Shadows of Motown. This was a Downtown Jazz production so I got to hang around at Massey Hall for the sound check. They were getting some amazing sounds during the sopundcheck - a keyboard player, somebody singing and two drummers playing full tilt. And these were just the roadies setting up the gear!. Walking in the dressing room area I saw through an open door that the horn section was being rehearsed. I heard them running through a couple of classic horn riffs, then I hear sombody say "by the way, have you guys met? Looked like they'd already rehearsed half the set before the regular horn guy was introduced to the two Toronto "ringers" one of whom was Chase Sanborne. I know only because at the end of the show, the entire band was introduced (and a big band it was) and when he got to the two new horn players, he had to be told their names. This was the greatest show I've seen in...whatever. At first I wasn't too sure about this, but as it progressed it was a phenomenal musical experience, especially watching bass player Bob Babbit drive that huge hit-making machine. An inspiration watching a bass player where every note counts.

Second Mix:



We all agree that we get the best results when we leave Paul to himself. Many engineers are that way. But I can't believe I've allowed myself to be so rushed...I was never a one-take-wonder! Anyway before handing off the big dual-processor mac to Paul, I plug in the pod and my strat and had a last shot to improve on the solo. I finally got a take that picked up the whole song, but I don't expect anybody to like it. I'm finding it quite stressful making this album but it's probably because there was already a residue of stress in me.

I was born in 1946, they say September 11 but no one knows exactly - I was taken in by some French Nuns who yearned to find me a nice catholic home. Two nuns were talking and one said " We have a patient who just lost a child and it looks like she might adopt" They brought me right away - all dalled up - but the woman said she was still grieving and sent us away. But the nuns came back the next day with another orphan, but she would not see them. The nuns returned a third time with another child and the woman relented, she said "l'll adopt... but I want you to bring me back the first one" (just trying out the intro for one of the tunes on the upcoming CD, Overqualified for the Blues) The song is the true story of how I was adopted.

Thank you, dear Fred, for being patient while I put together this album. I know you've been announcing its release since 2001.



I wanted to do this at my leisure and while I was grabbing a breath, a year went by. I started out recording at home, with basically the same equipment we used to record the final album in Paul Benedict's basement studio. Ah, to enjoy the wonders of being able to go through and edit the music in a safe, non-destructive environment. I guess everybody does this now, but it was a wonder for me, who's first professional session was on an Ampex 3-track at RCA's Montreal studio in 1964.



I go to pick up my old Strat and I notice i'm having trouble holding down the strings with my left hand. My nails have grown out to the edge of the finger so you can't press down on the guitar strings. That's a true sign that you have not been keeping music at the forefront of you consciousness.



It's so typical of this whole project that the moment I have a little time to play with the tracks some more that they're being taken away from me to be mixed. So I still want to fix some guitar parts but I haven't been playing in weeks - and my nail work needs to be done pronto. Like the day we started the sessions and I had this weird rash on my thumb - nothing serious, just enough to make me want to use a pick instead of playing finger-style. Then the day sheduled for some vocal overdubs, which we only used one, I wake up with a nasty cold - laryngitis even! On the third take of Ghost, my voice got very rough - I attribute it to a chanelling attempt from that damn ghost. This song has a new groove that came to the surface when I played it a few times with Lance Anderson and Terry Wilkins.

CHAPTER TWO



Today we started mixing - I shouldn't say "we", I wasn't even there - There was a lot of housekeeping to be done first so I didn't expect to get into the actual mixing so soon, alas, I am surrounded by people who crave completion - something I've never been acused of. Anyway, today was the last day of production for MapleBlues, so the only song I could mix would be "I Ain't Goin' Nowhere". But we got it together by eight at which time I got a call from Fred, boss man of Northern Blues, and I said I would meet him at the Silver Dollar to hear a bit of label-mate J-W Jones backing up the amazing Kim Wilson. Well, that was not a set you could walk out of. The band played like they've been backing him for years and JW must have been in "Blues Heaven" playing with blues royalty (and rising to the occasion). As I was watching the show, I realized I was surrounded by harp players, so on the break I got a photographer to shoot Kim posing with most of the great Toronto harp players who were in attendance: David Rotundo, Dr Nick, Lil Bobby Chorney, Mark "Bird Stafford" and Bob Adams. Carlos del Junco was the first player I approached about it but he said "can we talk on the break" and I got a little deflated about the idea but we rounded up them all up (except Carlos who slipped out for a slice of pizza). I don't think he wanted to be in that picture - maybe he was having a bad hair day...



On the break we slip out to Fred's car to hear the final (Sterling) mastered Johnny Cash tribute album with amazing renditions by Mavis Staples, Gatemouth Brown, my buddy Paul Reddick and some great playing from Colin Linden on several of the tracks. He sure puts the pedal to the metal. Fred is going to come by tomorrow to hear how we're coming along and this will be the first he's heard of the Brian Blain album. I hope it's up to his rigorous standards.



This album came together the week before Christmas when I realized I had to finally deliver an album before year end (or at least have one started). Michelle Josef (drums) and Victor Bateman (bass) are two musician friends I played with quite a bit, though not recently, so I called in some favours. Paul Reddick joined us for part of the first day and Richard Bell sat in for most of the second day. The running gag at the studio was that I took two days to record the album and spent the next three months trying to wreck it by adding more stuff, but the sweetening we did adds a lot. Harry Manx plays on a track and 19 year-old Mark Roy added some mandolin. After that we had some fun adding back-up vocals from Garth Logan, Sue Lothrop, Lily Sazz and Rebecca Campbell.

Mar 5 - Back in the studio after long diversion. I hadn't listened to the material for a couple of weeks - come to think of it, I haven't touched my guitar for a couple of weeks, but then, that's my life cycle - a couple of weeks of music, then a couple of weeks of desktop publishing and webwork.



On Thursday, Michelle came to add a few more percussion tracks. As usual, I was totally unprepared and didn't really know which tunes to work on - I had a feeling the faster tunes needed a little something extra. We got a couple of tracks down but then everybody was getting hungry (that was my cue to be a leader a get a pizza happening or something, which I did finally but by then Michelle had left). *Then* I look at my notes and see that I've flagged a couple of tunes for percussion but of course it's too late. I'm the only one in this crew taking anything resembling notes and then I forget to use them!



Now David has made a list of what's left to do on each song and has stuck it up on the wall and takes great pleasure in crossing off each item as it's done. I can't blame him for "craving completion" - this was going to be a quick and dirty, almost live, album and now here we are, two months later, adding shit.



Friday was scheduled for my vocals and guess what, I wake up at 7:30 in the a.m all stuffed up, sniffling and sneezing. I've got a cold. I go take a Contact-C and go back to sleep in the hopes that I will be unplugged by noon.



This is just like when we started the project - the first day we had to lay the tracks down I had some kind of rash on my thumb and couldn't really fingerpick without some discomfort - so I used a flat pick on some songs that I normally don't. Oh well, they dig in a little more now.



Now I've got both producer and engineer feeling a little impatient with me. They wanted this finished last month and I've been the stalling factor. Paul, the engineer, is convinced that I have a "fear of completion" disorder and is now using "tough love" to get me to finish this album.



I redid the vocal on a tune that might yet be "fired" from the album, but it was a good one to see if this is going to work. This is a tune I've only sung in public one time and I've changed the lyrics a million times - and, of course, I came to the session with *no* lyric sheets.



TIP: If you're doing vocals, bring lyric sheets. In nice big type. Even if you know the song, it's one less thing to go wrong if you have those lyrics right in front of you, and it can be a big help to the engineer and musicians - especially if it's the closest thing you've got to a chart.

I redid the vocals on one tune where there was a little problem and it went better than I thought. I said something to the boys about re-doing *all* the vocals and that brought forth some moans and groans. I continued on to a second tune, "Ghost of Clinton's Tavern" and by then my voice is going and the first note I sang came out very coarse - kind of "bluesy" I thought, so I kept it up for the whole take. I never sounded like that in my whole singing life (and probably never will again) but I rather liked it - I started thinking maybe it was the ghost himself chanelling through me. Anyway, nobody wants to use that take, so I guess we'll live with the original (live) vocal.



Saw Kelly Joe Phelps performing with Zubot & Dawson the other night and got some good ideas how to treat some of my tunes. After having toured with Harry Manx, who is often compared to Kelly Joe, I could see the importance of having the best and biggest guitar sound - especially when you are playing solo. Harry had insisted the club bring in a subwoofer (maybe it was 2) to augment their already very good sound system and it sure made a difference.

(TIP: if you're playing solo guitar, do not be satisfied with a thin, pick-up-into-PA sound. Get a decent preamp that puts out the sound you want. Stephen fearing has a description of his rig on his website and Harry uses a TC "Gold Channel" which is really a mic preamp, but which allows him tio optimize EQ and compression for each instrument and call it up with a MIDI pedal.