My Secret Blues Life

I was born on an Air Force base in Texas in 1943, my father a young Captain from Illinois. But my mother came from a Southcentral Georgia farm family named Spivey, and all through the later Forties and early Fifties we routinely paid visits to the Spivey tobacco farm (in Mystic, a 300-person village outside Ocilla and somewhat farther from Fitzgerald).

My playmates were young black children mostly, and one summer visit I even worked in the tobacco barn, the only white boy there. Race wasn't an issue I knew anything about, but visiting local sharecropper farms with my Uncle Henry (who was an area Farm Administration bureaucrat of some sort), and listening to the older white guys talk, I later realized I was seeing and hearing white paternalism, and mild racism, in action. If I was hearing any Black Music then, it's missing from my memories.

The Spivey family had in earlier days moved from further north in the state, where Spivey forebears had been plantation folk owning over a hundred slaves (or so I was told); and years later I wondered if somehow I was slavery-connected to the Classic Blues singer Victoria Spivey, but I've never done any research to answer the question.

Meanwhile, as an AF family, we kept on the move--Oklahoma, Texas again, then a few years in New York and Virginia. I remember riding the New York Central railroad a couple of times in those years, treated with kindly attention by black porters, one of whom I swear looked like Son House as he appeared when rediscovered later--he'd been a porter working out of Rochester for many years by then. In Virginia, my Southern belle mom experienced some years of migraine headaches that laid her low and left us kids routinely in the care of a big black woman named Rhoda, our part-time maid who soon became much more.

Then we moved to Montgomery, Alabama; the year was 1955-56... which means I soon saw firsthand the results of the Bus Boycott and the rise of Martin Luther King, Jr. I remember my parents actually giving rides to the black people walking along the roads; and for years afterwards I imagined they were displaying their liberal attitude, but I suppose it's more likely they were just helping maids and gardeners and other domestic workers get to their day jobs.

Seventh grade in Montgomery was a shock to me, chubby and awkward and socially inept--and astonished by all the blatant racial remarks I'd hear every day from poor-white and upper-crust adolescents both. Boys planning to pile into a car and go "nig'-knocking." Slurs against black women. Special vituperation reserved for King and the others "interfering in our local business."

But the regional radio was amazing! Elvis and the Memphis Sun guys got air play, and more importantly so did Fats Domino, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, and all those numerically named black rhythm groups. I was getting my first taste of versions of Blues music as well as seeing harsh aspects of black life and black/white relations. (I started buying records seriously then, adding to the Harry Belafonte 45 set I'd bought back in Virginia.)

Then we were shipped overseas for two years, to Izmir (old Smyrna), Turkey, where I unknowingly heard--drifting from doorways and open windows--the outcast Aegean Greek equivalent of the Blues, that haunting Piraeus-to-Smyrna music known as rembetika. Meanwhile, the local PX did bring in a few 45s and albums by Domino and the Burnette Trio and then Bo Diddley and Johnny and Joe, not to mention Jerry Lee Lewis and Buddy Holly. Yet by the time we got back to the States, the first rush of rock 'n' roll was already over, and the softer pop guys had started their ascension, along with the Kingston Trio and other folk.

It was the latter that interested me most, even though I soon began hearing too the music coming out of Detroit and Chicago, meaning Motown and a bit of Southside Blues. The nearby AF base teen club played popular r&b discs, and I danced with young black women at some teen functions--had a minor crush on one, as I kept denying the racial reality of America. (I don't know what happened to Gwen later, but her younger brother went on to a solid career as Jazz pianist and Music Dept. college prof.)

I went off to Chicago for college in 1960, but still wasn't hip or brave enough to go investigating the area Blues clubs in their heyday. I did catch a concert by Ray Charles and his amazing revue (sing it, Margie!) in a strange warehouse-like venue, but the one album that galvanized me most was this weird-sounding debut LP by a kid named Bob Dylan. I loved "Song to Woody" and enjoyed some other numbers, but was most intrigued by Dylan's covers of songs by Blind Lemon Jefferson (who?) and Bukka White. I immediately wanted to know more about the original performances and singers. (Dylan's music, of course, ranged far and wide during the ensuing decades, yet he never forgot the Blues; his Blind Willie McTell song is one of the great works of 20th Century music of any kind.)

About then, Columbia issued its first albums resurrecting the Blues of Robert Johnson and Leroy Carr... and I was a goner. Suddenly it was all Blues all of the time. Back in Seattle for the second half of college, I went regularly to thrift and junk stores and obscure Central Area disc shops in search of 78s and 45s (eventually sold the small collection I amassed to Bob the Bear Hite, lead singer for Canned Heat). And I started buying every Blues album I could find, especially the mesmerizing reissues of then-still-obscure older Bluesmen, on OJL, RBF, and then Arhoolie Records (thank God for Chris Strachwitz!), followed by Belzona (soon renamed Yazoo). I was in heaven for a while; it was actually possible in those days to keep up with all the Blues LPs being issued.

One of my favorite early buys, though, was a Vanguard set, Blues at Newport 1963, with Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, Mississippi John Hurt, and others, including a young white guy named John Hammond (son of the famous a&r man and artist discoverer with the same name). Hearing young John's amazing reworkings of Robert Johnson and Chuck Berry--some said slavish copying, but I disagreed--cheered on by the great black elders on stage, convinced me that a white boy could play and sing the Blues. (And he was soon followed on record by Koerner, Ray and Glover, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, the Rolling Stones, and other creditable white players.)

This revelation encouraged me to dig even deeper into what I could learn about the Blues. So I subscribed to England's wonderful collector mag Blues Unlimited, kept an eager eye out for Blues articles in DownBeat, scoured bookstores for histories by Paul Oliver and Samuel Charters and eventually others, and also attended what in retrospect were unique, and luckily captured on videotape: the mid-Sixties performances by John Hurt, Son House, Bukka White, Furry Lewis, Lightnin' Hopkins, and maybe Skip James too (I missed that one), brought out to Seattle by the Folklore Society.

I also started writing rock criticism, both locally and for newly minted Rolling Stone and then other rival publications. Among my proudest moments at Stone were key reviews of Clifton Chenier, the Memphis Swamp Jam set celebrating some of the rediscovered elders, and a major Chess Records reissue program. I also covered some interesting events for the magazine that brought me into direct contact with Bo Diddley, Albert Collins, John Mayall, Ike and Tina Turner, John Hammond, and one or two other Blues performers. An amazing couple of hours was me as "fly on the wall," backstage at a festival listening to Bo, Collins, Ike, and some of their band guys shoot the shit, talkin' smack and doin' the dozens on each other!

At the same time I had decided by 1967 that I was going to write a screenplay about Robert Johnson (somebody should, was my thinking); and I spent a couple of years researching, writing, re-writing, and finally copyrighting my fictionalization of his then-obscure life, which I titled Hellhound on My Trail. By 1970 it was beginning to circulate in Hollywood and elsewhere. A couple of agents took it on briefly, and then some fledgling producers tried their hand, but urban Blaxploitation pictures were what the studios wanted, and my script was definitely a mix of the film Sounder and some genre not yet filmed, call it maybe (excuse the pun) Blues noir.

On my own I tried to get copies to Eric Clapton and the Stones (via Jerry Wexler as I recall), but I never heard anything back. I did succeed in reaching Taj Mahal's management but not Taj himself; he told me much later that he'd never seen it. And I mailed a copy to actor-director Ossie Davis, who sent back a nice note saying he liked it and would agree to direct the picture if I could get a production going. Nothing along those lines materialized, but I did see the last portion of Hellhound published in Boston magazine Fusion.

In the late Sixties I was also writing educational films, a couple of them with race-conscious content and titles like Black Thumb and The 220 Blues; and I wrote lengthy treatments for proposed films called Betty and Dupree (more Blues) and The Arletha Jones Show (meant to be a television comedy series featuring a black pop star). But by the mid-Seventies I'd mostly become a writer-producer in marketing and advertising, and the inventive radio/TV work we did for Rainier Beer allowed me to write affectionate and successful pastiches of Blues and r&b numbers and also actually record an ale commercial with Bo Diddley. But my Hellhound screenplay languished on the shelves of Hollywood studios or wherever, and I basically forgot about it.

Over the next two decades, though, every five years or so some producer would discover a copy, call me up to praise it and ask my permission to try to get something going, and I always just said, "Okay, fine." Obviously, no movie got made. But I never stopped loving that down-child, uplifting music and I kept buying hundreds of Blues and r&b albums, new and old, and seeing the odd concert or club date by B.B. King, Bobby Blue Bland, the Meters, Taj Mahal, Gatemouth Brown, the Neville Brothers, and whoever else came to Seattle.

Around 1986 I remember telephoning Columbia Records' John Hammond (famous father, this time) in New York to ask what had become of the long-promised box set offering the complete Robert Johnson on record; he said there were hurdles and delays caused by conflicting financial and copyright interests, but it would appear some year soon... and when it did emerge at last, in 1990, the set went on to become a hugely successful bestseller, making Johnson a modern music hero all over again. I kept hoping for action on Hellhound too, but still nothing happened. So more years passed...

... And they just keep accelerating. I love that rich music as much as ever, even if Chicago-derived Blues by white artists has become something of a cliche. I play scores of Blues and related records and CDs weekly if not daily. And from the early Seventies on I added the Caribbean version, reggae, to that on-going, soundtrack-for-life mix. In fact I program Blues and reggae at home so much, one daughter recently commented that I must have been born a black person in some previous incarnation.

Could be, I suppose... or maybe it's just the South Georgia Spivey blood--luckily, in my case, resulting in an admiration for African-American music and culture (meaning artists Jacob Lawrence and Romare Bearden, writer Ralph Ellison and those of the Harlem Renaissance, and a host of other black figures) rather than a Southern white racist antipathy.

I'm nearing 66 now, and that screenplay has been a well-kept secret for almost 40 years. Time to let it be known. That's why I've posted it now at http://robertjohnsonhellhound.blogspot.com (use the connecting button down at the bottom of this page), in its warts-and-all entirety, for anyone curious to read.

My secret's out.

Chasin' the Devil's Trail

Improving on information in the previous post, I've now added a shortcut/button to send you straight to the Hellhound on My Trail script. Just drop down to the bottom of this page to find it listed among sites worth visiting. The behind-the-scenes backstory will be posted here soon...

Broadcasting the Blues

I was listening to the radio the other evening, Western Washington's hugely popular Jazz station KPLU (broadcast to the world via the Internet), which has all-Blues programs every Saturday and Sunday, 6 p.m. till midnight, hosted by a genial and very knowledgeable guy named John Kessler. One of John's program features is the "Blues Time Machine," in which he presents some great early Blues number followed by remakes made over the decades since. That time listeners heard Sleepy John Estes' "Someday Baby" from 1935 and then versions by Muddy Waters (1955), The Allman Brothers (1975 or so), and the more recent North Mississippi All Stars, but all four performances with something distinctive to offer.

A terrific idea, I think, well executed that night. (Some attempts aren't quite so perfect, when the remakes are too much of a letdown.) And it brought to mind my own brief career as a nighttime deejay. Back in the Sixties--it may be hard to imagine this now--the airwaves were dominated by AM stations, mostly rock 'n roll and Pop, hosted by loud local jocks doing way too many ads interspersed with repetitive Top 40 music selections. FM stations tended to be for Classical or Easy Listening fans only. But then a few brave FM stations in the Bay Area and elsewhere began programming their own freeform versions of (just a-borning) Rock Music, political commentary, hippie goofing, and whatever else.

Seattle's fledgling was KOL-FM, which had a handful of deejays creating their own radio personae each day and night. One regular was Pat McDonald, these days still a familiar Rock critic on the local and national newspaper scene. Another was a slightly off-center Philosophy professor from the University of Washington named John Chambless, who came across sometimes as a hippie guru a bit like Timothy Leary.

Anyway, Chambless was due his sabbatical year's leave from teaching (this was about 1968-69) and was bound out into the world somewhere, and I believe it was Pat who suggested me as a temporary replacement. Chambless' station slot was Sunday night from 6 p.m. until 2 a.m., an eight-hour on-air shift. I had no idea what that meant really...

The manager approved, and the engineers showed me the mechanical ropes--and then I was launched, much like someone tossed into the water to learn to swim! I was free to play anything that seemed relevant to the burgeoning youth culture (I was still a part-time member then), to talk at will and do whatever it took to fill the eight hours of air time. Oh, it was a heady thing at first, as I got to select fine current music, album music, cut after cut, weaving the sounds into mini-suites, sort of, jarring the listeners with something loud after a quiet number, cleverly connecting disparate cuts that echoed each other textually, and so on.

I was having a great time... except that every time, my on-air energy started to flag after about four hours, and by 1 a.m. I was hopeless. I belatedly realized that eight hours is a hellish long time to be on the air trying to be interesting, even just trying to maintain one's voice. I soon resorted to tricks to get through--playing whole album sides of the Beatles or Steve Miller or whoever, turning those mini-suites into longer and longer stretches when I'd say nothing, letting the music do all the talking whether the tunes fit together or not.

And I played my one ace in the hole. Like John Kessler I was a Blues fan big-time, and I knew a lot from reading everything I could lay my hands on. This was the period when the whole Blues reissue-album phenomenon was just getting rolling, and I could practically buy, and did, every record that appeared. Son House and Skip James and Mississippi John Hurt were in the studios again after decades of no attention, and younger figures were getting their chance to record whole albums too, Junior Wells, Magic Sam, and other Chicago guys (including Buddy, of course), and the Southern cats on Nashville's Excello and elsewhere.

I began featuring a couple of hours of Blues music, maybe 10 p.m. till midnight every week, which the audience seemed to dig; at least, most of the phone calls that came in were positive. So I got creative (or cocky maybe). A white musicologist and writer from England named Paul Oliver had published two or three books on the Blues, the themes and history, that is, and I latched onto one of them, The Story of the Blues, and began reading whole sections and chapters on the air, interspersing his prose with the musical examples he quoted or cited, and related stuff that I could find. (Somehow reading aloud was less of a strain on my voice than doing aimless chatter.) And, also like Kessler, I played modern British Blues groups like the Cream and the Stones and Led Zeppelin who were doing their own versions of older tunes, usually without giving credit to the artists they were stealing from. I made sure those connections were properly acknowledged.

And what of KOL's audience? Well, I got almost no calls at first, aside from the odd whiner saying, "Hey, man, what's all this old shit. Play some Hendrix!" (It was clear some goofs didn't have a clue where Jimi's own deeper roots lay.) But then gradually I developed a small following, with people tuning in every week to hear the latest chapter from Oliver's book, and then phone me to comment on the music I'd added--Frank Stokes, Leroy Carr, Memphis Minnie, Big Bill, Blind Lemon, Blind Willie McTell, et wonderful al, working on towards the post-War Chicago Blues.

I was on a roll. I felt great--"Educator at Work" was the badge I wore mentally--entertaining the listeners and giving them some major Black/White racial history too. But then the real educator, Professor Chambless, decided to come back early from leave and reclaim his radio slot. After only seven or eight months I was out--kept on the KOL roster as a fill-in, but almost never called.

And so ended, ingloriously, my one brief close encounter with the world of radio. There were some who complained to KOL about the loss of the Blues I'd been featuring, but all the bosses did then was start programming more of it themselves, not to mention lots of Hendrix and Mayall and Cream.

About then too I decided I'd read and listened and learned so much about the Blues past that I could attempt a screenplay about Robert Johnson... But that's another story.

(Which can be read at my blog posts for June 12 and June 15 last year.)

So Few Books, So Much Time

I've never written or published a book, though I've been featured briefly or mentioned casually in several--which relates slightly to the "witness" title this blog bears.

I think basically I'm too stubborn or willful to submit to the necessary work regimen, or just unable to stay focussed long enough, to write a novel or memoir or even a book of related essays; lengths ranging from brief lyric poem on up to feature screenplay seem to be my attention-span limits. Still, other people have deemed bits of my work worthy of preserving--poems appearing first in so-called little magazines, for example, and then a couple of them picked up for obscure anthologies later.

A different example: back in the late Sixties-early Seventies I wrote maybe two dozen short pieces for Rolling Stone; and three of my record reviews were then reprinted in the first book collection devoted to such--brief but deathless paragraphs praising releases by Clifton Chenier (I was proud to introduce his Zydeco accordion music to the world of rock), the Everly Brothers, and... who? Can't remember the subject of the third. (All of the pieces I wrote do also appear in the early bound volumes of Rolling Stone, but that doesn't count since there was no selection process involved.)

Another article I wrote back then, this time for Ramparts Magazine, critiqued what I saw as the phoney revolutionary attitude of Jefferson Airplane, examining the band's Volunteers album in particular, issued while the group was also doing jeans commercials! Many years later this piece was picked up for offprint use in the syllabus of a counter-culture course taught at a college in Germany, and then quoted too in a recent biography of the band, Jeff Tamarkin's Got a Revolution. I guess Internet access served as the key.

On the other hand, my long interview with Gram Parsons and Chris Hillman (offered complete, for the first time, in five early chapters of I Witness) has been quoted in a couple of Parsons biographies (one book also used a photo I own of Gram and me, seen below-right on this home page), but because both The Helix and L.A. Free Press underground newspapers long ago neglected to credit me as author, any quotations appeared anonymously (as it were).

Also basically anonymous were my writing and editing efforts for three other books: the notorious mid-Sixties Course Critique of professors and classes at the University of Washington (loads of fun to compile and write, laced with ridiculous puns throughout); the 30th anniversary history of Seattle Center and the renowned 1962 Seattle World's Fair that launched it (Meet Me at the Center by Don Duncan); and a thick Seattle Art Museum catalog for a major exhibition of (pre-Green Movement) giant "Earth Works." The author, some hopeless academic, hated my attempt to enable reader comprehension!

No thanks there, of course, but I did receive brief mentions, merited or otherwise, in two books focussed on Elvis Presley: Greil Marcus's Mystery Train (a later reprint offers after-the-fact acknowledgment for a story he used that I'd told him years earlier) and Peter Guralnick's great two-volume definitive biography of Elvis, for which I had helped line up a couple of interviews with Northwest promoters or reporters. (But you'd have to look deep in the lengthy Who's Who of people thanked to find my name.)

The experiences I had at the Stones' Altamont Festival turned up later in another guy's book too. Record producer and folksinger Sandy Paton, best known for his excellent Folk-Legacy label, published a collection of short prose pieces back in the mid-Seventies (I've forgotten the title and don't find it referenced anywhere) and in the one on Altamont he namechecks me and the battles, Hell's Angels vs. stoned fans, I witnessed with horror that day; Marty Balin of the Airplane, for one, was knocked out by them.

More personal: over the years I've fantasized that someone somewhere would discover my circulating screenplay on Mississippi Bluesman Robert Johnson, titled Hellhound on My Trail (written back around 1968-70; see blog chapters of June 12 and June 15, 2007), and offer to publish it, but only the last 20 or 30 pages have ever seen print. I've come to accept the unlikeliness of that ever happening now and have learned instead to look with special fondness on the final two books I want to mention.

Among the best English Lit courses I took in grad school, at the University of Washington in 1965, was one titled something like "The English Popular Ballad" (meaning the post-medieval Child Ballads, more or less), taught by Dr. David C. Fowler. The major assignment in his course was to select a folk song well-known in England or America that the ballad hunters had missed--to research it through history, try to find the ultimate source for it, analyze its structure and content, and finally make the case for its inclusion in the somewhat ex-clusive ballad books. I chose the Scots folk song usually titled something like "Lang a-Growin'," or "The Trees They Do Grow High," made famous by Ewan MacColl, Joan Baez and others; did all the research, sending for manuscript copies from overseas libraries, reading microfiche and old songbooks, listening to all the recordings available, etc., with no Internet back then to make things easier; then wrote my paper--which convinced Fowler so completely that his own subsequent book, A Literary History of the Popular Ballad, cited my research and thanked me for establishing the song as worthy of serious academic study.

That remains the highwater mark of grad school for me (even though I only learned of my inclusion in Fowler's book several years later). I may only be a footnote, but by God, I'm proud of it!

From a Scots ballad to the Nottingham cityscape... as we finally head south to England and the novel titled Living Proof, from the great "Charlie Resnick" series of police procedurals by prizewinning mystery writer John Harvey. Back when I still had a real-location bookstore, the annual BoucherCon gathering of mystery writers and fans came to Seattle, in 1994 or so; as a mystery bookseller I naturally had to "buy" a dealer-room table at the convention.

One evening there was an auction staged to raise funds for the widow of author Robert Bloch (best known for Psycho), whose medical bills and recent death had left his family in financial straits. Towards the end of this worthy event, Harvey as one of the guest authors offered to auction the rights for some fan to appear as a character in his next book. This novel idea (excuse the pun) seemed to leave the room confused, convention-goers looking around at each other wondering whether it would be "cool" to spend one's money so (let's call it) egotistically.

Let me just say that Harvey's generous offer soon became a regular fundraising occurrence at such conventions, and other authors immediately afterwards that same night made similar offers successfully. But this first time out was met with silence. Finally, just to get the bidding started, I raised my hand for the seventy-five dollars or whatever it was... and no one else bid! So suddenly there I was, about to assume some unlikely role in an upcoming mystery. Harvey and I talked a bit; I assured him I didn't care what he wrote, and that he really didn't have to use my name at all. But we corresponded more over the next few months, and finally he sent me a proof of the page and role I'd come to fill...

I'm quite happy to state that on page 137 of the hardback of Living Proof, any curious reader can find one "Ed Leimbacher" and his Seattle store MisterE Books given a comical, slightly venal, but recognizably booksellerish walk-on part (several paragraphs actually) at a fictional book fair in Nottingham. And further deponent sayeth not.

Gee, ain't it grand to be famous for, maybe, 15 seconds?

John Hammond, Bluesman (Part 1)

Once there was a fine Boston-based rock-and-politics magazine called Fusion. It survived for several years in the late Sixties and early Seventies as a solid rival to Rolling Stone. Among those writing for it were Robert Somma (Editor), Michael Lydon, Paul Williams, Robert Christgau, Lenny Kaye, Sandy Pearlman, Nick Tosches, Jonathan Demme, Robert Gordon, John Gabree, and William Kunstler. The magazine even published Peter Guralnick's first book.

As far as I know, Fusion has vanished into rock history now, but I published a few decent pieces in it, and I intend to resurrect a couple of them over the months ahead, starting with my portrait of white bluesman John Hammond, Jr. (not really Junior since his middle name Paul was not also his dad's, but usually identified that way)--still going strong today though not much more financially successful now than he was back then. The article's title was "Songs of the Road."

John Hammond, Sr. is one of the few giant figures in the recording industry. His efforts in discovering, recording, and monitoring neglected or future musical talents has long been legendary in a business short on memory. As an executive of Columbia Records and as the man best known to the rock generation for having signed up Bob Dylan, John Sr. is, in the words of his son, a "spectacular" man, one whose grace and tact are as obvious as his concern and intelligence.

So how does it feel to be John Hammond, Jr. when the year is 1970, when the really big brass rings are mostly gone and it isn't 1960 and there aren't any clubs or people left who haven't heard about Chicago Blues or Joan Baez or civil rights? Where do you go when all the months and years have slipped by and the lives of friends are measured in words like career and culture hero...

The club has character, atmosphere, as they say. No perpendicular sign outside announces its presence, only the word "Tavern" and a couple of beer ads in the dingy front window. But a chain just inside the door (due to the cover charge) suggests that this is no working man's beer-parlor; and once you dig that, you got it all. Band sound and crowd drone; ceiling looming down over parallel layers of spilled Oly, wall-to-wall bodies, and cigarette/pot haze as thick as catatonia; walls and supports decked out with such jagged addenda as mammoth deer antlers, a copy of Goya's Naked Maja, bare and glaring red lights, a vast, ragged U.S. flag, and posters proclaiming the very man now performing on the non-stage over at the left.

Clearly, the word has gone out: John Hammond's in town for three nights, and the Medicine Show Tavern in once again the place to be. (Concert halls and discotheques may control live rock these days, but the Medicine Hall is trying to make it--in backwater Seattle!--by booking in blues people: Lightnin' Hopkins and Son House in recent months, and now white practitioner John Hammond.)

Hammond's Blues Band--blacks Harry Holt, bass, and Charles Otis, drums, plus the man himself on vocals and small electric Gibson--is into the second set of the evening. All three musicians wear suits and ties, but there's no mistaking them for businessmen. Holt's bulging natural and sly smile peer around the neck of his bass, while Otis hides behind his shades and flickering sticks and his well-earned reputation as one of the best r&b drummers around. Hammond's looks are more complex: a bit of the Jagger leer framed in long dark hair, but an angular and gawky body like a high school basketball star--and the sounds issuing from his guitar and throat are flat-out black.

At 27, John Hammond has been scrabbling and scuffling on the road for over eight years. Aside from maybe Dave Van Ronk, he was the first white blues performer to get on record (in the rock era at least), both as country acoustic and then later as big-city electric; and his eight albums have even featured members of The Band and The Stones on occasion. But the chart sales have always managed to elude his grasp. So, although Hammond's deep involvement with black blues has served as the model for many young whites, performers and listeners alike, widespread popular recognition has not been his.

The audience at the Medicine Show at least voices approval--a couple of hundred hip kids, whooping and whistling and cheering wildly. The set opens with Muddy Waters' "I Can't Be Satisfied," all bottleneck strains and machine-gun drums, then moves into John Lee Hooker's "Sugar Mama," with Holt's bass heavily pronounced and Hammond getting into some wah-wah. He's really working out now, really going through changes: arching his body around, shaking the hair and sweat streamers back from his eyes, attacking the mike with his slack-jawed, explosive vocal delivery, as thick and slurred and black as two-days-old coffee.

Close your eyes and it's a South Side Chicago bar. There's "Mojo" and "Forty Days" and a "Cross Cut Saw" that stutters and booms with harsh guitar--and then "Spoonful," creeping in slow and evil and deadly, with Hammond outdoing even the Wolf, adding his own gutty and gritty inflection to those famous opening words: "Could be a spoonful o' coffee, Could be a spoonful o' tea..."

When fatigue and an increasingly erratic sound system finally bring the set to an end, the John Hammond Blues Band exits through cascading applause. Once into the tavern's combination storeroom-office-sound booth, Otis and Holt wander off to quench their thirst, but Hammond settles down to demonstrate acoustic bottlenecking techniques to a pair of inquisitive fans. he seems tired but pleased with the band's performance; and he agrees to do an interview the next afternoon.

********

At that time, Hammond arrives resplendent in jeans and a pythonskin jacket ("I'm not up to the pants yet"), armed with a mug of coffee and a pack of Camels, apologetic for his slight hoarseness, the result of having sung every night for over six weeks. With a disc of Magic Sam playing in the background, Hammond launches into a near monologue on gigs and people and dues:

"Robert Johnson was where I started. When I was 16, my father ((see intro above)) played me a record of Johnson's 'Terraplane Blues.' Something clicked in my head. That's when I became a blues singer."

Lightnin' Hopkins was another formative influence, but Hammond was playing only for himself and for friends--in the Village and during one wasted year at Antioch College--until early '62. "I had a job at a hotel in Florida, busman, roomkeeper, maintenance man, and in the off-time I was practicing guitar. I'd go into this little town, Boca Grande, and stand on the street corners playing for the black people in town. I met this cat Albert McCall who encouraged me and showed me some stuff on harmonica--I'm sure he's still playing there at the Phosphate."

That spring he began playing the club circuit in L.A.--the Satire, the Insomniac, the Troubador, the Ash Grove. After a stop in San Francisco, he moved on to Chicago in the fall. "I met up there again with John Koerner and Dave Ray, and we drove up to Minneapolis in this old hotrod V-8 Ford I had. Got a job playing with Koerner at Matty's Bar in Minneapolis. We had this duet thing going--two guitars, two harmonicas. I got to know those guys very well."

Then on to Gerde's Folk City in New York, where he attracted enough attention to get a contract from Vanguard Records. Hammond cut an album that winter, but Vanguard didn't get around to releasing it until the following September. Meanwhile he was playing dates up and down the East Coast; remember those innocent days when a white kid playing black music was still something remarkable?

Hammond continues, "Then I was asked to the Newport Folk Festival. I went over well and made some friends." He's being modest. His performance was actually an astounding success; just listen to the black artists cheering Hammond on in the background of "No Money Down" (on the first Blues at Newport album)....

((I'm splitting the article there for now, but with one bit of added info: Hammond's father was the man who staged the famous Spirituals to Swing concerts in 1938 and '39; and he tried to track down Robert Johnson to bring him up to NYC for the first one, but Johnson had been murdered by then. Younger John's connection with tragic bluesman Robert was in a way made back in 1938! Next time: The Band, Mike Bloomfield, Duane Allman, and a certain Jimmy James...))

Got the Blues, Still Not Satisfied

Continuing the story begun last post...

I did manage to get in to see a couple of agents (hoping for representation) and one producer too, leaving them copies of the Hellhound script. But I also came down sick, retching and sweating, holed up alone in that airless and un-airconditioned bungalow for several days. By the time I recovered I was also feeling overwhelmed by the movie scene, ready to head back to Seattle; and when one agent said he'd represent me for sure if I would move to Los Angeles, I just said I'd have to consider it...

Nothing to consider. I was sure my writing was so obviously brilliant that the script would sell without me down south to work it, make connections, schmooze with the big guys, whatever. Totally wrong, of course.

When nothing happened in Hollywood, I tried to push it myself via other connections, working to get a copy to Eric Clapton (never happened), and sending copies also to John Simon (producer who had moved on from The Band to film work) and white bluesman John Hammond; the last two gave friendly-but-not-interested responses.

I did succeed in getting scripts to black actor Ossie Davis (suggesting him as director) and the management for Taj Mahal, thinking that after his experience with the film Sounder maybe he'd like to provide the other-than-Johnson music for my film too. And I got back letters from Davis, saying he'd be pleased to direct if I could get a production going, and Taj's manager or some other person saying pretty much the same thing--show us a production and we'll be interested. (Taj told me later he'd never known about the script.)

By about 1975, I was ready to write off Hellhound as having no chance. But the script had an odd (devilish?) circulating life all its own, and something new would happen every five or ten years. A Seattle area black man, involved with the state's Film Production Support office (or whatever that title was), decided he'd move to Hollywood and sell my script; he had no luck. A well-connected cameraman known for perfecting the Steadi-Cam (can't remember his name) wanted to start directing, and he wrote me to say he'd be taking my script around to various studios. Again nothing happened.

As the years passed, one or two other eager producers called me up all excited, having found Hellhound in some stack of good unproduced scripts, ready to launch yet another effort to sell the film. I actually signed papers a couple of times authorizing so-and-so to exclusive rights for six months or a year. But I never did demand any option money, believing that unencumbered access would improve the production's chances, and that I'd get paid further on.

No luck. No film. Decades have passed, and many other movies involving the Blues have appeared--from elegant documentaries to sad blaxploitation films--some worth viewing and remembering, others just reminding the world how basically useless most movies are.

When the late-Nineties Robert Johnson CD box set finally appeared, selling millions of copies and reviving interest in the Blues once more, I hoped maybe the magic would finally work. (Nope.) But I have had 40-some years of reading about and listening to Blues of all kinds, from Chicago to the Carolinas, from London to Lisbon, from Memphis to Malawi. And I have enjoyed two other benefits from the years with Johnson...

First, back in the early Seventies I managed to place several Hellhound excerpts in a Boston-based rock magazine called Fusion. When the issue appeared, I was definitely jazzed (blues'd?) to see my prose and dialogue in print, but the rest of the world evidently just yawned.

And around 2000 when the excellent Blues Museum down in Mississippi opened and was accepting materials to build up its holdings and library, I presumptuously sent off a copy of Hellhound on My Trail, which was in fact welcomed, and which now appears (the script title, anyway) in some Museum computer files or lists.

So my own Story of the Blues rolls on, just like that mighty Mississippi!

(one of these days, I'll post some excerpts from Hellhound... maybe.)

Preachin' the Blues

By the early Sixties, thanks to the widespread late-Fifties popularity of the Kingston Trio and Harry Belafonte and, a few years later, Peter, Paul and Mary, the Folk Music scene was thriving--and the real folk musicmakers like Doc Watson and Clarence Ashley were getting discovered or rediscovered, and even listened to. Cambridge and Greenwich Village were in a happy ferment that mixed new songsters like Dylan (see the previous posting), old hands like Pete Seeger, and old new-handers or new old-timers or some such like half-brother Mike Seeger's New Lost City Ramblers.

And an amazing sidelight of this search for the real roots of American Music was the explosion of interest in the Blues. Seemed as though the entire East Coast was in a mad dash to track down old Country Blues performers like Son House, Skip James, and Mississippi John Hurt. Some of this was helped along by the Newport Folk Festival, which soon began showcasing rediscovered Bluesmen, and anyone else who played like them!

One album I bought around 1964 included a rousing performance by John Hammond (Jr., that is, son of the famous talent searcher and record producer), with John singing in a strangled voice and rippling his guitar masterfully and the elder true Bluesmen cheering him on from the wings. I thought, Yeah! White guys can play the Blues.

Which freed (presumptuous word) me too; I felt I'd been given the go-ahead for my own mad dash. But I was living in Seattle, so rather than searching for mysterious missing performers, I was searching for new albums in record stores (those astonishing RBF and OJL reissues), and old 45s and 78s in thrift stores and junk shops. (As you might imagine, the number of Country Blues 78s in the Pacific Northwest was limited. But I did assemble a small collection, spiced by Chicago Blues 45s, that I later sold to Bob "The Bear" Hite, lead singer of Canned Heat.)

Meanwhile I was reading every book, magazine article, and passing word that I could find about the Blues. There weren't many sources available then, back in the mid-Sixties--no comprehensive histories yet, no bios of big names published; just the groundbreaking books by Sam Charters and Paul Oliver, and one or two specialty mags from England, led by the great Blues Unlimited. (Even Rolling Stone was still a few years away.)

Somehow I got it in my head that I should write a film about Robert Johnson, whose reissue album on Columbia had stunned people everywhere, from Dylan and the young Allmans to Clapton and the Rolling Stones. I knew the few meagre bits of info available about his life, and I thought that he might be the perfect tragic embodiment of the rural Bluesman's life in the Twenties and Thirties.

I immersed myself in articles that mentioned Johnson (Pete Welding interviews with Howlin' Wolf and Honeyboy Edwards, for example), album liner notes for Johnny Shines, Johnson's own LP, and more, plus Oliver's astonishing book and accompanying record called Conversation with the Blues--even Ralph Ellison's novel Invisible Man helped me imagine Robert's world. I also studied Les Blank's Lightnin' Hopkins and Mance Lipscomb documentaries (got to know Les a little) and went to see every Country Blues performer that passed through the region; Son House and Bukka White were standouts.

And it was a help, I thought, that my mother's family had been farmers in Georgia and that I'd lived in Virginia and Alabama; I felt I had a broader perspective as a child of both North and South, son of a USAF officer, which meant I had been raised in the un-segregated world of the military. (The base teen functions back in the late Fifties were always racially mixed. Heck, I had a major crush on one beautiful black girl, me still too young and dumb to know it was a dangerous, racially fraught role for a white boy.)

Anyway, by 1969 I was ready to write, and over the next year and more I did just that: wrote, threw out, started over, revised, put away, kept thinking, rewrote again, until by 1971 I had a screenplay, Hellhound on My Trail, good enough, I was sure, to sweep Hollywood off its feet. I copyrighted it with the U.S. Government, then packed up and headed off to L.A. to sell it (and me as writer-producer). And thanks to filmmaker Blank, who owed me one and who was off filming somewhere, I had his bungalow to crash in...

(the rest of the story next time)