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This Week in BluesWax:
Bobby Radcliff
- In the E-zine:
BluesWax is Sittin' In With Bobby Radcliff. Join Bob Margolin as he sits
down with the guitar player's guitar player, Bobby Radcliff.
- On the News
Page: Handy Nominations Are In; Sad News For Omar and the Howlers;
Richard "Big Boy" Henry Passes; Burnside Hospitalized; Klas Yngtrom
and Sky High News; Brian Slack Named Toronto Blues Society's Blues Booster of
the Year; Buddy and Hopkins In Print; Blind Pig Signs Harper; Buddy Guy
& Percy Sledge Among Rock 'n' Roll Hall Inductees Named; Alabama Blues
Project Honored; Robert Johnson Legal Update; James Brown News; Tampa Bay
Festival Lineup Announced; and much more news that's Blues!
- On the Photo
Page: Handy Nominees!
- On the Blues
Bytes page: Rev. Billy C. Wirtz has some ideas for additions to your CD
collection. Check out his suggestions in Part One of his series called, Slipped
Discs.
- On the Blues
Beat page: And the nominees are ... The Handy Award nominations are in
and you see them here first!
- Under BluesWax
Picks: James Walker reviews Come And Get It by Sauce Boss;
Arthur Wood reviews the self-titled release from Ollabelle; Art Tipaldi reviews
That Represent Man by the Mannish Boys and Kirk Fletcher's Shades of
Blue; plus reviews of Carl Weathersby's Hold On and They Were In
This House by Larry Taylor.
- One
Year Ago Today In BluesWax: T-Bone Erickson's "50 Most Influential
Blues Artists of All Time, Part One." Check out this incredible list of
Blues pioneers and legends.
- Don't forget to play the Blues Trivia
Game: Remember, everyone who plays is in the drawing for the prize!
This week's prize: the CD True To Yourself by Albert Cummings, courtesy
of our friends at Blind Pig Records. Play Today!
BluesWax Sittin' In With
Bobby Radcliff
New West Side Soul and Beyond
Part One
By Bob Margolin
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Bobby Radcliff
Photo By Breton Littlehales
In mid-November, the internationally known Blues guitar
players at the Lucerne Blues Festival should have been sitting in the
"Green Room" socializing, enjoying the Swiss promoters' luxurious
hospitality. When I walked in, I saw that instead, they all were glued to the
big-screen TV, concentrating on the live video feed from the main stage. They
were hanging on every guitar lick. Who was this "guitar player's guitar
player?"
It was Bobby Radcliff, and he was throwing down some
West Side Chicago Blues on guitar and singing with no slickness and no
compromise. His guitar playing was tight and taut, snappy and rhythmic. His
singing was the same. The Blues guitar players in Lucerne were all fine
musicians, but that night, it was Bobby who inspired and fired us all.
I first saw Bobby almost 30 years ago and had the same
reaction. In 1975 I was playing guitar in Muddy Waters' band and we had
opened for the Allman Brothers at The Capital Center near Washington,
D.C. After that concert, I did what most Blues musicians could do back then: go
out and find some more Blues. Mark Wenner, the harp player for The
Nighthawks, was tight with Muddy and his band and he and John Earnshaw,
a music writer, took me down to a small nightclub in D.C. called Cousin Nick's.
They told me about Bobby Radcliff - that he'd learned directly from the late,
legendary Magic Sam, and that he was a master of the West Side style.
Still, I was surprised by how deep and advanced and purely talented Bobby was
then. I've been a fan of his music ever since and I was not surprised that 30
years later, he could make a room full of well-known Blues players shut up,
stop talking, eating, and drinking, and just watch him rip it up.
It was a thrill to hear Bobby again - I'd followed his
career and his many fine recordings for Black Top Records, but had rarely been
in the same place at the same time as him, and hadn't heard him live as often
as I would have liked. Bobby has lived in New York City for decades. It was
great to catch up again after so many years. I complimented Bobby and let him
know that all the guitar players - and some of the legendary Blues players that
had inspired him - had been taken and shaken by his performance.
He told me that he was excited about a new album he just
recorded and he was very deliberately trying to keep the raw feel that had hit
me so hard in the '70s and again now. I told him I'd been doing some writing
for BluesWax and wanted to interview him for our readers, who like to
keep up with the most exciting developments in Blues. Those of you who love
Blues guitar, powerful soulful vocals, a tight rhythm section, and the West
Side sound that has inspired so many of the best Blues players, will be
thrilled to know that Bobby Radcliff's got something hot and new for you.
His new album, Natural Ball,has just been
released on Rollo Records, which was "born to provide a home for musicians
too uncompromising, too challenging, and too kick-ass to either pigeon-hole or
ignore. Combining vintage techniques and current technologies, we put the
artists in the driver's seat and hit 'the highway to your soul' (the motto of
the inactive Black Top Records). Natural Ball is our first offering and
one to make any label proud," as Rollo Records founder Bill Bowman
explains. Right now, the album is available through www.bobbyradcliff.com (try
this first), Amazon.com, and CD Baby. And of course, at Bobby's gigs.
Natural Ball showcases both Bobby Radcliff's West
Side Chicago-style roots as well as the interesting musical paths he's followed
over the course of his long career. Though he performs like a force of nature,
he's thinks deeply about music, understands himself and his art, and is quite
articulate:
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Natural Ball by Bobby Radcliff
Click Cover For More Info
Bob Margolin for BluesWax: Congratulations on your
new album. I just listened to it and I think it lives up to your strong live
show I saw. Today, because modern recording technology makes it possible, many
musicians craft an album from parts. Yours really sounds like Blues onstage in
a club - and it could be that one at Cousin Nick's so many years ago, or one
today. You must have done that very deliberately...
Bobby Radcliff: Because this was a self-produced
project, I naturally went for what I hear myself and the band doing when we're
playing full blast. There's an energy and immediacy that you only get when you
put your head down and charge into the music. On Black Top Records, I was
really lucky to work with a producer like Hammond Scott, with great
session men in well-equipped studios. But it's a lot more intense when you have
to satisfy the toughest critic of all, yourself. When you play live, you don't
get any second shots or overdubs. In fact, most of the cuts on Natural Ball are
first takes ... just three guys sweating it out in a converted tool shed with
no risers and no screens. What you get is what we do. Is it "lo-fi"?
Was Cosimo Matassa "lo-fi" when he recorded New Orleans music
history in the back of the family furniture store? I don't think so.
BW: You've told the '60s story of your hanging out with
Magic Sam so many times in liner notes and interviews, but there's a whole new
generation of Blues fans born since you and I started playing and to them Magic
Sam - and you too, if they know their players - are legendary. Do you mind
telling these new Blues fans the story of your inspiration?
Bobby Radcliff: Magic Sam was simply the most
powerful embodiment of spiritual energy I've witnessed onstage in my life ...
EVER! It was totally positive with a modern approach. He also had that
impossible balance between being an exciting entertainer and a brilliant
musical mind. Don't forget, the Sixties was the era of wild distortion in
popular guitar playing. I was looking for a clarity of notes, lots of notes,
building into something massive. He had it and I wanted to play it that way.
I'll never stop trying to get into that zone.
BW: I've had writers ask me about the differences between
South Side and West Side Chicago Blues. From my connection with Muddy, I was
certainly more focused on the older South Side style. Can you tell our BluesWax
readers about the West Side style - its influences, who the primary players
are, why it's so powerful?
BR: I'm not a musicologist or anything, but anyone
who wants to get into distinctions and definitions should check out books by
Dick Schurman and Mike Ledbitter. New fans can check out records by Otis
Rush, Syl Johnson, Jimmy Dawkins, Hip Linkchain, and,
of course, Magic Sam. You could even consider Freddie King a West Sider.
My feeling was that it was really just geographical, like just where the guys
happened to live. They all played everywhere. One difference might be in the
instrumentation. You rarely heard harps or pianos in clubs on the West Side,
although they'd be worked in on albums. Generally, I think it's a misnomer that
they were two different kinds of Blues.
BW: I understand that from experience; in the '70s,
besides me trying to play "Old School" guitar with Muddy, he also had
Luther "Guitar Jr." Johnson, who has always been considered a West
Side guitar player, both in history and style. What was that when he and Muddy
played the same song together? You're right, the labels are only useful very
generally and can be misleading or irrelevant. But whether you label it or not,
you're carrying on a clear, snappy, inventive Blues guitar style as powerfully
as anyone I've ever heard. Who else do you feel is hitting it strong today?
BR: Billy Flynn, Rockin' Johnny Burgin ...
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Original Bill From Cousin
Nick's
Photo by Breton Littlehales
BW: One of the coolest things about your guitar playing,
especially in the trio setting that you use, is how the electric guitar covers
so many parts that a larger band would use and deconstructs them into something
that is funky and more primitive, yet sometimes more powerful. You do that all
the time and it knocks me out. Would you like to tell us about how you take
songs from all directions - newer Funk, older Blues, even Surf music, and give
them your own spin?
BR: Once you deconstruct something, you gotta take
the pieces and build something that goes beyond the original. I can pick out
different elements and recombine them into a new form, then jump back and
forth, like going back and forth from some monster chords to a sweet solo line.
I like the architecture of it. It's never boring. Maybe it's just how my brain
works. Nobody ever asks piano players why they don't just use one hand. You
know, way, way back in the day, Franz Liszt used to transcribe
orchestral works by Beethoven for solo piano and then they were sold as
sheet music to every middle-class home with piano. Maybe something simple makes
the audience think about what lives in the space between the notes. I guess what
I'm trying to say is that when you find the form for your art; the contents can
come from anywhere.
To be continued...
Bob Margolin is a contributing editor at BluesWax. Bob
may be contacted at [EMAIL PROTECTED].
