MUSSELWHITE IS AS TOUGH AS THE BLUES
After 50 years of playing, it’s a way of life, writes
The Blues Triple Bill, featuring Buddy Guy, Charlie Musselwhite and Steve Hill with Matt Andersen, is presented Friday at 7:30 p.m. at Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier of Place des Arts, as part of the Montreal International Jazz Festival. Tickets cost $83.75 to $108.75. Visit placedesarts.com or montrealjazzfest.com. Discoveries don’t come much more life-defining.
Charlie Musselwhite was only 18 when he arrived in Chicago in 1962, having left Memphis in search of a factory job. He had no idea about the city’s fabled musical pedigree.
“The first job I did get was as a driver for an exterminator,” he remembered during a recent interview with the Montreal Gazette. “I drove him all over the city, and I saw posters and signs in the windows of clubs, advertising people like Elmore James and Muddy Waters. It was only 50 cents or something to get into these places.”
At first, he said, he was more cheerleader than participant. “Coming from Memphis, I already knew how to drink, so I was hanging out. I didn’t tell them I played or nothing. They just thought I was a fan.”
Before long, however, Musselwhite was sitting in with the likes of Big Joe Williams and John Lee Hooker, adding his harmonica chops to their sound. At a certain point, he could see himself as part of it all.
And maybe that discovery, which shifted his focus, was actually something he had always known.
“It was just the truth,” he said of the musical genre that welcomed him with open arms. “Blues is the truth. Blues is about life — in good times and bad times. I always say that blues is your comforter when you’re down, and your buddy when you’re up. The popular music of the day just didn’t mean much to me. Blues just had it all.”
Musselwhite’s first album, Stand Back! Here Comes Charley (sic) Musselwhite’s Southside Band, was released in 1967, the same year Buddy Guy (who shares the bill with Musselwhite on June 30 during this year’s edition of the Montreal International Jazz Festival) launched his own recording career with I Left My Blues in San Francisco.
Musselwhite’s debut, a half-century after it was first issued, still bursts from the speakers with a kind of terrifying energy and intensity. If you listen to the version of Duke Pearson’s Christo Redentor on that record and compare it with the version he recorded two years ago for his most recent disc, I Ain’t Lyin’, it’s as if the elder Musselwhite feels more relaxed about the time ahead of him than his younger self did. Overthinking? Maybe. Musselwhite’s explanation for the urgency of his first album is far more prosaic.
“They told us we had to get it done in three hours,” he said, laughing. “That was the union scale. If you went over three hours, then you had to get paid double, and Vanguard (Musselwhite’s label) was not going to do that. (But) I don’t know if it would have been any different if we had had the entire day. I mean, that’s the way we played. I knew all those guys, and it was just a matter of showing up, remembering the key and counting it off.”
The astonishing band on that album — Barry Goldberg on keyboards, guitarist Harvey Mandel, drummer Fred Below and bassist Bob Anderson — existed only for the purposes of recording that LP, Musselwhite said, and it’s the first that comes to mind when he is questioned about favourite lineups. “I made some good choices there,” he said, immediately expressing equal admiration for his current musicians.
The momentum from the album landed Musselwhite in San Francisco — right at the height of the psychedelic music boom. But the likes of Musselwhite, Guy, Canned Heat and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band were all realizing that the blues felt right at home in the middle of 30-minute lysergic jams.
“The blues guys were the original jammers. We were all about jamming,” he said. “But the underground radio on the West Coast … those guys would play whatever they felt like playing. They were not playing me on the radio in Chicago, but they were in San Francisco. That’s what brought me to the West Coast.
“And the hippies … their minds were wide open — whether it was Ravi Shankar, Count Basie, Charlie Musselwhite or the Grateful Dead,” he said. “In fact, all those people could be on the same bill. It was a great time. It was really just so inventive and creative.”
But there was the darker side: a number of Musselwhite’s contemporaries started gambling with their lives.
“I remember when (Canned Heat singer and guitarist) Al Wilson tried to get me to take downers while we were drinking,” Musselwhite said. “I remember telling him ‘Man, that’ll kill you. Don’t you know that?’ And sure enough, they did.”
Indeed, Alan “Blind Owl” Wilson died in 1970, at 27, of a barbiturate overdose. Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin lasted only a few weeks longer than he did.
Musselwhite, now 73, sober for 30 years and about to receive the Jazz Festival’s B.B. King award, said he could have been among the casualties, but tried his best to be health conscious and “hung in there.”
The future of the music he has spent his life playing, spreading and loving is also cause for optimism, he said. In his books, it’s simply not going anywhere.
He cited young players like 26-year-old Marquise Knox and a thriving blues scene in places like Clarksdale, Miss., as evidence of the music’s continued vitality and its imperviousness to trends.
“The blues is tough,” he said, laughing. “I don’t think the blues will ever die. The blues is not a fad. It’s part of life. As long as people are having ups and downs, they’re going to be attracted to this music that makes you feel better.”