SOUL SESSION
BILLY PRICE BAND POURS SOULFUL JAMS INTO NEW LIVE ALBUM ‘ALIVE AND STRANGE’
By Scott Mervis Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Pittsburghers have known for decades that Billy Price is one of the finest soul men in the business, and that message was spread a little wider in 2015 when he hooked up with Chicago legend Otis Clay on “This Time for Real.”
In May, Price was in Memphis to pick up best soul blues album at the Blue Music Awards, sadly, a few months after Clay’s sudden death.
Price — whose career dates back to the early ’70s when he formed the Rhythm Kings, who toured as Roy Buchanan’s singer and then fronted the hugely popular Keystone Rhythm Band — has had a national and international profile before, but “This Time for Real” put him on a higher plane.
Rather than going the studio route, for the follow-up Price went to the place where he’s shined the most, the live stage. Last September, the Billy Price Band — guitarist Steve Delach, bassist Tom Valentine, drummer Dave Dodd, keyboardist Jimmy Britton and saxophonist Eric DeFade — and a few guests emerged from the South Side’s Club Cafe with his fifth live album, “Alive and Strange,” which will be released on Friday.
Being a soul scholar as well as singer, Price shies away from standards and puts his stamp on deeper tracks like Carl Sims’ “It Ain’t a Juke Joint Without the Blues,” Percy Mayfield’s “Nothing Stays the Same Forever” and Bobby Byrd’s “Never Get Enough.”
This week, it sat at No. 7 on the Roots Music Report soul blues chart, based on airplay. He will celebrate the release with a show at Moondog’s in Blawnox on April 14.
So, this is the follow-up to the record with Otis. How did that factor into the idea of making a live album?
Winning the award and getting all the recognition I got from the album with Otis, I wanted to sort of build on that, and I thought it was important to establish with the promoters and the people who book big festivals that I had a viable operation going, independently of Otis Clay. So, I wanted to really feature my band on this album, and the statement I’m trying to make is, um, I’ve got a really good band, and you should book us on festivals.
What kind of bump did you get from winning the Blues Music Award?
Well, that was the first album I really ever had good distribution on, through Vizztone. That record had just a lot more radio airplay and a lot more recognition from the blues industry, such as it is. The blues industry is pretty big, it’s a niche industry and you have to get on the circuit, and one way to get on the circuit is get played on all the radio shows out there. We got a lot of play on Bluesville on Sirius XM. My name has gotten out there more than it ever has, so I wanted to jump on this and capitalize on that.
This is your fifth live album. How did you go about picking the songs?
I always have a list, and I started to think about the songs in my repertoire that are recordable, and I’m not sure how I decide what’s recordable or not, but I guess: “Hasn’t been overdone,” “I’d never done it before,” “It would be something people would want to listen to more frequently,” that kind of thing.
So, let’s talk about a few of them ...“Lifestyles of the Poor and Unknown” is a William Bell tune.
This is sort of before William Bell blew up. He has a lot of albums he did on the cheap, maybe five or six of them for his own label. I listen to this disc jockey on the internet a lot. Her name is Cassie Fox, she has a show called “Soul of the Blues” and she’s really great, she’s from South Carolina. I heard her play that song one day, and I wrote to her. I said, “Cassie, what the hell was that? I love that song.” She told me it was a William Bell song, and I taught it to the band with the idea that we’re going to record that one day.
Is it almost unusual at this point for you to hear songs you haven’t heard before, in this genre?
Actually, no. Not at all. I’ll tell you about this other song, “It Ain’t a Juke Joint Without the Blues,” which is one of those things that sticks in your mind forever. This friend of mine, Mike Jaworek, is the booking manager at the Birchmere in Alexandria. He and I share a love for the soul/ blues genre. It’s a kind of an obscure genre. It’s really under the radar and not many white people pay attention to it. But it’s sort of the old soul stuff from Stax and Muscle Shoals but a lot dirtier in most cases, a lot raunchier and produced on the cheap with drum machines and fake horns. It’s really big in a community in the South of mostly African-Americans. Most musicians that I know don’t like it much, for various reasons, but I like it, so Mike told me, “You gotta do ‘It Ain’t a Juke Joint Without the Blues,’ by Carl Sims.” It stuck in my mind, great song, maybe I’ll do it, and I was listening to Cassie’s show and she played something from Carl Sims, so I downloaded a Carl Sims playlist to Spotify and on The Best of Carl Sims was “It Ain’t a Juke Joint Without the Blues,” and I said, “OK, I’m going to learn this song. This song would kill.” It’s maybe my favorite on the whole album, and it's one we’re pushing for blues radio. I’ll think it will do well.
Are there others that are particularly special to you?
“Something Strange.” I helped Fred Chapellier write that song for his most recent album. I was encouraging him to think Was (Not Was) for the song, but that wasn’t quite his thing. We took it into rehearsal and got a little closer to what I had hoped for for the song and then started playing it live with an eye toward recording it for this album.
“One More Day” is one I got from Mike Schermer, who goes under the name Mighty Mike Schermer, and he plays guitar with Marcia Ball, but he’s also on Vizztone. He’s a terrific writer, so I met him in Memphis at the Blues Awards last year, and I asked him to send me songs and that one jumped out.
Also, we added “Makin’ Plans” as a bonus track. I wrote it back in the Keystone Rhythm Band days. It’s one of the original songs that didn’t make it onto “Free at Last,” which was the original last KRB album. I wrote it with Mike Karr, who played trumpet and keyboards, and it’s just been around for years and we recorded it for “Strong,” the Billy Price Band album, and again, it didn’t make the cut on that one. It’s always in the back of my mind, I liked it and wondered if we shouldn't have recorded it then, so we remixed it and it was an opportunity to include it on this album.
I guess you could have gone into the studio and done this, but you wanted to catch the live energy.
Yeah, I did, I did. Actually, Bill Wax who used to program Bluesville on XM radio, I saw him a few months ago in D.C. and he was kind of wondering why we didn’t go into the studio with this. He said, “Gee, I’d like to hear the full studio treatment on some of these songs,” and he may be right, I’m not sure. I’m pretty sure my next album is going to be all original material, done in the studio.