Blues artist Dave Specter returns to Gary stage
As a teenager, Dave Specter used a fake ID to get into clubs to hear Chicago blues.
Fast forward a few years, he’s the one onstage making the music.
Specter returns Dec. 9 to the Hard Rock Casino Northern Indiana’s Council Oak Bar stage.
A blues guitarist and singer, he’s a frequent visitor to the Hard Rock, he said.
“It’s a beautiful new casino with really wonderful live music going on there regularly on two stages,” he said. “You really get a nice, music-loving crowd, for sure. You definitely get a lot of blues lovers, which I love. Sometimes in Chicago we get serious blues lovers, but we also get crowds that take the music for granted and I found that is definitely not the case at the Hard Rock.”
Specter grew up in Chicago, attending Lane Tech and Francis W. Parker high schools and the University of Illinois.
“I come from a very musical family and although I only really played classical piano as a kid, I was surrounded by musicians in my family,” he said. “There was always music being played. I was a huge music fan. Right before I went off to college, I started playing guitar, just for fun. I got very serious about it while I was down in Champaign. I decided to move back to Chicago and try to become a professional musician. That was almost 40 years ago. It worked out pretty well.”
Since 1985, Specter has been a working blues musician, performing regularly at clubs, festivals and concert halls across the country and even globally. He was inducted into the Chicago Blues Hall of Fame in 2018.
Despite a wide musical education, he gravitated to blues early on.
“The soulful feeling of it grabbed me immediately,” he said. “I was like most kids, listening to mostly rock ’n’ roll. When I heard people like Muddy Waters and Junior Wells, I had never heard anything like that. It just spoke to me with such power and feeling, that I pretty much immediately wanted to learn how to play it.”
When he moved back to Chicago, he found the scene welcoming — there was no shortage of veteran blues masters willing to mentor a young whelp.
“It was a great experience,” he said. “I feel very fortunate having come up in Chicago. I don’t think I would be in the same position today if I wasn’t in Chicago.”
He experiments with melodies and grooves when he’s writing songs, unafraid to work with Latin, funk and jazz rhythms.
“I like how jazz and blues have a rich history of having a lot in common,” he said. “I went through a period early in my career of listening to a lot of very bluesy jazz, so I think that shows in my style. I got a lot of ideas for melody and song structure for blues from listening to jazz.”
Hearing masters like Buddy Guy, Junior Wells, Koko Taylor and Albert Collins in a live setting was also instrumental in his training.
The latest feather in his cap is his contribution to a 2023 Grammy-nominated album, called “Into the Little Blue House” by Wendy and DB. It received a nomination in the Best Children’s Album category.
His friend, Chicago musician and instructor Wendy Morgan, reached out last spring, asking him to play on a couple of tracks on a children’s blues album she was creating.
“I played on two songs and it went really well,” he said. “A number of really fine Chicago blues players were also on the session.”
Specter’s first album came out in 1991. He has appeared on more than 40 albums and DVDs as a guitarist, bandleader and/ or producer, with 12 albums as a leader or co-leader on Delmark Records. He is also partner at the music venue Evanston SPACE and hosts the podcast, Blues from the Inside Out.
Currently, he’s celebrating a new double-album retrospective, “Six String Soul: 30 Years on Delmark,” marking his 30 years on Delmark Records, out on vinyl and CD, he said.
“It’s a really nice set of remastered songs from a number of different albums from my career featuring a number of special guests and I’m really pleased with it,” he said.
Hard Rock audiences will hear quite a few of those songs and have a chance to purchase a copy of the vinyl record on standard black or snazzy blue vinyl, he said.
Audiences will also hear a few Christmas tunes, as ‘tis the season.
“We do play the classic ‘Merry Christmas, Baby’ by Charles Brown that’s been recorded by people like B.B. King as well,” he said.
Specter specializes in writing instrumentals, so audiences will hear a few of those. “Brother” John Kattke will be joining him on keyboards and vocals (they split vocal duties) for the night and they will play a combination of originals and covers, he said.
“We try to stay away from the standard blues warhorses that tend to get a little overplayed,” he said. “We try to represent the blues with a bit of a more interesting and less-covered cover tunes.”