Get on the bus: meet Ellen McIlwaine, Cult Heroes,
IN 1966, BLUES guitarist Ellen McIlwaine got the biggest gig of her life. Two sets per night, six nights a week, for six months, at New York’s Cafe Au Go Go – all for a flat fee of $1.50 a night. “That was when I met Jimi Hendrix for the first time,” she remembers of that far-off Greenwich Village residency. “He was a gentle, brilliant accompanist and a great friend; like an older brother.”
The 21-year-old with the pre-Raphaelite look and the Guild acoustic had a globetrotting backstory. Born in Nashville but adopted at five weeks old, she was raised by missionaries in Kobe, Japan. Discovering the American Forces Network, she fell hard for the likes of Fats Domino and Professor Longhair. Hendrix’s influence, meanwhile, was heard on her 1968 studio debut fronting blues rock outfit Fear Itself, a group she formed then disbanded after that sole long-player, the departure of one bassist and the death of his replacement.
For 1972’s Bonnie-Raitt-via-Betty-Carter solo long-player, Honky Tonk Angel, she decided to go all out. It’s a maximalist maelstrom: intricate, instinctive, deeply funky, with the occasional gnarled psych freakout, scat digression and hillbilly yodel thrown in. Sadly, her record company were less enthusiastic about her versatility.
“It’s always been a hindrance as well as an asset to be completely original,” McIlwaine explains. “Critics don’t know what to compare me to. I played a few gigs in Pennsylvania with Tom Waits – we both didn’t fit into any convenient box.”
After her three solo LPs of lovelorn defiance failed to take off, her record company took the unusual step of preventing her playing guitar on her own album.
“I was told I didn’t ‘have the chops’,” she says. “Every night I rocked my acoustic and cried in the apartment hotel they put me up in.”
In retaliation, McIlwaine set off alone, recording The Real Ellen McIlwaine with the Ville Émard Blues Band in Montreal, playing with her hero Jack Bruce and moving to Calgary. She created soundtracks to plays and films (including 1999 environmental documentary Pocket Desert: Confessions Of A Snake Killer) and gigged relentlessly, sleeping in her minivan to save money.
Thanks in part to an excellent 1995 reissue on Stony Plain Recordings, she was sampled by Fatboy Slim on 1996’s Song For Lindy, and became a rare groove favourite with the likes of Gilles Peterson and David Holmes. Still a cult prospect (“No interest, no gigs and no money,” McIlwaine retorts), she continued to play internationally, including Japanese club engagements with
DJ Ken Yanai. Still, she needed to pay her rent, and since 2013 she has driven a school bus.
“I never had any children because I gave up everything to play music. Now I have bus loads,” she says. “I would not do over a single minute: it took everything I went through to get me where
I am today.”
She’s currently working on a documentary, and will complete her autobiography this summer.
“If they have to wheel me out on a gurney, I will still crank up the slide and blast away,” says McIlwaine, who celebrates 40 years of sobriety this November. “Never ever will I quit.”
See Ellenmcilwaine.com and Bandcamp for sounds and info.
“It’s always been a hindrance as well as an asset to be completely original.” ELLEN McILWAINE