When singer/songwriter/guitarist/taxi driver Mem Shannon released his debut CD A Cab Driver’s Blues in 1995, it marked the arrival of a major talent in contemporary blues. Yes, the inclusion of audiotaped conversations from passengers in his cab gave the record a unique twist and earned Shannon a mountain of media coverage, but above all, it was Shannon’s street-wise, insightful songwriting and guitar licks that carried the proceedings. Shannon retired from driving his taxi in 1996 to focus full-time on his music, and his sophomore CD, 2nd Blues Album, was crammed with more idiosyncratic gems and proved that the success of his first album was no fluke. Now Shannon plans to bust out in a big way with his forthcoming third CD, Spend Some Time with Me. It’s no accident that the word "blues" doesn’t appear in the title.

"This was a conscious effort to make people think about putting it in another bin," says Shannon. "I didn’t want to see blues on the cover. I want to see what happens."

It should prove to be the best career move yet for Shannon, who’s never played "straight" blues from day one. His solos are jazzy, stream-of-consciousness explorations that can quote a Latin figure one minute and head into lyrical George Benson territory the next. But most of all, Shannon is funky. While young bands like Galactic, Iris May Tango and All That are spearheading New Orleans’ current funk explosion, Shannon and his band the Membership have been funky all along, and his rhythm playing and arrangements are currently gut-busting tight.

"A lot of people don’t realize I play funk, since I don’t hang out, and don’t gig enough around here. I’ve been playing funk since I picked up the guitar. That’s always been my background, from the Bar-Kays, to Kool and the Gang, to the Isley Brothers."

The opening track on his new CD, "Who Are They," sets the tone for Shannon’s resolve to break out of the confines of the "blues" label. A slinky Leo Nocentelli-like riff gives way to a swelling horn blast, and the rhythm section kicks in with gusto. True to form, Shannon’s lyrics are downright brilliant, detailing his frustration he feels with invisible pundits: "They say everything’s looking real good/Well they must have forgot to check my neighborhood/They say the cost of living is going down/Well how come I don’t see no extra money hangin’ round…Just who are they and has anybody ever seen ‘em?"

And that’s just the start. For my money, Shannon’s one of the finest songwriters working today, in any genre. "The Last Time I Was Here (Millenium Blues)" is a dual tale of reincarnation and slavery; "Don’t Talk About My Mama" is a hilarious response to mother jokes, with the refrain "You better not go there"; "Dirty Dishes" is not the Albert Collins classic, but addresses hypocrites from all walks of life; "A Certain Shade of Blue" is a beautiful country song embellished by Dave Easley’s pedal-steel guitar; "Not My Friend" is a heartbreaking tale of burned bridges; and "No Such Thing" brings it all home, proclaiming, "Ain’t no such thing as too much funk."

The overall strength of the record shouldn’t come as surprise. Shannon’s made quite a few friends and fans in the last few years, including Dennis Walker (best known for his work with Robert Cray), who co-produced Spend Some Time with Me. Shannon earned a new record deal (this is his debut for Shanachie), and was even invited to be a featured performer at the Muddy Waters Tribute at New York’s Kennedy Center, where he shared the stage with the likes of Gregg Allman, Buddy Guy, John Hiatt and Charlie Musselwhite. (Mem played Waters’ "Honey Bee.") It was after that concert that Shannon met a legend who reassured him that he was on the right path.

"I met Robert Jr. Lockwood after we filmed that show for PBS. And I spent two hours in his hotel room after we finished, and he gave me a personal concert on 12-string acoustic. He played ‘Sweet Home Chicago’ the way it was supposed to be played, the way Robert Johnson taught him. He had changes in it–it wasn’t I-IV-V–he went all over the place with that song, and had lyrics I’d never heard in the song. And it hit me why I hate that song. Because everybody’s been doing it wrong for the last 50 years. He knows chords, he knows structures, he just knows. I felt like I met history. I met the guy that learned from Robert Johnson and taught B.B. King."

Another strong songwriter and New Orleans bluesman, Andy J. Forest, releases his new Apaloosa CD Letter From Hell this month. The CD features some sizzling, deep-toned harmonica playing and a crack band; most intriguingly, Forest will be simultaneously releasing his novel (!) of the same name…New Orleans’ "Deltabilly swing" guitarist Jeremy Lyons is recording at the Boiler Room Studio this month recording his second CD…Look for Tab Benoit to sign a new record deal any day now; Benoit was recently released from his contract with Justice Records, and with the help of local attorney Justin Zitler, bought back the rights to all his Justice Records and a host of unreleased material, including tracks with Dr. John, and the recent live show recorded at House of Blues that featured Benoit alongside Raful Neal and Tabby Thomas…For live blues in February, check out "Best of the Beat" hot picks on p. ?.

Writing this month’s column was a bittersweet assignment: this is my final installment of "Bluesworthy," and my last issue as a staff member of OffBeat. It’s hard to believe that it’s been almost six years that I’ve been with OffBeat–that translates into 67 deadlines. It’s been a great ride, and I’ll look back at my tenure here with fond memories. When I started, there were only four full-time employees (now there are 10) and an average issue clocked in at 56 pages. Now OffBeat regularly tops the 100-page mark each issue, and it’s been an immensely rewarding experience to be a part of the phenomenal growth of this magazine. I know that OffBeat will continue to be the bible of New Orleans and Louisiana music, and I’ll miss riding shotgun as it takes continued strides into the new milennium.

What I’ll miss most of all is the camaraderie of OffBeat. Anyone who works in a small office knows that your co-workers often become family, and that’s certainly been the case for me with OffBeat. I’d especially like to thank OffBeat publisher Jan Ramsey for her friendship, encouragement, support, and for giving me a shot when I was the new kid in town; OffBeat editor David Jones for the teamwork and laughs, and all the present and past OffBeat staffers who’ve made working here such a pleasure. Thanks as well to all the OffBeat readers (local and national) who wrote, called, and e-mailed me with suggestions, comments and criticism.

Many, many thanks to all the musicians, who often endured early morning phone calls, aggravating fact-checking questions, and all sorts of crazy queries about their craft.

Thanks again, everybody. I hope to see you down the road.

“We’re the brothers/We’re the funky four/funk to the Valence/from the Calliope/like to sing and dance/in the neighborhood/we’re bad as lightning/and we’re loud as thunder/When you hear the Brothers/your body got to move“–The Neville Brothers, “Real Funk”

The Neville Brothers’ familial bonds have kept them together as the Funky Four, even as each Brother has nurtured successful solo careers and side projects. Cyril leads his own “second-line reggae” band, The Uptown All-Stars; Charles has recorded acclaimed jazz albums and collaborated with musicians from the Native American community; Art scored solo success in the ’50s for Specialty Records with tracks like “Cha-Dooky Do” and went on to found The Meters; and Aaron recaptured the glory spawned by his 1967 smash hit “Tell it Like it Is” in a string of duets with Linda Rondstat and a steady stream of contemporary solo albums. But the Neville Brothers band has remained the common musical thread in their lives. Ever since they first united on record in 1976 for the landmark Wild Tchoupitoulas album, they’ve come to symbolize the musical and cultural diversity of New Orleans. They first recorded as The Neville Brothers for their eponymous 1978 Capitol Records debut, and have released a steady stream of compelling albums, including the Grammy-winning efforts Fiyo on the Bayou and Yellow Moon.

On February 16–Mardi Gras day–the Neville Brothers will release their new album, titled Valence St. It’s their debut for Columbia Records, and stands as one of the strongest and most diverse albums in the Nevilles canon. Valence St. boasts classic sensual New Orleans second-line grooves (“Real Funk,” the title track), adventurous multi-cultural explorations (“Over Africa,” “If I Had a Hammer”), and the first single is a heavenly ballad from Aaron (“A Little Piece of Heaven”). But the record has its share of surprises as well, including a hip-hop collaboration with Wyclef Jean, a pair of heartfelt ballads sung by Cyril, and arguably Art’s finest vocal performance ever, a mournful, gospel-like reading of Richard Thompson’s “Dimming of the Day.”

Valence St. is the sound of four brothers, four distinct musical personalities, coming together and celebrating their individual and collective roots.With Valence St. waiting in the wings, the four Brothers each talked to OffBeat about the new album, their individual inspirations, and the forces that have kept The Neville Brothers going strong for over two decades.

CYRIL

The youngest of the brothers, Cyril has staked out a musical identity as the band’s percussionist and its grittiest vocalist.. He earned the respect of his siblings quickly, playing with Art and Aaron in the late-ë60s band the Neville Sound, and he joined forces with Aaron again in the mid-ë70s group the Soul Machine. He is the most outspoken of the brothers, and prefaces every his interviews with the disclaimer, “When I speak, I don’t speak for my brothers, I speak only for myself.” He tirelessly speaks out against racial and social injustices, displaying a passion born out of the circumstances of his youth.

“There’s a lot of misconceptions about me,” he says. “One misconception is that the Neville Brothers grew up together. I did not grow up with my brothers. I grew up under them. I’m ten years younger than Art, I’m nine years younger than Charles, and I’m like seven years younger than Aaron. When I was a child, they were young men. So it wasn’t like we all came up at the same time and have the same likes and dislikes. Even people who came up at the same time don’t have the same likes and dislikes. I came up during a different time and a different era; my formative years were during the so-called civil rights movement, and that just puts my approach to life a little more different.”Cyril doesn’t mince words; the “indoctrination” rather than education of schoolchildren, and his comparison of artists in the music industry to sharecroppers, are just two issues stoking the fire in his belly of late. But his strong stance on various issues is just one facet of his personality. Cyril is above all a devoted family man, immensely proud of his wife and children, and he’s not afraid to show those sentiments. On Valence St., the love song “Utterly Beloved” grew out of a poem he wrote for his wife Gaynielle after visiting her on the movie set of Oprah Winfrey’s Beloved.

“I got a chance to do some different stuff [on this album], and for me the audience has a chance to hear me do the things that they haven’t heard me do before. I’ve done things like that on gigs before, but never on record,” he says. “Tears,” the closing track on Valence St., finds Cyril in similar emotional territory, capturing a lifetime of heartbreak in a vocal tour-de-force. For Cyril, his performances on Valence St. don’t represent a departure from form, but an extension of the musicial mantra The Neville Brothers have always followed. “Because what was first with us the whole time, is musically, what we’re saying is always true. That’s why we never went disco. We were playing ‘Hey Pocky Way’ and ‘Brother John’ and ‘Iko Iko’ from day one up until now. When you go see the Neville Brothers–I don’t care where you’re from–you’re coming to a parade. You’re coming to an Indian practice, a jazz concert, a rhythm and blues concert, reggae, gospel. We went all the way from doo-wop through bebop on into hip-hop, and we’re gonna be around any kind of way it flip-flops.”

No matter what side roads the Nevilles’ music travels down, for Cyril, the guidance of New Orleans’ musical legacy will always be omnipresent. It’s evident in his Friday and Saturday night series “Cyril Neville Presents” at Tipitina’s French Quarter, where he’s not only spotlighting local talent, but playing with the Uptown All-Stars and a new band he recently formed that focuses on classic New Orleans rhythm and blues. “The good part about is, when you’re from New Orleans, you never do some of that stuff the same way twice anyway. So every time I do it, it’s a brand new experience for me and whoever sees me doing it. And Fess, Booker, Alvin Shine Robinson, Nat Perillat, and all of those people, Professor Shorthair Tillman, constantly travel with me, so that’s another reason that I know that what we’re doing is going to succeed, because we’re getting constant input from all of them people. Every time we go in the studio, there’s always empty chairs and empty microphones for those people. And people can call it crazy or whatever they want, but it’s the truth. The spirit lives on and on and on.”

CHARLES

Saxophonist Charles Neville is the Neville Brothers’ musical compass, transporting their rhythmic interplay into new realms and back again with his otherwordly solos. “Charles can blow anything,” says Aaron. Charles’ll make you feel like you’re in China, or Arabia, or anywhere.” And that’s not just brotherly love and praise, it’s the truth. In Charles hands, a song like “Yellow Moon” is embellished with a mystical heat, thanks to his hypnotic snake-charmer solo. He contributed the heartbeat of Valence St., its title track, a searing instrumental that is one of the most wicked and intoxicating grooves from the Nevilles in recent memory.

“I wrote that a long time ago–in fact it was sometime in the ’70s,” Charles remembers. “I was living in New York at the time that I wrote it and I played it with the band that I had there. I had a tape of it, and I’d forgotten about it. And listening and going through some old tapes, I heard it and said, ‘yeah.’” Charles’ move to the Big Apple opened up new musical horizons for him, expanding his already substantial musical knowledge.

“For me, the time that I moved to New York really played a big part in what the experience meant to me, because through the ’50s and early ’60s, I had played with a lot of the top blues and rhythm and blues bands around the country, and had gotten to play with some of the jazz musicians in some of those bands. But I got to New York at the time when Minton’s Playhouse was still happening, and the Baby Grand, and Count Basie’s, and all the great jazz clubs in Harlem were still really happening. There were clubs in Brooklyn and the Village as well where jazz was really hot in New York at the time, and a lot of the bebop players were there, so I got to really work with some of the people that I had really looked up to most of my life, and it was a real educating and inspiring experience for me. One thing, I got to play with Tiny Grimes, and we got to be friends, and I played with him for a while. Also I got to play with Billy Higgins and George Coleman and Charles McPherson, and that was really great. That had become a part of the way I play, and I incorporated that into what we do here.”

For Charles, it was a path that revealed the common ground in indigenous music from around the world. After contributing his newfound musical discoveries to the Wild Tchoupitoulas sessions, his role in the Neville Brothers – and in all his side projects – has blossomed into a torchbearer for the expansion of cultural horizons.

“The main difference in the music is just the rhythm, and to me it’s all kind of the same. For me when I play with the jazz group we have, we have pieces that are based on some of the New Orleans street beat rhythms, some of them just funk rhythms, some of them like straight ahead bebop, and a lot of the stuff I do is Latin, and Afro/Cuban, Puerto Rican, Brazilian-kind of stuff as well.” In his pursuit of hidden connections, Charles became one of the guiding lights in the recent movement to bring together the historic traditions of the Mardi Gras Indian and Native American communities.

“It’s a similar kinship, and something that I wanted to help happen was to have the Native Americans and the Mardi Gras Indians get to know more about each other. I got to meet, and know, and I’m friends with Dr. Orvil Looking Horse, who’s the sacred pipe carrier for the Lakota Sioux. When we did that recording called Songcatchers, our aim was to combine other American music forms with the Native American music form. And we used to like to introduce the band as being a cross-section of America, because we had Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, Native Americans, African Americans and Jewish Americans in the band. So what we had to show was that things that appear different are really the same, in terms of especially human culture and human everything. Just like people thought Native American music was so different from jazz or rock or funk or hiphop, but we put all those elements together with traditional Native American music and it worked.”

That experience led to Charles writing “Tears,” the tribute to Native American culture on Valence St. The song is an example of Charles’ other dominant trait, a quiet spirituality that permeates all his musical endeavors. The connection to a higher power, Charles believes, is the main reason the Neville Brothers have remained united, in the midst of an industry that often tears families apart.

“I think our main interest in it from the beginning wasn’t the business of it, but more the music part of it. And the fact that making music is a kind of spiritual experience and it requires that people who do it together, need to be able to link together spiritually. And that experience kind of overrides everything else and becomes more important than anything else. That’s what’s made it easier for us to stay together for so many years, because that particular thing, sharing that experience, has kind of gotten us through most of the things that could turn into conflicts for most people.”

ART

The oldest of the Brothers, Art Neville has earned the nickname “Poppa Funk.” Watch him walk on stage, and settle in behind the wall of keyboards he surrounds himself with, and there’s an undeniable aura of cool confidence that surrounds him. It’s only fitting for the man who’s written such memorable piano lines as the intro to “Hey Pocky Way,” a figure as instantly recognizable in New Orleans music as Professor Longhair’s “Tipitina.” He’s practically a one-man rhythm section; his Hammond B-3 lines–and baritone voice–are the perfect counterpoint for Aaron’s falsetto and Cyril’s fiery vocals. It’s a testament to Art’s serenity and leadership that in both the Neville Brothers and the Funky Meters,, he’s the consummate team player, always ready to give his bandmates the spotlight. That philosophy also explains the pride he feels over the diverse musical contributions on Valence St.

“Everybody had a chance to do something on the album and participate, and do a little special thing, each of us,” he says. “You can tell from whatever the song is, who can run that particular play. It’s like a football team, man, when you’ve got a certain play, you let whomever runs that play the best go with it. You can hear certain songs, and if I’d try to sing it, I wouldn’t be able to do what Aaron or Cyril did with ‘em, you know?”

Art’s talents are stamped throughout Valence St., from the apocalyptic rumble he brings to his vocals on “Over Africa” and “The Dealer” to his trademark funkified organ on the title track and “Real Funk.” With over forty years of playing music professionally under his belt, Art’s playing has still retained a youthful exuberance, and matured into a league on par with his own heroes.

“I think what happened is I’ve learned to understand what I’m doing a little better, and appreciate what I’m doing better. I have fun when I’m doing it, and I enjoy doing it, and I want it to be cold-blooded stuff. I just did a thing for Windham Hill Records which is going to be out. I did it up in my studio, and I’m playing everything except the guitar. It’s an instrumental, and the album is called Organ Summit, and it’s Jimmy Smith, Jimmy McGriff, Al Kooper, Booker T. and me. So I’m happy with that. And we’ve got some stuff we’ve been doing with the Meters that’s so treacherous. What’s happening now is that everybody who influenced me wanting to play, like one my main dudes is Horace Silver, and Bobby Timmons too, I can’t play like them, but the kind of attitude I got from what they’re doing is creeping out now, I think.”

Like his brothers, Art can’t help but shake his head at the band’s critics–especially here at home–who at various times over the years have claimed the Brothers have strayed from their New Orleans roots. It’s practically a foregone conclusion that someone somewhere will perceive their hip-hop pairing with Wyclef Jean on Valence St. as a sellout, or one of Aaron’s new ballads as simply a track geared for radio airplay. “All of our records are special to me, and one of ‘em we did, Uptown, everybody said that didn’t sound like us,” says Art. “That’s crazy. It’s the Neville Brothers; we’re singing on the stuff. I don’t understand. Man, to me, it sounded like us. But they weren’t gonna get away with us doing that stuff. It was too pop, and we had some bad dudes playing on that: Santana, Jerry Garcia… I thought it was real good. “People try to put you in the pigeonhole. They got that statue at Lee Circle, and they want you to be like that: don’t you never change. We wasn’t made for no bag,” he says.

And for Art, the constant acknowledgements he receives from the younger funk players on the scene, and his role as “Poppa Funk,” are all the more incentive to keep pushing, and keep shaking things up musically. “I love to hear the cats say that stuff,” he says. “It’s flattery and a compliment, and it makes you know that whatever you’ve been doin’, somebody’s been paying attention to it. There are bands out there kickin’ butt too. It makes me want to do more stuff, and say, ‘I’ve got something else for you; it ain’t finished. You got that one, now check this out.’ … The songs on this new album–like that ‘Over Africa’ thing, or ‘If I Had a Hammer,’ ‘Until We Meet Again,’ ‘The Dealer,’ there’s some nice stuff. It’s tasty. It’s a bunch of mixtures–you got Indian, you got all this stuff goin’ on in there at one time. You’re born in Louisiana, you’re mixed up,” he laughs. “You got to be mixed up.”

AARON

Aaron Neville arguably possesses arguably the most recognizable voice in American music. There’s no disputing his status as one of the 20th century’s greatest balladeers, and his vocal genius just earned him another Grammy nomination, this time for his most recent solo album, To Make Me Who I Am. But while his love songs may have earned him his greatest recognition, Aaron aficionados also know that he’s always been a master of heat-seeking New Orleans rhythm and blues, singing scalding vocals on his classic ’60s track “Over You” all the way through to his tough turn on “Brother Jake” from 1989′s Brother’s Keeper. No amount of mainstream success has kept Aaron from keeping it real: underneath the beautiful flourishes of the Valence St. ballad “Give Me a Reason” is the tale of a man searching for salvation, in a society that often doesn’t make sense.

“Give Me a Reason” was a song that [producer] Joel Dorn brought to me back when we did Fiyo on the Bayou,” remembers Aaron. “We did it one time, but it didn’t work out. Then I heard it done by the Cate Brothers. That’s how I wanted it, that same feeling… I’m thinking about the people out in the streets, and the kids, and that line, ‘Somebody tell me where I belong / and that’s where I want to be,’ the first time I heard it, it made me cry.”

Aaron believes in the healing power of music, and has maintained a strong connection to his gospel influences. He contributed the reggae-ish rearrangement and vocal to Valence St.’s version of the Pete Seeger folk classic “If I Had a Hammer,” eliciting new nuances out of the song’s message. He’s also currently recording a spiritual album on his own, and shares his brothers’ views on the importance of their respective solo projects, and the positive effect they have on the Neville Brothers band.

“It’s a way that everybody keeps their individuality, and then we become the Neville Brothers and put it together. It’s like your fingers opening up, and they might be going in separate directions, but when you close ‘em up, you’ve got a fist, and we’re going in the same direction.” When the Brothers come together, they have generations of connections that unite them.”We look out for each other,” he says. “I want for them what I want for me. I don’t feel like I’ve made it until they’ve made it. We’ll be on stage and I can look at my brothers and I can see my ancestors that aren’t here anymore. I think they can do the same thing. We’ve got stories we can tell on the bus; we can talk about things from a long time ago, and it’s special, you know?”

That sentiment also bodes well for the musical future of the Neville Brothers. Of the many projects they’d like to see come to fruition, Aaron sounds particularly enthusiastic about an idea of Cyril’s. “We talk about doin’ the stuff we grew up listening to, the stuff that we did that was dear to us. Cyril’s been talking about doing a show, and having a park bench we could bring out there, because when we came up in the Calliope housing projects and they had these cement benches, we’d sit on those benches and just harmonize like Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters, or Billy Ward and the Dominoes, Sonny Till and the Oreos, Pooky Hudson and the Spaniards, and all those cats. We would do our history.”

On the eve of a new album that embraces old traditions and new musical directions, it’s wholly appropriate that Aaron and his brothers have never forgotten their early inspirations. Yes, they are the most renowned ambassadors of New Orleans music, and their songs and faces are known the world over, but when all is said and done, the Neville Brothers have stayed true to their home town, and they don’t plan on stopping now. Home will always be Valence St.

“I think any Neville fan, diehard or whatever you want to call it, they should give it a listen, and check the Neville Brothers out,” says Aaron. “The Neville Brothers are still keepin’ on keepin’ on. That’s the bottom line. We’re trying to be here until the year 3000.”

It’s been over two decades since Lazy Lester left Louisiana for Michigan, but the timeless harmonica-driven sound he forged for Excello Records in the mid-’50s and early ’60s still courses through his veins.

On January 23, Lazy Lester’s swamp-blues rise again with the release of All Over You (Antone’s Records), a powerful new cd that pairs Lester with the cream of the Austin, Texas, blues community, including guitarists Derek O’ Brien and Sue Foley, bassist Sarah Brown and drummer Mike Buck. Like B.B. King’s recent Blues on the Bayou, All Over You is a career-defining effort, an album that matches vintage aesthetic musical values with ’90s production. Lester reprises some of his classic Excello hits ("I’m a Lover Not a Fighter," "Strange Things Happen," "I Made Up My Mind") and the swamp-pop anthem "Irene," and picks up the guitar again for haunting solo versions of "My Home is a Prison" and "Nothing But the Devil." His, well, lazy drawl is still arresting, and his harmonica playing packs a piercing tone and succinct directness. All Over You is all the more remarkable considering that a young Lazy Lester (a.k.a. Leslie Johnson) had never even considered a career in music until he took a fateful bus trip some 40-odd years ago.

"I was living in Rayne, Louisiana and working construction for a short period of time, working around Kaplan and Abbeville, around there," Lester remembers. "It had rained and work was off for a while so I went to Baton Rouge, and on my way back to Rayne, Lightnin’ Slim was on the bus. He didn’t know who I was, but I knew him. When I got to Rayne, it was only 25 cents more to go from Rayne to Crowley. So I said, I’m going to keep going to Crowley and see about this recording business they’ve got going on over here. I didn’t have no intention of making a record. So I got off the bus, and I told Lightnin’ that I’m going around with him to see about all this". After we got around there, I introduced myself, and Lightnin’ told everybody I wanted to see what was going on.

"So he went and got this big red Cadillac convertible, he was pretty warm, and we went on out to Port Arthur and Beaumont looking for Wild Bill Phillips, the guy that played harmonica. We rode around lookin’ for him, lookin’ for him, never did find him. So we came back around Lake Charles lookin’ for him, and he wasn’t there"so he had no harmonica player. So Lightnin’ said, I don’t what we’re gonna do. We got no harmonica player here, looks like we’re going to reschedule this thing. I said, ‘What’s so special about this harmonica player y’all are talkin’ about? And he said, ‘Well, he’s the one that does all the recording." I said, "I’m not trying to be funny, but I can play better than that. I’ve been playing that stuff for years." He said, "What?!?" I know what key he’s playin’ in; go get me a G and an A harmonica. Then I reached and got an old guitar he had, and tuned the guitar with the harmonica. His eyes were lit up like a Christmas tree. He said, ‘You’re ridin’ around with me all day and half of the night, and you didn’t tell me you played that good?’ That’s what started me with playin’ guitar with Lightnin’."

After establishing himself as an able sideman for Lightnin’ Slim, Lester became an all-around utility man at producer J.D. Miller’s Crowley studio.

"I was a drummer, and played guitar and bass too. When I started messin’ around with the harmonica in the studio, everybody wanted me to play with the harmonica. I played with Lonesome Sundown, and did some harmonica with some of the French guys down there, like Nathan Abshire. I’d play percussion, washboard, all that stuff."

Lester also established himself as a prolific and gifted songwriter, a valuable commodity for Miller.

"Anything that would come to mind, he would sit down and write, and I would sit down and write. He and I were pretty close. There’d be nobody in the studio but us. I’d go across the street and get a six-pack, and we’d drink a beer and he’d write some lyrics, and I’d put the music to it. Whenever somebody was coming down to record with him, we’d just put it on the record. Of course I wrote most of my songs myself, but he’d put his name on it," Lester laughs.

After his own successful run as an Excello artist, Lester grew disillusioned with the music business, and has played sporadically, alternating performing with day jobs. But All Over You is his first album in a decade, and with recent festival gigs in Europe, the time is ripe for Lazy Lester to be rediscovered by the blues world. Typically, Lester is modest about his recent achievement.

"We were just tryin’ to put a good record together, and I think we did. The stuff is so simple, you know, a three-year old can play that," he laughs.

Studio news"New Orleans harmonica man Rockin’ Jake is set to record his followup to Let’s Go Get ‘Em. John Gros is producing, and Jake’s studio band is top-notch: Brian Stoltz on guitar, Russ Broussard on drums, and David Lee Watson on bass" Joe Krown (pianist for Gatemouth Brown and Amy and the Hank Sinatras) is making preparations for his second CD, which will focus on Krown’s Hammond B-3 prowess. Krown also guested on recent sessions for Jumpin’ Johnny Sansone’s next cd, which features longtime Sansone guitarist Ricky Olivarez and the rhythm section of ex-Sonny Landreth (and John Hiatt) bandmates Dave Ranson (bass) and Kenneth Blevins (drums).

Upcoming shows to look forward to in January include Leon Russell (touring in support of his recent country-flavored Legend in My Time: Hank Wilson, Volume 3 cd) at House of Blues Jan. 7; soul and gospel matriarch Mavis Staples at Levon Helm’s Classic American Caf Jan. 8&9; also on Jan. 9, the biggest, baddest horn band in the land, Roomful of Blues, blows into House of Blues with a new singer (Mac Odom) and new cd (There Goes the Neighborhood). Speaking of Roomful, ex-Roomful sax man Greg Piccolo whose most recent cd is Red Lights on the Fantasy label) plays two shows at Levon Helm’s Classic American Café Jan. 12&13. Teenage whiz kid Jonny Lang’s recent A&M cd Wander This World is perched near the top of the Billboard blues charts, and expect to hear material from that album when Lang plays H.O.B. Jan. 11. Jan. 16 is a blues club-hopping night: Tab Benoit is at Mid-City Bowling Lanes, acclaimed electric bluesman Larry McCray makes a rare New Orleans appearance at the Mermaid Lounge, and the most intriguing show of the night is Louisiana bluesman B.B. Majors (who released one of the finest local blues CD’s of 1998, Evil Woman/Evil Ways) making his New Orleans club debut at Vic’s Kangaroo Café.

Finally, Jon Cleary returns home from his tour with Bonnie Raitt, and plays The Maple Leaf Jan. 22.

Where does the time go?

Another year is coming to a close. Perhaps it’s a time for reflection, where we take a look at the last 364 days, and gaze forward to 1999, wondering what new experiences it may bring.

Nah. There’s too much going on in December in New Orleans, let alone running around and trying to get presents for family and friends.

Even though he moved back to New Orleans a year ago, Spencer Bohren has maintained his busy playing schedule, and hasn’t been playing in town much. But Bohren will be playing a special Christmas show at Snug Harbor on December 17, and featuring some special guests to help spread the holiday cheer. In addition to his old buddies Dave Malone and Reggie Scanlan of the Radiators, duets are planned with pianist Scott Kirby, gospel vocalist Barbara Shorts, cowboy poet Tom Perlman, and Bohren’s son Andre, a talented pianist and percussionist.

Louisiana is losing another blues landmark in early 1999, as Baton Rouge bluesman Tabby Thomas’ club Tabby’s Blues Box is officially being demolished by the city. (Who thinks up these brilliant ideas?) But before the club closes its doors for the last time, Thomas and his son Chris are aiming for inclusion in the Guinness Book of World Records, by hosting the world’s longest blues jam. Plans call for the marathon jam session to take place in late January or early February, with 72 continuous hours of music. All musicians interested in participating can e-mail Chris Thomas King at king21cb@bellsouth.net.

Two new clubs that promise regular bookings of local and national blues artists are opening their doors this month. In what’s being called a “sneak peek,” Southport Hall (located at 200 Monticello, just off River Road over the Orleans/Jefferson Parish line), welcomes former Roomful of Blues sax man Greg Piccolo and his band Heavy Juice on December 9. Southport Hall is still under construction and slated to open in February 1998, but the cocktail lounge is now open nightly. Levon Helm’s Classic American Café (see Backtalk, p. 89), at 300 Decatur St., welcomes James Cotton on Dec. 26 & 27 as part of the grand opening festivities, and Brint Anderson and Luther Kent will also be appearing regularly at the venue. December 12 at Vic’s Kangaroo Café, Texas guitarist Mark May makes a rare stop in New Orleans. On New Year’s Eve, at the Howlin’ Wolf, Superfly Productions presents the second installment of their “Superjam” series, and it’s another doozy: Walter “Wolfman” Washington, Jon Cleary, Tony Hall and Zigaboo Modeliste will join forces for the first time. After the superjam, Washington and his band the Roadmasters will play a late-night set.

If you’re stumped on what to get your favorite blues lover for the holiday season, there are hosts of worthy CDs that have hit the stores in recent months. In the box set category, Taj Mahal’s three-CD In Progress and In Motion (Sony/Legacy) collects the cream of Taj’s early acoustic work for Columbia, including sides featuring the tuba support of Howard Frazier, and backup vocals from the pre-”I’m So Excited” Pointer Sisters. Fans of Taj’s ‘90s work may be disappointed at the skimpy selection from his recent Private Music albums, which drew heavily on New Orleans inspirations. Booker T. and the MGs, Memphis’ version of the Meters, have finally gotten their due with Time is Tight (Fantasy), a three-CD collection of their vintage instrumental sides, previously unreleased live cuts backing Albert King, Boz Scaggs and Neil Young, and other gems culled from radio broadcasts and the Bob Dylan 30th anniversary tribute concert at Madison Square Garden. The incendiary live performance of “Hang ‘Em High,” with its slow-simmering groove building to a breathless conclusion, is worth the price of this set alone.

Other CDs to keep an eye out for include the Derek Trucks Band’s new CD, which features ex-Allmans guitarist and vocalist Warren Haynes alongside slide whiz Trucks; the band does a slamming version of the Meters’ “Look-a-Py-Py” on the disc. Delmark’s terrific ongoing reissue series includes legendary Chicago guitarist Robert Nighthawk’s Bricks in My Pillow and boogie-woogie piano master Albert Ammons’ Boogie Woogie Stomp. Blues piano buffs will also find plenty to enjoy in Fred Kaplan’s Signifyin’ (Blue Collar Records), a solo piano CD from the Fabulous Thunderbirds keyboardist. Tuff City Records has compiled The Best of Scram Records, which features one of Walter “Wolfman” Washington’s ‘60s tracks, “Mary Jane.”

The late Luther Allison is further immortalized by Ruf Records with Hand Me Down My Moonshine, a compelling acoustic CD. Duke Robillard fans won’t want to miss Stretchin’ Out (Stony Plain), a live album featuring Duke’s supremely tasteful guitar playing tackling every blues-guitar style under the sun, to typically stunning effect. Ex-Anson Funderburgh and Ronnie Earl vocalist Darrell Nulisch (who was here at JazzFest ‘98 with James Cotton) has just released one of the best blues/soul CDs of the year, The Whole Truth, on Severn Records. And, John Lee Hooker’s The Best of Friends, compiles the cream of his Pointblank recordings.

So what’s around the corner for 1999? We should be hearing new albums from Mem Shannon (who was recording at American Sector Recording Studios last month); Jon Cleary (yes, his Pointblank debut is finished); another New Orleans R&B-flavored effort from Ruth Brown; Anders Osborne; Stavin’ Chain; the Wild Magnolias; and the Neville Brothers. On the wish list, it sure would be nice to hear new CDs from Earl King, Snooks Eaglin, Tommy Ridgley, Irma Thomas, Lazy Lester (his Antone’s debut is temporarily postponed), Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, Sonny Landreth, Allen Toussaint (with a long-rumored solo piano CD), John Mooney, Marva Wright, Chuck Carbo, Roland Stone, Jumpin’ Johnny Sansone, Rockie Charles, J. Monque’ D, Wallace Johnson, Guitar Slim Jr., Eddie Bo, Augie Jr., and Marcia Ball, for starters.

As one of the founding members of The Band, Levon Helm helped rewrite rock and roll history. In one stretch from 1965-1969, Helm and his bandmates broke all the musical rules of the era. They were the backing band for Bob Dylan’s famed transition from acoustic folk to electric rock, and then moved to Woodstock, NY, where they honed an earthy, multi-layered sound that spotlighted the singing of Helm, Richard Manuel and Rick Danko, and the group’s proficiency on no less than 17 instruments. Their first two albums, Music From Big Pink and The Band, contained stunning songs filled with rural imagery ("The Weight," "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down"), and helped created a mystique around them that landed them on the cover of Time magazine in 1970.

The turmoil that followed their meteoric rise (intriguingly documented in Helm’s autobiography, This Wheel’s On Fire) culminated in the Band’s 1977 "farewell" concert, The Last Waltz, filmed by Martin Scorcese and also released as a three-LP set.

The original members of The Band reformed in 1983, without original guitarist Robbie Robertson. Richard Manuel passed away in 1986, but Helm, Danko and Hudson have carried on The Band’s legacy, with support from guitarist Jimmy Weider, keyboardist Richard Bell and singer/drummer Randy Ciarlante. This September, they released Jubilation, a rich song cycle that captures their inimitable classic sound in new songs like "Book Faded Brown," "High Cotton" and "Kentucky Downpour."

For Helm, his life and musical career are coming full circle. He’s opening his own club, Levon Helm’s Classic American Cafe, in New Orleans at 300 Decatur St. The grand opening date is December 26, and will feature Helm with some of his old friends and playing partners, including harmonica legend James Cotton and The Cate Brothers. His new New Orleans home is the result of years of ties to Louisiana music, and his business partner, Carmen Marotta, is the son of Tony Marotta, who ran the New Jersey nightclub where Bob Dylan discovered the Band three decades ago.

Opening your club here in the French Quarter is a somewhat of a homecoming for you. When you stopped playing drums for Bob Dylan for a spell in 1966, you came to New Orleans.

Yeah, that was a pretty skinny time, economically. I’ll tell you a funny story: I got fired from the Court of Two Sisters for eating the entrees while I was working. I had a pretty good meal before I got fired (laughs). The Aquatic Engineering and Construction Company out of Houma, Louisiana was good enough to give me a job at the time. I finally retired out of that off-shore stuff after a couple of trips and went back to Memphis to the cotton carnival and started playing with the Cate Brothers again, and shortly after that, it was time to go up to Woodstock—The Band had gotten back. We were with Dylan at the time I took off. I had done the American part of the tour, playing Texas and California and up in the East. Then they were moving to Australia and Europe, and I bailed then. And a long year later, I was up in Woodstock, and we were in the basement at Big Pink, starting to put the Basement Tapes together. We didn’t know that at the time, we were just strugglin’ and looking for anything, mainly trying to listen to ourselves. We would record something, and Garth [Hudson] would tape it, and we’d hear ourselves back. When you first start that stuff, it’s a hell of a hard lesson to take, ‘cause you sound like hell (laughs). You just can’t help it. We had to listen for a while, in order to stop doin’ that stuff that didn’t sound so good. I’ve had Duck Dunn tell me that too, that workin’ at Stax Records and bein’ the house band for Stax Records made him a much better player, because every day he would record and he would have to listen to himself back. They’d cut something with Otis [Redding] or Sam & Dave or whoever, and have to listen to it back and try and better that performance. Otherwise, you just work and sleep and work and do a song, and you’re just producing all the time, so at Woodstock for the first time we could kind of sit back and take our medicine with it. After a while, we’d get it going and record it, then tear it up and start all over with it and re-record it. And if you do that three or four times, you can finally shake the dust out of ‘em, if it’s got any kind of a hook or little thing that calls on you at all. That’s the only way we’ve been able to come up to what I would call record quality.

When you did start playing and recording at Big Pink, did you find that you were trying to break the wheel, so to speak, since you were used to playing in that full-bore muscular rock and roll mode with Ronnie Hawkins and Dylan?

True. All we were supposed to do was show up and produce. You know, produce the show, pack up, and get the hell to the next town and produce another show. So now we’re faced with trying to re-do that song in a better way, and it gave us a chance to try and see if we could sound like the Staples Singers with our harmonies, or try standard songs, and Richard would sing the lead, usually, but Richard would stop, and then Danko would sing the lead, and he would sing a harmony part, then I would do the lead, and switching it around like that gave us a better idea of the way we could blend our voices. And it ended up, they started calling us the band with three singers. But it started out as resting Richard up (laughs), because in the very beginning, Richard was our singer, of course. I never thought much about it because Richard was so damn good.

When you were living down here, was that your first direct experience with New Orleans music, aside from hearing artists like Fats Domino on the radio?

I had heard the New Orleans music, of course. Huey Piano Smith and the Clowns, those records were real big all through the Delta, and all the New Orleans music was on the radio and available, and was my cup of tea right from the very front. Earl Palmer has got to be the greatest rock and roll drummer that’s still around, as far as I’m concerned. God, the songs he recorded…I got to meet him at the JazzFest, and I didn’t really twist his arm, but I told him we were going to be downtown, and showed him the club, and I told him, pick out your apartment up there, because it’s going to be your place (laughs). I hope he was serious, because I was. I can’t wait to ask him to come in and play with me, and get a drum chorus going. Whatever Earl wants to do would be fine with me.

Did you ever directly cop licks from Earl, or any of the other great New Orleans drummers, like Smoky Johnson?

Oh, yeah (laughs). I’ll tell you what I did. Growing up in a Memphis town, that’s what made my playing a little different, because I concentrated so much on that wooden-sounding backbeat, with lots of stick and skin in the sound, and not much metal—that hard Memphis knock. So I was naturally drum-conscious going into it. So we were cutting up at Big Pink, or after Big Pink, and we had learned a few little recording techniques of our own. I came up with a drum fill that I thought was pretty hot, and I was just about ready to pat myself on the back, and started listening around to some stuff, and damn it if Earl Palmer didn’t already do it on one of Little Richard’s records (laughs). The hook that Earl Palmer did on "Keep a Knockin," that drum kick-off, that’s one of the greatest hooks in music, for my ears.

When you all did the Moondog Matinee album of covers, New Orleans is stamped all over that album, with Clarence Frogman Henry’s "Ain’t Got No Home," Allen Toussaint’s "Holy Cow" …

Of course. The first song we did that we could get horns on was "Life is a Carnival," or "W.S. Walcott’s Medicine Show," one of ‘em, but we got Toussaint up there when we could make that move. Because his music, the Lee Dorsey records and all that, was really where we thought horns should live. I’m still glad that we did it exactly like that, because we had that history with Allen that early, in ‘72 or ‘73. And there’s an example, that record that you’re talkin’ about, it was just old ones and good ones that we all loved. By then that was our fourth record maybe, and we knew what the score was by then. Everybody had come to realize that ugly word, publishing, and we didn’t have any of it (laughs). And writer’s credits, and the Band, for the music part of it, had pretty much busted up already. We did live things, and we did old ones and good ones, but we never collaborated with each other and wrote songs like we did for the first three records.

Toussaint’s horn charts on the live Rock of Ages album are tremendous.

Exactly. That was an example, it was time for us to turn in an album for Capitol. It seemed like we were always an album behind, and we got Toussaint to come in and help us do a live show. I think Bob [Dylan] came down and played with us, and we had all those good horn players, and turned it in and called it a record, and Capitol didn’t know the difference (laughs). And that’s kind of the way our career went right on up to The Last Waltz.

You’ve also been tight with Bobby Charles over the years.

Bobby came up later on. Dr. John came to Woodstock, and Bobby showed up around that time, because one night me and him played with Bobby Charles up at Bearsville Studio. Bearsville studio was brand new, and Bobby ended up doing a recording deal with Bearsville with Albert Grossman. And me and the Dr. played drums and organ for him one night there in studio B. I think it was "Small Town Talk."

How did Dr. John get into the Woodstock scene? You two have a long history as well.

Just that mutual thing between musicians, you know. When I first heard the Night Tripper, Dr. John was my man. When I finally got to meet Dr. John, it was right there when we got to help Bobby with his record. And I was knocked out to get to play with him and have a friendship with him. We just ended up buddying up, you might say. We cut some things together: he did The Last Waltz, helped us do that, and some other things that happened. The last thing that me and him did together was the Ringo Starr All-Star Band thing, which was a whole lot of fun. We went to China and had a ball, and I think the people enjoyed the show. It was funny, too. With Dr. John, and Billy Preston, and Clarence Clemons, and Joe Walsh…oh, man, me and Nils Lofgren, everybody was just laughing all the time.

And you two did the Muddy Waters at Woodstock album together…

That’s right, and a lot of that I’ll take credit for, because I’ve always been looking to hook up with Dr. John any time I could get a chance.

And your RCO All-Stars Band that you put together when the Band first broke up was such an underrated band: you and Dr. John and Steve Cropper and Duck Dunn. Did you hand-pick that band?

Yeah, ABC Records had not been conglomerated up yet—they got bought out shortly after that—but I signed with them, and all of a sudden I had a record budget to spend on a record, so I said, hell yeah, I called up Duck and Fred Carter and Dr. John and everybody, and we all got to Woodstock and started having fun. I had as good a time with that project as I’ve ever had. And of course we had Henry Glover there, who was our main guidance system there. Everybody knows who Henry was.

Is Henry still alive?

No, dammit. We lost the studio there that we cut the RCO thing, I had just built the studio that we got there, and we had a damn fire, and lost the building, or most of it. And the night the building burned down, damned if Dr. Henry Glover didn’t die that night. So I get up the next day at the damn Holiday Inn with a bathrobe and a pair of cowboy boots, and answer the phone, and now I’ve got to rent a tuxedo and go to Henry Glover’s funeral. Jesus. What a day. When it rains, it pours. But he sure did do right by us. He brought Muddy Waters to town, and we did the Muddy Waters Woodstock record, and Butterfield did some great stuff. Henry did some string things with Butterfield that I don’t think people have gotten to hear yet, where Butterfield’s playing and singing with strings behind his voice and his harp. It’s great stuff. And he helped me do the RCO All-Star thing, and did the horn arrangements for Van Morrison on The Last Waltz. With Henry Glover being around, music would happen all the time. Something good was always happening.

The new Band record, Jubilation, to my ears, is the best thing The Band has done since you started recording again. It has that warmer, acoustic, Big Pink, Basement Tapes kind of feel.

That’s right. We even went so far as to use the acoustic stand-up bass, and it is on eight songs, I think, and the electric bass is on three.

Did you approach Jubilation differently from your last two albums, Jericho or High on the Hog?

The main thing we did was we went back to the way we cut Big Pink, which was to get in the building together in the studio, and record the song, then tear it up and rewrite it and do it again, and do that until it was right. And then we had some friends come in and help us do some songs—Bobby Charles, John Hiatt, Eric Clapton. We all kind of co-wrote the things with each other. We started in January and worked until pretty close to the end of the summer. We were doing it as a tribute to Big Pink—it was the 30th anniversary for Big Pink, and we were seeing if we could come up with some songs that would last for a while like Big Pink seems to have done. And we’ll be doing the live premiere of the album here on New Year’s Eve, right at at 300 Decatur St. And I’m sure there’ll be some special guests. Down the road, I’ve asked Donald Fagen to come, and Harry Dean Stanton, Clarence Clemons, Vassar Clements, then people like John Anderson will be coming in later on with their band. Asleep at the Wheel is coming, James Cotton. It’s exciting. James will be in and out all the time, because we’re from the same town..

Jubilation also has your classic drum sound: that muted, beautiful ensemble playing.

Yeah, playing the lyric more. The most fun of it is when you get the song down, and it’s effortless, and the song plays you, and it’s a free ride through a wonderful time. That’s always what you’re shooting for. It was that way with special attention paid to the micing of the snares and cymbals, and then we used the overhead mic and got a lot of the room sound in, and the sound of the horns, we put over in the entranceway, which has got a lot of glass, to sharpen up the blends from the horn section. The other acoustic instruments help a lot, and lots of times we only have one electric instrument in the ensemble, and that’s Garth’s territory, because Garth can do more with it. And a lot of times Jimmy Weider used acoustic guitar and stayed off the electric. So that acoustical sound and style and attitude with the emphasis more on voices and blends, that was akin to Big Pink a lot, and the Basement Tape ensemble way of doing stuff.

If you had to narrow it down, what drummers did you really look up to when you were coming up?

My first big hero was Pat Curtis, with Sonny Boy [Williamson], the King Biscuit Boy. Pat Curtis also had the first plastic, "hot rod" I ever saw. He had it made out of a wooden handle, like a brush handle, and he had piano strings about 10, 12 inches long into that wooden handle. Those piano strings were heavy and copper wrapped, and hitting that brass cymbal, that metal on metal, it sounded like thunder coming. And he had filed off the ends of ‘em so they weren’t sharp, so when he hit the snare, and it wouldn’t cut the skin, and it would sound like a stick. He’d have a stick in his left hand, and carry that hot rod in his right: Rap, bap, bap, bap! Then he’d go to the cymbals for the crash with the piano strings, and it was a wild damn sound.

You used to be able to see James right in the studio at KFFA in Helena growing up.

I’d go watch him do the radio show, and on Saturdays, they used to go load up that little King Biscuit bus, and they’d drive out to Marvel and set up at the depot and play for an hour, and maybe drive to Elaine, and set up somewhere down there, around the VFW hall and play for the people, and advertise a dance they were doing that night. We had a good band there in Marvel. Ralph Dejohnette had a band there, and he had an electric mandolin player that was good, and he had a drummer named Bubba Stewart who had a full set of drums, and he was good. We were drum-poor right there in my part of Arkansas. Bubba and Pat were the only two people I knew that had a set of drums. I borrowed and begged from both of them for a long time, until I could finally get a set. Pat and Bubba, and Walcott’s Medicine Show, and Silas Green from New Orleans…Walcott had a nine-piece band, and had a left-handed drummer with three tom-toms that was real good. And then listening to the records, listening to Earl [Palmer], and the Memphis records with D.J. Fontana.. That was before Al Jackson and some of the later players, when Sun was still going. I’ve always been pulled into that Memphis drum sound. I really enjoyed making Jubilation, because I’d grown tired of the electric bass over and over and over. It hums and gets into everybody else’s space, and I needed a little bit of rest from it.

It must have been a thrill and validation for you to see Sonny Boy Williamson again in 1967, after all the acclaim The Band was starting to generate, and learning from him as a kid.

Oh, hell yeah. We were this close to getting to play, because we went, we left Helena and went to Somers Point, New Jersey, to Tony Mart’s club, and started playing, and the plan was, when we shook hands goodbye with Sonny Boy, was that we would be back in touch and we’d try and get him fixed up so he’d come up to New Jersey and join us before the summer was out. We didn’t know how the hell to pull that off, but we had some big plans at the time, and of course Sonny Boy had lived out his life by then, and passed away shortly. I tell you what though, Garth got Champion Jack Dupree to come through town, when he was here three years ago I guess, he was on his way back to Germany, he came through Woodstock and we recorded an album’s worth of songs. He left Woodstock and went back to Germany and passed.

I would imagine that is his last session; the two CDs he recorded here in New Orleans for Rounder were thought to be his final recordings.

Yeah, and it’s still in the tape vault some-damn-where. It should be out though. Garth produced it. We cut two nights with him, 10-12 songs, and good ones too. He had a young kid from Holland playing guitar with him, and me and Garth and Jimmy Weider and some more players.

Is that an album that may come out on Woodstock Records, the label you just started?

I hope so. We’ve done a live album from Rick Danko, and my CD with the band the Crowmatix. We’ve got some more things that we want to cut.

Is that something you’re enjoying having as your own, after all your experiences in the music business?

Yeah. Record companies haven’t made me feel very good lately, and I’d just rather not work for ‘em. I’d rather work for myself. They take your songs, and treat you the way they want to, and put your songs out when they think they should come out, and it just gets a little cold, for me. We want to do what we want to do, we don’t want to talk somebody into every goddamn thing. You know, they come up at you and give you a piece of money, and look at you like they’ve given you half the world. I’ve got news for ‘em: inflation eats those little budgets up, boys, they don’t work no more.

Have you considered doing a solo album again at some point?

Yup. I’ve got a couple things I want to do. I want to work with my daughter Amy, who’s ready to start doing some music herself, and I want to work with her because she can sing a whole lot better than I can, and is a whole lot prettier than me (laughs). And I want to cut a blues record of my own, and a Nashville record, and I want to cut an instrumental record with the band.

As a fan, the country record is one I’ve always hoped you’d do. Your version of "When I Get My Rewards" on the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s Will the Circle Be Unbroken, Vol. II, is gorgeous, and that’s a side of you people don’t get to hear very often.

I sure want to do it. I want to get Vassar Clements, and Randy Scruggs… And hell, if we can’t do it any other way, we’ll do it live at the club. It’s really exciting. Besides it giving me a good job, it can give me a record, and a stage to experiment with any song I want to.

In the last decade, your work as a sideman seems to really have taken off. You’ve played on albums with Los Lobos, Bonnie Raitt, the Largo project, … Do those projects seem to fall into your lap, or are musicians just looking for your voice on particular songs?

I think so. It’s like we do each other favors. I got to sing on John Anderson’s record, and got to play some shows with John, and it’s because we like each other and get along and like to play with each other. It’s no big plan on my part or his, it’s just luck. When it wants to happen like that, I don’t believe anything is just circumstance. I believe everything is for true, and we should take everything we can get and really enjoy it, and expect it to mean something. I’ve made myself that way, open to anything, and people know that I love to try anything new. Because of it, I’ve gotten to sing with Emmylou Harris, and Sheryl Crow, and Martina McBride, and some great people.

Word has it you’re going to be playing with a lot of New Orleans musicians at your club, and assembling an all-star New Orleans band. Who can people expect to see?

I’m really looking forward to that. That’s the reason for doing it right here, because there’s more players here than probably anywhere else in the world, when you get right down to it. And I want to get to play with all of ‘em. A lot of ‘em I know, and a few of ‘em I’ve gotten to play with already. All of us should be able to have a good gig out of this, that’s what I’m looking for. Luther Kent’s one of the best singers in town, and Banu Gibson, one of our partners, and Brint Anderson is our ace in the hole. He’s going to be our bandleader. And we’ll have Irma Thomas, Gary Hirstius, Adams/Griffin Project, Eddie Bo, Tom McDermott… We want to make sure this is the one club musicians will be treated right. We just want to be for real and natural in this thing, and get some good out of it. Can you imagine Earl [Palmer] back here, as the godfather for us all drummers, and giving us something we can pass on to the younger drummers coming up, and helping them not having to go through what I had to go through?

Is part of what’s made you keep the Band going through all these years to pay tribute to Richard Manuel, and keep his spirit alive?

Absolutely. People still talk about Richard, and ask about Richard, so the memory of Richard Manuel lives on. A lot of what Richard was has rubbed off on us, so we still sound a lot like we did back in Big Pink. Because we still had Richard then with us, and we went at it so hard that it kind of bore into us, and I guess we’ll always sound like that a little bit.

It didn’t seem like a hard decision for you and Rick and Garth and Richard to get back together and start playing music after The Last Waltz.

No, no a bit. We’re all rhythm section guys, you know? That’s what The Band was, and still is. And that’s who Bob Dylan hired, and who Ronnie Hawkins hired, and anybody, like singers, they used to call them frontmen. They called us, The Band, sidemen. Anybody we worked for knew…especially being a drummer, you don’t hardly think about the music without thinking about the band, and building a band is what rhythm section people have to do. Because I can’t really sound my best until I’ve got the bass player and the piano player and the guitar and horns and all that with me. The more of them that will help me, the better I sound. And The Band’s selling point, I thought, was that Richard Manuel was such a great singer, as we all know, that The Band had a frontman quality singer right there on the piano. And with myself and Rick resting Richard up, it kind of forced us to offer those second and third lead vocals that grew out of the outcome of it all. All of a sudden the band had the lead singers and the musicians all in one unit. It meant we could get a job without having to go to Ronnie Hawkins or Bob Dylan or somebody and ask for one.

The Band has had so many trials over the years—car accidents, fires, losing Richard…

And losing Robertson—losing him for The Last Waltz. It was tough coming back after The Last Waltz. There were some times it didn’t seem like very many people were pulling for us at all, except when we would go and play, and the people that showed up to hear us play wanted to hear "Cripple Creek," and "King Harvest," and all those old songs. That’s what got us through.

Your ongoing differences with Robbie Robertson are no secret, but one thing that seems to get lost now is that you two were such good friends for a long time.

Of course. We were a band of brothers, and like I said, we were all rhythm section guys, and none of us were afflicted with that frontman fever. Guitar-itis, I’ve heard it called, where it’s just you, you’re the most important one, and everybody else is in support of you, and ain’t you just somethin’? (laughs). I thought we had pretty much beat that damn thing. None of us were goofy enough to want to be that way, I thought. And all of a sudden here’s Robertson, goddamn if he ain’t joined up with ‘em. He’s got the smoke and mirrors, and has Capitol Records willing to say, ‘Okay, we’ll go along with that, you are the one." And shit, he ain’t singing or writing, but I’ll tell you one thing: he is doing all the publishing. He and Albert [Grossman] are damn sure doing all the publishing.

The publishing is what your feud ultimately boils down to today.

Exactly. He and Albert get all the money, and the rest of us get all the leftovers, and he was supposed to be one of us, and was.

You’ve certainly got a great couple of guys with you now, with Randy and Jimmy.

Jimmy Weider has damn sure earned his seat with the band. He’s had to listen to that bullshit "Where’s Robbie?" more than anyone. It probably cut him more than anybody. He’s damn sure had to listen to his share of that. It’s taken Jimmy twelve, fifteen years just to get around all that. Only now can The Band get talked about as being the group that’s able to do something without Robbie Robertson. Goddamn, that was so long ago, it just ought to be put to rest. The Band ain’t Robbie Robertson.

“I’m now 73, and I’ve been in the business now over 50 years, so I’m still looking for things I haven’t done,” says B.B. King. Calling from a hotel in New York City, the King of the Blues is referring to his new MCA album, Blues on the Bayou, a back-to-basics recording that King produced himself (amazingly, for the first time in his career). There are no big-name guest stars, no studio trickery, and no session musicians—King recorded the album with his long-time backing band—on Blues on the Bayou, just the sweet sound of King’s guitar Lucille wrapping around a collection of timeless material and new songs. And the title is telling: the album was recorded in Maurice, Louisiana at Dockside Studios. “I heard about Dockside through our A&R person, Gary Ashley, he had some friends that had recorded there, so he was telling me about it. So we checked it out, and liked it. When you’re in a place like that…they fed us, and it was like being out at a resort. And I had a good time. If it didn’t help, it certainly didn’t hurt,” King says. (The beautiful cover photograph of King on Blues on the Bayou was taken on the back porch of the studio.)

Truth be told, while Blues on the Bayou will undoubtedly make King’s Louisiana fans beam with pride, if he had recorded it in Timbuktu it would still hold up as one of his finest albums. This is the CD his diehard followers have wanted for years, a no-frills affair that has the feel of King’s always-intimate concert performances. The CD opens with the wistful instrumental “Blues Boys Tune,” which sets the tone immediately with soulful Hammond B-3 work, an unhurried rhythm section, understated horn charts, and King’s guitar work unfolding naturally, hanging on the single-note bends that are his trademark. He gives his bandmates some solo room n “Bad Case of Love,” a funky uptempo number, and slow-blues aficionados will find reason to rejoice with the songs “I’ll Survive,” “Mean Ole World” and “Darlin’ What Happened.” The overall effect of the CD is like visiting with an old friend after 30 years, but the ever-gracious King doesn’t entertain comparisons between the sound and personality of Blues on the Bayou and his other recent efforts, like 1997’s cameo-heavy Deuces Wild.

“Each time that I record, with or without anyone, I play what I feel. I leave it to the listeners to choose for themselves what part of me they pick [out] and what they don’t. I just have a good time doing it. I’m a blues player. You set me anywhere, and people let me do what I feel like doing, I feel good,” he says.

Further proof of King’s humility is evident in his downplaying of the inestimable effect he’s had on the contemporary blues scene. When I mention how many current guitar players point to him as the man, the one individual responsible for paving the way for countless six-stringers and performers, he responds, “I’m glad to hear them say that they listen to me and think well of me, but they would have made it anyways with or without me. But you know I was playing when all these guys were born, so it makes me feel good that I’ve got something that they think is pretty good. I’ve tried very hard, and I think of them as great young artists that are doing the same thing that I did when I was their age. All of them seem to have a sound of their own—they don’t sound like me or anyone else I know. To hear them [play], and hear them praise me and pay compliments to me, it makes me feel good, yes, and of course it makes me want to do better.”

For King, his greatest satisfaction still comes from feeling the love of his fans. “One of the most rewarding things is to hear people say, ‘I liked what you did,’ or to watch them when I’m playing concerts and to see them move, or get their attention. That’s wonderful. It’s a lot like that song “I’ll survive.’ People have kept me out there for over 50 years, and they’ve helped me to survive, and for them to still show up and come around, all of that is rewarding. To be honest with you, I’m glad to be here.”

Amen, and long live the King.

One young local player King has influenced is Kipori “BabyWolf” Woods, who celebrates the release of his debut CD I’m a Blues Man From Way Down South November 28 at Margaritaville Cafe. Woods doesn’t quite have the seasoning yet to convincingly pull off his cover of King’s signature song “The Thrill is Gone,” or T-Bone Walker’s “Stormy Monday” but his debut reveals a guitarist and singer with a truckload of promise. Woods, whose nickname comes from his friendship and stylistic debt to Walter “Wolfman” Washington and his youthful looks, is a funky fretman, and he’s backed up by Washington’s drummer Wilbert “Junkyard Dog” Arnold and keyboard wizard Davell Crawford, among others. Woods has a few catchy originals here too, including the humorous ditty “Just Like King Kong.”

Harmonica player Adam Gussow is best known as half of the acclaimed blues duo Satan and Adam, but Gussow’s also led a dual life as a writer, chronicling his journeys with guitarist “Mister Satan” for such outlets as The Village Voice and Harper’s. Now Gussow has just published the book Mister Satan’s Apprentice (Pantheon), and stops in New Orleans this month on his national book tour. Catch Gussow performing and discussing his book on November 16 at Garden District Bookshop, 2727 Prytania St., from 5-7 p.m.

And speaking of harp players, a pack of ‘em—including New Orleanians Jumpin’ Johnny Sansone, Bruce “Sunpie” Barnes and Rockin’ Jake—are converging on Glendora, Mississippi, the weekend of December 5 and 6 for a tribute and workshop to benefit Glendora’s newly-opened Sonny Boy Williamson Library and Community Center. Other confirmed performers include Lee Oskar, Blind Mississippi Morris, and Mark McGrain (of Anders Osborne’s band), and Rod Piazza and Paul DeLay are also tentatively scheduled to appear. Glendora, the birthplace of Rice Miller, a.k.a. Sonny Boy Williamson II, is an extremely impoverished town, with 93% of its citizens living below the poverty line. A number of sponsors, including Hohner and the Southern Music Network, are helping the cause as well. Individuals interested in donating records, books and memorabilia to the Sonny Boy Center can send material in care of Mr. Tom Freeland, P.O. Box 629, Oxford, Mississippi 38655. For more information on this event, call 530-873-9048, or e-mail Maggie Mortenson at magmorten@worldnet.att.net.

The Maple Leaf has a particularly strong line-up in November of national blues acts we don’t get to see in New Orleans often, including Texas firebrand Smokin’ Joe Kubek (featuring B’Nois King on vocals) on November 6, boogie-woogie piano player and saxophonist Deanna Bogart on Nov. 19, acclaimed female blues guitarist Deborah Coleman (touring in support of her new Blind Pig CD Where Blue Begins on Nov. 20), and blues-rocker Tinsley Ellis on Nov. 21. House of Blues presents the Fat Possum Mississippi Juke Joint Revue on Nov. 21, featuring R.L. Burnside, Elmo Williams and Hezekiah Early. This is also an OffBeat-sponsored show, and the first 15 people who buy a copy of R.L.’s new record Come on In (see review, p. 62) receive a free pair of tickets to the show.