Dear Friends,
With the new albums by The Mellow Fellows and Lucky Peterson, we’ve wrapped up our 1990 releases. But we have a couple of treats for January –the return of two of our most popular West Coast artists, Elvin Bishop and Little Charlie and the Nightcats. The Nightcats are coming with their first live album, CAPTURED LIVE, cut during the summer at Slim’s in San Francisco and Melarkey’s in Sacramento. It includes three new Rick Estrin originals and gives both Rick on harp and Charlie on guitar lots of space to stretch out, with close to an hour of music. If the covers of their previous albums made you think this was just a novelty band, you’re about to have your ears opened!
Elvin’s new disc features his absolutely beautiful slide guitar and some great new songs, including the title track, DON’T LET THE BOSSMAN GET YOU DOWN (in honor of me, I think). Besides new Elvin originals, the band carouses through un-moldy blues oldies like “Stepping Up In Class,” “Kissing In The Dark,” my favorite, “Fannie Mae.” If you found Elvin’s last album too eclectic and not quite bluesy enough, I think you’ll really enjoy BOSSMAN. Elvin never forgot what he learned during all those years in Chicago!
Now, to return to the story of recording Lonnie Brooks’ first ’Gator, BAYOU LIGHTNING: I wanted to capture the magic of Lonnie’s LIVING CHICAGO BLUES session, so along with Lonnie’s road band (Bob Levis on guitar, Rob Waters on keyboards, Harlan Terson on bass), we called on the drum master, Casey Jones, who had sparked Lonnie’s LCB date. Lonnie was writing furiously, and came up with a second “voodoo beat” classic to follow “Two Headed Man.” It was called (appropriately) “Voodoo Daddy” and it had that wonderful swampy groove that I liked so much. Along with that, he wrote “Watchdog,” “Watch What You Got,” “You Know What My Body Needs,” all of which have become staples of his live show. Son Seals had influenced me to look at Junior Parker tunes, and I suggested to Lonnie that lie slow down “In The Dark” to a moody, minor key blues. The song gave Lonnie a perfect vehicle for showing off his deep blues singing as well as some very tasty guitar.
My most vivid memory of the “Bayou Lightning” sessions was cutting “Voodoo Daddy.” Lonnie counted off the song, launched into it, and, to everyone’s shock, sang and played for literally 15 minutes, taking the song way past its rehearsed length. At the end, Lonnie was lying on the floor in the middle of the studio with me and the band circled around him, still playing. He climbed to his feet, told Casey to keep playing and hold the pocket right there, and announced to the band that the song was really in the groove now, and they were ready to cut it! Casey kept the beat going, Lonnie counted off the tune, and they cut the version that appears on the album. All in all, the two takes of “Voodoo Daddy” ran almost half an hour! At the end, Bob Levis’ fingers were bleeding, but we had a great final version. Glad I was at the beginning of a fresh reel of tape when Lonnie started!
More next time,
Bruce Iglauer