Dear Friends,
It’s the end of an era at Alligator. Mindy Giles, our vice president and national sales, marketing, advertising and rock radio promotion director, has left to start her own artist management firm. Mindy’s been at Alligator since 1978 and has been very much responsible for the tremendous visibility and growth we’ve had over the last few years. If you discovered Alligator in the last nine years, chances are that Mindy’s partly responsible. She’s a terrific person and we’ll miss her a lot. In fact, she’s been so good that two people are taking her place–Jay Whitehouse is moving to sales and marketing while Blake Gumprecht is taking over advertising, radio promotions and special projects.
Started on Roy Buchanan’s third album a couple weeks ago. Got the same great crew of musicians to help us out on this one that we used on his last, “Dancing On The Edge”–Donald Kinsey on rhythm guitar (have you heard the cut by Donald and his brothers on “The New Bluebloods” yet?), Stan Szelest on keyboards, Larry Exum on bass and Morris Jennings on drums. Dick Shurman co-produced as usual.
We cut a whole batch of songs (eleven I think) and we’ll be back in the studio in July to finish with a couple of very interesting and soulful guest vocalists. Look for a September release.
Meanwhile, I’ve started work on a soundtrack for a French (fictional) film about a couple of blues musicians living in France. Roy is playing on the soundtrack too, along with Archie Shepp (!!). A local singer named Kineka Kress did the vocals for the demos and Etta James is supposed to sing the final versions (my first chance to work with Etta, and boy am I excited!). We rehearsed over at Blue Chicago for some club atmosphere (thanks, Gino).
Listening to Archie, who is sort of an “outside” jazz sax player, playing blues, is fascinating. He has a great feel but some of his note choices are bizarre by blues standards. Fits right into the plot of the movie (kind of bizarre,too). The movie hasn’t been shot yet but it’s tentatively entitled “Saxo”. It’s my first time with a soundtrack and feels very strange and different trying to please someone else and not just myself with a production project.
The new Big Twist album, “Live From Chicago!–Bigger Than Life!!” is out and doing extremely well. Like most of our new releases, it’s on LP, cassette and compact disc. The compact discs are really happening for us and we’re even going back into the back catalog to do CD versions of four of our earlier albums—”Crawfish Fiesta” by Professor Longhair, “Stone Crazy” by Buddy Guy, “Live In Japan” by Albert Collins” and “Serious Business” by Johnny Winter. Should be out in July along with our new low-price sampler, “Genuine Houserockin’ Music II” (which will also be on CD with sixteen songs, or on LP and cassette with twelve). Time to invest in a CD player, gang.
I was reminiscing last time about the recording of Son Seals’ “Live and Burning” LP at the Wise Fools Pub in Chicago back in ’78. We started in February but during the first set of the first of four projected nights, snow began falling. A lot of snow. A whole lot of snow. By the end of the night, there was over a foot on the ground and it was still coming down hard. I made it home, snowplowing my car up a completely deserted Lake Shore Drive with Robert Palmer, the writer, who was staying with me, but the city was paralyzed for the rest of the week. The Wise Fools closed (no one could get there!) and we had to postpone the recording for two months. Robert was snowbound in my house for a couple days (they closed the airport) during which we became very good friends. Maybe that’s why he wrote such nice things about me in “Deep Blues”.
Bruce Iglauer