Nov. 12, 2022

Adam Gussow interview

Adam Gussow interview

Adam Gussow joins me on episode 73. Adam is a native New Yorker now living in Mississippi, working as a professor at the university there. Adam rose to stardom as part of the blues duo Satan and Adam in the late 1980s. They found their audience on the streets of Harlem, where they were briefly filmed and appeared in a U2 documentary and album. Satan & Adam enjoyed great success, playing together for 15 years, releasing three albums before disbanding in 1998, re-forming some years later a...

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Season 1 Diatonic Harmonica Blues Harmonica Harmonica Author

Adam Gussow joins me on episode 73.

Adam is a native New Yorker now living in Mississippi, working as a professor at the university there.
Adam rose to stardom as part of the blues duo Satan and Adam in the late 1980s. They found their audience on the streets of Harlem, where they were briefly filmed and appeared in a U2 documentary and album. Satan & Adam enjoyed great success, playing together for 15 years, releasing three albums before disbanding in 1998, re-forming some years later and releasing another album.
With the passing of Mr Satan, Adam formed his own one-man band, then a duo which has recently added Mr Satan’s nephew: Sir Rod & The Blues Doctors.
Adam was the first person to release blues tuition videos on YouTube and has had over 20 million hits, accompanied by his website Modern Blues Harmonica.


Links:
Adam’s website:
https://www.modernbluesharmonica.com/home.html

Satan & Adam documentary:
http://satanandadamfilm.com/

Pete Farmer kick drums and harmonica holders:
https://www.footdrums.com/


Videos:

U2's Rattle and Hum clip of Satan and Adam:
https://youtu.be/x6M2aWVx0LA

Ronnie Shellist ‘Funky Blues Harmonica’:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hs_OchfmBc8

Gussow's classic blues harmonica videos:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfYHJbTZklgZU1bEVLaZyvQ

Modern Blues Harmonica YouTube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/user/kudzurunner

YouTube video teaching Sunshine of Your Love:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqFnpCcvUvQ

Adam busking solo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-E3qQ59VcQ

Crossroads video:
https://youtu.be/KeMis-B7f58

Sir Rod and the Blues Doctors: What’d I Say:
https://youtu.be/retCfgoCO3M


Podcast website:
https://www.harmonicahappyhour.com

Donations:
If you want to make a voluntary donation to help support the running costs of the podcast then please use this link (or visit the podcast website link above):
https://paypal.me/harmonicahappyhour?locale.x=en_GB

Spotify Playlist:
Also check out the Spotify Playlist, which contains most of the songs discussed in the podcast:
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5QC6RF2VTfs4iPuasJBqwT?si=M-j3IkiISeefhR7ybm9qIQ

Podcast sponsors:
This podcast is sponsored by SEYDEL harmonicas - visit the oldest harmonica factory in the world at www.seydel1847.com  or on Facebook or Instagram at SEYDEL HARMONICAS
and Blows Me Away Productions: http://www.blowsmeaway.com/

Support the show

01:30 - I first heard Adam playing on on his 3rd Satan & Adam album in an Oxford Street bookshop in London, in the mid 1990s

02:08 - Adam was raised in and around New York

02:32 - Not many people on the podcast have been from New York: and the blues scene there

04:22 - Blues scene in New York is more modern than Chicago and other areas of the US

05:00 - Blues scene in New York is not as vibrant as it was

05:17 - Adam now lives in Mississippi where he is a professor of English and Southern Studies at the university there and has written several books on blues, harmonica and black culture

05:48 - Still an active musician down in Mississippi

05:55 - Studied at Princeton and Colombia universities

06:04 - Played guitar in a high school jazz funk fusion band

06:32 - Went to Berklee music school for a short stint

07:11 - Returned to Princeton and wrote a dissertation on blues music and southern violence

07:51 - Willie Dixon and BB King witnessed violence in the south that heavily influenced their blues music

09:34 - Adam started playing harmonica age 16

09:59 - Whammer Jammer was the first track that inspired Adam to take up harmonica

10:58 - Was also learning guitar at the same time and connecting the blues scale and the pitches between the notes that really make the blues

11:57 - Adam was a self-taught harmonica and guitar player, discovering Nat Riddles as his mentor when he was a little older

12:33 - Summer school at Berkeley School of Music where he learnt some jazz theory

12:57 - Stopped playing music for a little while after graduating from college before going to a blues jam in New York age 25

14:02 - Saw James Cotton opening for the J Geils Band, BB King and Muddy Waters in New York

14:44 - Adam was part of the famous blues duo: Satan & Adam, and how he discovered Sterling Magee, aka Mr Satan, in October 1986

15:44 - Adam didn’t know who Sterling Magee was, e.g. that he had played with James Brown and George Benson

16:17 - The duo made an impact on the streets of Harlem when busking, with the groove the thing

16:57 - Took a while for Adam to find his place in the duo with Sterling

17:36 - Busked for four years initially with Sterling, earning other money from teaching harmonica

18:02 - They weren’t called Satan and Adam until first demo came out

18:16 - In 1987 The duo were filmed by the rock band U2, briefly appearing in a film and album (Rattle and Hum) from the band

20:30 - Made first album together in 1991: Harlem Blues, after signing with a high-profile music manager

22:00 - The album was well received and had a lot of air play on the radio and a WC Handy Award nomination for Best Trad Blues Album

22:22 - They received some publicity and started to playing in clubs and touring, instead of busking

23:16 - Touring around US and some internationally

23:50 - Satan and Adam documentary

23:56 - The duo dis-banded in 1998 when Sterling became ill, and re-formed later to release another album and Adam released some recordings of them busking in the late 1980s

25:12 - Adam’s memoirs of that time: Mister Satan's Apprentice: A Blues Memoir

25:52 - After Satan and Adam, released a solo record Kick and Stomp: playing solo harmonica, vocal and a kick drum

27:11 - Tracked down a better quality kick drum from Pete Farmer, who created what is now the Seydel Gecko harmonica rack

27:33 - Adam started his solo project at the same age Sterling was when he first met him

29:14 - The album received air play on a national radio show: the first solo harmonica to be aired on there

29:59 - Southbound album, released in 2011, with Adam adding guitar and a few musicians

30:23 - 2012: formed a duo with another university professor: The Blues Doctors

30:37 - Now joined by the nephew of Sterling Magee: to form Sir Rod and The Blues Doctors

31:48 - Latest album from Sir Rod and The Blues Doctors is Keep It In The Family

33:33 - Adam’s YouTube channel, starting 2007, was the first of harmonica tutorial channel on that platform

35:11 - Has two YouTube channels now, which have had millions of views, but first channel wasn’t monetised

36:12 - Modern Blues Harmonica website accompanied the first YouTube channel

36:40 - Created second channel in order to be able to monetise

37:19 - Records lots of the videos in his car

37:39 - Son plays several instruments, except harmonica

38:15 - Modern Blues Harmonica website contains lots of information

38:35 - Has written six books around blues and harmonica

39:37 - Subject of latest book: Whose Blues: Facing Up To Race and the Future of Music

40:30 - Blues is a worldwide phenomena now, partly from US and British military bases

41:35 - BB King also helped spread the blues around the world

42:06 - Blues has Senegalese roots

43:45 - Adam has been involved in numerous harmonica teaching camps

44:09 - Has played at different festivals around the world

44:25 - Hoping to tour to Germany in 2023

44:52 - 10 minute question: practise blues scale and licks through middle and upper harp

46:50 - Uses some custom harmonicas from Joe Spiers but mainly plays stock Marine Bands

47:48 - Singing

48:06 - Has played some chromatic, but not really now

48:53 - What is ‘modern blues harmonica’ partly involves not just playing all the classic Chicago blues songs

51:15 - Is a Hohner endorsee and plays mainly standard Marine Bands

52:13 - Overblows: had one lesson with William Galison, who Adam also took over the Big River show harmonica part from too

52:28 - Adam is part of the popularity of this technique, along with Mike Turk, Carlos del Junco and Jason Ricci

53:55 - Embouchre: puckers and tongue blocks

54:35 - Often uses two amplifiers at the same time

56:05 - Uses a clean vocal mic, and not a bullet mic

56:44 - Uses a delay pedal as main effect, sometimes reverb, and delay settings

57:34 - Future plans include teaching a blues literature class (including some harmonica) in Parchment Farm penitentiary, the famous prison in Mississippi

WEBVTT

00:00:00.002 --> 00:00:02.104
Adam Guslaw joins me on episode 73.

00:00:02.403 --> 00:00:07.668
Adam is a native New Yorker now living in Mississippi, working as a professor at the university there.

00:00:08.189 --> 00:00:13.012
Adam rose to stardom as part of the blues duo Satan and Adam in the late 1980s.

00:00:13.554 --> 00:00:19.658
They found their audience on the streets of Harlem, where they were briefly filmed and appeared in a U2 documentary and album.

00:00:20.280 --> 00:00:30.728
Satan and Adam enjoyed great success playing together for 15 years, releasing three albums before disbanding in 1998, reforming some years later and releasing another album.

00:00:31.370 --> 00:00:32.411
With the passing of Mr.

00:00:32.470 --> 00:00:37.337
Satan, Adam formed his own one-man band, then a duo which has recently added Mr.

00:00:37.396 --> 00:00:40.920
Satan's nephew to create Sir Rod and the Blues Doctors.

00:00:41.582 --> 00:00:50.774
Adam was the first person to release blues tuition videos on YouTube and has had over 20 million hits accompanied by his website Modern Blues Harmonica.

00:00:51.634 --> 00:01:03.643
This podcast is sponsored by Zeidel Harmonica's Visit the oldest harmonica factory in the world at www.zeidel1847.com or on Facebook or Instagram at Zeidel Harmonicas.

00:01:24.313 --> 00:01:24.414
Music

00:01:24.930 --> 00:01:26.731
Hello, Adam Gusso, and welcome to the podcast.

00:01:27.572 --> 00:01:28.634
Neil, it's my pleasure.

00:01:28.674 --> 00:01:29.796
Thanks so much for having me.

00:01:30.677 --> 00:01:35.442
I first heard you when I was in an Oxford Street bookstore in London.

00:01:35.763 --> 00:01:38.186
I heard an album of Satan and Adam for the first time.

00:01:38.225 --> 00:01:39.007
I'd never heard of you.

00:01:39.066 --> 00:01:43.652
It was just in the bookstore, kind of featured, and I listened to it, and it was fantastic.

00:01:43.733 --> 00:01:45.355
And I always remember you since then.

00:01:45.415 --> 00:01:46.956
And yeah, so it's great to get you on.

00:01:47.296 --> 00:01:48.078
How long ago was

00:01:48.138 --> 00:01:48.298
that?

00:01:48.337 --> 00:01:51.361
Was that back in the 90s when we were sort of out there playing?

00:01:51.841 --> 00:01:52.143
Yeah.

00:01:52.283 --> 00:01:52.603
Oh, yeah.

00:01:52.745 --> 00:01:54.891
It was your third album, I believe, and you just released it.

00:01:54.930 --> 00:01:56.293
So, yeah, it would have been the early 90s.

00:01:56.454 --> 00:01:56.835
Yeah, yeah.

00:01:57.057 --> 00:02:02.492
Actually, the third album, if it was Living on the River, I think came out in 95 or 96.

00:02:03.585 --> 00:02:08.110
And we toured the UK, of course, briefly back in 91.

00:02:08.629 --> 00:02:10.592
So starting just about with you.

00:02:10.852 --> 00:02:13.634
So you were born near New York, just north of New York.

00:02:13.655 --> 00:02:14.876
So you're a New Yorker.

00:02:15.235 --> 00:02:24.824
Well, I was actually born in New York City, but we moved to what I call downstate New York, about 20 miles north of the city when I was, I think, less than a year old, three months old.

00:02:24.903 --> 00:02:32.191
So I think of myself, although I'm literally a New York City native, I think of myself as a small town guy from just up the river a little bit.

00:02:32.550 --> 00:02:40.218
It's funny because on the podcast, I can't think of anybody offhand who's actually from New York, which is very strange given the, you know, the famousness of the city.

00:02:40.479 --> 00:02:43.643
You know, so what's the association and what's the blues scene like around New York?

00:02:44.002 --> 00:02:45.223
Well, you know, it's interesting.

00:02:45.284 --> 00:02:48.487
I reviewed a book that came out recently called New York City Blues.

00:02:48.548 --> 00:02:57.076
I can't remember the author's name, but fantastic book that talked about the New York City blues scene in the 20 or 30 years coming after World War II.

00:02:57.657 --> 00:03:03.503
It had a lot of migrant black Southerners who came up from the South, North Carolina, and a lot of them moved to Harlem or they moved to New York.

00:03:03.503 --> 00:03:05.225
the other boroughs in the city.

00:03:05.847 --> 00:03:14.395
When I came along in the early 80s, I met some of those people, people like Bobby Robinson, who recorded James Cotton and Buster Brown and everybody else.

00:03:14.436 --> 00:03:16.258
He had a record store in Harlem.

00:03:16.418 --> 00:03:17.878
The blues scene in New York was interesting.

00:03:17.919 --> 00:03:23.665
I tried in my book, Journeyman's Road, to sort of figure out what made for New York City blues.

00:03:23.906 --> 00:03:30.853
Some of it's that the people who play it, at least the people that I met in the scene, also sometimes play other kinds of music.

00:03:30.913 --> 00:03:32.735
So there was an ad mixture of soul.

00:03:32.835 --> 00:03:38.742
Think about the The Holmes Brothers and Papa Chubby and Shemeika Copeland and Satan and Adam.

00:03:38.782 --> 00:03:46.710
If you think about the four of us who all sort of overlapped in that late 80s, early 90s period, all of us kind of do more than just blues.

00:03:46.750 --> 00:03:50.013
The Holmes brothers are doing country music in there and soul and stuff.

00:03:50.073 --> 00:03:54.516
And we had a lot of funk and even a little bit of kind of rap stuff that Mr.

00:03:54.576 --> 00:04:00.542
Satan threw in because it was flowing through the streets of New York up in Harlem when we were playing out on the streets.

00:04:00.681 --> 00:04:06.907
I would say the New York blues sound is, it's hard to identify, but that sense of more than one thing going on at the same time.

00:04:06.986 --> 00:04:09.590
So it's not, that Chicago groove.

00:04:09.669 --> 00:04:14.354
It's not Texas piano, the Amos Milburn sound that goes to the West Coast.

00:04:14.414 --> 00:04:22.444
It comes more off the East Coast, the Piedmont sound a little bit more, but again, with a whole lot of soul and blues and a little bit of rock and roll too.

00:04:22.884 --> 00:04:23.064
Yeah.

00:04:23.084 --> 00:04:30.833
So it sounds like it's maybe like a bit more modern, like you're saying maybe the late 80s is obviously blues associated from the 50s and so from Chicago.

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So a bit more of a modern scene for blues in New York.

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I think so.

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But without sort of identifiable styles leaders.

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I mentioned those four acts I mean, there is a Texas blues sound.

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There's a Stevie Ray Vaughan sound.

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There's a sort of Albert Collins kind of thing.

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There's the B.B.

00:04:46.711 --> 00:04:47.492
King sound.

00:04:48.052 --> 00:04:50.295
Well, Freddie King, obviously, coming out of Texas, too.

00:04:50.694 --> 00:04:53.697
There's Blind Boy Fuller and a sort of Piedmont sound.

00:04:54.117 --> 00:04:54.939
People can identify.

00:04:55.119 --> 00:04:56.740
What is the New York sound?

00:04:56.779 --> 00:04:58.341
There's not kind of one specific sound.

00:04:58.682 --> 00:04:59.882
But it was a really cool scene.

00:04:59.963 --> 00:05:02.285
It's calmed down quite a bit now.

00:05:02.925 --> 00:05:09.651
The club, Terra Blues, that was sort of the upstart club that came in in the early 90s, is like the last club standing.

00:05:09.911 --> 00:05:15.156
So all the players is that I learned to play and used to gig, especially Dan Lynch and Manny's Car Wash.

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They're all gone.

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They've been gone for a

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while.

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You now live in Mississippi.

00:05:18.821 --> 00:05:22.425
Again, strangely, I've talked about Mississippi quite a lot in the last few episodes.

00:05:22.464 --> 00:05:23.386
It just keeps coming up.

00:05:23.466 --> 00:05:25.507
Of course, the kind of spiritual home of the blues.

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So you're a professor now in English and Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi.

00:05:30.934 --> 00:05:31.353
That's right.

00:05:31.574 --> 00:05:35.259
Yeah, and you mentioned there that you've written a book, and we'll get onto that later.

00:05:35.338 --> 00:05:41.826
But you teach courses in American and African American literature, blues tradition, and I do,

00:05:41.966 --> 00:05:42.206
yeah.

00:05:42.225 --> 00:05:43.387
20 years, actually.

00:05:43.466 --> 00:05:45.449
I just finished putting 20 years here.

00:05:45.490 --> 00:05:52.817
So I've been doing sort of the blues scholar thing and also the blues musician thing from here, from Mississippi, although as a transplanted New

00:05:52.857 --> 00:05:53.158
Yorker.

00:05:53.458 --> 00:05:54.418
So, I mean, what a journey.

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And we'll go through that.

00:05:55.519 --> 00:06:00.725
So you studied at Columbia and Princeton, which are Ivy League universities in the US, yeah?

00:06:00.886 --> 00:06:01.245
That's right.

00:06:01.286 --> 00:06:03.928
I was actually an undergrad at Princeton many years ago.

00:06:04.209 --> 00:06:10.255
My great claim to fame as a musician was that I went in having played guitar for about, good God, for about six months.

00:06:10.255 --> 00:06:12.759
I put on my application that I played electric guitar.

00:06:12.819 --> 00:06:14.060
My mother was incredulous.

00:06:14.081 --> 00:06:16.264
She goes, Adam, you've been playing guitar for six months.

00:06:16.584 --> 00:06:18.146
You can't put that on your application.

00:06:18.648 --> 00:06:20.050
You know, guitar and harmonica.

00:06:20.089 --> 00:06:26.579
And yet, by the time I graduated, I was playing guitar in one of the hottest bands on campus.

00:06:26.639 --> 00:06:32.166
It was a sort of jazz-funk fusion ensemble, a sextet called Spiral.

00:06:32.788 --> 00:06:37.074
I had one stint at a music school, a famous music school in Boston, one summer.

00:06:37.505 --> 00:06:39.408
I mean, I enjoyed reading and I enjoyed playing.

00:06:39.449 --> 00:06:42.932
And usually when I was doing my homework, the guitar would sit there and look mournfully at me.

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And when I was playing guitar, the books would sit there and scold me.

00:06:48.000 --> 00:06:50.684
I've always been sort of hamstrung between those two things.

00:06:50.744 --> 00:06:57.572
And it turns out that I really needed to do both in order to live the life that I was, I guess, put here to live.

00:06:57.733 --> 00:06:59.495
So, yeah, I was an undergrad there.

00:06:59.536 --> 00:07:03.601
Then I was at Columbia for a couple of years in the early 80s.

00:07:04.098 --> 00:07:10.528
After working, I was like a publishing assistant in New York City and used to go out during my lunch hour and watch the buskers.

00:07:10.990 --> 00:07:18.541
And then many years later, after the whole Satan and Adam thing had gotten well underway, I went back to graduate school again, this time again to Princeton.

00:07:18.601 --> 00:07:22.910
So I was a graduate student now, not an undergraduate, very different sort of thing.

00:07:23.233 --> 00:07:34.963
Got a PhD there in the year 2000 with a dissertation on blues music and blues literature and violence, southern violence, which I had paid zero attention to while I was playing with Mr.

00:07:35.024 --> 00:07:35.303
Satan.

00:07:35.564 --> 00:07:43.130
Violence was not really a thing I thought about much, but then at a certain point, suddenly in graduate school, I began to say, well, what happens if you actually look at that?

00:07:43.190 --> 00:07:48.935
And maybe there's songs about it, but there's also was a lot of memoirs in which blues musicians like B.B.

00:07:49.036 --> 00:07:53.860
King and Manse Lipscomb and Willie Dixon, all the names that people know so well.

00:07:53.901 --> 00:08:01.269
But Willie Dixon, one reason he left Mississippi for Chicago is because he saw the aftermath of a lynching in Vicksburg.

00:08:01.608 --> 00:08:01.949
And B.B.

00:08:02.028 --> 00:08:05.954
King talks about seeing the aftermath of what turned out to be a kind of legal lynching.

00:08:06.153 --> 00:08:06.473
And B.B.

00:08:06.514 --> 00:08:09.737
King talks about that incredibly powerful moment in his memoir.

00:08:09.778 --> 00:08:12.521
And I was fascinated by the fact that while B.B.

00:08:12.560 --> 00:08:27.137
King doesn't really sing about racial violence, except maybe in the one song, Why I Sing the Blues, which was at a politicized moment in the late 60s, he talked about racial violence in in interviews and how important, how it had sort of shaped his art.

00:08:27.639 --> 00:08:36.331
There's one interview I found that just, I think it sort of formed the core of my book where he said, so many people have been killed down there where I come from in so many different ways.

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And he says, and sometimes you start to think about it and it's way back in your mind, but it really hurts you, you know?

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And he said, and so you try to say what that means.

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And it comes out in the music.

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And he said, the next most important thing after that is your woman.

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And I thought, wait a minute.

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I thought everybody thinks B.B.

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King is singing about my baby hurt me, my baby this and that.

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And yet he's saying that that racial violence is actually in the back of his mind.

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And that's the foundation of his blues.

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That was, I wrote my first book, my dissertation book, trying to kind of explain that, trying to make sense of that insight that I felt like I had got gained from him.

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Your prodigious output, which we're going to go through obviously on this interview here, is obviously you're entrenched in the blues, an incredible amount of research you've done and understanding.

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Going back to your beginnings of playing the harmonica, so as you say, you were playing guitar, and I think you started playing harmonica about 16, did you?

00:09:42.033 --> 00:09:44.017
Was it about the same time as you were learning guitar?

00:09:44.317 --> 00:09:45.980
Yeah, it was the fall.

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I was a smart whippersnapper, so I was a young senior in high school.

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I was a 16-year-old, and that fall, for whatever reason, I had begun, I mean, I'd really been loving the music that I heard in school.

00:09:59.268 --> 00:10:13.519
And I think the first blues harmonica track that really got my attention, that made me say, I'm going to go out today and buy a harmonica and an instruction booklet and learn how to play the dang thing, was Whammer Jammer, the Jay Giles Band instrumental with Magic Dick.

00:10:24.385 --> 00:10:25.947
And so I went out, I literally went out.

00:10:25.988 --> 00:10:29.572
It was like executive decision, you know, we are going to learn the harmonica.

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I had had enough kind of, there was enough in there from all of the boogie woogie 78 RPM discs that my father had had.

00:10:38.480 --> 00:10:40.263
He had a, he was sort of a jazz record collector.

00:10:40.462 --> 00:10:43.145
And so I'd gotten a taste of that boogie woogie blues stuff.

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I think that's why Whammer Jammer called to me because once it gets going, there's a sort of boogie woogie piano and guitar and hot rhythm section.

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And I And so I taught myself how to play.

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I mean, I have a recording of me playing it at nine months and it's pretty bad.

00:10:56.423 --> 00:10:59.629
And yet without any, you know, instruction booklets were useless.

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You do the old fashioned way.

00:11:00.990 --> 00:11:06.860
We played it at normal speed and again and again and again, lifting the needle off the record.

00:11:06.919 --> 00:11:09.484
And I learned how to play enough of that.

00:11:09.524 --> 00:11:10.686
But that wasn't the only thing.

00:11:10.785 --> 00:11:11.866
blues that interested me.

00:11:11.886 --> 00:11:16.091
At the same time I was playing guitar, I was learning the magic of bent notes.

00:11:16.390 --> 00:11:20.173
And of course, guitar and harmonica work exactly the opposite from each other.

00:11:20.214 --> 00:11:29.261
They both have bent notes, but in the guitar, you squeeze, let's say a minor third up a quarter tone to get that bluesy, muddy watersy kind of sound or B.B.

00:11:29.322 --> 00:11:29.842
King sound.

00:11:30.283 --> 00:11:33.184
On the harmonica, you pull the note down a little bit.

00:11:33.405 --> 00:11:44.216
It was immensely helpful to realize that the instruction books that I had that said, here's the blue scale with that minor third and And that flat seventh, you know, I sort of learned the scale degrees.

00:11:44.298 --> 00:11:47.903
I learned what they were called, but I knew that the minor third alone wasn't it.

00:11:47.923 --> 00:11:49.004
There was some other magic.

00:11:49.065 --> 00:11:53.831
And it was that those intermediate pitches that very early were the thing that really actually called to me.

00:11:53.871 --> 00:11:55.534
And I'm sure that I'm not the only one there.

00:11:55.794 --> 00:11:56.856
They're that blues

00:11:56.876 --> 00:11:57.278
difference.

00:11:57.798 --> 00:12:01.985
I think you took up with your sort of mentor was a Nat Riddles there in New York.

00:12:13.409 --> 00:12:16.173
So the important thing here is that he came along 10 years later.

00:12:16.195 --> 00:12:16.975
Okay.

00:12:17.056 --> 00:12:28.333
So I was a self-taught harmonica and guitar player with the exception of like one lesson that I took on guitar with a guy who graduated from Princeton in the class of 75, a few years before me.

00:12:28.794 --> 00:12:31.479
But otherwise I was self-taught playing jazz and funk guitar.

00:12:32.000 --> 00:12:37.889
Didn't really have a personal teacher, although I went to the Berkeley College of Music for a summer term in jazz guitar for seven weeks.

00:12:38.241 --> 00:12:51.684
When I was 20, and that made a huge difference in teaching me something about jazz harmony and helping me understand so I could talk to musicians and think about chord tones and extensions and all that.

00:12:51.865 --> 00:12:53.107
It's really shaped my playing.

00:12:53.168 --> 00:12:54.230
It's made sort of a difference.

00:12:54.450 --> 00:12:56.854
But I didn't have a harmonica teacher for a long time.

00:12:56.875 --> 00:12:58.677
And I put the music away.

00:12:59.009 --> 00:13:05.337
when I graduated from college in 1980 and really didn't do much with it until 83, 84.

00:13:05.357 --> 00:13:07.802
83 was when I first...

00:13:08.182 --> 00:13:18.735
I'm sure there's people in your audience who, when you're in a long-term relationship and it begins to go sour and it's going to end, although you don't know that yet, but you feel it.

00:13:18.755 --> 00:13:25.962
I mean, blues is particularly good, I think, at conducting that feeling and purging that feeling.

00:13:26.144 --> 00:13:31.975
And it kind of calls to you because it knows all about that condition of, will she or won't she?

00:13:32.395 --> 00:13:36.764
Down on the killing floor, that kind of incredible, tense...

00:13:37.442 --> 00:13:39.764
Are we back together or is it all going down?

00:13:39.943 --> 00:13:48.491
And that's when I first hauled my guitar and the amp that I had at that point down and harmonicas down to Dan Lynch, a blues bar that I'd found a little ad for.

00:13:48.511 --> 00:13:49.432
They had a jam session.

00:13:49.471 --> 00:13:56.457
And that was like the first time that I was sort of actually playing with, listening to and playing with in a blues club setting.

00:13:56.479 --> 00:13:57.019
And that was 83.

00:13:57.139 --> 00:13:58.801
How old were you then?

00:13:59.081 --> 00:14:01.442
Well, I was born in 58, so I would have been 25.

00:14:02.624 --> 00:14:12.371
Prior to that, I mean, I saw James Cotton opening for the Jay Giles Band when I been playing for about nine months, which was the first time I'd seen actual live blues musicians up close.

00:14:12.392 --> 00:14:13.312
And it was astonishing.

00:14:13.373 --> 00:14:16.375
That, as much as anything, got me hooked on the harp.

00:14:16.775 --> 00:14:17.216
I saw B.B.

00:14:17.277 --> 00:14:18.857
King once live in Central Park.

00:14:19.038 --> 00:14:22.921
Again, astonishing, like when you see him live for the first time and you're right up front.

00:14:23.402 --> 00:14:26.565
I saw Muddy Waters once with, I think, Mike Bloomfield.

00:14:26.605 --> 00:14:28.546
They were both playing solo in New York City.

00:14:28.767 --> 00:14:32.629
But other than that, very little real, legit blues.

00:14:32.750 --> 00:14:39.379
And it wasn't until I started going to the club in New York and then seeing that sort of lower level kind of club level stuff.

00:14:39.399 --> 00:14:43.543
It's still very good and real where I suddenly got kind of hooked again.

00:14:43.582 --> 00:14:51.269
And so you, you're part of a, you know, one of the great traditions of blues duels and one of the most famous ones, Satan and Adam, as you've mentioned.

00:14:51.350 --> 00:14:57.335
So you discovered Sterling McGee as his real name is, Satan, when you were, you know, you were in Harlem.

00:14:57.615 --> 00:15:04.140
Was it, you know, not long after this time you were starting to check out the acts again while you were starting to, you know, get more interested in blues going around Harlem.

00:15:04.160 --> 00:15:04.981
You saw him playing.

00:15:05.481 --> 00:15:07.764
Yeah, it was a couple of years later and I'd been a busker.

00:15:07.784 --> 00:15:09.967
I'd played with a number of guitar players at that point.

00:15:10.008 --> 00:15:12.371
I'd been over to England and to Europe.

00:15:12.812 --> 00:15:22.629
And it was after that period of a couple of years when I was doing quite a bit of busking that I drove through Harlem and saw him and got a chance to play with him, having paid a fair share of dues.

00:15:23.394 --> 00:15:26.756
I think your first song with him was Mojo, I read.

00:15:26.836 --> 00:15:28.038
Is that the first one you bussed

00:15:32.422 --> 00:15:51.918
with him on the street?

00:15:53.360 --> 00:15:59.626
And then he decided to go busking on the streets because he didn't really like, you know, the whole music industry.

00:15:59.667 --> 00:16:01.649
So he decided he just wanted to just play on the street.

00:16:01.708 --> 00:16:04.152
And so you just sort of took up with him because he sounded good.

00:16:04.172 --> 00:16:04.331
Yeah.

00:16:04.532 --> 00:16:04.932
Yeah.

00:16:04.991 --> 00:16:16.104
I mean, he was, you know, if you're a young harmonica player like me and you run into an incredible guitar player with an incredible groove and an original sound, and he likes your, you know, he likes your playing.

00:16:16.163 --> 00:16:17.044
He likes your presence.

00:16:17.265 --> 00:16:21.529
He recognizes, and you both recognize that this is a great busking kind of thing.

00:16:21.649 --> 00:16:24.894
We, you know, we, the traffic would stop dead when we were playing.

00:16:24.974 --> 00:16:26.796
It was really quite, it was quite amazing.

00:16:27.395 --> 00:16:32.361
Having done a lot of busking, I could appreciate that this was something that like I could really learn from him.

00:16:32.381 --> 00:16:37.787
And of course, the lanyap, I guess was, I was playing, you know, on the street in front of a black audience.

00:16:37.868 --> 00:16:47.518
So if I could, if I could get their attention and get their approval, if they like what I was doing, I could, and that's what I learned really quick is that people were uninterested in having me show off.

00:16:47.618 --> 00:16:51.621
They just, but, but if the moment you kind of really groove together, then everybody would stop.

00:16:51.682 --> 00:16:53.264
And they, so the groove was the thing.

00:16:53.264 --> 00:16:53.945
I think that's what

00:16:53.985 --> 00:17:06.758
I learned.

00:17:23.215 --> 00:17:34.949
By the time we went into the studio to record in early 1990, the recordings that became part of our first release, Harlem Blues, at that point, I think I'd kind of found my sound, but it took a

00:17:34.989 --> 00:17:35.229
while.

00:17:35.548 --> 00:17:38.392
And so you were busking, I think, for four years on the streets, yeah?

00:17:38.412 --> 00:17:44.979
So at this stage, were you working or was this just a kind of part-time thing or were you earning enough money to be able to live from it?

00:17:45.279 --> 00:17:47.122
Yeah, it was kind of a little bit of here and there.

00:17:47.182 --> 00:17:48.643
I did not have a full-time job.

00:17:48.863 --> 00:17:58.173
I was teaching at a I was doing a bit of freelance work, kind of freelance editorial work here and there.

00:17:58.513 --> 00:18:01.297
And we would play an occasional club gig.

00:18:01.336 --> 00:18:09.204
But the key thing to understand is we were not called Satan and Adam until our first demo came out in the spring of 1990.

00:18:09.746 --> 00:18:10.866
We were just Mr.

00:18:10.946 --> 00:18:14.270
Satan and that white boy who plays with him up by the phone company.

00:18:14.431 --> 00:18:16.212
I mean, that's how people would talk about us.

00:18:16.553 --> 00:18:23.119
A famous event that occurred for you is that you were filmed by U2, the Irish rock band, who were obviously pretty massive.

00:18:23.119 --> 00:18:34.311
So you were filmed and you were playing a song called Freedom for My People and that was taken and included in part of the Rattle and Hum YouTube documentary and also album, only a short clip.

00:18:34.711 --> 00:18:38.916
I don't think you ever met them or anything, but that kind of did give you some exposure.

00:18:39.057 --> 00:18:41.179
Did that sort of help get your name more on the map?

00:18:41.440 --> 00:18:41.880
I think it

00:18:41.960 --> 00:18:42.160
did.

00:18:42.200 --> 00:18:44.082
Of course, it had nothing to do with blues.

00:18:44.182 --> 00:18:48.027
The song, it's a wonderful song and it was Sterling's or Mr.

00:18:48.086 --> 00:18:50.269
Satan's, as I called him back then, Mr.

00:18:50.348 --> 00:18:52.230
Satan's, his composition.

00:18:52.791 --> 00:18:54.313
You know, they had a film crew with them.

00:18:54.373 --> 00:18:57.396
I guess they were doing sort of a swing through America.

00:18:57.416 --> 00:19:03.502
They were obviously huge in the summer of 1987, which is when they came by.

00:19:03.522 --> 00:19:07.867
They had filmed, I still haven't found what I'm looking for, like with a Harlem choir.

00:19:08.288 --> 00:19:11.832
They were just like walking out on the street and we happened to be playing.

00:19:12.132 --> 00:19:13.032
I didn't know who they were.

00:19:13.073 --> 00:19:16.057
I didn't even know that they'd actually been there until they were gone.

00:19:16.136 --> 00:19:18.219
And then somebody said, do you know who those guys were?

00:19:18.318 --> 00:19:19.000
I'm like, what guys?

00:19:19.259 --> 00:19:20.421
And then they said, well, that's you too.

00:19:20.500 --> 00:19:23.023
And I thought, well, aren't they like a rock group, right?

00:19:23.023 --> 00:19:26.647
They were, of course, like the most famous rock group in the world, I think, at that point.

00:19:26.748 --> 00:19:27.648
They were really big.

00:19:27.909 --> 00:19:33.295
There was a sort of deal that was made between Bobby Robinson, who was Mr.

00:19:33.355 --> 00:19:35.356
Satan's kind of de facto manager.

00:19:35.718 --> 00:19:37.920
And Bobby, you know, I think took the card.

00:19:38.240 --> 00:19:43.945
They used like literally 40 seconds, 39 seconds of that song in the film.

00:19:44.247 --> 00:19:45.688
I don't know what effect it had.

00:19:45.768 --> 00:19:52.976
Certainly, you know, when I finally got a chance to go into the movie theater and see the film, it was amazing to have that, even that little bit of effect.

00:19:52.976 --> 00:19:53.417
little bit.

00:19:53.719 --> 00:19:56.210
It wasn't representative of what we were doing.

00:19:56.550 --> 00:19:59.343
In other words, we were really playing groove-oriented blues.

00:19:59.403 --> 00:20:00.709
And that particular song...

00:20:01.122 --> 00:20:03.144
I mean, we ended up recording it at full length.

00:20:03.523 --> 00:20:05.665
In 1990, we did and released it in 93.

00:20:17.977 --> 00:20:19.817
When I wrote my memoir, Mr.

00:20:19.877 --> 00:20:25.143
Satan's Apprentice, I transcribed the full length version and put those lyrics in the book.

00:20:25.262 --> 00:20:26.864
So if somebody's interested, they can go to Mr.

00:20:26.923 --> 00:20:27.644
Satan's Apprentice.

00:20:27.964 --> 00:20:31.087
And so this happened in 87, but you made your first album together.

00:20:31.087 --> 00:20:34.211
in 91, Harlem Blues, yeah.

00:20:34.250 --> 00:20:40.137
And also, so I think you'd sort of signed to a manager and you went and toured with Bo Diddley in the UK.

00:20:40.999 --> 00:20:45.604
So you still were busking for a few years and then you made this album, did the tour in 91.

00:20:45.824 --> 00:20:52.191
Yeah, the album was made at two sessions about a year apart in February of 90 and February of 91.

00:20:52.471 --> 00:20:57.056
And it was when we were doing that second session, that's when Margot Lewis came along.

00:20:57.375 --> 00:20:58.676
And she was huge.

00:20:58.938 --> 00:21:01.901
She was a talent consultant International.

00:21:01.961 --> 00:21:04.624
She managed Bo Diddley and Wilson Pickett and the Village People.

00:21:04.983 --> 00:21:11.371
She saw us in a women's bar down in Greenwich Village where we had a sort of curious 3 to 6 p.m.

00:21:11.431 --> 00:21:12.731
gig on Sunday evenings.

00:21:13.053 --> 00:21:16.737
And she happened to wander in and loved it, loved us and gave us her card.

00:21:16.817 --> 00:21:23.644
We took a while to convince Sterling that he wanted to kind of accept management and accept having a record out there.

00:21:23.723 --> 00:22:00.083
But I still remember the day that I played our CD or I played, I think, the demo that we did after the that first session i remember sitting with him with my with my little honda the doors wide open in harlem on the street like with the stereo cranking our music and it was and just saluting like drinking a little vodka and thinking man we got it what a sound you know because you play on the street you don't know people would make recordings and videos but he was singing through a ratty old couple of little mouse amps and you couldn't really hear his vocals as well suddenly there we are with studio level with the vocals right on top

00:22:00.182 --> 00:22:00.383
yeah

00:22:00.824 --> 00:22:10.334
what i i'll say is that to have get to get that record out and then to get the responses that we got from the djs let's just say they really really loved that first album

00:22:10.473 --> 00:22:16.059
yeah i mean it was nominated for a wc handy award yeah for best traditional blues album of the year so yeah

00:22:16.441 --> 00:22:16.661
yeah

00:22:16.961 --> 00:22:20.064
it felt new i think to them they fit there wasn't you know it was just a very

00:22:20.124 --> 00:22:22.227
different kind of sound it was an original sound

00:22:22.406 --> 00:22:27.092
by this stage 91 you were you still busking or were you playing in clubs you know around new york

00:22:27.112 --> 00:22:33.178
then that's a great question we started to play in clubs in new york in in 90 after the demo came out.

00:22:33.298 --> 00:22:36.162
We began to play little restaurants and stuff, but nothing really big.

00:22:36.261 --> 00:22:38.423
Margo then began to put us out there.

00:22:38.544 --> 00:22:46.692
And there was an article when the album came out, a big cover story in the entertainment section of Newsday, which is a pretty big New York City paper.

00:22:46.972 --> 00:22:49.215
People began to see that, people in Harlem too.

00:22:49.296 --> 00:22:53.640
And so Sterling said, yeah, I think the money's not quite as good out here because people think, well, y'all are making it now.

00:22:53.700 --> 00:22:55.362
You don't need my nickels and dimes.

00:22:55.803 --> 00:22:56.824
We kind of evolved.

00:22:57.003 --> 00:23:04.751
We liked playing the street, but I think when we realized there was a market for us away from the street and in the clubs and then off on the road, I think.

00:23:05.011 --> 00:23:07.515
So you released three albums through the 90s, Jan.

00:23:07.535 --> 00:23:13.260
We talked about Living on the River, which contains Unlucky in Love, which I absolutely love that song.

00:23:13.381 --> 00:23:14.221
I'm glad you like it.

00:23:14.362 --> 00:23:16.183
So yes, you did three albums together.

00:23:16.263 --> 00:23:23.112
And by this time, you were touring more and you started touring more around the US and internationally as well through the 90s.

00:23:23.152 --> 00:23:25.074
Yeah, internationally, we did it here and there.

00:23:25.114 --> 00:23:27.476
We went to Finland twice.

00:23:28.136 --> 00:23:32.461
We went to the Guinness Temple Bar Blues Festival at one point in Dublin.

00:23:32.781 --> 00:23:34.844
So we didn't do a lot of international stuff.

00:23:34.884 --> 00:23:38.147
We got to Canada and we got out to the West Coast once or twice.

00:23:38.647 --> 00:23:41.612
I used to call us a regional to national touring act.

00:23:41.711 --> 00:23:45.316
We would get in my car and we would go up and down the East Coast, occasionally go out to Chicago.

00:23:45.355 --> 00:23:50.080
We played a lot of festivals in New York, in America, but mostly east of the Mississippi for the most part.

00:23:50.760 --> 00:23:55.967
You mentioned the Satan and Adam documentary, which I watched myself last week and it's fantastic.

00:23:55.987 --> 00:23:57.848
So touching on some of the things that happened.

00:23:57.868 --> 00:24:33.727
So you guys kind of disbanded in 98 when the sterling became ill and you you had a bit of an illness yourself yeah and then and then you guys came back together and it's a really touching story in the documentary where sterling was really quite you know he looked like he couldn't play anymore and then certainly he rediscovers his mojo it's like amazing isn't it he kind of like gets it back and it really seems to help him recover so i really um people check that out it's really a heart heartwarming story but so then and then you recorded two more albums later on yeah when you sort of got back in around in the sort of 2011 and i'm trying to think we We had one called Back in the Game.

00:24:34.047 --> 00:24:34.768
Yeah.

00:24:34.827 --> 00:24:40.113
I think I'm thinking of your word on the street, which is the one where you got recordings of live performances on the street.

00:24:40.653 --> 00:24:40.792
Right.

00:24:40.932 --> 00:24:44.916
So those are recordings from 1989, just before we went in the studio.

00:24:45.217 --> 00:24:48.921
So if somebody wants to know, what did it really feel like to be there on the street playing with them?

00:24:58.609 --> 00:24:58.910
Hey, hey, hey, hey.

00:25:02.625 --> 00:25:03.688
That's just a download.

00:25:03.728 --> 00:25:04.910
I don't sell that as a disc.

00:25:05.029 --> 00:25:09.155
So that's available through your website, as are most of your albums.

00:25:09.215 --> 00:25:11.660
And so, yeah, people can get in touch.

00:25:11.819 --> 00:25:13.182
Neil, I do want to say one thing.

00:25:13.221 --> 00:25:16.948
If somebody wants the full backstory, they really need to get a hold of my memoir.

00:25:17.107 --> 00:25:18.990
And there's also an audiobook version.

00:25:19.070 --> 00:25:22.757
I actually read the entire thing, which is called Mr.

00:25:22.817 --> 00:25:23.778
Satan's Apprentice.

00:25:23.919 --> 00:25:26.061
It's spelled M-I-S-T-E-R.

00:25:26.282 --> 00:25:28.625
And that's out there as a book and as an audiobook.

00:25:28.685 --> 00:25:30.910
If you have that, then you've got the full thing.

00:25:31.650 --> 00:25:31.950
Here's a

00:25:31.990 --> 00:25:34.875
quick word from the podcast sponsor, Blows Me Away Productions.

00:25:37.538 --> 00:25:39.843
Hey folks, this is Charlie Musselwhite.

00:25:39.863 --> 00:25:47.194
If you're in the amplified tone like I am, the best and only place to start is a microphone from Blows Me Away Productions.

00:25:47.694 --> 00:25:49.919
Check them out at blowsmeaway.com.

00:25:50.420 --> 00:25:51.902
You know I ain't lying.

00:25:52.513 --> 00:26:11.170
So after Satan and Adam, I think in 2010, then you decided to release your own kind of solo one-man band album called Kick and Stomp, which clearly you were building on all the experience you'd had playing with Sterling and playing on the street and the kind of busking kind of vibe that you get in the album.

00:26:11.230 --> 00:26:12.391
It's a really good album.

00:26:12.411 --> 00:26:17.115
I think it comes out really well and building on that big tradition of, you know, one-man band harmonica.

00:26:17.214 --> 00:26:22.480
You're playing harmonica and kind of a foot stomping pedal and singing, yeah?

00:26:22.480 --> 00:26:22.940
Yeah.

00:26:23.540 --> 00:26:35.634
And I have to say, for all the years that I played with Sterling, as the harmonica playing sideman to a one-man band, it never once occurred to me that I wanted to play the percussion and try to do what he was doing.

00:26:35.933 --> 00:26:41.359
And what happened was that I was friends with a harmonica player who I met through YouTube.

00:26:41.559 --> 00:26:44.644
He commented on a video of mine, and he's a young guy named Brandon Bailey.

00:26:44.864 --> 00:26:47.826
Brandon ended up giving me kind of a primitive stomp box.

00:26:48.007 --> 00:26:51.030
He said, I've been doing this stuff involving harmonica and beatboxing.

00:26:51.070 --> 00:26:52.192
Here's something you might like.

00:26:52.211 --> 00:27:15.797
And he said, me a little present basically i plugged it into an amp and stomped on it i didn't like the sound but the the fact of having a groove and then when i would play harmonica along with it really suddenly called to something in me and and now i in retrospect i realized it was like i was i was adding the little mr satan to my harmonica mix and of course i i would groove to that sound i very quickly tracked down a kick drum made by a guy named pete farmer

00:27:16.037 --> 00:27:21.063
this is the same pete farmer who who made the harmonica right which uh side will sell now yeah

00:27:21.363 --> 00:27:23.045
i maybe i I don't know.

00:27:23.065 --> 00:27:23.905
I actually don't know.

00:27:23.925 --> 00:27:29.133
So in the summer of 2009, I called Pete and he said, well, let me send you something here.

00:27:29.192 --> 00:27:30.153
Let's try this out.

00:27:30.354 --> 00:27:31.855
And that transformed my playing.

00:27:32.076 --> 00:27:33.178
It was like a rebirth.

00:27:33.637 --> 00:27:36.061
Interestingly enough, so 2009, I would have been 51.

00:27:36.422 --> 00:27:40.606
That was like right at the age that Sterling was when I ran into him.

00:27:40.688 --> 00:27:41.347
He was 50.

00:27:41.749 --> 00:27:51.163
So it was like the same age, 50-year-old, where you feel like you're a kid again as a musician doing something brand new But in my case, it was also very old.

00:27:51.263 --> 00:27:51.884
It was very...

00:27:51.924 --> 00:27:55.627
Now, the percussion setup that I played, totally different than his.

00:27:55.907 --> 00:28:00.471
So again, he was using two hi-hat cymbals, tacked sort of strapped down to a wooden board.

00:28:00.832 --> 00:28:03.074
I was using a kick drum and a tambourine pedal.

00:28:03.114 --> 00:28:04.536
So totally different setup.

00:28:05.276 --> 00:28:08.778
You're not wrong to say there's some weird resonance.

00:28:08.818 --> 00:28:14.743
And I could hear him in my head as I began to learn how the percussion thing worked.

00:28:14.904 --> 00:28:24.473
And if I didn't get it right at first, I would try something and I him in my head because when I ran into him, he wasn't playing two hi-hat cymbals on a wooden board.

00:28:24.513 --> 00:28:27.257
He was playing one hi-hat cymbal that was like right on the concrete.

00:28:27.457 --> 00:28:37.208
And it was while I was playing with him about six months after we started playing together back in early 87 that he got the second hi-hat cymbal.

00:28:37.288 --> 00:28:41.092
And I remember him talking about how hard it was to sort of do these two things at the same time.

00:28:41.112 --> 00:28:43.894
He would say like, man, it feels like your feet be getting drunk.

00:28:44.494 --> 00:28:48.199
So I had this inner guide with him, all that experience with him.

00:28:48.239 --> 00:28:49.861
And that made huge difference.

00:28:50.141 --> 00:28:54.786
And so in the summer of 2010, I said, I'm going to record a solo album.

00:28:54.967 --> 00:28:59.570
And it was just vocals, amplified harp and percussion.

00:29:00.031 --> 00:29:11.284
And then I would joke with the guy who was my recording engineers, like in 16 and a half percent reverb, you know, we would argue about how much reverb would fill it in just the right amount so that we didn't need anything else behind it.

00:29:11.624 --> 00:29:14.047
And I did an album with 13 or 14 cuts.

00:29:14.386 --> 00:29:15.107
I sent them out.

00:29:15.147 --> 00:29:18.151
At some point, somebody said, Adam, you realize they're playing you on Bluesville.

00:29:18.270 --> 00:29:42.413
He goes, it's like a national blues show and he said you're the first solo harmonica player he said I think except for Russ Green that they've ever played on that show you know it's Bill Wax so I have huge thanks to give to a particular blues DJ Bill Wax who's a legend who you know not only played the album but he invited me into the studio when I was in Washington DC the next summer and so that reanimated my career that album

00:29:42.555 --> 00:29:46.238
great it's a great album and I love Sunshine of Your Love on there

00:29:54.018 --> 00:29:58.173
light shining through on you i'm with you

00:29:59.617 --> 00:30:06.463
So you released another album called Southbound, which was, you had a few more instruments join you on that one, so it wasn't quite solo.

00:30:06.604 --> 00:30:06.983
I played

00:30:07.064 --> 00:30:07.525
guitar.

00:30:07.585 --> 00:30:11.387
In fact, I played a lot of guitar kind of in the background, and then I had a couple of different bass players.

00:30:11.468 --> 00:30:20.395
So yeah, I thought, well, what would happen if we now, now that we've stripped it down, that was the first album, what happens if we record everything as stripped down, and then I add other things in after the fact?

00:30:20.476 --> 00:30:21.616
And that's how it was recorded.

00:30:21.856 --> 00:30:23.198
It was one man band at first.

00:30:23.479 --> 00:30:23.939
And then you

00:30:23.999 --> 00:30:29.584
joined a duo with a guitar player called Alan Gross, who's also a professor and a teacher.

00:30:29.584 --> 00:30:48.384
Yeah, it's kind of hard to

00:30:53.328 --> 00:30:53.670
believe.

00:30:53.869 --> 00:31:01.718
Chris, just before Christmas in 2019, just before the pandemic roared in, I got an email from a guy He said, hi, my name is Rod Patterson.

00:31:01.959 --> 00:31:02.880
He goes, I'm Mr.

00:31:02.960 --> 00:31:03.740
Satan's nephew.

00:31:03.961 --> 00:31:05.481
He said, I saw the documentary.

00:31:05.722 --> 00:31:06.182
I loved it.

00:31:06.282 --> 00:31:07.904
He goes, why don't we get together?

00:31:07.924 --> 00:31:09.626
He goes, I can sing my uncle's song.

00:31:09.686 --> 00:31:11.348
I can sing Satan and Adam's song.

00:31:11.608 --> 00:31:16.034
Why don't we get together and maybe do a demo and put together a show of some kind?

00:31:16.134 --> 00:31:17.734
I was very dubious at first.

00:31:17.796 --> 00:31:20.417
I thought, well, Alan and I are not your typical blues band.

00:31:20.438 --> 00:31:22.160
I don't know how much experience this guy has.

00:31:23.060 --> 00:31:23.682
Can this work?

00:31:24.162 --> 00:31:24.782
Well, it did.

00:31:25.083 --> 00:31:27.506
And we got together in January of that year.

00:31:27.526 --> 00:31:31.690
And then in February to finish it, we Basically, we made an album in a couple of sessions.

00:31:32.191 --> 00:31:34.673
And it's been a wonderful ride.

00:31:35.473 --> 00:31:36.695
Totally unforeseeable.

00:31:36.796 --> 00:31:40.078
And yet, and he's nothing like his uncle in terms of what he does.

00:31:40.199 --> 00:31:43.482
I mean, except there's a McGee thing that he's got.

00:31:43.502 --> 00:31:44.864
It's a charisma, I think.

00:31:44.903 --> 00:31:47.047
He's an incredibly charismatic guy, like

00:31:47.307 --> 00:31:47.788
his uncle.

00:31:48.127 --> 00:31:51.171
Yeah, so your latest album is called Keep It In The Family.

00:31:51.270 --> 00:31:55.435
This has got a song in it called Brother Sterling, which Rod's singing about Sterling, isn't he?

00:31:55.516 --> 00:31:56.616
And making, again, that connection

00:31:56.636 --> 00:31:59.440
back to that.

00:31:59.440 --> 00:32:08.910
Well,

00:32:08.950 --> 00:32:22.684
he's singing about Sterling, and there's a specific interesting thing that really is at the heart of Rod's connection with me, which is that I met his uncle in 1986, but between 80 and 82, Sterling, at that point, who had become Mr.

00:32:22.744 --> 00:32:25.807
Satan, was living with Rod and his mom, Sterling's sister.

00:32:26.107 --> 00:32:29.392
He had this sort of close-up and personal connection with his uncle.

00:32:29.392 --> 00:32:31.474
the way, you know, a version of it.

00:32:31.494 --> 00:32:32.836
It wasn't as musical.

00:32:32.876 --> 00:32:35.019
And yet Sterling would play house parties.

00:32:35.401 --> 00:32:36.782
And so that's what Brother Sterling's about.

00:32:36.823 --> 00:32:43.972
It's about being a young man, young Rod, and having this crazy, incredible musical uncle living in the house.

00:32:44.233 --> 00:32:47.357
And his mother would sort of have these house parties and Sterling would play.

00:32:47.397 --> 00:32:50.082
Here's the line that I came up with for this song.

00:32:50.182 --> 00:32:52.546
Alan, it was really in the pocket for Alan and me.

00:32:52.586 --> 00:32:53.606
This is on an A-harp.

00:32:56.971 --> 00:33:18.365
A-harp bye bye

00:33:18.753 --> 00:33:28.762
You know, I had Slim Harpo and, you know, I don't know who else I had in mind, but I wanted something very sort of strong and full and heavily groove-oriented.

00:33:28.962 --> 00:33:30.663
And so that's what that song is.

00:33:31.045 --> 00:33:33.227
Touching on now some of the other things you've done.

00:33:33.267 --> 00:33:35.709
So we've got to talk about your YouTube channel.

00:33:35.989 --> 00:33:51.222
When you made your first YouTube video back in 2007, I believe, which was called Blues Harmonica Secrets Revealed, I think you may have been the first person, certainly to come to prominence at least, with these, you know, YouTube harmonica tuition videos.

00:33:51.242 --> 00:33:52.203
Do you think that is the case?

00:33:52.584 --> 00:33:52.964
I do think

00:33:53.005 --> 00:33:53.525
it's the case.

00:33:53.625 --> 00:34:02.454
I can tell you, because before I did that first one, I made a pretty, well, I think thorough sort of attempt to figure out what else was out there.

00:34:02.775 --> 00:34:07.099
And so John Gindick had a channel called Jam Camp 06.

00:34:07.500 --> 00:34:09.702
You know, he'd strum and play rack harp.

00:34:09.922 --> 00:34:12.224
There wasn't a whole lot of lesson kind of stuff.

00:34:12.364 --> 00:34:20.855
And Ronnie Shellist, who would become a good friend of mine, had a lesson, he would just sort of play along with a jam track.

00:34:20.914 --> 00:34:24.480
That remains a legend, I think, among harmonica players, that particular video.

00:34:34.195 --> 00:34:38.099
There was, you know, James Cotton in a blue t-shirt, sweating really heavily playing.

00:34:38.280 --> 00:34:44.268
There was, you know, a handful of sort of stage stuff, Sonny Boy Williamson, a couple of clips that people could find.

00:34:44.309 --> 00:34:48.148
But if you were to go back, I was February of 2007.

00:34:49.025 --> 00:34:51.949
go back and just look at timestamps, you'll find there's very little

00:34:52.389 --> 00:34:52.648
out there.

00:34:52.668 --> 00:34:57.072
I think, I mean, I certainly remember, you know, you, and it was quite a sensation at the time.

00:34:57.132 --> 00:35:02.217
And I, you know, I watched your videos back then and it was like, wow, yeah, you can get this instruction on the internet.

00:35:02.237 --> 00:35:03.438
You know, it was like a new thing.

00:35:03.498 --> 00:35:03.579
Yeah.

00:35:03.619 --> 00:35:07.061
Which, you know, now when it's just absolutely flooded with it, you know, right.

00:35:07.501 --> 00:35:14.748
So you kind of got in there first year, which put you in a, you know, in a great position and your, your YouTube channel now has had like 20 million views.

00:35:14.788 --> 00:35:17.250
You've got 70,000 subscribers, you know?

00:35:17.291 --> 00:35:20.172
So what was the whole YouTube, uh, journey like for you?

00:35:20.233 --> 00:35:25.918
Well, now it's interesting because I've got two channels and the original channel has 70 to 80,000.

00:35:26.699 --> 00:35:34.768
I might even have 85 at this point, but the newer channel that I started in 2015 has like 157,000 subscribers, I believe.

00:35:35.108 --> 00:35:40.635
What it's been like actually is when I started, there was no such thing as monetization and nothing commercial about it.

00:35:40.655 --> 00:35:41.996
It was strictly prohibited.

00:35:42.177 --> 00:35:44.940
So I used a whole bunch of copyrighted music.

00:35:45.019 --> 00:35:48.784
I'd put on Herbie Hancock's CD, Taken Off, and then I'd play along.

00:35:48.923 --> 00:35:52.788
I I do four videos about how to play Watermelon Man, for example.

00:35:52.807 --> 00:35:59.215
So I did all the things that are not best practices if you want to be monetized, because nobody was thinking in terms of monetization.

00:35:59.235 --> 00:36:00.996
You couldn't make money off YouTube, right?

00:36:01.898 --> 00:36:05.101
Now we talk about YouTubers like it's always been like that, but it wasn't like that.

00:36:05.181 --> 00:36:12.208
So it really was, when I said I'm going to give it all away, I had zero ulterior motive in terms of trying to profit from it.

00:36:12.509 --> 00:36:25.862
What I did was I started a website called Modern Blues Harmonica that I intended to last for 10 days with a PayPal icon on it and then I was going to kill it because people, after I did the free videos for 40 days, people said, we want to give you a tip.

00:36:26.204 --> 00:36:27.344
You know, we want to send you tips.

00:36:27.425 --> 00:36:28.186
It's like, really?

00:36:28.646 --> 00:36:34.992
I kept that website and it's still up and I still have$5 videos and$2 tab sheets.

00:36:35.474 --> 00:36:37.536
I have not raised my price since 2007.

00:36:37.835 --> 00:36:40.018
Not many people can make that thing.

00:36:40.259 --> 00:36:43.822
But the YouTube thing, what happened was ultimately I was disabled from monetization.

00:36:43.862 --> 00:36:47.586
And so I watched the thing grow up 2010, 2013, 14.

00:36:48.166 --> 00:36:50.210
And I finally said, well, wait a minute, I need to start fresh.

00:36:50.269 --> 00:36:51.492
I need to start another channel.

00:36:51.791 --> 00:36:53.373
I need to monetize from the beginning.

00:36:53.393 --> 00:36:56.637
I need to make sure that I don't play along with lots of copyrighted music.

00:36:56.998 --> 00:36:58.079
Let me just do my own thing.

00:36:58.139 --> 00:36:59.001
I know how to do this.

00:36:59.081 --> 00:36:59.842
I've learned how to do it.

00:37:00.063 --> 00:37:03.507
And so I started a new channel and bit by bit, it gained viewers.

00:37:03.827 --> 00:37:06.871
That's where all of the things that I upload go there.

00:37:19.650 --> 00:37:39.447
thing you did back then which was uh you certainly touched me is that you used to do a lot of your videos in the car so uh you had this real kind of uh you know thing in the car i still do that i did that the other day yeah i'm still i like my car different car i think it's at that time because your your son was the baby and you needed to just get out the house and so it was quiet and things yeah

00:37:39.567 --> 00:37:52.920
you know it's really strange my kid was an infant he is 16 now and tomorrow we're driving him down he plays a whole bunch of instruments he plays every instrument except except harmonica He's utterly uninterested, but he's really a euphonium player right now.

00:37:53.260 --> 00:37:56.103
I don't know if people know what that is, but it's like a tenor tuba.

00:37:56.302 --> 00:37:57.925
He's an incredible musician.

00:37:58.025 --> 00:38:02.228
He's national class on the euphonium, playing everything but blues.

00:38:02.489 --> 00:38:03.630
So you're not playing with him then?

00:38:04.050 --> 00:38:06.094
No, but he can play electric bass.

00:38:06.153 --> 00:38:09.056
And so once or twice, he's played along with Alan and me.

00:38:09.416 --> 00:38:14.503
I think in the future, there may be a Sir Robson of Blues Doctors bass player, but we'll see.

00:38:14.603 --> 00:38:15.364
I'm not sure.

00:38:15.603 --> 00:38:41.311
So you mentioned your Modern Blues Harmonica website there, which as you say, started at about the same time and it's a great website great source of information there's tons of stuff on there stuff about you stuff about blues and some great videos of great players and albums so all sorts of stuff on there so that's a really good resource as well for people to check out again put the link on to that we touched on obviously you're a professor now professor of the blues and you've written I think is it five books now I

00:38:41.592 --> 00:38:44.775
think it's five or six I wrote Mr.

00:38:44.815 --> 00:38:52.402
Satan's Apprentice was sort of the first one of the memoir in the late 90s and then a dissertation book called Seems Like Murder Here, Southern Violence and the Blues Tradition.

00:38:52.663 --> 00:39:00.090
I did one called Journeyman's Road, Modern Blues Lives from Faulkner's, Mississippi to Post 911, New York.

00:39:00.251 --> 00:39:12.023
I self-published a first novel that it's called Busker's Holidays, wildly fictionalized version of my transformation from first round graduate student to busker in Europe one summer.

00:39:12.605 --> 00:39:18.550
And then the last couple of books, there was a study called Beyond the Crossroads, The Devil and the Blues Tradition.

00:39:18.831 --> 00:39:24.378
And then Who's blues facing up to race and the future of the music i think that's six

00:39:25.119 --> 00:39:37.878
clearly this is something you're passionate about you know you talked at the beginning about you know the links to you know kind of racial injustice and the blues and you know the fact that we are um uh you know we're appropriating the blues music all these white guys you know so um well

00:39:38.000 --> 00:39:44.429
i don't i don't my book whose blues is not really about cultural appropriation that's not a phrase that i use very much i mean i'm

00:39:44.949 --> 00:39:44.989
uh

00:39:45.442 --> 00:39:49.407
What I'm trying to do is understand some of the complaints that were out there.

00:39:49.427 --> 00:39:59.719
I was interested in the fact that the conversation about blues had become heavily ideologized and not really productive.

00:39:59.760 --> 00:40:09.152
And what I meant by that was that it felt like when we talked about the blues, not as aficionados, but sort of arguing about the blues, that people fell into two camps very quickly.

00:40:09.291 --> 00:40:11.054
One was sort of blues is black music.

00:40:11.393 --> 00:40:13.916
There was a sort of almost a black nationalist take on the blues.

00:40:14.336 --> 00:40:17.059
And anything white folks have to do with it is just trouble.

00:40:17.278 --> 00:40:25.385
And the second one was sort of no black, no white, just the blues, which I thought I understood the idea that it was a sort of one nation or one world under the blues.

00:40:25.465 --> 00:40:26.387
It's a big tent.

00:40:26.746 --> 00:40:29.148
But I also thought that there were problems with it.

00:40:29.429 --> 00:40:39.617
And I thought that what people were missing was the real story, which is that if Americans think the blue story is about a tension between black and white, they're missing the global blue story.

00:40:39.878 --> 00:40:46.344
I actually did a long article that was a sort of attempt to understand the way in which blues music had gone around the world.

00:40:46.405 --> 00:40:48.608
And here's something for your UK audience.

00:40:49.088 --> 00:40:51.471
There were a couple of things that became really important.

00:40:51.590 --> 00:41:09.750
One thing that was clear is that to the extent that blues is now a world music, that it's spread to South America, to East Asia, to all sorts of places, that the British blues guys, the blues rock guys, the Rolling Stones, Cream, Led Zeppelin, were a key part of spreading it.

00:41:09.931 --> 00:41:13.614
The UK had all all these military bases around the world.

00:41:13.815 --> 00:41:22.563
And there were a lot of people that I found when I began to look country by country who would say, well, you know, we heard these radio shows coming off the English military bases.

00:41:23.085 --> 00:41:30.693
Oh, well, I didn't realize that, you know, because I obviously know about the 60s blues boom, but I didn't realize they picked it up from American radio bases from the States.

00:41:30.813 --> 00:41:31.413
American and

00:41:31.474 --> 00:41:32.074
British, yes.

00:41:32.153 --> 00:41:35.077
American and British military bases were one of the places.

00:41:35.137 --> 00:41:35.538
Now, B.B.

00:41:35.597 --> 00:41:37.880
King was also crucial because he toured the world.

00:41:38.181 --> 00:41:41.824
So, you know, King goes to China only once really late.

00:41:41.905 --> 00:41:44.947
And China's blues scene is not particularly big, although they do have one.

00:41:45.168 --> 00:41:47.530
But he goes to Japan in, I think, 68.

00:41:47.931 --> 00:41:51.114
And Japan was like the number three place that he toured.

00:41:51.496 --> 00:41:52.416
It was quite remarkable.

00:41:52.536 --> 00:41:54.639
And Japan has a thriving blues scene.

00:41:55.059 --> 00:41:56.641
But it's really not just about black and white.

00:41:56.681 --> 00:41:57.922
It's not just about America.

00:41:57.963 --> 00:41:59.925
Blues has traveled widely.

00:41:59.945 --> 00:42:01.407
And the question is why?

00:42:01.487 --> 00:42:05.632
What is it about the music that makes it so open in that way?

00:42:05.873 --> 00:42:08.516
And it may have something to do with its Senegalese roots.

00:42:08.576 --> 00:42:10.137
Senegal was...

00:42:10.657 --> 00:42:12.378
was a place that traders came through.

00:42:12.400 --> 00:42:16.262
It was heavily Islamicized and there were a lot of people sort of moving through.

00:42:16.302 --> 00:42:26.170
And I think Senegalese music, which worked its way into the blues, it worked its way into the hoodoo and mojo kind of language that is part of the blues vocabulary.

00:42:26.751 --> 00:42:31.215
It's a long story, obviously, but I try to get at a lot of the complexities.

00:42:31.476 --> 00:42:35.059
And one of my mottos here is sort of always look for the bad facts.

00:42:35.398 --> 00:42:37.701
Look for the facts that don't quite fit.

00:42:38.161 --> 00:42:41.023
So for example, there was a moment Yeah.

00:43:10.576 --> 00:43:18.789
moment i don't need to tell people how what a transformation happened you guys like blues breakers um you brought the music to back to america you know in a

00:43:18.889 --> 00:43:36.958
form that certainly galvanized me so you got six books available all available for your website yeah and on other sources as well i tell amazon amazon uk and other places yeah so great yeah so check them out you know fantastic i've had a look through and i intend to read some more so

00:43:40.385 --> 00:43:41.085
Bye.

00:43:45.442 --> 00:43:57.012
you've been involved in teaching obviously you said you taught in new york you've taught in some of john gindick's camps and you you teach at some hill country harmonica teaching camp in mississippi is that still running uh no it's not but

00:43:57.152 --> 00:44:09.222
i've done yeah i've done a lot of different i mean i did 10 of gindick's camps i did like half a dozen workshops with ronnie shellist i put on four or five hill country harmonica things

00:44:09.583 --> 00:44:16.588
and you're still traveling you played at festivals you played at the uh the mund harmonica live festival in klingenthal that's a Seidel one, isn't it?

00:44:16.608 --> 00:44:17.489
A Seidel festival.

00:44:17.510 --> 00:44:18.010
Yeah.

00:44:18.050 --> 00:44:18.291
Yeah.

00:44:18.391 --> 00:44:22.115
You played at the one in Edinburgh and the NHL festival in 2017.

00:44:22.155 --> 00:44:23.217
So you've been in the UK.

00:44:23.237 --> 00:44:25.219
So you're still doing some traveling around.

00:44:25.460 --> 00:44:26.360
Yeah.

00:44:26.460 --> 00:44:32.027
I'm hoping, Sir Rod and the Blues Doctors are very much hoping to get over to Germany in 2023.

00:44:32.347 --> 00:44:34.990
We've got a guy in Metman who's interested in bringing us.

00:44:35.472 --> 00:44:39.777
And we've just got a new, we've got a booking agent, finally, a top quality blues booking agent.

00:44:39.856 --> 00:44:42.360
So I have great hopes that you'll see us in the UK.

00:44:43.661 --> 00:44:43.742
Yeah.

00:44:44.130 --> 00:44:50.173
Break it down.

00:44:52.577 --> 00:44:52.818
Yeah.

00:44:52.878 --> 00:44:59.623
So a question I ask each time, Adam, related to teaching is if you had 10 minutes to practice, what would you spend those 10 minutes doing?

00:45:00.204 --> 00:45:06.789
Well, I can tell you that I'm going to do it by, I'm going to do it by taking out three harps and showing somebody what I would do.

00:45:07.190 --> 00:45:14.597
One of the things that I think you should do every day, I'm going to take an A, a C and an E flat just for the heck of it, is you should play the blue scale.

00:45:14.737 --> 00:45:20.943
You should play it up and down and you should certainly make sure that that three draw, the blue third, as I call it, that you get that right.

00:45:20.963 --> 00:45:23.644
You should make that blue scale sound I'm good, so I might.

00:45:23.686 --> 00:45:34.219
And

00:45:34.300 --> 00:45:35.340
once I can get it on the A.

00:45:44.452 --> 00:45:46.976
Just making sure that those pitches, here's an E flat.

00:46:00.353 --> 00:46:19.764
Of course, you could hear that I pulled a little vibrato in at the end, but I think, especially for developing players, it's not obvious to developing players that each harp, on each harp, the bent notes, the blue notes, or every note, it's going to require maybe a slightly different mouth shape, just very subtle kind of movements that will give you the best sound.

00:46:19.885 --> 00:46:34.612
So like the one hole on an A harp, if you don't know that, if you do know that, So learning how to drop the job so that when you're on a gig and you change harps, every harp sounds right.

00:46:34.911 --> 00:46:38.257
So that would be something that would make sense to do every day.

00:46:38.277 --> 00:46:46.028
I also think playing harp, although I do use an occasional custom harp courtesy of Joe Spires, I play mostly stock Kona Marine bands.

00:46:46.309 --> 00:46:49.474
And I do think it's important to develop a certain amount of lip strength.

00:46:49.775 --> 00:46:51.637
So I try to do runs.

00:46:51.677 --> 00:46:52.217
I have a couple.

00:46:52.438 --> 00:46:54.061
I'll take a C harp, for example.

00:46:54.081 --> 00:46:54.782
C harp.

00:46:58.273 --> 00:46:59.215
Now I haven't warmed up.

00:47:09.269 --> 00:47:10.431
And I would start slow.

00:47:10.492 --> 00:47:14.277
Find something that will move you through the middle of the harp.

00:47:14.416 --> 00:47:15.579
I think that's a big weakness.

00:47:16.219 --> 00:47:22.949
Not only do most players not play the high notes melodically, anything that gets you doing that, even boogie woogie.

00:47:26.081 --> 00:47:26.664
That's what I would do.

00:47:26.704 --> 00:47:37.543
I think a lot of players don't know how to move melodically through the middle, up and down with, say, the sixth blow as the note in the middle.

00:47:41.826 --> 00:47:44.972
Just learning how to move through that register.

00:47:45.012 --> 00:47:47.639
I would say that that's something every day would make a sense to do.

00:47:48.079 --> 00:47:48.922
So singing-wise,

00:47:49.041 --> 00:47:50.806
you do sing on some of your later

00:47:50.826 --> 00:47:59.485
albums.

00:48:00.001 --> 00:48:01.384
You

00:48:03.246 --> 00:48:05.971
know, so singing is obviously something that you've done as well.

00:48:05.990 --> 00:48:11.820
And you also do play some chromatic, certainly on your albums with the Blues Doctors, I found you playing some chromatic.

00:48:25.840 --> 00:48:26.983
Is that quite a recent thing

00:48:27.023 --> 00:48:27.242
for you?

00:48:27.304 --> 00:48:28.224
Have you been chromatic for a

00:48:28.244 --> 00:48:28.626
long time?

00:48:29.025 --> 00:48:34.211
Oh, I'm embarrassed to say that although I did play them on those albums, I've kind of given that up.

00:48:34.351 --> 00:48:37.476
So I don't feel like I'm much of a chromatic player now.

00:48:37.576 --> 00:48:38.737
I kind of went through a phase.

00:48:39.097 --> 00:48:46.706
I still have ambitions to do Stevie Wonder, you know, Fingertips or one of those Stevie Wonder Stomp Down kind of things, Harmonica Man.

00:48:46.766 --> 00:48:48.809
But yeah, I don't really do much chromatic.

00:48:48.929 --> 00:48:49.068
No.

00:48:49.329 --> 00:48:52.452
I play chromatically on the Marine Band, obviously, on the diatonic.

00:48:52.572 --> 00:48:52.793
Yeah.

00:48:53.074 --> 00:48:56.336
And so another thing, obviously, your website's called Modern Blues Harmonica.

00:48:56.538 --> 00:48:59.273
And You touched on it there, of overblows.

00:48:59.333 --> 00:49:03.139
So, you know, what do you define as a modern blues harmonica player?

00:49:03.500 --> 00:49:05.543
Well, I certainly think overblows are a part of it.

00:49:05.663 --> 00:49:08.728
But I also think that relating, how you relate to the repertoire.

00:49:08.927 --> 00:49:17.161
I think that, unfortunately, there are a number of players who imagine that the repertoire begins and ends with what the Chicago blues guys did.

00:49:17.420 --> 00:49:21.447
This is why something like Rockin' Robin by Rod Piazza is so interesting.

00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:00.000
.

00:49:26.338 --> 00:49:58.335
his approach there was to take a rock and roll song now it was still from the classic 50s 60s period but he was responding creatively to all that music out there that you know guys like little walter responded creatively to i came up with a version of superstition so There's this repertoire, this funk repertoire from the 70s.

00:49:58.717 --> 00:50:00.824
There's music in the 80s, Earth, Wind& Fire.

00:50:00.846 --> 00:50:01.748
I mean, that's what...

00:50:02.050 --> 00:50:11.157
contemporary blues players, if they're looking backward, they shouldn't look backward to 1950s Chicago and 1960s LA, I mean, Hollywood.

00:50:11.197 --> 00:50:13.500
They should be, that's too retro for me.

00:50:13.960 --> 00:50:18.804
We need to get something new into the mix because that's what the guys back then were doing.

00:50:18.844 --> 00:50:22.867
Because what we think of now as retro was in fact kind of hip and modern then.

00:50:23.248 --> 00:50:26.351
And Little Walter was very much a style leader in that respect.

00:50:26.391 --> 00:50:31.675
He was listening to Joe Liggins doing Honey Dripper, and then he turned it into the Evan Shuffle.

00:50:31.856 --> 00:50:37.097
I mean, you can find those sorts of appropriations, taking jazz stuff and putting it in.

00:50:37.257 --> 00:50:43.219
So I think that's part of what it means to be a modern player is to be listening and going, Uptown Funk.

00:50:43.460 --> 00:50:46.523
I wonder what the harmonica version of Uptown Funk would be, right?

00:50:46.623 --> 00:50:50.909
And just asking that question begins to get you into some interesting places.

00:50:51.510 --> 00:50:58.619
And you do play quite a range of, you know, styles on your albums, play some jazz songs and, you know, like you say, some modern takes and some funky stuff.

00:50:59.221 --> 00:51:01.103
Grazing in the Grass, for example, right?

00:51:01.143 --> 00:51:10.275
Hugh Masekela, Grazing in the Grass, which I'm proud of, that particular version.

00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:00.000
...

00:51:12.449 --> 00:51:18.534
So talking specifically through gear now, so you've already mentioned there that you're playing honours and you're a honour and Dorsey, yeah?

00:51:18.956 --> 00:51:19.775
Yes, for a long time.

00:51:20.237 --> 00:51:22.117
I am strictly a marine band guy.

00:51:22.157 --> 00:51:26.302
I mean, I've tried Special 20s, I've tried Golden Melodies, I've tried a couple of others.

00:51:26.501 --> 00:51:28.804
None of them really do it for me like the marine band.

00:51:28.884 --> 00:51:32.266
So I'm actually very, in that respect, kind of conventional, I guess.

00:51:32.628 --> 00:51:34.869
Which type of marine band do you like these days?

00:51:34.929 --> 00:51:36.371
Is there several available?

00:51:36.431 --> 00:51:38.211
Well, I just use the stock marine band.

00:51:38.793 --> 00:51:44.257
Occasionally, honour will set them up a little bit for me, but to make the four or five and six overblows play a little better.

00:51:44.418 --> 00:51:47.021
But just the model 1896, I don't.

00:51:47.201 --> 00:51:49.063
Occasionally I'll play a Marine Band custom.

00:51:49.123 --> 00:51:50.385
I like the G.

00:51:50.764 --> 00:51:57.612
I've sometimes had a hard time with the straight out of the box Marine Band Gs, but the Marine Band customs I do better with.

00:51:57.771 --> 00:51:58.193
Yeah, great.

00:51:58.273 --> 00:51:59.914
And so we touched on overblows.

00:51:59.974 --> 00:52:01.516
So you are an overblow player.

00:52:01.536 --> 00:52:01.856
Did you

00:52:02.157 --> 00:52:04.018
have some lessons with Howard Levy earlier on?

00:52:04.139 --> 00:52:04.599
Never did.

00:52:04.619 --> 00:52:05.860
I never did.

00:52:05.880 --> 00:52:12.367
I had a lesson and it was one crucial lesson with my friend William Gallison who had actually learned from me.

00:52:12.367 --> 00:52:12.929
from Howard.

00:52:13.148 --> 00:52:21.217
And so in the fall of 87, not long before I took over the Big River chair from William, that was his sub in Big River.

00:52:21.338 --> 00:52:24.641
He showed me how to do the overblow just on a marine band.

00:52:24.920 --> 00:52:27.704
And of course, as a great chromatic player, he knew exactly how to use them.

00:52:28.125 --> 00:52:40.998
I was, I can say with some confidence, I've gone and tried to research it, that I was one of the first players to make overblows, certainly to record overblows as part of a sort of fairly straightforward amplified blues thing.

00:52:41.259 --> 00:53:02.742
Mike Turk had done a little bit of that Howard was doing jazz at that point but Carlos Del Junco and I were both kind of in the late 80s early 90s and that's when I met Carlos it was like oh my god there's somebody else now I didn't know about that Mike Turk had done a few things back then but Mike was not really a straight ahead amplified blues player I was in that respect I was more conventional yeah

00:53:02.782 --> 00:53:10.449
so you're using them as you're saying in more in the blues setting you know you know obviously you do do some jazzy stuff but it's more about putting them into fitting them into a blues idiom

00:53:10.630 --> 00:53:14.675
yeah and I never went I never did the The Howard thing of sort of switching keys around.

00:53:14.695 --> 00:53:17.016
I mean, so Carlos took them much further in that respect.

00:53:17.356 --> 00:53:23.523
But I would say that I kind of, Chris McCulloch came along and began to do them, the late Chris McCulloch.

00:53:23.563 --> 00:53:30.150
And then Jason Ritchie, who I knew, he took them and he sort of took them to a whole different level and sustained them and bent them.

00:53:30.190 --> 00:53:31.652
And I couldn't really do that.

00:53:32.052 --> 00:53:37.079
I guess I'm part of that, the great chain of being that sort of helps begin to get them into circulation.

00:53:37.298 --> 00:53:37.539
Yeah.

00:53:38.099 --> 00:53:40.862
Well, I think that's a good approach for a lot of people who are blues players, right?

00:53:40.902 --> 00:53:42.224
Which is most harmonica players, right?

00:53:42.224 --> 00:53:48.771
You know, it's a good approach, like you're saying there, to be able to throw some overblows into, you know, a kind of blues song to get the notes you need.

00:53:48.971 --> 00:53:53.936
The Sunshine of Your Love being a great example of that, needing the overblow on the four blow there to get that missing note.

00:53:54.416 --> 00:53:55.938
And so what about your embouchure?

00:53:56.018 --> 00:53:58.260
Do you like to tongue block or pucker or anything else?

00:53:58.280 --> 00:53:58.380
I

00:53:58.420 --> 00:53:58.842
do both.

00:53:59.161 --> 00:54:03.847
And I've had a lot of, you know, I've had some scuffles with Dennis Grunling about this.

00:54:03.887 --> 00:54:07.751
He and Joe Felisco will tell you that, you know, you've got a full-time tongue block.

00:54:07.811 --> 00:54:12.175
And then I'll say, well, but there's some things that you can't, it's hard to do some of the things.

00:54:12.175 --> 00:54:13.878
that Magic Dick does with...

00:54:13.898 --> 00:54:24.619
I can't really do them terribly well, but the sort of high-powered clarinet-style stuff that Magic Dick can do on Whammer Jammer with tongue blocking.

00:54:24.659 --> 00:54:25.541
So I do both.

00:54:26.342 --> 00:54:31.291
So absolutely, when I'm doing runs that involve overblows, it's strictly lip-pursing.

00:54:31.833 --> 00:54:34.717
But I will switch back and forth really quickly

00:54:34.818 --> 00:54:35.978
Talking about equipment then.

00:54:36.059 --> 00:54:43.027
So amplifiers, there's a great list of amplifiers you've used on your website again, which, you know, is a good insight to people what amps they might want to use.

00:54:43.047 --> 00:54:44.309
And you've got some advice on there.

00:54:44.329 --> 00:54:46.431
But you kind of famously use two amps, right?

00:54:46.472 --> 00:54:48.175
Is that something you still do?

00:54:48.335 --> 00:54:53.001
Yeah, that started really when I was playing on the street in Harlem and Sterling had two amps for a guitar.

00:54:53.041 --> 00:54:55.583
So I got a pair of mouses, not just one mouse.

00:54:55.844 --> 00:54:59.989
So I was using two little solid state five watt amps on the street.

00:55:00.170 --> 00:55:03.313
And then what happened is when we went indoors to play clubs...

00:55:03.905 --> 00:55:06.367
When I would play with a band, I wouldn't use two amps.

00:55:06.467 --> 00:55:09.210
But when I would play with Sterling, I kind of wanted parity.

00:55:09.331 --> 00:55:10.911
So I used two amps.

00:55:11.311 --> 00:55:16.797
And I think one of the things that happened is I learned over the years with him that smaller was better.

00:55:16.856 --> 00:55:23.123
I mean, there was a point early on where even in club gigs, I would bring like a Fender Bassman, you know, and something else.

00:55:23.182 --> 00:55:23.902
It was like too much.

00:55:24.204 --> 00:55:33.871
So yes, I still use when I'm playing now with in most contexts, I try to use a pair of amps, partly because if you have a smaller amp and a larger amp, you can always turn the smaller amp on.

00:55:33.871 --> 00:55:36.173
up into operating range and then mic it.

00:55:36.295 --> 00:55:39.077
And then the larger amp can be sort of your stage volume.

00:55:39.398 --> 00:55:40.599
It sort of fills in the sound.

00:55:40.858 --> 00:55:44.402
If you're on an outdoor stage, you can crank it up all the way as far as you want.

00:55:44.443 --> 00:55:47.146
But if you're indoors, you can go a little bit lower.

00:55:47.447 --> 00:55:54.914
When I'm playing club gigs, when I'm on the road with Sir Rod and the Blues Doctors, I actually bring a pair of five watt amps and then a 12 watt amp.

00:55:55.014 --> 00:55:58.057
And so for the smaller club gigs, the smaller amps work just fine.

00:55:58.358 --> 00:56:00.059
And in fact, Come Together was recorded.

00:56:00.079 --> 00:56:05.025
In fact, I think both albums were recorded entirely on that pair of 5-watt amps.

00:56:05.525 --> 00:56:09.150
And microphone-wise, you like to use a clean microphone, like a Shure microphone, yeah?

00:56:09.590 --> 00:56:09.911
I do.

00:56:10.030 --> 00:56:13.094
I have a Shure from the late 70s, early 80s.

00:56:13.755 --> 00:56:18.059
It's called a PE5H or Hi-Z, high impedance.

00:56:18.400 --> 00:56:20.021
Not your standard harp player's mic.

00:56:20.081 --> 00:56:26.007
What I like about it is it's fairly clean and yet it overdrives really well in these small tube amps.

00:56:26.068 --> 00:56:35.157
So for me, it turned out that that was what works best, was the combination of a fairly clean mic with a fairly good output, but it's not like a harp mic.

00:56:35.398 --> 00:56:38.101
It gives a sound that you can recognize my sound.

00:56:38.201 --> 00:56:39.842
It's not like a green bullet.

00:56:40.163 --> 00:56:42.065
When I play in a static, I just don't quite sound

00:56:42.085 --> 00:56:42.545
like me.

00:56:42.585 --> 00:56:46.989
And effects wise, you like your delay pedal, yeah, but you don't use too much else.

00:56:47.371 --> 00:56:48.190
That's all I use.

00:56:48.231 --> 00:56:48.512
Yeah.

00:56:48.572 --> 00:56:53.597
At one point years ago, I used a little bit of a flanger occasionally on some songs.

00:56:54.077 --> 00:56:56.619
I think Sterling gave it to me and I gave him my MXR.

00:56:56.639 --> 00:57:01.826
I had an old phase shifter pedal, but yeah, all I use just digital delay or analog delay.

00:57:01.846 --> 00:57:04.869
And occasionally I have a from mere reverb tank.

00:57:04.949 --> 00:57:07.351
And I've used that from time to time, but not a lot.

00:57:07.452 --> 00:57:09.333
Usually just the pedal.

00:57:09.574 --> 00:57:12.777
And what I try to do is I try to get about 400 milliseconds.

00:57:13.599 --> 00:57:16.240
So it's not quite half a second, but it's a fairly long delay.

00:57:16.280 --> 00:57:18.344
It's not a quick rockabilly slapback.

00:57:18.543 --> 00:57:23.048
And then I try to get not a terribly high level, but a fair bit of repetition.

00:57:23.148 --> 00:57:26.693
So like five or six repeats, but not a high volume.

00:57:26.713 --> 00:57:32.278
And if you get those right, if you get that dialed in right, it opens up the sound and it feels more like a reverb.

00:57:32.458 --> 00:57:33.679
It doesn't feel like a slapback.

00:57:33.679 --> 00:57:33.780
So

00:57:34.521 --> 00:57:36.882
final question then, just about your future plans.

00:57:37.804 --> 00:57:38.905
You've

00:57:39.286 --> 00:57:44.612
got a few gigs lined up.

00:58:03.632 --> 00:58:07.938
Parchman Farm that John Mayall sang, that song.

00:58:08.157 --> 00:58:14.146
Believe it or not, my English department at the University of Mississippi has a program called the Prison to College Pipeline at Parchman.

00:58:14.505 --> 00:58:20.454
And I will be doing a blues literature class for a group of 10 to 15 students.

00:58:20.614 --> 00:58:25.880
I've been told to call them not inmates, but I mean, they're inmates who are about to be released.

00:58:25.940 --> 00:58:29.161
These are people who are sort of looking forward.

00:58:29.742 --> 00:58:31.447
And I'm going to bring my harmonica in.

00:58:31.487 --> 00:58:32.268
I'm allowed to do that.

00:58:32.307 --> 00:58:36.958
In fact, I'm going to talk to the folks at Hohner and see, I'm going to see if I'm allowed to actually give the prisoners.

00:58:37.679 --> 00:58:39.563
I'm not sure I'm allowed.

00:58:40.364 --> 00:58:42.688
So thanks so much for joining me today, Adam Gussell.

00:58:42.929 --> 00:58:43.490
Thanks, Neil.

00:58:43.570 --> 00:58:44.472
It was really my pleasure.

00:58:44.994 --> 00:58:47.077
Thanks to Zydle for sponsoring the podcast.

00:58:47.362 --> 00:58:56.894
And be sure to check out the great range of harmonicas and products at www.zidel1847.com or on Facebook or Instagram at Zidel Harmonicas.

00:58:57.797 --> 00:59:02.302
Many thanks to Adam, a true professor of the blues in both the written and oral form.

00:59:03.043 --> 00:59:07.230
Most of the songs discussed in the podcast are available via Adam's website.

00:59:07.362 --> 00:59:10.485
and also some of them on the usual Spotify playlist.

00:59:10.806 --> 00:59:17.452
Thanks for listening, and I'll leave you with Satan and Adam playing us out with my favourite track of theirs, Unlucky

00:59:17.992 --> 00:59:25.300
Love.

00:59:25.320 --> 00:59:26.280
Oh, yeah.

00:59:26.300 --> 00:59:49.565
MUSIC PLAYS People, people, I'm unlucky in love Finders, keepers, losers, weepers That's the way that it's gotta be Finders and losers