Guitar Shorty, R.I.P.

From Beachcomber Magazine, Destin, Florida, April 2010...

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Blues Great Guitar Shorty Rocks Beachcomberland June 6

By Christopher C. Manson

Alligator recording artist and blues legend Guitar Shorty returns to Destin’s The Shed Barbeque & Blues Joint Wednesday, June 6, for a FREE performance at 7 p.m. (He’ll play at Pensacola Beach’s Paradise Bar & Grill Inn the following night.) He’s no stranger to the area, having appeared last year at the Village of Baytowne Wharf’s concert series to great acclaim. This year marks the 55th anniversary of his first recording, and with 2010’s Bare Knuckle still eliciting well-deserved praise and earning the man new fans at every tour stop, Guitar Shorty shows no signs of slowing down.

You recorded your first single with Willie Dixon in 1957, and your latest album, Bare Knuckle, came out in 2010. How has the record industry changed for better or worse in 50-plus years?

It has changed tremendously. Most people are downloading now. I think it’s a (bad thing)…a lot of shops are closing up, everything is going to the Internet. Artists and record companies can lose a lot. You get a real CD, you get better quality sound.

“Please Mr. President” from Bare Knuckle was released during the current administration. Do you think Mr. Obama has done a good job, and what are your thoughts on the upcoming election?

I think he’s doing all right myself. All the things they say he’s done since he’s been in the White House, all that mess was there when he got there. Before he got there, actually. He’s getting the blame for all the things that have happened. There’s no way he could clean up all that mess in four years. I’m constantly getting emails with all these statements about him—I just delete ‘em. 

Your guitar style has been cited as an influence on Jimi Hendrix and Buddy Guy, among others. Who influenced you, and how did your style develop?

My uncle was the one that taught me how to play. I used to get mad ‘cause I couldn’t bend the strings like he did. My grandma would tell me to keep practicing. “One day it will happen.” And it happened. At the age of seven, I was playing. I never looked back since. I’ve had so many people help me coming along.

What’s your guitar of choice?

In 1994, I picked up a G&L. That’s the genuine Fender—the G stands for George, and the L stands for Leo. It’s been with me ever since.

This is the third or fourth time you’ve been to the area that I’m aware of. What are some of your favorite things about Northwest Florida?

I remember the barbecue. I ate so much, I felt like a bag (laughs). I’m looking forward to getting back there again.

You’ve worked with a lot of music greats. What were some of the highlights?

My first was Ray Charles. I was just 16 years old, and I got to go on the road with him. I was scared, but I learned a lot from working with him and his whole crew. They taught me a lot. My singing—phrasing the lyrics—is very similar to his. I played with B.B. King, which was great. I’ve done shows with Guitar Slim when I was doing flips and standing on my head. Sam Cooke and Lou Rawls. Back in the ‘90s, I did some stuff with Chuck Berry. Oh, man, I can’t think of ‘em all right now. My dream now is to be on a show with Eric Clapton—I’ve been trying to do that for the longest.

How many days a year are you and your band on the road?

I used to be on the road almost 300 days a year. Now I’m lucky if I can do 200 days. I just like to be on the road. I love to be on stage. I’m happy long as I got my guitar in my hand.

Tell me about your current band.

I have a complete new band now. Right now, I have my drummer Danny Gerass, he used to be with the Who. My bass player, Eric Ward, played with Marvin Gaye, and my rhythm guitar player, Mark Burgess, he sings as well. He’s been with lots of other dudes. 

 

Have any of the new generation of blues musicians captured your fancy?

I got so many young guys coming up after me it’s pathetic. There’s one out of Phoenix, Arizona called Nick Sterling—he’s kicking up sand like it’s nobody’s business. I gave him the nickname Guitar Nick.

What advice would you offer to blues up-and-comers?

If you wanna play the blues, you got to live it. On the other hand, if you’re gonna mess with playing, you have to be dead serious about it. I see so many people playing rock and roll that don’t have a clue. I don’t consider myself a blues player—I play rock—but I can play the blues with a rock edge. 

Do you ever think about retiring?

No. I’m like B.B. If he dies with his guitar in his hand, he’ll die happy. And I’m the same way. I’ve been on stage since I was 19 years old. I still walk, jog, do my stretches. People ask me if I get arthritis going up and down the neck of the guitar, but I don’t feel it. I can still do the same stuff I did when I started.

The Town That Music Rebuilt - John Swenson's "New Atlantis"

In 2011, I spoke to author John Swenson by phone from New York, where he was promoting his excellent book, New Atlantis: Musicians Battle for the Survival of New Orleans. The book is a tribute to the healing power of music…among other things.

New Atlantis benefits from a true insider’s perspective. How long have you been immersed in the New Orleans music scene?

I’ve been writing about New Orleans since the 1970s. I did a cover story for Crawdaddy in 1974 and I started going—I’m from New York—in the early ‘80s and covering the music there more thoroughly while doing other things. In 1999, I was hired as an editor of OffBeat magazine. So I’ve been pretty much exclusively writing about the music of New Orleans since then.

After the flood, it became not just a love but an obsession. Because writing about it—collecting stories about what people were going through—was how I dealt with my part of the recovery. I’m not much for fixing rooms and stuff. The story I was writing wasn’t magazine length. It became obvious the musicians were one of the main economic engines driving the recovery. They were the independent contractors coming back to the city and providing its character. In the years after the flood, the corporations left, and even the fast food places weren’t reopening.

There was a sense the city was finished, but the people who were part of the culture wouldn’t let that happen. Without the second lines and music in the streets, what is New Orleans? Fortunately, the new mayor Mitch Landrieu really gets that. It’s not just something that exists on the side to play at conventions. I think you’re going to see that since the flood, the French Quarter Festival has overtaken the Jazz Fest because it’s all local music. The main message is the music of New Orleans, and the numbers say more people come to the French Quarter Festival now.

One of the great things about your book is that it provides a comprehensive overview of the music recorded post-Katrina. Dr. John and the Lower 911’s The City That Care Forgot and the Dirty Dozen Brass Band’s What’s Going On I already knew and loved, but I thank you for introducing me to most of the others, especially John Boutte’s rendition of Randy Newman’s “Louisiana 1927.”

It’s amazing. He and Paul Sanchez collaborated on that. What I’ve done over the course of my life—I’ve been a reporter, done magazine work for Rolling Stone, a lot of newspaper work for UPI and Reuters—my basic strength is as a reporter. What I’ve been doing is reporting on what’s happening, and that’s reflected in the book. I try to cover a lot of ground.

I wish there was a companion soundtrack album for the book. I was fortunate to have MOG on my phone, so I could dial up a lot of the songs as I was reading.

I’m putting together a Web site now for the book, and I plan to stream music on it. I’ve already gotten some help from Mark Bingham. He’s given me a lot of stuff that’s been recorded at Piety Street, some of which has been released and some outtakes. My blog is johnswensonlistens.blogspot.com, and eventually there will be a link to the new site.

There are a lot of characters in the book, and it’s a tribute to your writing skills that I could keep up with them all.

When I originally wrote the book, it was half again as long. My editor at Oxford Press told me the book needed to be redesigned in terms of its narrative, that I should streamline it and take a few characters to make a storyline you could follow. I organized it around the Voices of the Wetlands All Stars—Tab Benoit, Dr. John, Cyril Neville—so it was easy to weave their stories for the book since it started there.

One of the gratifying things about covering the music after the flood is seeing the challenge and how the tragedy has tempered and changed the musicians. James Andrews was in the city playing when practically no one else was, and the music had a much more profound effect. Before, it was legacy music, but “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans” and “St. James Infirmary,” which I think is the anthem, take on a new meaning. The songs are so good, they reflect the contemporary reality of the flood.

And watching Troy “Trombone Shorty” Andrews develop… He was a virtuoso player, but in the years since the flood he’s developed into a great singer. Before that he was shy about his singing. He’s developed into a powerful bandleader, frontman and great organizer. I think he’s the single most exciting musician in New Orleans right now. He’s going to be a great star for a very long time. He was advised to move to L.A. and New York, like so many others have, but he insisted on staying close to home and being with his family—whenever he wasn’t on the road.

James and Troy’s cousin Glen David Andrews is someone I got a chance to cover a lot after the flood, and he ends up being the main character in the book because it’s not just the narrative arc with him---you can see character development. He’s so open about his feelings in his interviews with me. I see him in all these circumstances—succeeding, failing, struggling, reaching a moment of triumph. If there’s a main character in the book that embodies what New Orleans has gone through, I think it’s Glen.

Obviously, your book has been in the works for a long time, but is the renewed interest in New Orleans—I’m thinking of HBO’s Treme series—a happy coincidence?
Undoubtedly I’m benefitting from it. First of all, any fictional or nonfictional narratives about New Orleans after the flood with musicians as the main characters are going to have a lot of parallel development. Treme and my reporting overlap a lot. That’s not lost on people who watch Treme and read the book. (Creator) David Simon had wanted to do a New Orleans series before the flood, and he was sort of scouting around in the immediate aftermath and came across the first piece in OffBeat I wrote after the flood. It was a piece on DJ Davis Rogan where I talked about his album and how it reflected his personal life. David read the review and called Davis.

If you follow Treme, the Steve Zahn character is based on Rogan’s life. That’s why I think there’s such a bond between my book and Treme. I have an interesting task ahead of me. I’m working on a piece for OffBeat on Davis, following him around, watching the results of the HBO series… it’s like being in a dream. That show often gives me that feeling, and I think that’s why it has such a profound impact on people who lived through the flood. It rings true. The show is a semi-documentary in a sense, capturing the music and Mardi Gras Indians and brass bands in the streets. The quality of the production the Treme crew gets…the soundtrack album is a really important record for New Orleans history. It’s helped a number of people, like Davis, Glen David Andrews—if they use one of your songs you get, like, 10 grand, I think. That’s as much as some musicians make all year playing clubs. The impact of being on that show can really make a difference. For that alone, I thank David Simon.

What do you hope readers will come away with after they’ve finished New Atlantis?

I hope they listen to New Orleans music and get a feel for the people behind the records. New Orleans musicians treat music like a sacred trust, handed down from their ancestors. It’s different from the commercial pop world. I hope readers get a sense of that from the musicians’ stories. I wanted to tell their stories in their words. I hope they get a sense of who these people are and by extension how different they are from who you see on MTV and Entertainment Tonight. I hope when I’m not around anymore, future generations can read this book and understand what happened.