Chicago to Los Angeles – Jeff Dale’s ‘Blues Room’ – Good ol’ brand new blues.
Chicago to Los Angeles…Jeff Dale’s ‘Blues Room’ …Good ol’ brand new blues.
Last night (Tuesday October 11th, 2011) was the official Los Angeles CD release party for Jeff Dale and The South Woodlawners ‘Blues Room’ CD. Myself along with a crowd of JD fans filled up the Typhoon in Santa Monica where Jeff and Co. put down some very serious (and some not so serious) Chicago style blues. I’ve known Jeff for a few years now and have been anxiously awaiting the release of this record. I heard Jeff play a couple of tracks from this disc during the time he was recording it and after hearing it, I sure am glad I stayed in touch.
From the first eerie chords of the opening track ‘This Time’ through the up-tempo closer ‘My Own Worst Enemy’ Blues Room takes the listener on a ride worth taking…more than once.
The title track, ‘Blues Room’ tells a story we’ve heard all too often lately about the demise of a blues hall in ‘everywhere’ USA while songs like ‘Stuck In Traffic’ reflect the lighter side of the blues while still adhering to a solid gutsy blues style.
From the rough edged ‘Hanging By A Thread’ which talks about the state of our economy and even grittier ‘They’ll Never Take Me Alive’ which is about an outlaw Uncle of Jeffs who literally, wasn’t taken alive, to the lighthearted ‘She’s Mad’ the Woodlawners deliver it all with class and style unlike any new or old artist out there. Jeff played the entire record last night and I don’t think I blinked the whole time. JD is a well traveled blues veteran and it shows in his songs and live performances. He engages his audience at live shows with insight and yarns about the inspiration for his songs and tidbits from his long experience in the business.
Jeff’s day’s growing up on the south side of Chi-Town have not only helped to mold his sound but even inspired the name of his band. South Woodlawn is a place that’s better to be from than to be at and according to Jeff himself, in order to be considered a South Woodlawner, one must be something of a scofflaw or social miscreant. Everybody in the band is from South somewhere. Myself, I’m a South Pasadena guy so when I asked if I could take the title of ‘honorary South Woodlawner’, after an exhaustive application screening process the short answer was ‘maybe’. I’m crossing my fingers and hoping to someday belong to this exclusive fraternity but until I do, I give the disc my recommendation, two thumbs up and a handful of stars.
With this record, Jeff pays homage to the blues halls we’ve lost . Places like the infamous Babe and Ricky’s here in LA where Mama Laura (May she Rest In Peace) provided a place for musicians like Jeff to hone their craft to a razors edge (and if they were lucky, to get fed some of Mamas fine one of a kind fried chicken) in a business where at the time blues artists were taking a back seat everywhere else. We all miss Mama.
During a conversation we had when Jeff was in LA laying down tracks for this record, Jeff himself told me a few tales of Mama and how she impacted his career.
The following is part of that conversation:
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Jeff Dale Interview………….Beta Records, Hollywood, CA. November 7th, 2010
Jeff Dale I/V @ Beta Records
C: Just so you can put a face with the name, I’m the “Grown Ass Fan” who sent you an email.
(both laughing)
J: I know….Grown Ass Fan, that made me laugh.
C: I’m sitting here with Jeff Dale, guitar player, bluesman extraordinaire, hailing from the south side of Chicago. Jeff joins us today as an official honorary Los Angeles native / transplant. When did you leave Chicago Jeff?
J: Actually I left when I was quite young, I left when I was 18 and came out here…
C: The first 18 years of your life, that’s quite a bit of influence…
J: Yeah, and my family and all the friends I grew up with are still out there or still live there so it’s not as if it’s still not my home. I still visit there all the time. But, I had heard that Los Angeles was the music capital of the world and I thought “y’know if I’m gonna make it I’m gonna go to Hollywood and be famous”. And now I always say “I discovered coming out here to become a bluesman in Los Angeles was sort of like someone from Los Angeles going to Chicago to try to become a professional surfer”.
(both laughing)
C: That’s a good analogy, kinda the way I would paint it. There is a burgeoning blues movement in LA right now, probably more so than when you first arrived.
J: Back then, it was a struggle. What happened was I started this band, a blues band with a guy I grew up with in Chicago who is just an amazing blues guitar player by name of Lightning Dan. He was like the second coming of Michael Bloomfield, he played in that style and he and I just worked so well together. We started a band out here and it was at the height of…It was the late 70s, he came out here to try and make it with me y’know and we started this blues band, I can’t even remember the name we came up with, but one of our first gigs, I was talking to the club owner and he said to me, he goes “I’m gonna tell you right out front, all we book is new wave acts”, because that’s what was happening here at the time, new wave and punk music and he goes “are you new wave?”, and I stopped for second and said well, “we’re blue wave” (laughing). And there was this “misunderstanding” so when we came to play the gig he had on the marquee “Blue Wave Band”, so we just kept the name. (still laughing) We thought that was really funny. So we played in LA for a good 10 years as the Blue Wave Band.
C: So the gig went off?
J: Well here’s the thing, if you play the blues in front of people it doesn’t matter if they have spiked hair, or wearing the skinny ties, or the leather jackets, people want the blues so you play it and when they experience it live and they dig it. It was a struggle, but it worked. During that time, this was in the 80s now, we did our own thing,we recorded a couple of records on our own, but we also got to start backing up people like Lowell Fulson, PeeWee Craton, Long Gone Miles, Margie Evans.
C: This was on the heels of the blue wave project?
J: Yeah. And I got to know these men (and women) and I was young.
C: Still pretty much all in LA?
J: Yeah, mostly Southern California. And well,…these guys became my mentors and my friends. It was all pretty good.
C: You go out to see live shows a lot now but how about when you were living in Chicago back in the day?
J: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
C: You would consider that your main influence?
J: Absolutely. I’ll tell you what turned my life around, I was 14 years old and I saw this sign up on a telephone pole that said ”all ages (which was a good thing because I couldn’t get into the nightclubs) @ the American Legion Hall, Otis Rush, Sam Lay and Hound Dog Taylor. So I thought “OK” and I went. Sam Lay played with Lucille Spann, who is Otis Spann’s wife, and then Otis Rush came out. Hound Dog was the headliner, and man, I’ll never forget this. He comes out, (if you’ve ever seen videos of him, he sat in a chair, he played this cheap ass Japanese guitar, and he had drummer and second guitarist, no bass player). Brewer Phillips played bass, rhythm and lead on guitar. I remember, I was a kid and I was just learning myself at the time, and I looked at these guys and I thought, “this is gonna suck”, because y’know Otis Rush just played and he had his full band and it was powerful and I thought “what the hell is this?” I thought to myself y’know what, “it’s getting late and I don’t even want to stick around”, and I started walking out the back of the hall when he (Hound Dog) hit his first note and it sent a chill down my spine, and I turned around and I ran back and pushed my way so I could be at the very front right next to the stage and him… and the rest is history.
C: Wow. What was it about that sound?
J: It was the sound of the soul. It was the guitar, it was the way he sang, and his trio was so powerful, I mean they made more sound than Otis Rush’s full band and it was just like “that was it”.
C: A defining moment. Didn’t Bruce Iglauer from Alligator Records help put Hound Dog in the public
eye?
eye?
J: Yes, as a matter of fact I have talked to Bruce about this because I told him that story and he said “I remember that gig” , he goes “yeah I was there because we had a gig down in Carbondale later that night and I had to drive him down there”. So he was there and he was acting as Hound Dog’s manager/roadie kinda of thing.
I started playing guitar when I was 12, and I didn’t really know the blues, I didn’t know anything. I was just bashing around…My parents bought me for like $25 this…they came home from an auction where they won a Kay bass guitar that they got for $25 bucks, and it was like the same kind of sparkle that was on a drum kit. (chuckling) It was uglier than hell and I looked at it and I said “what the hell is this?”. “I’m trying to play the guitar and you’re giving me this thing with 4 strings” . I just put it aside, I wanted to buy an amp and I needed some money so I took a free ad out in the local Southeast Economist in the southside and the next day I get a phone call from these guys (chuckling) asking me…cause I think I was selling the bass for like $20 bucks, and these guys called me up and said “you still got that bass?” and I said “yeah”, they said “we’ll be right over” and I gave them my address. My parents weren’t home, and I was probably 13 years old and these guys come to my house and they’re these two blues musicians that were playing clubs on the west side and one of them was a guitar player and the other one was a bass player. The bass players bass had something wrong with it and he had to put it in the shop and they had a gig that night, and they needed an ‘emergency’ bass and figured it was worth the $20 bucks.
(both laughing)
C: Should’ve got $30.
(both laughing even more)
J: So he played it and said basically “this is fine”. Then the other guy looked at me and goes “do you have a guitar?”. I said “yeah”…he goes “go get it for me”. (grinning) These guys played a half hour set for me.
C: At your pad?
J: Yeah, at my parents house, in the living room! And it was like “whoa”. Then the guy hands me the guitar and goes “now I want to hear you play me some blues” and I went “I don’t know how”. So he said “alright man, I’m gonna show you some things”, and he showed me some chords that I still use today.
C: Sort of like the Crossroads story? “Now you play some blues”…So they bought the bass?
J: Yeah, exactly. And as they were leaving, the guitar player says “how old are you?” and I said “13″, and he goes “gettin’ any trimmin’?” with this smirk on his face. I said “what’re you talking about?” and then I went “well yeah”. He looked back at me and said “bullshit!”
(everybody laughing)
Not only that, this just occurred to me, with that money (that $20 bucks) and some other money I had saved up ($30 dollars) I bought a used amp, a Gibson Invader, a 1960 Gibson Invader, which is what’s up on the stage right now. (pointing to the stage) I still use it.
C: Cool story. So when did that band morph into the South Woodlawners?
J: Well, that’s the interesting thing…
C: It’s a big jump I know…
J: It’s a big jump because basically the last gig I played with the Blue Wave Band was in the late 80s and then the first gig I played with the South Woodlawners was I think in 2008.
C: So there’s a big gap in there.
J: There’s about a 20 year span.
C: So you went through some personnel changes?
J: I went through some personal changes. (laughing) One of the things that I learned was through all this experience…I mean I’ve had great experience…I played on stage with Etta James, I met Albert King, I met Muddy Waters.
C: Tell me about when you met Albert King.
J: This is a great story. It was the early 80s and he was booked to play at the Club Lingerie in Hollywood on Sunset, and we had just played the club the night before and that’s how we found out he was playing the next night, so we showed up early, and he pulled up in his tour bus, and my guitarist and I, Lightning Dan from Chicago, he and I went up to the bus, knocked on the door (laughing) and some guy opens it up and goes “what do you want?”, and we go “we wanna talk to Albert:”, and the guy turns and goes “hey Albert, there’s a couple of young men who want to talk to you”. So he says “OK”, so we get on the bus and we’re sitting drinking with Albert and at one point he goes to me (you gotta understand this is the early 1980s) and he says to me “you boys heard of some young guitar player outta Texas, his name is Steven?” and I went, “Stevie Ray Vaughan”? and he goes “dats da one”. He goes “everybody’s telling me about him…have you heard him?” I said “I’ve heard him on records, he’s really good”. He asked my friend, Lightning Dan, “you heard of him?”, and Dan goes “yeah, he’s good”. So Albert goes “where you heard him?” and I said “well, he plays on this David Bowie song that’s out right now, called “Let’s Dance”. And he goes “David Bowie??? Who the hell is that?”
(everybody laughing)
C: That is true though.
J: Than we talked about some other things. So the funny thing is later on he gives us the VIP treatment…
C: Just from a knock on the door.
J: Yeah, so later on he’s playing his set and he says to the audience ”y’know there’s a young fella down in Texas, and I’m heading down to Texas, and I’m planning on meeting with him” and he goes uh “he’s a guitar player by the name of Steven Bowie”
(all laughing)
C: You mixed him up.
J: My friend Dan and I looked at each other, and said “we shouldn’t have said David Bowie”
C: The thing is, just weeks later, Albert was in a studio down in Austin with Stevie Ray recording those sessions which have become legendary.
J: And probably by then he had figured out what his name was.
C: I was living in Austin when Bowie came through town and took Stevie away on tour with him. That was a big scandal in Austin at the time. Stevie Ray had yet to break nationally at the time, but locally he was bigger than the Beatles. The thing was, Bowie took Stevie, but not the rest of the band, he just hired him as a guitar player and that pissed everybody off.
(both laughing)
J: I’ll bet.
C: They did a bunch of dates on the Eastern seaboard , made it as far as New York and the public outcry from Austin was so large it made Stevie see who his real fans were and which side of his bread the butter was on, and came home and said “Oops… let’s get Double Trouble back together”. of course I’m paraphrasing here.
J: That had to be within weeks of when I met him. Albert was really a good person. [grinning] (and now everyone knows Steven Bowie)
(both laughing)
C: I hear them calling you to the bandstand Jeff, I could listen to your stories all day and would like to take this opportunity to ask you to sit down with me again in the near future and finish this conversation.
J: Absolutely, Casey, anytime I’m in town. Thanks for what you do.
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Having heard the new record performed live just last night from start to finish plus a couple of JD ‘standards’ like the one he dedicated to yours truly from stage, ‘Grown Ass Man’ it gives me great pleasure to recommend ‘Blues Room’ for your listening enjoyment. See the band, buy the disc and …thanks for the ride!!
Jeff Dale and the South Woodlawners…. ‘Blues Room’ CD Review / Interview
Story/Photos and Interview By:
Casey Reagan
For: American Blues News
all rights reserved 2011
