An Improbable Blues Record
Desert Fox Blues, my new blues album is a wonderfully improbable record. An Iowa boy packs up his guitar things and travels to Tucson, AZ to create sounds with veteran players whose roots stretch like big solid middle-earth trees from Chicago to New Orleans, the Mississippi Delta and the Desert Southwest. To me it is a dream. The radio plays my sounds images are blended with the darkened studio room. The recording session was a unique moment in semi spontaneous music that developed and defined itself in a room full of mojo. In this case the shape of mojo is trusting one’s self and following it like a river. Fortunately for that day we were all leaning leeward together, linked in beautiful purpose. I wish you could have been there to feel the genuine blues spirits moving. Whatever the “blues” are.
Even in the cooler seasons, Tucson feels like a desert. Dry even in the rain. It’s a mindset and a metaphor . It’ cracks in the concrete and adobe walls. I love Tucson, because it is simultaneously harsh and unloving while draping lovable softness, as curtains of pastel across the hills, sifting juxtaposed weirdness on everything like the iconic murals found on many walls around town. It was the perfect place for me to play guitar and write, sitting on the porch looking out over the winter cactus landscape, absently picking on my resonator guitar. Blues songs seemed to appear every so often. Far from Chicago, where I first heard blue notes, whatever “blue notes” are. This album started out as the dirty blues record (whatever “dirty blues” are?) I always wanted to make and ended up even better than I could ever imagine.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that I made a blues record, (whatever a “blues record” is) — blues music is my first musical love. When I was 12 my parents gave me a cheap blue plastic phonograph and some record albums, including one record that gave me shivers and touched my musical soul from it’s regal blue cover to the hair-raising screams from the audience. BB King Live — a London import, I think. 3 O’Clock Blues, Sweet Sixteen, Sweet Little Angel and other gems like Everyday I have the Blues. I was hooked.
I diverged from the path of pure blues, whatever “pure blues” are, with obsessions over Led Zeppelin, Van Halen, ACDC, Ozzy Osborne and other metal, rock and pop derivatives. I didn’t really think about it, but I could hear that blues was at the root of it all. Then Stevie Ray Vaughn came on the scene and I really did a deep dive. A back-flip dive in the river. Going back to the early Delta and Chicago stuff. Alligator records was always a reliable source. When I heard the Johnny Winter and Muddy Waters record Hard Again, I really felt it. That feeling, maybe that is the blues.
I had picked up the guitar after a stint in rehab at 18. Chasing Jimi Hendrix and the others who had chased him and those he had chased. When Stevie Ray Vaughn hit, I was right there and I traded my cheap Eddie Van Halen Kramer guitar for a Stratocaster. I saw SRV several times before he threw his last notes into the cosmos at Alpine Valley.
Three years after picking up the guitar, I was on stage with Black Light Syndrome a flirty college band with a crazy good harmonica player and all of us listening to the blues greats, (whoever “blues greats” are). We performed The Thrill is Gone, but it was only beginning of thed amn thrills. I experienced the electric crowd plus band synergy for the first time. BLS mostly played covers, and I was starting to write, trying so hard to sound original that I avoided the blues music form, whatever “the blues music form” is. mostly Most of my original music had a blues root or branch, but only a whisper here and there. With my next band, Salamagundi we wrote quirky originals, sometimes in a blues vein, (whatever a “blues vein” is). With King of the Tramps, our self-styled whiskey gospel was the closest I had come to blues … whatever.. you know…, but it veered and careened into jam band, gospel, alt country and touches of blues elements, like slide guitar, but it still wasn’t “blues” music. I had “blues” songs in my pocket, but they never quite seemed to fit.
Finally, around 2019 or 2020, inspired by the Tucson desert and spending winters there, I started writing a few “blues tunes”… whatev-…. I had about 20 songs or loose song structures and I started to get serious about a project. It would have to be recorded in Tucson, of course. The only studio that had the dusty vibe and mojo was Dust and Stone, and the best person for the job of engineering and producing was Gabriel Sullivan. I saw him described as Tucson’s musical “Wunderkind” in some publication or another. He is the shadowy/sun king of the Tucson scene and I love working with him. Much of the direction of the record was Gabe, behind the wheel.
Tucson’s inspiration for me is bands like Giant Sand, Calexico, Ranier Ptacek, Sergio Mendoza y la Orkestra, XIXA. A mix of Sonoran wind and sun, Tohono O’odham waila, surf, desert funk groove, mariachi and pueblo noir, with a mezcal chaser. That was what I was feeling in “blues form”. Gabe and I talked about a “Dirty Blues” record, with electronic elements. We achieved half of that, and twice as much as we thought.
We set a couple days, and Gabriel lined up some of the best players around. Winston Watson on drums. Arguably one of the most famous elbow brushing musicians in town; Winston toured with Bob Dylan for some years, and also performed with Alice Cooper, Perry Farrell, Giant Sand, Warren Zevon, MC5 and others. He is hands down the most versatile and seamless drummer I have ever played with. Nick Augustine, who is nicest dude- and so chill that he freezes ice- on bass, he was original bassist for Rainer Ptacek’s legendary Rainer and Das Combo and performed in many noteworthy New Orleans bands. We needed a taste of my favorite blues from Chicago, and Tom Albanese fit the bill, a seasoned Chicago harmonica player (Big G and the Real Deal, The Bono Bros Band, Bo Ramsey and Willie Hayes Band). Later, after the original tracks were recorded, I asked Kent Burnside, grandson of the legendary R.L. Burnside, to play guitar, at my Old School studios in Auburn, Iowa. There are also guest appearances by luminaries Joe Novelli on steel guitar — adding that desert vibe, Thøger Tetens Lund on upright bass and Tom Walbank on harmonica. These are heavy cats, but they are not “guests” performing cameo roles, they are friends, expressing their authentic musical selves and contributing to a unique collaboration down familiar roads.
This unique band formed an axis influences from the Tucson Desert to Mississippi Delta to New Orleans to Chicago and a stop in the Iowa Prairie. It is so good and I am so happy with how it turned out. I feel lucky, but that isn’t the blues is it? Or is it? To me this record is not the record I envisioned when we began the project, but it is the Blues, our blues, with a capital B. To me, The blues is personal. It is your picture and your path. It embodies music that our farthest ancestors played. It is the root, the tree and the branch. When players step into the creation space, the sacred healing temple, each brings a conduit to the great river and peppers it with their own blend of self. It resides between the strings and the body of the guitar, and the space before the stick hits the drum head. It is that spontaneous yell when the spirit moves.
The music on this record is raw, scratch, dirty and pure. Groove is king. It is my Blues. When I am listening I hear little pieces of the music that freed my musical soul. It is as pure as old school. Live room mics, and minimal overdubs. That crunchy guitar tone is the “Brown Turd”, a hacked and repurposed 1940’s DuKane reel-to-reel recorder. It drips post war joyfulness from its capacitors and smells like an old attic. It was live in the room on every track and it glues everything together.
When you listen you are hearing something a bit different, also. It is being released with a 432 hz A tuning instead of the normal 440 hz A reference. I personally like this frequency. It is warmer to me and also more calming. I was pleased and surprised to discover that one of the most well-known and influential blues players, Robert Johnson, played in 432 hz. It seems a lot of players did, because they often used Hohner Harmonicas as a tuning reference, and until around 1920, Hohner made 432 hz based harps. Tune in.
I decided to call the record “Desert Fox Blues”. Who is the Desert Fox? A scruffy and cunning fellow from two worlds. Sly and graceful. Alert in survival. There is a portal between Fox’s two worlds. The ever-expanding world of inside possibilities and the external reality of reactions. Memory and expectation vs. the blossoming now of a moment in a canyon sunset or dancing without volition. It is putting the needle in a vinyl groove and in an instant you can’t wait to turn the record over. The Blues is the moment carrying us away from the tangled strings of thought that are always pulling and pushing us towards our suffering nature. Put this music on and dance in the living room or put in your earphones and create your own sanctuary. This is the blues moment and I am really enjoying this one right now.
