ARTHUR ADAMS "STOMP THE FLOOR" Source: Living Blues Magazine Date: 12/2009 Writer: Lee Hildebrand

Catching Up With Arthur Adams

As Arthur Adams rips into a scorching guitar solo on Paying The Cost To Be The Boss, the blues classic by his friend B.B. King, the husky musician moves from the bandstand into the middle of the multiracial, multigenerational audience of some 200 in the lounge of the luxurious, century-old Langham Hotel in Pasadena, California.  Sweat pours from his shaved head down his face while he burns. He’s wearing a red dinner jacket, navy blue slacks, and the shiny white Stacy Adams shoes that appear on the cover of his new Delta Groove CD, Stomp The Floor.

The dance floor fills when he and the cast of Southern California studio vets who play on the disc—keyboardist Hense Powell, bassist Lou Castro, and funk drum dynamo James Gadson (augmented this evening by tenor saxophonist Dr. Louis Thomas)—serve up a throbbing instrumental treatment of Marvin Gaye’s Got To Give It Up. In one corner of the room, a dozen women face off in two lines doing the Electric Slide.

The band mixes blues, popular, and R&B standards such as Sweet Sixteen, The Very Thought Of You, and Express Yourself. (Gadson was the drummer on the original 1970 recording of the latter tune by Charles Wright and the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band.) Singing in a sweetly soulful tenor, Adams also delivers My Heart Will Go On (the theme song from The Titanic, written by his friend and frequent songwriting collaborator Will Jennings) and several of his own blues and soul songs from Stomp The Floor.

Adams’ eclecticism is reflected on the seven albums he’s recorded under his own name, beginning with It’s Private Tonight on Blue Thumb in 1972. Two albums on Fantasy and one on A&M followed, but it wasn’t until the 1999 Blind Pig CD Back On Track, on which B.B. King joined Adams on two tracks, that he added blues to the musical gumbo. A second blues-oriented CD, 2004’s Soul Of The Blues on the MMIII PM label, received scant attention due to weak promotion and publicity. With its mix of biting blues, sweet soul, and a couple of instrumentals that could fit smooth-jazz radio formats, combined with Delta Groove’s aggressive promotion, Stomp The Floor is unlikely to suffer the same fate.

 “When people ask me, ‘Why don’t you do just blues,’ I say, ‘I can’t help myself,’” Adams explains in his hotel room prior to the performance. “If I did it, I wouldn’t be doing what I truly feel. I’m being myself.”

Born on Christmas Day, 1940, in Medon, Tennessee, Adams started out singing in church and playing his older brother’s guitar at home. Harold Carroll, the Dixie Hummingbirds’ longtime guitarist, was a major inspiration, as was B.B. King. Adams began playing professionally in Nashville in late 1950s with tenor saxophonist Jimmy Beck’s band backing proto-soul singer Gene Allison. During a tour of Texas, Allison left Adams and the rest of the band stranded in Dallas. The guitarist worked steadily in Dallas clubs during the early ’60s, frequently backing such visiting artists as Chuck Berry, Lowell Fulson, Rosco Gordon, Buddy Guy, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Elmore James, Miss LaVell, Roscoe Sheldon, and Ted Taylor. Watching Guy perform inspired Adams to stroll into the audience while soloing, which has been a trademark of his shows ever since. He also cut several 45 r.p.m. singles during this period for the Jamie, Duchess, Valdot and Arkad labels.

Adams signed with Vee-Jay Records in 1964 and moved to Los Angeles to record, but the company went bankrupt before the record was released. There was plenty of work in Southern California, however, and he began gigging at such clubs as the 49er, Mint, Plush Bunny, and Cozy’s. He signed with the Bihari brothers’ Kent label in 1967 and recorded a series of blues and R&B singles as Arthur K. Adams, including duets with Mary Love and Edna Wright. Also at Kent, he played behind and wrote songs for Z.Z. Hill and, working with staff arranger-producer Maxwell Davis, added rhythm guitar parts to several already recorded Lowell Fulson songs, and even played lead guitar on some unfinished B.B. King tracks.

The guitarist’s association with Kent was only prelude to the studio work that would keep him in steady demand for record, television, motion picture, and commercial jingle work for the next decade. Through producer-arranger Miles Grayson, with whom he had worked at Kent, Adams was hired to play on a Bobby Womack session for Liberty Records, which led to playing with Womack’s friend Roosevelt “Rosey” Grier on a television show hosted by the football star–turned–soul singer. Offers began pouring in from many of the hottest producers in the business, including Phil Spector, Quincy Jones, Frank Wilson, and Holland, Dozier, and Holland. Adams not only played on Jones’ 1969 album Walking In Space but contributed the original song Love And Peace, which subsequently was recorded by such artists as the Crusaders, Johnny Nash, Ronnie Dyson, Buddy Rich, Phil Upchurch, and Adams himself.  Adams also worked closely with the Crusaders and Hugh Masekela at Chisa Records in the early ’70s, and played on countless sessions by artists as varied as Herb Alpert, Gene Ammons, Sonny Bono, Jerry Garcia, the Jackson 5, the Lettermen, Henry Mancini, Patti Page, Lou Rawls, Jimmy Smith, and Nancy Wilson.

Often the music he was asked to play was above his level of musical knowledge, but Adams was a quick study. “When I came out here” he explains, “I was just writing simple songs with simple melodies and simple chord progressions. I probably knew four or five chords. I’d do the minor and the major, and I would modulate. That’s all I intended to do, but I started working with all these different people and learned how to play other things besides simple blues. I started to expand my musical abilities.

 “I didn’t play no jazz chords,” he adds. “By being in the studio with these people and listening to what they was playing, I just picked it up. Sometimes they would give me chord progressions, and I would just say, ‘Wow, that’s interesting!’ I was going to school and didn’t even know it. Joe Sample, Caiphus Semenya, Hugh Masekela, and all these people was playing all these rhythmic things, and they was saying, ‘Yeah, you sound good on this.’ After doing it for so long, it came naturally.

 “I would hear how the piano player or the guitar player next to me was voicing it. Tommy Tedesco, Howard Roberts, Larry Carlton, and all these people went to school. Some of ’em went to Julliard and the Boston School of Music. I’m here with all these people, and I’m just listening. I could read the chord maps, but when they got to certain codas and second endings, I had to figure that out. I was just using my ear. People wanted me for that certain feel.”

Adams was one of several guitarists, including Carlton, Upchurch, Cornell Dupree, Eric Gale, and David T. Walker, who often brought a pronounced blues feeling to their studio work during the ’70s. Although he played little blues, either on his own or on others’ recordings, during his studio heyday, some producers hired Adams specifically for the blues flavor he brought to the music they were recording.

 “They had me there doing a certain thing, like a certain country blues feel,” he says. ‘At bar 50, I want you to come in and play eight bars. Then you’re out for the next 16 bars, then I want you to come in and get down again.’”

Although he was averaging three sessions per day and earning $7,000 or more every Monday through Friday, Adams was feeling burned out by the end of the ’70s and stopped accepting studio work for a long period. He played bass on the road with Nina Simone in 1985, and the following year reconnected with the blues through resort gigs with harmonica virtuoso Chris “Hammer” Smith at Mammoth Lakes in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. He led the house band at B.B. King’s Los Angeles nightclub from 1994 to 2002.

Adams began sitting in with the Mannish Boys in 2004, and he and bandleader-producer Randy Chortkoff became friends. Chortkoff hired Adams the following year to play on Mitch Kashmar’s Nickles And Dimes CD. When Adams approached Chortkoff last year about a blues-oriented CD he and bassist Lou Castro had co-produced, the Delta Groove boss jumped at the chance to release it.

 “I got to the point where I said that before I get too old, I’m gonna do something that makes me feel good,” Adams says of Stomp The Floor. “I’m continuing to be myself, and it’s working. I’ve been told, ‘Be yourself. Do what you feel.’ If you do that, and do it right and do it good, people can tell and they’ll accept it.”