The Messengers of the Blues tradition

HBF consists of veteran musicians in the LA area. Their cult fame dates back to the 70s Hollywood Fats Band and their legendary debut album Rock This House.

Hollywood Fats Band joined Westcoast-sound with Chicago Blues and created the roots for the later styles Westcoast Blues and Jump Blues.

These highly sought-after musicians have reactivated their old band under the name HBF. Delte Groove has released some of their new material as well as live material from the Fats era. The original members Al Blake, Fred Kaplan, Richard Innes and and Larry Taylor have been joined by Junior Watson and Kirk Fletcher on the guitar. Rauna Blues 2010 was a rare opportunity to see the band alive in Europe.

Junior has been to Finland many times but this must be the first time for the rest of you?

JW:

Yes, I’ve toured Finland with many bands as the featured artist. I think for the first time in 1987.

With The Mighty Fliers?

JW

Yes, I toured Europe and Scandinavia with The Mighty Fliers. We had an agent in Europe who took care of the bookings and I performed here many times also with my own band.

When did you start playing together? Late 60s or the 70s?

AB

We started around 1975 as Hollywood Fats Band. It was the predecessor of Hollywood Blue Flames. In fact Fred Kaplan and I started to play as a duo in ’72 or ’73. Then Hollywood Fats joined us and we became a trio. We became a band in 1975 but the band - Larry Taylor, Richard Innes, Fred Kaplan, Hollywood Fats and I – was together n 1976. Then we cut our first record: Rock This House but it wasn’t released until 1979. It has been rereleased seven, eight or nine times: twice inAustralia, twice in Germany, once in Japan and three or four times in the US.

It was difficult to get the record here in Finland. Its distribution in Europe can’t have been very efficient.

FK

The original record company was a small company called PBR which was based in LA. They stopped doing business and were taken over by Black Top. The original record was released in blue vinyl. I noticed one of the original records on sale on Ebay some time ago and they got 200 or 300 dollars for it. A limited edition was also released with a comic strip and those records are collectors’ items if you can find one.

How have times changed since the seventies?
FK
The 70s were the heyday of disco music. Now we don’t have to compete with bands playing disco.

In the 70s you played together with many r’n’b pioneers.
FK

We were lucky to play with many black blues pioneers. Many of them played really well and worked in the LA and SF areas as musicians and singers. There aren’t many we haven’t worked with. We played with them as a band and as individual musicians. As Hollywood Fats Band we were lucky to be able to accompany visiting musicians.

AB

It was all traditional blues for us back then. Junior Watson lived in the Bay area and played with Gary Smith, Sonny Rhodes and Luther Tucker. The rest of us lived in LA.

FK

Rick and I played with Rod Piazza. He got sick and was hospitalized for a long time. AB asked us whether we’d like to join his and Fats’ band. There you have the beginning of Hollywood Fats Band. Junior Watson joined Rod Piazza’s Flying Saucer Band later in 1977. First Al and I played as a duo. When I first met Fats he was working with J.B.Hutton and Muddy Waters. Then we became a trio. Few people know that besides being a harmonica player, Al is also a great country blues guitarist and he writes music, too. The Rick took over the drum department.  Our first bass player was Jerry Smith who still plays. A couple of years later he was replaced by Larry Taylor.

FK

We’ve been lucky as we really sound good together and have unique chemistry. We grew up listening to the same kind of music and we were lucky to find each other. But we’re also individuals. Nobody plays the drums as Richard Innes and nobody sounds like Al Blake.

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You can line up twenty harmonica players and still easily pick him out. So we have a career as a band but also as individual musicians with other bands. The greatest thing about all this is we can play together but also with others.

JW

Another good thing is there are no “midgets” in the band (Midgets? Inferior musicians?)

AB

We’re like a family and have affected each other. The core of Chicago blues is likewise a family. Some players were related and others learned from each other. They were all from the same area in the South. Big Walter Horton’s sister used to go out with Robert Johnson. The connections are everywhere. That is unique to the blues. We have all settled to southern California where you wouldn’t expect to find blues.

JW

I first met Al in 1971. I was with Gary Smith then and we were on our way from San Jose to our first and only gig in Los Angeles which was big for us. In Richmond we went to a bar with the best juke box I had ever seen. The sandwiches were named after blues musicians: Little Walter Memorial had shoots (sprouts?). It was a great little bar.

AB

We all started out accompanying blues veterans. We played with everybody who was living on the West coast. Fats played with Muddy Waters, Albert King, Jimmy Witherspoon, John Lee Hooker and J.B. Hutton. We played with Percy Mayfield, Lloyd Glenn and Big joe Turner to name but a few. We grew up and developed among those musicians; they were our mentors. Today’s musicians don’t have that opportunity any longer as those great musicians have passed on. Blues needs personal contacts to be understood more deeply. It’s a difficult language that needs personal guidance to be understood. We were lucky to have just that from the likes of Louis Meyers, Johnny Shines, Lightnin’ Hopkins …

FK

Rick played with Little Richard, Big Mama Thornton, George ‘Harmonica’ Smith and Pee Wee Crayton. He was doing Europe with Rod Piazza even before I knew him.

RI

I had a record deal with Blue Horizon at the age of 20 in 1969 when I was playing in Bacon Fat with mike Vernon producing. I first went to Europe in 1970 with George Smith, Big Mama Thornton and Rod Piazza. I’ve been touring with them since the late 60s. I was in Rod’s band for seven years before I started to play with Al Blake.

AB

We started out when all the black veterans of blues were still performing. There were no young black blues musicians. Young black musicians weren’t interested in the blues or learning it. Those were strange times. Young white musicians like us were interested and looking for the roots of blues. We didn’t want to turn blues into rock’n’roll although that was the aim of many musicians of our generation.  We were old school; we just wanted ro revive the blues. There’s a clear difference.

FK

We had hung out with old blues musicians. Al had the keys to James Cotton’s home and he slept on the couch or the floor at Cotton’s in the late sixties. Billy Boy Arnold and Louis Meyers were Al’s friends when Paul Butterfield was in Chicago. Richard met musicians like S.P. Leary and Fred Below. I was lucky to have Lloyd Glenn as my mentor. He was uniquely talented. Along with piano playing, he taught me about life. Junior hung out with people like Pee Wee Crayton, T-Bone Walker, Luther Tucker and Lowell Fulson. We had the opportunity to interact and become friends with all these people.

AB

I think we understood what many others didn’t: in order to be a good musician you need a good teacher. And there were no better teachers than these veterans of blues. You can’t pick up their thing from books. It’s better to go to the master, figuratively sit down at his feet and learn. That’s what we did. Many other musicians didn’t see the need for this. Instead they thought they could play the blues in their own way and change the blues. The problem is each change leaves you with less and less blues. There’s originality in blues not many players can achieve.  Consequently, they want to change the blues as they can’t reproduce its originality and then call their music New Blues. However, we feel it lacks elements that have always been an intricate part of the blues as a whole. How can you call that Blues?

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JW

I have to add when I came to Sweden, Finland, Holland and Norway for the first times, there weren’t blues musicians here but now there are in every country, Jussi for example here in Finland. He’s great.

FK

In the 80s record companies made deals with musicians who were marketed as blues musicians whereas they actually played something completely different. 20-year-old cats don’t know the makers of traditional blues; they just know the music peddled as blues and consider it the blues. I don’t want to badmouth the new generation of musicians as they all are doing their bit for music. However, I think record companies should take responsibility for what has happened to the blues in the last 25 years. They’re not fooling anybody. Record companies sell records to make money. There used to be bad record companies as well but the music doesn’t have to be like fast food, changing all the time. The blues has actually been pushed to the background. The situation is not completely hopeless, however, but it resembles the situation of languages that are going under: The Blues is like a language, the speaking of which people forget. I know my responsibility to make the coming generations remember and understand that language. I don’t mean the only options will be either to completely forget the past or to strictly adhere to the tradition, but keeping the tradition alive and doing your bit as an individual or as a band.

AB

When I was young, my taste hadn’t fully developed. I wouldn’t give coffee to my child because she would have found the taste offensive. Now she drinks coffee every day. The Blues has the same bittersweet taste. The problem these days is people don’t have the chance to hear enough blues to learn to like it.

When Berry Gordy was producing Motown artists, he had a keen ear for pop music and the knack for making hit records and money. When recording blues musicians, making money wasn’t an issue. If a blues record made money, so much the better. Blues was never popular except maybe during the 20s and 30s. Blues artists have always ben considered the underdogs of music business and the blues has always had to rise from the ashes time and time again.

FK

Many people have told me that my music is so old-fashioned. My answer to them is people still like classical music which is hundreds of years old.

AB

In the capitalistic world it is eventually just money that matters. Moneybased thinking has taken over music business as well. In his book about Charlie Patton, William Spier tells us how all white owned record companies sent him to look for and record blues musicians and the way blues players were regarded as being on the lowest level of musicianship. These musicians were making brilliant music but didn’t earn a living doing so. Unfortunately, money and art can seldom be separated from each other.

What is interesting is what happened to blues happened to jazz. There are new styles in jazz. Jazz started out as kind of blues and swing and now there are jazz musicians who don’t have the first idea how to play blues or swing but they call the music they play jazz.  The same is happening to blues, which is sad.

People don’t generally tell you music and the language of blues can be studied and learned but the thing is to have the knack for playing unique blues. Ask a country musician to play blues and many of them can’t deliver. A good footballer is not necessarily a great swimmer. People think music is just music and musicians should know how to play anything. That’s not the case. Blues is unique and different. You need to have a gift to play it. You can find out everything about classical music in sheet music which preserves it. Two hundred years later people read the notation and at the same time the thoughts of the composer in some way. Blues wasn’t written down anywhere, it’s in people’s hearts. The musicians who played it didn’t always know how to read or write their own name. You learn the blues in a different way: you listen, you observe and you try to create music based on what you have heard. That’s the way to move the tradition from one generation to another.

FK

People used to think you had to be black to be able to understand and create the blues. Over here in Finland, you guys aren’t even from America and yet you speak English. You don’t have to be from Mexico to learn Spanish. You can study it. It’s the same with the blues: it’s possible to study the language of blues just like any foreign language. Admittedly it helps to be close to its sources. In our country there are African-Americans who went to Europe to study the opera which is part of your culture, not ours. Some of them have become great big stars yet no one tells them they can’t perform white people’s music. But when a white musician learns to play the blues, everybody doubts his talents and he won’t be appreciated. That’s a double standard.

AB

Yep, the blues has always been stigmatized, always.

You and Al had a record company with Kim Wilson and made solo recordings in the 90s, right?

FK

Yes, we were Blue Collar. We cut three records, one for Kim, one for Al and one for me. Richard played on all three records and Junior Watrson, Larry Taylor and Kid Ramos also attended the sessions. The company is inactive now but some of the records are still available in Amazon.

After that you moved to Delta Groove.

FK

Yes, we ended up in Randy Chortkoff’s company. Somewhere down the line Al Blake found Kirk Fletcher, which not many people know. Al found him somewhere in LA and took him under his wing. Kirk was still very young, just over twenty and Al recommended all kinds of stuff for him to listen to. At some point I met Kirk and Junior Watson met him, too.

JW

I met Kirk for the first time at a church. A year late he was already in the loop, he became good and the rest is history.

Did you also tutor him?

AB

Well, I told him to listen to all kinds of music and after that a few lessons were enough. All in all I tutored him for a couple of years. Junior taught him after me and then he made it quickly to Kim Wilson’s band. One day I phoned Kim Wilson to tell him about Kirk, who I thought would interest Kim and his band.

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Kim said he wasn’t interested. After the call I phoned Kirk to tell him I had tried to make Kim Wilson interested in him. Kirk said Kim had already made the call to him.

On your latest double CDs you have released live material from the 70s and 80s featuring Hollywood Fats, Roy Brown and Eddie ‘Cleanhead’ Vinson. Is there more stuff like this on the horizon?

It’s possible. Al has been looking into our archive of old live recordings. There could be some takes to be considered on those tapes but we don’t want to release everything. We try to pick the best tunes.

AB
We were lucky to have live tapes left as much of the material is gone. The 1970s was the era of compact cassettes and live recordings. When we listened to the tapes, we were surprised how good they were. We hadn’t played together in a long while and they made us think how good we sounded back then. We digitized the tapes to make the sound even better.

JW

People’s interest in Hollywood Fats was little at first, but it grew in the course of years and he became a legend. The same thing happened to Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan whose records have been selling better after their death than when they were alive. I’ve been thinking of committing suicide … J

You’ve been the guest star on other Delta Groove artists’ records e.g. Mannish Boys and Philip Walker. Are there any plans for a solo CD?

AB (?)

Yes, there will be a CD and I’ll be singing on five of the songs. I will naturally be playing on HBF records.

In the 70s you merged West Coast Blues with 50s style Chicago Blues and made it your own style. Were you the first to merge styles?

AB

Hollywood Fats Band took the 50s style Chicago Blues and a little bit of West Coast Blues and made it  modern, exciting Hollywood Fats Blues. We breathed life into it and created music but stayed ‘in the box’. Even 35 years later people are interested in what we did. Their interest is growing. People say our record is one of the best they’ve ever heard. Be that as it may, we did it.

Tell us about Mr Blake’s Blues.

AB

It’s a collection of blues songs from the deep South from the 30s to the 60s. Some of the songs are acoustic, others electric. It has the country atmosphere that I like most but which you don’t hear so often any longer. In Hollywood Fats Band we made and will still make all kinds of music but I like this style most.

You started playing as early as in the 60s, right?

AB

Yes, I started the but in fact my interest in the blues started in the 50s. In the early 60s I was living in Oklahoma. I was raised by a woman named Ruby Anderson who was my parents’ housekeeper. Ruby was black and from Mississippi. She was from the country and blues was her music. She used to sing and play the blues in my home and sometimes she would take me to her house on the other side of the town - on the other side of the tracks if you will - where she lived in a little hut. I would walk from her house down the street to a grocery store which also sold blues records. There were loudspeakers outside the store and the owner was playing blues songs that he was trying to sell. I would stand in front of the store and watch how the kids were dancing to the music. In Oklahoma the whites listened to country music and the blacks to blues. I found the blues much more challenging and much more difficult and I wanted to know if I could leave my mark in it.

You haven’t been touring much in Europe lately. Do you still gig every now and then?

AB

Not very often. Last year I visited Switzerland. I haven’t been touring much in the past few years unlike the rest of the guys here. After my divorce I have had to take care of my daughter and get a job which hampers my traveling. My daughter is a sophomore in college and has two more years to graduation so that leaves me with a little more latitude.

Have you known Randy Chortkoff of Delta Groove fame for long?

AB