JASON RICCI & NEW BLOOD Source: Chattanooga Times Date: 04/2008 Writer: Casey Phillips

Times Free Press music reporter Casey Phillips spoke with Jason Ricci, lead singer and harmonica player for blues/rock/jam band New Blood, about how he bucks traditions, his introduction to blues and transition from punk rock.

CP: Listening to your music, I was struck by how vibrant and colorful it is, and when I looked at your album color, the colors are just as brilliant. Was that intentional?

JR: I think maybe the label did that intentionally. I had nothing to do with that, but I certainly don’t like drab things. In my decorating style, in the house, there are lots of colors and nick knack around. I’ve always wanted to be anything besides boring. I would much rather be bad and interesting than good and boring. I don’t like boring.

CP: Looking at your pictures, you definitely don’t look like the stereotypical blues harmonica player.

JR: I used to be what you would imagine. I used to have a suit and a little pompadour. I used to speak in semi-inflected, eubonic language between songs until I realized that I wanted to be real. So like the Velveteen Rabbit, I began my process, and it was painful. My stitches fell out and my nose became crooked, but I was loved, and I was real.

CP: So how did you get into music?

JR: I was in a punk rock band in high school. I wasn’t a very good singer, and the other guys in the band were also writing and singing songs. So since I didn’t play an instrument, I was slowly getting phased out of the band because I couldn’t be on stage when other people were singing. The band felt for me because I was a good entertainer, and I wrote some funny songs for them that were good, by high school punk band standards. They suggested a harmonica.

So I got one. My mother was a blues fan, and she encouraged me to take it seriously and take lessons. So she hooked me up with a guy could only play a little but who knew a lot about it. He made me tapes of these blues guys and let me know when players were in town. There was this restaurant in Maine where kids could go, eat with their parents and watch the shows. My mom knew who these guys at the restaurant were, or if she didn’t know, she knew who they played with. She knew who Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf were.

My mom used to play their records around the house all the time. My brother and I would always make fun of these horrible album covers because this was the ’80s and the age of fancy, airbrushed covers. Those old records were funny because they’d have this ugly, sweaty guy on the cover and looked really low-fi and low budget.

Because of the instrument only, I would start listening to those records one by one while I was doing homework or whatever. I listened to it by myself, and I liked it. Somewhere along the lines, the music started affecting me deeper than just the harmonica, and I started digging the whole package. I was hooked.

CP: How old were you?

JR: I was 14.

CP: What about the music affected you?

JR: It was the sincerity. I quoted Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin earlier, but that’s not accurate. I liked them, but I was more into punk rock bands like The Misfits and The Dead Kennedys. I was into politically motivated, angry music at that time of my life. I was at a private school at the time, and the teachers were cultivating those same ideals, which was fantastic. I was getting a lot of that same sincerity out of that music as well. At the time, there were a lot of bands out like Debbie Kingston, Wasp and Poison, and I felt at the time, that guys like Sun House and Walter Horton were singing with a sincerity that Debbie Gibson was missing.

It struck me. It was music like punk rock in a lot of ways. It was about very real things, not necessarily political, but not necessarily un-political. Blues is made to be this bar type of enjoyment thing, but people forget that this was the original protest music. Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry wrote songs about how it was so great to be in America, which is a really attack on what it was like to be taken from Africa.

There was a lot of brilliant, really intense lyrics that people, even those who play it, don’t get. They think it’s just, “I woke up and heard the news, it gave me the blues. Cue guitar solo.”

This music was originally very sincere protest music. When it was about drinking, it was about drinking. When it was about the man, it was about the man. They always meant it, every single time. Some of the language was coded so they could play it and get away with it, and some of it really wasn’t hidden that well at all. It was not unlike punk rock music at all.