One Hand Loose: July 2005

A third reason

Today would be the last time you would ever type in the words "Dragon Boat."

Remembering a conversation with a bluesman

I was ripping all of my blues CDs to my external hard drive last night and I recalled this TWANG! column that I wrote after seeing Phillip Walker and interviewing him after the gig. That cat can flat out play. Period.

TWANG!
Dealing from the top of the bottom

Anybody that doesn’t believe chance doesn’t play a big part in fame needs to sit down and ruminate on the 50-year career of bluesman Phillip Walker.

Walker is one of the granddaddies of West Coast blues but his music career is split up into several little careers, which makes for a great volume of stories and experience, but it never kept him in the public eye long enough for the big payoff.

About 75 people got a heavy dose of Walker at Ichabod’s Tavern in Spokane on Sunday night, as he rolled into town with his crack band and unraveled a tapestry of guitar styles that would make a bigshot like Eric Clapton think his manhood cheap.

Walker’s story reads like many of the Southern cats that brushed alongside fame for years but never were able to completely exploit it for themselves. He took twenty minutes after his gig to fill me in on some of his adventures.

He was lifted out of the fields around Port Arthur, Texas, in 1953 by the legendary Louisiana musician Clifton Chenier, as a self-described 17-year-old “greenhorn.” Walker embarked on a musical journey that has now lasted 49 years.

Life traveling the south with Chenier’s three-piece Zydeco band was a healthy dose of wonder for Walker. “It just wiped me out – I hadn’t been anywhere but the country all my life and here I was in all these big cities,” he said.

Chenier’s band evolved into a seven-piece blues machine after a year or so, backing titans like Etta James, Lowell Fulson and Jimmy Reed. Walker moved in the same musical circles as the fellas that were inventing Rock and Roll – Chuck Berry and Little Richard.

“Talk about kings – man, Little Richard and Chuck Berry were the kings of Rock and Roll,” he said with a look that told me I better take that sentiment to heart myself.

Walker was in and around Memphis as both black and white artists unleashed the new musical form. He wasn’t shy about giving Elvis Presley his due either. “I remember when everything transpired there – it was so great,” he said. “I liked Elvis, I knew where he came from and where he got his sound – from sneaking off to black churches.”

Walker himself backed Roscoe Gordon on a few Sun Records cuts.

After becoming a seasoned pro at 21, Walker broke away from Chenier and started his own group, The Blue Eagle Band. He played Rock and Roll on both sides of the Tex-Mex border before migrating to California in the 60s.

He got a break in 1969 as Little Richard recruited him to play guitar in his new band. “That was the biggest thrill of my life,” Walker said.

After toiling in relative obscurity for nearly a decade, Walker’s time rolled around. His finely-honed guitar talents caught the eye of Hugh Hefner – yes that Hugh Hefner. He recorded his first solo album in 1973, “The Bottom of the Top” – the first record released by Hefner’s short-lived Playboy label.

After recording records for a jumble of different labels, Hightone Records signed Walker and he released a song that Robert Cray would cover and turn into a huge hit, “Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark.” Cray lists Walker as his foremost influence.

Since then, Walker has continued to record and tour. But how does one survive 50 years on the road?

“I have dedicated my life to this – you only get one single life, and I wanted to spend mine playing the guitar,” Walker said. “I learned early on, you have to love the music – if you are playing for fame or money, you might as well forget it.”

Walker said he doesn’t regret the direction his career went, as he prefers to look at the blessings and experiences it provided him. I mean, how many of us get to say we played with Little Richard?

Another reason -- day 2

If I open my windows in my office and crank the volume the Gov House is close enough to ponder the underlying themes in "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap."