I remember standing off to the side of the main stage at the Doheny Blues Festival in Dana Point, California on May 26, 2002. A musician from the Swedish band the Blue Birds, whom I had met just a few days earlier, sidled up to me. He stood in rapt attention listening to every note coming from the band on stage.  Between songs, Patric Carlson leaned over to me, and in a thick Scandinavian accent said, “David, this is Los Angeles style”.  I remember the smile beaming across all of our faces as we watched Al Blake and the Hollywood Blue Flames launch into another tune. 

What Patric called ‘Los Angeles style’ is more commonly referred to as West Coast Blues. His apt description, along with its geographic accuracy, has come to define the Hollywood Blue Flames and their front man, principal songwriter, singer and harp player Al Blake.

Music writers and critics too often use labels as descriptors in trying to communicate a certain style of blues. It is an easy shortcut. Shortcuts in life, more often than not, come with a price tag. That toll is often a lack of understanding of what really lies beneath the music and behind the label.

To put a label on Al Blake would be like trying to put a Post-It note on a tornado. It wouldn’t be easy and it certainly wouldn’t help to gain a better understanding of the subject matter. Is Al Blake the quintessential west coast blues man? Maybe... the real story like blues music itself is much more complex and infinitely more interesting.   

I ran into Al Blake at a café in Newport Beach, CA, a couple of years ago. I walked up to him and introduced myself. We had been introduced to one another ten years earlier in a loud, and in those days smoky, nightclub but we didn’t have a meaningful conversation that night and I was fairly certain he wouldn’t remember me. He didn’t.

We did however engage in a meaningful conversation that afternoon. We both had places to go but we begged off on those plans as nothing beats a good conversation. That conversation hasn’t stopped.

We meet, as often as our schedules allow, to swap old books and old stories. We exchange old records and discuss new ones. We also exchange some old ideas and hopefully new ones as well. We have discussed art, politics, culture, history, gardening, surfing, boxing and what should be a surprise to no one... blues music.

A couple of weeks ago I was plowing through my notes and trying to find a compelling figure to write about for the November monthly artist spotlight feature of this ezine. It was very important to me that this person be alive. The last two months we have shared with our readers essays on David “Honeyboy” Edwards and Willie “Big Eyes” Smith as subjects in our Monthly Artist Spotlight. To quote Bob Margolin, “death has been hungry this year.” I have lost my appetite, so there I was staring at that proverbial blank page when the phone rang. The display on my phone read, Al Blake.

David Mac (DM) Hey Al...

AL Blake (AB) So what are you writing about tonight?

DM: Al Blake

AB:  No Kidding. What do you have so far?

DM: Nothing...

AB: Let’s get busy. What do you want to know?

DM: Do you remember the first time this music we call blues hit you?  

AB:  I do.  I was nine years old.  I had this little orange Sears and Roebuck, Silvertone radio with white knobs. I turned it on and heard Ray Charles singing the blues. and it sent chills up and down my spine.  It gave me goose bumps and I said I want more of that. I can’t remember what song it was but I’ll never forget the feeling that came over me.

 In those days we had a maid who took care of me. She was from Mississippi. Her name was Ruby Anderson. She listened to blues music around the house. That’s when I first heard those great records by Lightnin’ Hopkins, Jimmy Reed, Junior Parker and Lazy Lester. The feeling I got when I first heard those records and that song by Ray Charles is something I have never forgotten.  

DM: Initially where did this feeling take you?

AB: Well it took me to the other part of town. Oklahoma City back in those days was segregated and if I wanted to hear this music in the jukeboxes or performed live I had to go to the black section of town. It is where I first saw Freddie King. I was 17 years old.  

DM: When did you start thinking of playing this music?

AB: I was fortunate to grow up in a home where my parents were very culturally astute. They enjoyed the arts and encouraged me to partake in those kinds of activities. They tried to turn me on to classical music. We had a piano in our home and I learned to play the flute. I really didn’t like the flute or classical music all that much. Then they bought me a classical guitar. I didn’t care for that much either. Then they bought me a Martin 00018 steel string guitar and bingo that was it. I loved it. I took lessons from a guy named Bill Cheatwood. He was a running buddy of the legendary Hoyt Axton.

DM:  Do you remember when you first picked up the harmonica?

AB: Yes... I started playing harmonica in the 11th grade. There was a guy by the name of Bill Sherman who made me a bet I couldn’t play the thing.

DM: I guess he lost that bet.

AB: Pretty much... The more I played the harmonica, the more positive reaction I got from folks. I got a better response for my harmonica playing than my guitar playing. People really seemed to react to what I was doing with the harmonica. It was very encouraging.

DM: What brought you out to California?

AB: I traveled out to California as kid to visit both sets of grandparents who lived out here in the Los Angeles area and up in San Francisco. I loved it. I always wanted to move out here and of course I did the first chance I got.

DM: Tell me about meeting Hollywood Fats.

AB: The first time I met him was at the Ashgrove in L.A.  I was introduced to him by Freddy King. 

DM: Do you remember when that was?

AB: 1971...I went up to the dressing room to say hello to Freddy. I was a huge fan. I knew him from my Oklahoma days. He remembered me because when I was going to see him back in the early 1960’s in Oklahoma City, I was the only white guy in those clubs where he was playing and I stood out.

By the early 70’s Freddy was working with Leon Russell at Shelter Records. He was playing out here in L.A. a lot. I saw him two or three times at various clubs in Southern California. He would introduce me as one of the best harmonica players in the world, which was an absolute lie. On one of those occasions I went up to the dressing room and Freddie said, “Al, I think you should meet this guy. He is the best guitar player in the world.” He said that about me so I’m thinking that’s bullshit. Freddie split to go downstairs to play. He left me in the dressing room with Fats. He was this fat kid with a ponytail and a polyester sports suit that looked like he got it from the big and tall store. There was a cheap Gibson guitar in the corner of the room, the kind that comes in one of those cardboard cases. I said to him, “I’d love to hear you play.” I was trying to flesh him out but he wouldn’t play. 

I can’t remember what I finally said to him that made him pick up the guitar but whatever it was he started playing. He sounded exactly like Lightnin’ Hopkins. I’m a pretty perceptive guy, and I know my music. There is probably no other person on the earth at that time who could play like Lightnin’ Hopkins. His playing, as you know Dave, is very idiosyncratic. This kid nailed it. I was stunned. Then Fats went down on stage and tore it up with Freddie King. 

Fats was very young but he had already been on the road with J.B. Hutto, Albert King, John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters and Jimmy Witherspoon. He adapted himself to each of these bands as if that particular artist’s music was the only music he knew.

When he wasn’t traveling, he would come down to Laguna Beach where I was playing with Fred (Kaplan) at the time. He would check us out and sit in with us. He loved to come down to Laguna because he could smoke the best thai weed around. Thai sticks as they were called represented the gourmet of pot back in those days. Fats loved to smoke. He liked it better than sex.

DM: Where did you meet Fred?

AB: I met him at a Muddy Waters show at the Whiskey A–Go–Go in the early 70’s. Muddy even let us come up and jam with him.  Fred as you know is an AMAZING musician.

DM: How did you put together that remarkable rhythm section that would round out the legendary Hollywood Fats Band?

AB: It was easy. Everyone just wanted to play with Fats. That’s how we got Larry Taylor. He was with Canned Heat in those days. He had played Woodstock with them just a few years earlier. They were making those Hooker and Heat records with John Lee Hooker back in the early 70’s. Richard Innes was with Rod Piazza at the time. Everyone wanted to play with Fats.

DM: Let me play devil’s advocate for a minute. No one questions Fat’s virtuosity or his versatility.  I have read however that he was not an original voice. He could play anything and sound like anybody but didn’t necessarily develop his own sound. You heard Fats play as much as any person dead or alive. What are your thoughts on that assertion?

AB: That is a very narrow minded view of what he did. Fats played from 20 different directions with laser beam precision.  Like a lot of people, writers of blues today are not very knowledgeable about the blues.  Robert Johnson who is this iconic, revered figure was not an original like Tampa Red for instance. Be fair, if you’re going to criticize Fats for being unoriginal, criticize Robert Johnson too. The critics don’t criticize Robert Johnson for instance because he is black, so it is assumed he is an original. If you are white it is assumed you are not. The fact is most music critics don’t have the knowledge or musical sophistication to understand the subtleties and complexities in this music in the first place. There are many recordings out there where he does sound like his idols. There however are just as many that sound like nobody in the world but Fats. Fats took ideas from so many different people and made them so beautiful. Nobody in the fucking world can play guitar like Fats. I defy anybody to find anyone who could play like that.

DM: So there you are fronting a band, singing and playing harmonica on stage with Hollywood Fats, Fred Kaplan, Larry Taylor and Richard Innes. For many folks this represents the greatest blues band of that or any era. Did you have an appreciation of what you were doing at the time?

AB: I did. I know we were good but it was still a hard period for us.  We had a vintage look to us, vintage clothes, vintage amps, vintage instruments and were playing vintage music. Nobody was using a stand-up bass in those days. Nobody was using cocktail drum kits either for that matter. All these things eventually became stylish. In the late 70’s people would just stare at us when they showed up at all. There’s a quote by Gandhi, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” We were way ahead of our time. People were not used to hearing this kind of music and they sure weren’t used to hearing it from young, white guys. By the time blues music was starting to gain some momentum again, Fats was gone.

DM: That is so tragic on so many levels.

AB: It was so devastating to me because I really believe Hollywood Fats had the potential to save the music. He could have drawn big crowds. Fats not only had talent to spare but had a stage presence and a persona that was like no one else. He had this kind of worldly, sort of stately persona. He was funny too. He was like the Jackie Gleason of the blues.

DM: Let’s talk about his legacy. Does his influence still resonate with some of the younger players who are trying to understand this music?

AB: Absolutely! Take Nick Curran for instance. Nick is a huge Hollywood Fats fan. He was one of the main inspirations for Nick to start playing.

DM: There is another young guitarist we should talk about who owes a great deal to Fat’s legacy and your mentorship, Kirk Fletcher. How did that association come about?

AB:  I first met Kirk at this little blues festival at L.A. City College.  Kirk’s band was playing.  He was only 17.  I could tell he was gifted but had a lot of growing to do.  After the gig I introduced myself to him. Kirk LOVED Hollywood Fats. He told me that he wanted to play his music so bad but just didn’t know where he could learn it. I told him I have a pretty amazing music collection. I said, “Come listen, take it home and we’ll talk about it as long as we can stand each other.” Kirk wanted to play it all. I played him everything from Charlie Patton to Tommy Johnson and Big Bill Broonzy. Kirk loved Big Bill. I also turned him onto the Mississippi Sheiks and then to some of the Chicago players. I finally told Kirk that he now had to go to Junior Watson because I couldn’t teach him anymore. Junior then worked with him for a period of time.

One day Kirk told me he needed a job so I called Kim Wilson. Kim said he wasn’t interested. Then about an hour later I get this call from Kirk and he is all excited. He told me Kim had hired him. This was great because Kim could expose Kirk to a larger audience.

DM: There is another young guy you recorded with recently, Big Pete.

AB: Yea... He has a new release that came out just last Tuesday on Delta Groove. We did the old Smoky Smothers tune, I Got My Eyes You. I play harp on the song. It is a tune we did on Hollywood Fats album Rock This House. The arrangement we did on Big Pete’s new album Choice Cuts is similar to our old version. We took the song and added that groove from the Sonny Boy Williamson tune Help Me. It is the same riff the M.G’s borrowed for Green Onions.

DM: There is another song I always wanted to ask you about.  You have recorded the L.C. McKinley song Nit Wit at least three different times. Why?

AB: I like the song obviously. When we would do it live back in the day, it was a vehicle for Fats to really take off. He would play this absolutely burning solo when he did this tune. The song live would be twenty minutes long. We edited the song way down to just under six minutes for the album Larger Than Life Volume 1. I thought it could be a good idea to include a new version in the first Hollywood Blue Flames album, Soul Sanctuary with Kirk on guitar. Then we did the tune again on the album Deep in America with Watson on guitar. We knew his take on it would be completely different. It was of course, so we put it on that album as well.

DM: Actually there are few songs that you have gone back and re-recorded through the years.

AB: I like to find different ways to approach a song especially with different musicians. We did the song National Enquirer for instance on Soul Sanctuary in 2005 with a horn section and we re-did the song with a different arrangement and with Junior on guitar on the Deep in America album in 2010. 

DM: You have written a lot of tunes through the years. How do you go about that process?

AB: It isn’t a process in any strict sense. I don’t, for instance, walk into a room with a pen and paper and say to myself I am going to write a song this morning. The ideas just come to me and in a few minutes I have a song. I even get ideas in my sleep. I dream about music that doesn’t exist yet. 

DM: Let’s talk about the Hollywood Blue Flames. How did this band come about?

AB: Well that kind of came out of my 2002 album Dr. Blake’s Magic Soul Elixir where I brought in Fred, Richard and Larry along with Kirk and Junior. We all agreed to form or re-form the band if you will. We agreed that the name of the band should be a tribute to Fats without including his name directly. We have done three albums to date and the last two, Road to Rio and Deep in America are two disc sets. The first discs are new studio recordings with the original guys from the old Hollywood Fats Band, with either Kirk or Junior on guitar. Discs two are old live recordings from 1979 and 1980 with Fats. These are from performances up and down the coast including dates at the White House in Laguna Beach and at the Belly up Tavern in northern San Diego County. 

We are very lucky to have these performances documented as some of the tapes have been lost. Larry found these recordings one day while cleaning out his garage. We really wanted to have folks be able to hear some live material with Fats playing since there is so little recorded history of him. On the Road to Rio album’s disc two called Larger than Life Volume 1 we have Eddie “Clean Head” Vinson and Roy Brown sitting in with the band. The bonus disc on Deep in America is called Larger than Life Volume 2.

DM: What are you working on now?

AB: I just got through laying down tracks for a new solo album. It is going to have a country, rural blues feel to it. It is mostly just me singing, playing guitar and harmonica. I have Fred playing piano on two tracks and he plays brushes and snare on another track but the rest of the record is just me. 

DM: Are you doing originals, covers or a little of both?

AB: A little of both. I don’t do covers per se. I like to think of them as adaptations. Sometimes there is what I call head room in a song, which means the tune leaves room for a different interpretation. Other times there are songs where everyone else has rung every drop out of it. Those you can’t touch. However when people leave something in a song that hasn’t been explored yet, I try and find that.

 DM: Do you have title for the new album yet?

AB: Right now I am calling it The Road Less Traveled. That is one of the tunes on the album.

DM: Who is producing the record?

 AB: I am. The amazing Joe Bellamy, the man with the platinum ears, is the recording engineer. That’s why I am driving 500 miles each way to the foothills of the Sierra Nevada to his studio to get this album made. I have worked with Joe on all three of the Hollywood Blue Flames’ albums that we made over the past few years.

DM: Why this record and why now?

AB: It is something I dreamed about doing for years and years. I want to capture that time when music was played by just one person. These days there seems to be a kind of sameness to the music. I thought a solo acoustic record might stand out. This record should be a little different but it is still the blues.

Everybody out there is trying to sound like Little Walter, Big Walter Horton or William Clarke or somebody else. That’s fine but I can only sound like Al Blake.  I want folks to listen to how I am expressing myself on harmonica and say, “That sounds great. I never heard that before.” I want to be an original, yet stay true to the authentic sounding blues. I want to be traditional without being directly derivative.

DM: How do you do that?

AB: I have been doing this a long time and I think about it a lot. It isn’t easy that’s for sure. That’s why most people don’t even attempt it. They either copy somebody or they make music that has NOTHING to do with blues and then say, “Look at me I am growing the music.”

DM: What is it that makes you so dedicated to present your music in such an uncompromising way?

AB: I do it for the people who inspired me. Lil’ Son Jackson and Boogie Bill Webb, Jimmy Rogers and especially J.B. Lenoir... J.B. Lenoir made those records in the 1960’s produced by Willie Dixon. He showed me that you don’t necessarily have to be a virtuoso guitar player to be a great solo artist. He had so much soul.

I do this for my teachers as well. Taj Mahal would take me into his home in Santa Monica in the late 60’s. He was already an established player even back in those days.  Louis Meyers, George “Harmonica” Smith and Lightnin’ Hopkins are others who worked with me. I used to play harp with Lightnin’ when he was playing out here. I also do this for Hollywood Fats.

DM: I have heard you sing some originals that have never appeared on any album. For instance the song Precious Time is one of the most beautiful haunting blues tunes I have ever heard.

AB: Yea, I am going to go back up and cut a few more tracks next week. I am planning on doing that song. It seems to be the right time for that tune. As you know our friend Richard (Lynwood Slim) is very sick and is in the hospital right now. I have been thinking about how time really is precious. It isn’t just time. It’s precious time.

DM: Thanks again for your precious time Al.

AB: Thank you. I enjoyed it. We will do it again soon.