A few weeks ago Charlie Lange went back on the broadcast airwaves. This time on KZSC FM as host of a blues radio show entitled, Two Steps from the Blues. Emanating from the campus of the University of California at Santa Cruz, this program may just be the best of its kind anywhere on the planet. Lange, who is the founder and owner of Bluebeat Music, which is by any measurable standard the best on-line blues music retailer, is as qualified to host a radio show as anyone. Enjoy a discussion I had with Charlie as we talk about his career in the music business, Bluebeat Music and what he calls the ‘rocket ride to nowhere.’

David Mac (DM): Where are you from Charlie?

Charlie Lange (CL): I was born in Long Beach, Ca. I grew up there and spent half my life in Long Beach.

DM: Have you always taken an interest in music?

CL: It was kind of like my refuge. It was the place where I went when I got bored, and I got bored a lot. Music’s always been really important to me.

DM: Do you recall hearing a live performance, maybe radio program or a specific recording perhaps that sent you down this crazy blues path?

CL: Actually there were a few things that had an impact on me. Like many people our age, I was into the popular rock music in the 1960’s.  The first time the group Cream played in Los Angeles, it was a big deal to me. They played at the Shrine Hall, not the Auditorium, but the Hall and the opening act was that great James Cotton Band with Luther Tucker on guitar, Albert Gianquinto on piano and Bob Anderson on bass. He had the bass slung down around his knees and Cotton in his bright orange t-shirt. I’d never really seen a Chicago blues band. Once I heard that, I realized that that was it.  The other show was Hendrix’s legendary concert in 1970 at The Shrine. The band Electric Flag with Mike Bloomfield and Buddy Miles opened. They were a very good band. 

Also Huggy Boy and Wolfman Jack and all of those guys were broadcasting from Hollywood in those days but their transmitter was in Rosarita Beach down in Mexico. They played anything, including blues.

DM: I remember picking up the signals from the old border blasters. It was the first time I heard Jimmy Reed.  

CL: Oh yeah. It was great. During that same time period Jimmy Witherspoon had a regular Sunday evening blues program on the radio, which I listened to religiously every single week.  I never missed it.  He played mostly his own records and talked about himself for an hour or two, but you know I got a feel for that kind of music from that too.

DM: Do you remember some of the first records you used to listen to?

CL: Thrifty’s drug store had these cut out racks of vinyl and I remember picking up these Crown LPs that had these black women with the red lipstick on them. One was a Howlin’ Wolf record. Another one was a John Lee Hooker record and one was a B.B.King record I think.  Hearing that stuff, especially Howlin' Wolf just set me off.  It sent me on a quest to find more stuff like that and that’s really where it started.

DM: What were some of your interests outside of music in those days?

CL: I have a degree in child psychology.  I graduated magna cum laude with straight “A”s in four years from California State University at Long Beach (Long Beach State). I had a black professor of English but he was one of those teachers that had the profound impact on me.  I ended up taking five years of classes, mostly independent, classes from him and got enough credits to get a concurrent degree in the “The Harlem Renaissance” period of black literature.  That was that period in the 30s and 40s where there was a flowering of writing by intelligent black artists. Being with him every day five days a week, for five years, again had a huge impact on me. He gave me a feel for black culture in kind of a tangential way. It was still something I felt more at home with than a lot of the situations that I was in with my own culture. It wasn’t music related but it was certainly related to music.  So much of the writing of those classic black writers of that period was rooted in the Harlem scene and the music scene, which was the social scene.

DM: How did you get into the music business?

CL: The business end of it started for me as a researcher and a writer for boutique blues labels in the late 1970’s. I worked for Route 66 Records out of Sweden. I worked for Specialty Records during the transitional period between the original owner and Fantasy Records. I worked and did liner notes for the Verve label, Rounder, and a few others.  During that period I was going out into south central Los Angeles and kind of doing oral histories with a lot of these guys that were still alive back then.

DM: Such as...

CL: Joe Liggins, Ray Agee, Roy Milton, Little Caesar, a lot of the black popular artists. I spent hours and hours with Percy Mayfield, Lowell Fulson, JD Nicholson and George “Harmonica” Smith for instance.  A lot of these labels didn’t pay in money. They paid in “stuff”

DM: Stuff?

CL: They paid me in records. I ended up with this giant closet full of records, duplicates, triplicates, quadruplicates and so on. That’s kind of how I sort of started selling records. I’d always been a sort of record hound back in my college days anyway. 

DM: Do you remember checking out live music back in those days in and around Long Beach and the greater L.A. area?

CL: Oh yeah, there was this on-campus pub at Cal State Long Beach called the Nugget. On Friday nights they often had blues acts play at that place. Also during that period the Golden Bear down in Huntington Beach was presenting a lot of blues and I saw Paul Butterfield, Electric Flag, Lightnin’ Hopkins and all those acts that were around in the 60s and early 70s. 

My best friend’s brother was in a band called, The Icehouse Blues Band which was the popular in the early 70s. The Icehouse Blues Band was kind of the house band for a number of clubs that featured blues up in L.A. including Rick’s Bar on Washington Blvd.  The bar was set off the street. Rick in the daytime restored old cars and leased them to the movie studios. So when you walked in you’d walk through this empty lot and he’d have three cars on each side of the sidewalk leading into the place. They were fully restored and in beautiful shape. Canned Heat played there, Piazza, Harman, lots of those guys were playing there in those days.

DM: Tell me about Santa Cruz. You have been up there for a long time now.

CL: When I graduated, I left L.A. and got lost in the hills behind Santa Cruz. One day I ended up buying a house up there and became an artisan.

DM: What kind of artisan?

CL: I was a potter I made ceramics for 20 years. I supported myself being a potter. The name of my pottery business was Houston Stackhouse Pottery. 

DM: With a name like that it sounds like you were still into blues music.

CL: Of course. The whole time I’m being a potter I’m buying and absorbing music like a sponge. Like the sponges that were all around me while I was making pots. I was completely engrossed in music. All during that period, one thing always seemed to lead to another and I started a blues radio program in 1975. Of course that led to a snowball effect of the acquisition of music.  I worked at a book and record store in downtown Santa Cruz to get health insurance and my collection grew by 100 fold during then.

There was a transition period in the late 80s and early 90s when the whole popular thrust for handmade anything was on the way out and it was also a period when the economy was not real good.  Then I met my wife and we started having kids and it became real apparent, really quick that you couldn’t support the needs of a growing family being a potter. There’s just not enough money in it. 

DM: When did you start getting involved in the business of booking artists?

CL: It was during this time as well. I was a regional booking agent for a lot of acts out of Texas and Louisiana. I had a business called Bon Ton West back in the 80s.

DM: Let’s talk about that.

CL:  A lot of the acts that were coming through the area I would help get gigs in the Monterey bay area. We booked guys like Jimmy McCracklin, Buddy Ace, Lowell Fulson, Percy Mayfield, Little Milton and Buckwheat Zydeco. It wasn’t a big deal like it is now, and there wasn’t a lot of money in it either.  Bon Ton West grew out of a series of concerts I and a guy who had an agency did at the Lonestar Café in New York City. In 1984 there was a hit record called, My Toot Toot which was done by the south Louisiana artist Rockin’ Sidney and it became a big, big hit all over and there were a lot of cover versions, Denise LaSalle, everyone covered that tune. The shows at the Lone Star Café in New York City featured the cream of New Orleans bands.

DM: Do you remember who some of these players were?

CL: You know the usual suspects back in those days, The Dirty Dozen Brass Band, Clifton Chenier, Rockin’ Sidney, Katie Webster, Clarence Garlow, there was a number of artists. It was a big deal back then because that music had not really hit the wider culture yet. We were seeing people like Paul Simon in the audience.  It was right after those concerts that Paul Simon reached out to Rockin’ Dopsie to play on his album, Graceland but he ended up getting Clifton Chenier instead to play on it. 

After that, I would create tours between Louisiana and California The typical thing was, Austin, Santa Fe, New Mexico, then Tucson, Phoenix, and on to San Diego, L.A. and up to Santa Cruz maybe a stop in Santa Barbara. We might even do Portland, Seattle and Vancouver.  So that was a good route and I used it not only for artists from Louisiana but I started picking up artists out of Texas like The Angela Strehli Band out of Austin. We did the first California booking for both The Fabulous Thunderbirds and the Cobras who in those days had Denny Freeman.

Of course Clifford Antone was like the impresario of Austin for that whole scene around his club. We got talking one time about how cool it would be to do a series of concerts spotlighting the Antone’s house band and featuring a bunch of guest artists. So I did it in conjunction with a guy in San Diego who had a booking agency that was headquartered at the Belly Up Tavern in Solana Beach, CA. We partnered on this Antone's West Blues Tour which filled up venues all up and down the west coast and all through the southwestern states. We had this incredible show. I mean we had Buddy Guy, Albert Collins, Kim Wilson, Doug Sahm, Luther Tucker, Mel Brown,  Denny Freeman, Lou Ann Barton, every night was a little bit different. We had different combinations for different cities.

Those tours showed me that there was interest in Texas blues outside of Texas. That’s when I developed this whole thing of bringing Anson Funderburgh and the Rockets featuring Sam Myers out here a couple times a year, and working with other bands who weren’t as successful or road savvy, like Mike Morgan and the Crawl.  Then I started working with the bands here in California and tried to reverse the thing and send them in that direction.  

DM: A Texafornia blues cultural exchange program…

CL: Pretty much. Not only that, one of the things I am most proud of was kind of rediscovering if you will, Joe Liggins, of the original Honey Drippers fame. He was playing at veterans halls and doing a piano lounge thing in Long Beach. I went to one of his shows. He said that he could put together a full band with Little Willie Jackson on alto. He still had Harry Little Caesar who was an R&B vocalist out of the Bay area, he still had a lot of his original guys and the other guys were awesome players as well. So I started booking Joe Liggins everywhere and we booked him on the Chicago Blues Festival, the Long Beach Blues Festival, San Francisco Blues Festival, I mean we got that great band a lot of work.

DM: You were wearing a lot of hats in those days.

CL: I was a busy mother fucker. I was doing the bookings in my spare time between selling records, making ceramics and working at a bookstore. I’ve always been that kind of a person. I never take on more than I can handle, but I do take on a lot. 

DM: We first met at the 1996 Long Beach Blues Festival. That was a very special festival for a lot of reasons. You had a role in making that an event that is still talked about to this day.

CL: I booked all the cool acts.  The festival was three days back then. The two principal producers in those days were Gary Chiachi and Ken Poston. They came up with the idea of a Texas themed show. I said, ‘Look, I can certainly get all these guys from my work with Antones and my connections with Austin.’ So what we did was we brought the Antone’s  house band with Mark “Kaz” Kazanoff on harp and horns, George Raines on the drums and Derek O’Brien on guitar, Sarah Brown on bass. We used those players to back up a lot of the artists.  The deal was I went to everybody and I said “We will fly you out here, put you up, feed you, provide all the transportation and when you’re ready to go home we’ll give you $1000.” and that worked for most everybody. 

I brought Grady Gaines and the Texas Upsetters out here and they did Long Beach and the San Francisco Blues Festival and then toured that week with Ronnie Earl and the Broadcasters.  He had that really great band with Darrel Nulisch singing and Gerry Portnoy on harp.  We did a series of dates here in California, between those two weekends and so bringing Grady back was no problem at all.

DM: It was a really eclectic festival.

CL: Oh yeah. The thing was, I’d been friends with Doug Sahm for years, and some people down there in Long Beach with their small ears and small minds were objecting to Asleep at the Wheel and the Texas Tornadoes.  You know but that’s really what Texas is about.

DM: I am glad you prevailed.  

CL: Gary and I spent hours and hours discussing who to get.  Believe me, there was a lot of teeth gnashing about doing Asleep at the Wheel and the Texas Tornadoes. 

DM: There was something special, like I said, about that festival for me in particular. Many of the artists you booked were people based out of Houston that I got to know when I was living there. I had just moved back to California and the 1996 was my first Long Beach Blues Festival (LBBF) and the last time I had a chance to hear many of these very underappreciated artists.

CL: Oh yeah, I booked Texas Pete Mayes, Milton Hopkins Joe Medwick, Joe “Guitar” Hughes and the great duo of Clarence Holliman and Carol Fran. That was another act that I worked a lot with. I was the guy who brought them out here. They were such a soulful couple.  They stayed at my house and hung out with me.  Carol showed me how to cook real good gumbo.

DM: That is so true. By this time I had befriended them and had been in their home in Houston. I was able to hang out with them that weekend. It was the last time I saw Clarence. It isn’t just my affinity for the 1996 LBBF. I know a lot of people who attended that event for years that, without hesitation, still think it was the best. 

CL: You are right. I had friends who flew out from Houston to come to it. Pretty much everyone I knew was there.

DM: There was another booking that you did that was pretty special that we have talked about.

CL: Oh yeah, in 2001 Shuggie Otis cancelled at the very last minute. Chiachi asked me if I could help him out. At that time I had just read this article about Howard Tate being found living in a car in Philadelphia and I somehow found the DJ who found Howard Tate. I got Howard Tate $10,000 to come at sing at the LBBF which was like his first major gig. He totally killed the place. It helped lead to an album he did a couple of years later entitled, Rediscovery and a resurgence in his career. He died last December.

DM: 1996 was also the first time I was at your traveling record store, Blues Beat Music. I know you had been a vendor at the festival long before that. I would like to talk to you about Blue Beat Music.

To be continued....