Gerry Hundt is perhaps best known for his association with Nick Moss and the Flip Tops. He also recorded a Delta blues album with longtime partner John-Alex Mason under the banner of Mason & Hundt. In 2007, Hundt recorded a solo album under his own name entitled Since Way Back. Along the way he has played with Chicago blues royalty The Cash Box Kings, Barrelhouse Chuck and Joel Paterson among others. Back in February and March of this year the multi-talented, multi-instrumentalist recorded a fifteen track CD entitled, Gerry Hundt's Legendary One Man Band. This brand new album is a beauty. 

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

Gerry Hundt (GH): I was born in Rockford, Illinois, which is northwest of Chicago.

DM: I know exactly where that is. It is my Mom’s home town. Very near the Wisconsin border. Do you still live in Rockford?

GH: I now reside in Chesterton, Indiana, which is on Lake Michigan, east of Chicago.

DM: How did you get interested in music?

GH: Early on I was listening to all the cool music on Sesame Street. 

DM: That makes you younger than me, as that show wasn’t on the air when I was a kid.

GH: I’m 38. I remember hearing the song The Wind Cries Mary by Jimi Hendrix at a
school dance and that kind of turned my head around. So I went out and bought Smash Hits. I remember listening to a blues radio show out of DeKalb, Illinois, which is about thirty miles south of Rockford. They played everything from Robert Johnson to Albert Collins. I remember listening to the Saturday night blues show. I was young, so I wasn’t going out or anything, but I had a boom box and I would make cassette tapes of the show.

DM: Were there any live performances that had an early impact on you as a musician?

GH: One day the radio station had a contest to call in and win tickets to a John Hammond show at a theatre there in Rockford. So I called in and won. That was my first exposure to a real professional touring blues guy. He was in his own way a one man band. He sang, played rack harmonica, guitar and would stomp his foot real loud. He could also change a string on a National Steel guitar faster than anyone I ever have ever seen. That made an impression on me. I also got to see Albert Collins right before he died.

DM: Were there any records that had an early impact on your musical development?

GH: At that time they also had a couple of cool independent record stores in Rockford which had a pretty healthy blues section. The first CD I ever bought was Buddy Guy and Junior Wells, Alone and Acoustic. The album had a harmonica on the cover. That appealed to me, as I had recently been sidelined with a sports injury. So I picked up a harmonica and started tooting around on it.

DM: What sport and what kind of injury?

GH: I was the varsity captain my junior year of our soccer team. In the first half of our first game I hurt my knee. So there I was with a brace on my knee. That left me with a lot of spare time so I was left with my harmonica. I went back and played soccer my senior year, but it just didn’t interest me the way that music did by that time. I even tried out for my college team a year later.

DM: Where was this?

GH: Middlebury College in Vermont. I was so disinterested by this time that I didn’t even go by the field house to see if I had made the team. I had already made up my mind that music was it for me.

DM: When did you pick up the guitar?

GH: My mom had a guitar so I had been messing around with that all along. I could play all the cowboy chords. By the time I was in college I was playing the guitar more and more. The other part of the story was that I started to work as a blues DJ at the college radio station. So I had access to lots of music.

DM: What were you getting into back in those days?

GH: I was really into James Harman. I loved his singing, his harmonica playing and especially his songwriting.

DM: Are there any teachers or mentors during this formative period you would like to mention?

GH: As I started getting more and more into the guitar, I was getting some guitar
instruction from Paul Asbell. He played rhythm guitar on Muddy Waters’ album Fathers and Sons. He played in Earl Hooker’s band in the late 60’s. He gigged around Chicago with Sam Lay and others. I took lessons from him. I also studied jazz theory with Paul as well. I wasn’t studying too much blues with him. At the end of my tutelage with him I said, ‘I really should have had you show me more blues stuff.’ I mean the guy had been on a Lightnin’ Hopkins record and has a real amazing discography. He said, ‘We’ve changed your ears so now you can go and listen to whomever you want and figure it out for yourself.’ I thought that was pretty interesting.

In the summer time when I would come home I would be scooting off to a little club in Delavan, Wisconsin, called The Silver Moon. Glen Davis was, and still is, very active in Central Wisconsin. He was a great influence on me in terms of his stage presence and guitar playing. My harmonica got me on stage where I could watch Glen sing and play.

DM: There are a lot of great blues players coming out of Wisconsin. Billy Flynn, Joel Paterson and Jim Liban are just three names that immediately come to mind.

GH: There are a lot of bars there. People in Wisconsin love to drink beer and have a good time. So as a result there is a lot of support for musicians up there. I think that record that came out last year by Jim Liban and Joel Paterson woke a lot of people up to the fact that there is some real serious blues in Wisconsin.

DM: Absolutely! That was the 2014 BLUES JUNCTION album of the year. Let’s get back to your career.

GH: Oh yeah, I had a good friend at Middlebury named John-Alex Mason and we did some gigs off and on for awhile. I ended up getting a job in New York City as a stage hand. I played in a garage rock band with a bunch of other stage hands which was pretty awesome. My main gig was at MTV in Times Square. It was a time when they had the Backstreet Boys on and all these boy bands. You can’t get more mainstream than that. It was kind of a bizarre. A real paradox is what it was. Here I am completely absorbed with my love for traditional roots Americana music and I go to work and there is the Backstreet Boys.

DM: (laughing) In all the interviews I have done this is the very first Backstreet Boys reference. Congratulations!

GH: (laughs) Do I win anything? Then one day, while I was in New York, out of nowhere I got a call from John-Alex. He told me he had been playing Delta Blues for the past year professionally.

He had moved to Vail, Colorado, where his wife had a job. He asked me if I wanted to come out and do a week’s worth of shows. I said, “Sure.” So I came out and played
harmonica with him for a week and did it one more time that year. By this time I had saved enough money to pay off my student loans and moved out to Colorado in late August/early September of 2001. The very first gig we did after I moved there was the Telluride Music Festival which started on Wednesday, September 12^th and ran through the weekend.

DM: Are you telling me that they went on with the festival as scheduled after the tragic events that took place the previous day?

GH: That’s right. Not all the acts were able to get there due to the complete shutdown of commercial air travel. Alvin Youngblood Hart drove all the way from Memphis to fill in for some of the acts that couldn’t make it. By Sunday, the festival headliner was James Brown and he got some kind of special permission to fly in and do the gig. So I did get to see James Brown. He was just amazing and that really was a cool experience.

DM: I can just see JB on the phone with the FAA, ‘Do you know who I am? I’m super bad. I am the hardest working man in show biz. Now clear me some airspace and let James Brown bring the funk to the Rocky Mountains.’ Sorry, where were we?  I am guessing by this time you had taken up residence in Colorado.?

GH: That’s right. I was living in Golden and it was during this time that we recorded a Delta and Piedmont blues album under the name Mason & Hundt. We did a couple of tours together of the East Coast. Just out of economic necessity we started working with other bands as well outside of Mason & Hundt in the Denver area. We were both gigging five or six nights a week.

DM: So you are familiar with places like Lincoln’s Roadhouse, Ziggie’s and The Skylark Lounge.

GH: I loved the old Skylark. That’s where I saw Nick Curran for the first time. I actually did a couple of gigs there with a Hound Dog Taylor tribute band...you know two guitars and drums. They kept yelling at us because we were too loud. I played there about every other month with a buddy of mine called Easy Bill.

DM: The last time I was in the Skylark was eight years ago to see a band called The Informants. My brother was one of the founding members of that band and was their bass player.

GH: Oh yeah...Mac…he was in a band called Sol-Fed-Jo before that.

DM: (laughing) You remember Sol-Fed-Jo? I saw that band once when I dropped in on them at a dive up in Idaho Springs.

GH: The West Winds Tavern...

DM: That’s right! It is just such beautiful country and Denver is such a cool town, I think it is wonderful you had a chance to experience that.

GH: I still love going back there and playing now and again. I still play with Ronnie Shellist when I go back there. I made a lot of really good friends there working and playing and being young and having fun.

DM:  At this point you joined the circus? How did that come about?

GH: My connection to the big show was Easy Bill who I mentioned earlier. He hired Nick Moss to produce his first record. He asked me to come in and play harmonica on a
couple of tunes. Nick and I hit it off. I joined the band playing second guitar and harmonica.  So that was the connection with me moving back to Chicago and going on the road with Nick.

Before we move on, I would like to mention the music of John-Alex Mason. He died due to medical complications about three years ago. He was about my age. He was such an extraordinarily talented musician and song writer. He had just completed his master work entitled Jook Joint Thunderclap. He has Lightnin’ Malcolm, Cedric Burnside, Cody Burnside, Lionel Young and some great West African percussionists, along with me on harmonica and mandolin, on the record. It’s an incredible record. I urge you to check that out.

DM: That is so tragic. I am so sorry for your loss. Thanks for the heads up on that record. He sounded like a real kindred spirit.

GH: I remember when I got off the road with Nick, I said to my wife, ‘What am I going to do now?’ She said, ‘You are going to do what you have always done, make music. It will just be with other people.’ Chicago is only 40 miles away, so I go into to town all the time and do my own thing or get gigs with other people.

I also have a full on analog recording studio set up at the house. So I do record other people. I do record bands with a stereo tape recorder, so I have archives of lots and lots of live shows, Barrelhouse Chuck, Billy Flynn, Joe Filisko, all kinds of stuff. Going through that material is kind of a hobby unto itself. I also work on customizing and repairing harmonicas. So I stay pretty busy.

DM: Let’s talk about the new record, Gerry Hundt’s Legendary One Man Band. I would like to start from the outside in, as the album art is wonderful and, in its own way, adds to the experience.

GH: It was done by a guy named Colby Aitchison. He is a local artist who works for a graphic design company here in town. Our kids play together. You can find his art all over the region. I have worked with him before. So I hit him up and I sent him the track listing and started to kick around some concepts. We just bounced ideas back and forth until we came up with the final product. All fifteen songs on the back cover have a corresponding piece of art work that you can find on the front cover.

The inside has on one side an illustration of the instruments you can hear on the album and the other the sun setting over Lake Michigan with the Chicago skyline in the background. That is the view from Chesterton.

DM: Let’s talk about the ‘one man band’ concept. I know it has been done before but what was your motivation for doing it.

GH: I suppose, like a lot of things, it was born out of necessity as well as inspiration. John-Alex Mason, who we talked about, started doing his own one man band in Colorado. He had hung out with, prior to that, Richard Johnston down in Memphis. That kind of inspired me. When I moved to Indiana, I didn’t know anybody in town, but I still wanted to play what I wanted to play.

There was this restaurant in town that was advertising on a little sandwich board, ‘Burgers and Blues Every Wednesday.’ I went in and talked to the owner. He said he had recorded music, but was open to the idea of live music. So that kind of started the process of doing the one man band thing. I was so in love with the low down Chicago blues, but moved to kind of the down home Chicago style that you might hear on Maxwell Street.

So I started with a bass drum, hi-hat, guitar and harmonica and started putting it together like that. Of course that wasn’t good enough because I had in my head that I wanted to sound like Robert Whitehead or Willie Smith. So I added a snare and eventually another hi-hat. It took me about an hour to set all that up. It was kind of frustrating, but I was getting gigs. I played this place called The Coach Light every Tuesday for about three years.

Not only was I using all that other stuff, but I was also bringing out this little combo organ. I had a bunch of gigs with Barrelhouse Chuck which kind of cemented that Farfisa sound in my head.

I found a guy who made a drum kit in one unit that was reasonable and portable. It was a rig that had everything I was looking for which could be set up in about ten seconds as opposed to twenty five minutes. That made a HUGE difference in my willingness and my enjoyment of doing live gigs.  

DM: Let’s talk about the actual recording process.  

GH: I set out to record one or two songs a night. I had the some songs that I had written a couple of years ago and some songs that I wrote specifically for this record. I just wanted to sit down have the microphone set up and record whatever happened. I did it with a minimum of preparation.

DM: What do you mean by that?

GH: I didn’t want to do this type of blues or that type. I thought ‘Whatever comes out that’s what you get.’  Each track is a single live performance with no overdubs. I set up just a few microphones and recorded straight to tape. For instance the first two songs I did were tracks six and seven, Salty Dog and Freight Train. I recorded those the same night. For Salty Dog I had the mic a little further back. When I did Freight Train I moved the mic up a little.

There was very little mixing involved. I had everything set up so what came out of me into the room was captured. I dumped that to digital and sent it off to Justin Perkins for mastering and he did a magnificent job. Then it was just a matter of sequencing which is really important.

DM: You close the album with a couple of early 20^th Century spirituals which you put together to create the album’s last track. It is such an effective choice. Was there ever a time when that wasn’t your last track?

GH: That’s right. I Shall Not Be Moved/I’ll Fly Away were always slotted for that spot. There was a lot of experimentation and moving things around until I had everything just the way I wanted it.

DM: Great job...

GH: In the end there are a lot of genre references because of the different instrumentations and the type of songs being played. Some of the material has more of a Maxwell Street sound, some a more Delta sound.  One of my favorites is the solo acoustic guitar number Sunset.

DM: The album visits so many different styles. I think it is a lot of fun.  I also don’t think that it needs to be explained to people in any esoteric terms to enjoy it.

GH: That is so true. Now that I am reflecting back on the entire one man band concept, I should have mentioned some time back in our conversation that I started out as strictly electric. That raw sound is what I wanted. Somewhere down the line I switched to the acoustic sound.

DM: Why?

GH: I was spurred on to do it by the premature death of John-Alex Mason. I thought to myself, ‘I want to carry on what he would have done.’ So I went to Elderly Instruments up in Michigan, which is a famous acoustic instrument store and bought my first Resonator guitar. At that point the one man band became more of an acoustic thing. Eventually I inherited one of John-Alex’s guitars and I use that now too.

I think the acoustic thing goes over better because it is quieter. So people get closer, they hear more. They get closer to me physically. I think the trend of building smaller guitar amps is a good thing. People are tired of being blasted out of the room. If you go and hear Joel Paterson and his organ trio on a Sunday night at The Green Mill or his band The Modern Sounds or any of these nouveau Americana bands, they’re playing quiet. That is the coolest thing.

DM: What kind of reaction do you get to your music from live audiences?

GH: That’s an excellent question and I’ll answer it like this; it depends on the venue. If I’m playing a farmers market, which I do once a month here in Chesterton, I encounter people who are not necessarily into the music and they love it.  Part of it is the spectacle. They understand that there are multiple parts to the music and then they might wander over and see that it’s just me, they think, ‘Wow, that’s kind of cool.’ I have people come up to me and say, ‘I’m having a party next month. How much do you charge?’ That is very rewarding to get that type of reaction from people who don’t go to blues shows. I have always contended that people like this music. They just have to hear good blues. Then they dig it.

DM: Are you still doing more traditional nightclubs?

DM: Ah sure. When I do nightclubs I try and do a more raw sound with an electric set up. Some of the more nuanced acoustic stuff often gets lost in all the chatter. That’s another modern conceit. Music is everywhere. It’s like wallpaper. So they take it for granted. In a nightclub people don’t shut the f*ck up Dave. They just don’t…they DON’T LISTEN.

DM: It is maddening. People used to be so engaged in the music. The band was not secondary. The band was the center of everything. It just isn’t that way anymore. It is sad, as the live music experience has been so degraded by the fans themselves. I will take a lot of crap for this, but it is a sad irony. Regardless of what specific style you are playing, there is a lot to overcome just by playing the blues.  

GH: Absolutely! There is a stigma associated with being a blues musician. If someone outside this little world asks what I do, when I tell them that I am blues musician they assume one of two things, you play like Stevie Ray Vaughan or the Blues Brothers. When I tell them I play blues, they often say, ‘Great, I love jazz.’

DM: (laughs) I have heard that my whole life. You tell someone you like blues music and they say, ‘You mean like jazz.’ There are just so many stereotypes and misconceptions about this music. It also speaks to the fact that most fans are more narrow minded about what they listen to than the musicians who make this music.

GH: That’s right. It all goes back to two things, the innate need to name things and to belong to something. It is like what Shakespeare said, ‘A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.’ Good music is good music. I think that the music business is so competitive right now as a result of all the technological advances. The industry has become very democratic. Everybody can get their music out there. It makes people feel that there is a greater need to label and to categorize all types of music. I think it is unfortunate.

DM: You hit it on the head Gerry. ‘Good music is good music.’

GH: You know Dave when I hear Nick Drake sing his songs it moves me. When I hear Mississippi Fred McDowell sing his songs it moves me. When I hear Muddy Waters or Jimmy Rogers sing their songs I am moved. When I hear B.B. King sing and play, it moves me. By playing some of these non-traditional venues I might be able to reach people that might not hear this music otherwise.

DM: I hope so Gerry. I know I was moved by your music. You should be very proud of the new CD. It is simply marvelous. Congratulations!

GH: Thanks Dave. That means a lot to me.