BLUES JUNCTION Productions
7343 El Camino Real
Suite 327
Atascadero, CA 93422-4697
info
David Mac (DM): Where are you from Steve?
Steve Freund (SF): I was born in Brooklyn in 1952.
DM: What part of the borough?
SF: I grew up on Kings Highway and East 13th street.
DM: Do you remember some of your first encounters with music?
SF: I do. I would hear doo wop groups that would actually play on my street corner. They were made up of three or four guys. In the winter they would light a 55 gallon drum on fire to keep warm and just stand there and sing.
DM: Were you exposed to music in your home growing up?
SF: Yes...My mother was a classical pianist who tried to teach me how to play the piano when I was a little kid but I couldn’t do it.
DM: Do you remember hearing blues music for the first time?
SF: We lived in an apartment building in Brooklyn. There was this old janitor who worked there. He was a black guy from Mississippi named Paul. I used to try to hang out with the guy when I was a little kid, when I was five and six years old. I really liked this guy. He had a big dog and lived in the basement. He would play music in there, and I remember hearing it. When I think back to what it was, it was like old Bessie Smith stuff and Ma Rainey, real old Louisiana and Mississippi blues. I remember hearing that and a very small part of that rubbed off on me and stayed with me.
As a small child I also remember seeing Louis Armstrong on TV. I didn’t really know it was blues. I just knew the music was powerful. It kind of had a hypnotic effect on me. I was always mesmerized by Louis Armstrong. I know it’s jazz but it WAS blues too. I kind of pieced those two images of sounds together. It was kind of an image of black culture that I was starting to assimilate.
DM: When did you pick up the guitar?
SF: I rented a guitar when I was 16 in the summer of 1968. It was a shitty guitar. I would take it down to the shore and I would try to play it. I would try to learn, House of the Rising Sun and stuff like that. It was very unpleasant. So I brought it back.
The next summer I went out and I bought a guitar. It’s funny because I wanted to be a bass player actually when I started out. There is a bass player named Harvey Brooks, I really liked his work with Electric Flag. I thought that was very cool. You know you can be in the background and still be in a band. I went to the local music store, Sam Ash in Brooklyn and they had this red bass. It was like thirty five bucks. I had a job as a busboy so I went back to the job and I worked for couple of weeks until I had enough money to buy the bass. When I went back it was sold. Instead of that red bass they had a regular six string guitar, same brand, same price except it was a guitar. I figured I’d get that and get the bass later and I just stuck with the guitar. I play bass now as a second instrument.
DM: What was some of the stuff you were listening to back then?
SF: I was very into James Brown when I was like twelve years old. There was a show called the Tami Show and they made a movie of it. My father took me to see it because you had to go with an adult. I got into James Brown. I still didn’t put it together with blues yet. I hadn’t connected those dots.
When I got a little older I used to take the subway into Manhattan quite a lot and go to record stores in Greenwich Village or Times Square. Times Square wasn’t like it is now. It was really sleazy, but there were some cool record stores. I would stand there for hours and hours and read the liner notes of all these blues records, and I would just follow the yellow brick road up and down. I would follow all the genres and I would follow them right back to Charlie Patton, Ma Rainey and Ida Cox. The road took me right back to the original blues. I would buy a lot of these records and I still have some of those recordings.
When I was around sixteen I started connecting the dots. I started going to the Fillmore East when I was seventeen. I got to see T-Bone Walker, Paul Butterfield, Albert King and Freddie King. I was very fortunate to see Lightnin’ Hopkins play several times, as well as Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee a few times. I met almost all of these guys. In 1969 I met Willie Dixon’s Blues All Stars backstage. That was Sunnyland Slim, Willie Dixon, Big Walter Horton, Clifton James and Johnnie Shines. Opening the show was Otis Spann and SP Leary doing a duet. That was a very important night for me. It changed my life. I met Sunnyland Slim. He gave me his business card, told me to look him up when I came to Chicago someday, which I did seven years later. I became part of his band, for eighteen years.
DM: What were you up to before you went to Chicago for the first time?
SF: I was hanging around Brooklyn for a while. There were a few good players there. Then when I was twenty-two I started hanging around the village. I used to hang around Bill Dicey, the harp player and Robert Ross, the guitar player. I eventually started playing on the street with Robert. There just wasn’t enough blues in New York for me. It’s not a blues town. There weren’t really any blues clubs, very few musicians were playing the shit I wanted to play.
So, I made an exploratory trip with a friend of mine, a guy named Paul Cooper who lives in Los Angeles now. We borrowed my parent’s car and drove to Chicago. The first day we dropped in on Hubert Sumlin and Eddie Shaw, Howlin’ Wolf’s old band. The next night I sat in with Sunnyland. Every night I was with a different legend. It was like walking into a living encyclopedia, into a movie, you know what I mean. It’s like if you wanted to make an all-star team of the greatest baseball players. I want to be on that team and be the manager. You put all these guys Babe Ruth, Ted Williams, Willie Mays on one team, that’s what Chicago was like in those days.
DM: I think it’s pretty amazing that you had developed as a musician to the point where you could hang with these guys.
SF: I was able to play really good single string lead guitar. I played along the lines of B.B. and Albert King. However, I was very weak in my knowledge of how to play rhythm guitar. I really didn’t have that experience as I didn’t play with a bass and drums that often. That’s how you become a good rhythm player. I didn’t really have that in New York. Sunnyland made a big deal over me and he called all his friends up and he brought me out to these crazy clubs. He bragged on me and said, “This boy came out to play with me all the way from New York”. It was crazy.
Anyway, I hung out and I was jamming every single night until we had to bring the car back to New York and I had to get back to the job. I was working at a store in Manhattan. That lasted about another three weeks. I was like, “This is garbage compared to what I just did.” I really wanted to play blues. That’s what I wanted to do the rest of my life. I told my parents, “I’m moving to Chicago.”
I had a thousand dollars saved up, I took a guitar, I brought a small Fender amp with me on the plane and a really small bag of clothes and I went to Chicago. I got a motel room and started going out to all the same clubs I had been going to a month or so before. I went out every single night, sitting and jamming. I’m not saying almost every night. I am saying EVERY SINGLE night. Finally, Sunnyland hired me for some gigs and he would come by and pick me up. I’d play, have some beer, smoke cigarettes with him and he’d give me ten or twelve dollars. That was when my motel room was only like eight to ten dollars a night.
I had day jobs as well. I drove a cab for a couple of years. A lot of the blues guys did day labor, dry wall and plumbing, I did some of that too. I did all kinds of shit man, but eventually I became a full time musician.
I started to become popular and people called me all the time to play. That’s how things went for the first ten years I was in Chicago. After that things started to slow down, I got married and we had a child. A lot of the old guys who I had been playing with started to pass on. So I didn’t have those kinds of gigs anymore. I wasn’t working quite as much. Eventually my marriage fell apart and my ex wife took the child and moved to upstate New York and a year or two later I just left and moved to California.
DM: You were also making records during this period before you moved to the west coast. I know you had at least two records on Delmark.
SF: I have stuff even before that. One of my very first recordings was with a gal named Gloria Hardiman. She sings a lot like Aretha Franklin. We did an LP called Gloria Hardiman, Set me Free on Razor records. Then I did one LP called, Romance without Finance on a little record label called Red Beans. I did some stuff with Sunnyland. I produced Snooky Pryor’s record on Blind Pig. I produced Going to California with B.B. Odom for Flying Fish. I produced a Magic Slim record for Blind Pig called, Gravel Road. I played on a bunch of stuff.
DM: We have talked about your guitar playing let’s take a moment and talk about your singing.
SF: Thanks for bringing that up. Very few people ever write about or talk about singing. The vocals don’t get as much respect as they used to. The instrumentation is just an extension of the human voice. The human voice is the key, it tells the story. It sets the timbre. It’s supposed to inspire your playing. I wasn’t always a good singer, by any means. It’s only been the last fifteen years or so that I’ve become a decent vocalist.
DM: Who are your vocal mentors or inspirations?
SF: Without Sunnyland Slim I probably wouldn’t even be a singer. If you wanted to be in his band you’ve got to sing a song or two and so he forced me to sing. I didn’t want to do it. He lectured me and told me I should do it and that I could become a good singer. Being in Chicago all those years I was fortunate enough to play with some incredible vocalists.
Even though he doesn’t sing anymore James Cotton, at one time, was a brilliant blues singer. Cotton’s mid sixties stuff is the shit. That was the epitome of a blues band.
DM: Let’s talk about the big move out to California.
SF: My mother had died. My marriage was gone. So I’m all alone, I had been touring with Cotton and playing shitty gigs when I got back to Chicago. So I thought something should change. We did a trip to California with Cotton. We had a gig at Avila Beach on the central coast between L.A. and San Francisco. I met a girl in Avila Beach, we hit if off pretty well. We didn’t hang out long because there wasn’t any time. We exchanged phone numbers and then the band drove in the car from Avila all the way to San Francisco. We took Highway 101 all the way up. I’m taking in the beautiful scenery, the pleasant climate and my experiences of the last few days hanging out. I’m thinking, ‘This may be the chance for you to get out of Chicago because there’s nothing there for you anymore.’
When I got home that girl had met left a message on my machine and she invited me to come back and hang out. I had some time off. I had money so I got on a plane and flew to California. I hung out with her for about a week or so. We had a great time and I’d been talking about leaving Chicago. She said, “Well why don’t you come out and hang with me here and if we don’t really hit it off at least you’ll get your foot in the door in California.” So that’s what I did. The relationship didn’t work out, but I’m still here.
DM: What kind of gigs were you getting?
SF: I was living in this little town called Nipomo it’s near Avilla Beach an hour or so north of Santa Barbara. I was down there one time and I met this guy named, Robert Thomas. He had a little band that was playing at some place called The Green Dolphin. I approached him and started talking to him. He never heard of me, but I asked him he would mind if I got up and played a number. He was gracious enough to let me play a tune. Once he heard me play, he wanted to know who I was. We became friends and eventually, I would crash on his couch in Santa Barbara instead of going back to Nipomo. I would hang out with him.
He introduced me to guitaris Jonny Lawton. Lawton was living in Santa Barbara at the time. He was in a band called the Pontiacs. Jonny is a good finger picker too, so he and I started doing duets together in Santa Barbara. It’s funny because we’re playing for millionaires and we’re getting like ten bucks.
I did that for about three months, and I’m thinking I can’t really survive on ten dollars a night. I heard that Jimmy Rogers was going to be playing in Oakland, California, and I found out some of my friends were going to be playing with him. So I got in my truck and I drove to Oakland on my own. I went to the gig and there’s a bunch of my friends from Chicago playing with Jimmy Rogers. He was playing for four nights, so they let me sit in.
While I was up in the Bay Area I got hooked up with a band out of San Francisco, called The Dynatones. I had known the drummer who was the band leader for many years. He said, “Hey man you want to be my guitar player”. They toured all over and played up in Reno a lot.
DM: I remember that band. Wasn’t that a show band that did kind of a 60’s soul revue kind of thing?
SF: That’s right. I stuck with that a year and a half. Then Boz Scaggs started to call me to jam with him. I really wanted to get back to playing blues.
I have been hustling gigs here in California ever since.
DM: Which brings us to the new record, Come On In This House. I like it a lot.
SF: I’m really proud of it. This CD represents a project I have wanted to do for a long time. There are songs on here that I have been playing live now for thirty years but have never appeared on any of my records. Easy Rider is one that I’ve always wanted to do.
DM: That’s a real old tune.
SF: Whenever I introduce it to an audience I say it’s one of the oldest blues songs. I did it the way that Leadbelly or Big Bill Broonzy would have arranged it. By that I mean that four chord twice on each verse and that little guitar line that you hear in the intro. I came up with that myself which is just an embellishment of the vocal line.
DM: I thought it was a great choice to use the trombone and mandolin.
SF: It was my idea to have the trombone on there and it was Scot’s idea to put the mandolin on there. Scot and I were trying to decide which one gets the solo first, we both decided let them play together Dixieland style and that’s what happened. They soloed alongside each other and it turned out real good. That’s Mike Rinta on trombone and Dave Earl on mandolin by the way.
DM: Tell me about Scot.
SF: His last name is Brenton. He plays harmonica on one tune and percussion on a couple more. It is his company, 9 Below Records, out of San Francisco that put the record out.
DM: I noticed that there isn’t a production credit on the liner notes.
SF: I don’t know why there isn’t one, but Scot and I essentially co-produced the project. We chose the material, bounced ideas back and forth over the course of it. We mixed it together. Scot did the mastering.
DM: There are some very interesting covers on the record to go with the lone Steve Freund original. One of the covers I want to ask you about is Turtle Blues.
SF: That’s a Janis Joplin tune of course. I got to see her perform live in 1969 at the Fillmore East. I always thought she was a very special, soulful person and an important person in bringing the blues to our generation. Turtle Blues is a song you never hear a man do that’s for sure.
DM: To add to the dynamic of this album you have a terrific female vocalist on two of the album’s eleven tracks.
SF: That’s Jan Fanucchi. She is a great singer. She is also my girlfriend.
DM: What are your interests outside of music, besides Jan of course?
SF: I grow my own organic produce. I am pretty much a vegetarian. I have a big vegetable garden and I grow fruit trees up here. I also like to ride my bike. I try to keep physically active. I like to work on guitars and mess around with amps. I buy and sell amps and guitars when I can.
DM: There are so many great musicians in the Bay Area. That must be nice to be able to find talented people to play and record with.
SF: You are right about that, there is a ton of talent up here. At sixty one years old I am kind of the elder statesmen now. I try to treat younger musicians well because I was treated pretty well when I was coming through Chicago. Those old guys were really nice to me and they gave me opportunities to sit in and show my stuff and they didn’t have any jealously and I try to do that to fellow musicians, especially young ones. I pretty much let them sit in. I like to at least give them a shot.
DM: What would you like people to know about you Steve?
SF: I was never out here to achieve stardom and make a fortune, I was just here to do what I love to do and pay my bills through that. Just to be self sufficient through my music and play the music I really enjoy.
DM: What’s the old saying Steve, if you work at what you love you never really have to work a day in your life.
SF: Exactly, that’s pretty much the whole gist of it. I don’t want to put anybody down, everyone’s entitled to like what they like and do what they do. I just have certain tastes and there are still are a few people who play what I call the natural blues. Not too affected, still telling stories, because blues is really a vocal art form, it’s not all about the blazing guitar and the harmonica, it’s about the story.
DM: Thanks Steve for sharing your story with our readers.
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BLUES JUNCTION Productions
7343 El Camino Real
Suite 327
Atascadero, CA 93422-4697
info