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Who Else Need Fe Know? Credits and Session Work

Posted on by abassford

I never set out to be a session musician. I wanted to be the lead guitarist in a famous rock and roll band, like George Harrison of the Beatles. The Beatles were my favorite band. Girls loved them. Their pictures were on album covers. And I heard them every day on WDRC, one of Hartford’s two Top Forty radio stations. My tiny transistor radio was permanently set to 1360 AM, the home of Big D, as the DJs called it. (The “Big D” emanated from an absurdly tiny building  in nearby Bloomfield, CT. But from the way the DJs talked about it, you would have thought it was the biggest structure in Hartford.) My brother and I had gotten the radios as Christmas gifts in 1964. This little box with one mono earpiece had changed my life irrevocably once I discovered that I could find WDRC on it. My parents’ radio was permanently set to WTIC, which was snoozeville. WDRC was the station that the cool kids at school listened to, and now I could listen to it too.

Apart from the Ed Sullivan Show, which my parents rarely watched, The Big D was the only evidence I had that the universe outside of my little town was a fascinating, turbulent place. At any given moment, a singer or a band with an accent or a rhythm I had never heard before might become hugely popular. The world of Top 40 Radio was reconfigured weekly based on local record sales. The most exciting part of every week was the Top Ten countdown. As a sports fan, I loved the competition and rooted for my favorite records to stay around as long as possible. If the Beatles had a record out, it invariably ended up at number one. The only questions were how many weeks it would take the song to get there and how long it would stay.

I didn’t know too much about the Beatles. Their hair was quite controversial, they had funny accents, and they were from Liverpool, which was somewhere in England. In the pre-internet world, that was about all one could find out about pop stars.

But whatever the Beatles’ lives were like, they were clearly too busy to work in the insurance industry. Hartford at that time was known as “The Insurance Capital Of The World.” My father worked at the Aetna. My uncle worked at Connecticut General. My mother had worked at the Travelers. Other relatives had worked at the Metropolitan in New York. (My aunt somehow managed to avoid this by becoming a librarian like my grandmother, the other traditional family occupation.) I grew up hearing about life insurance, health insurance, property insurance, casualty insurance, rates, premiums, and actuarial tables. My parents’ nightly discussions about his day at the office filled me with quiet horror. It sounded like school, but longer, more boring, and with a stricter dress code. Nothing any of the other grownups I knew did sounded any better.

Every weekday my father got up early. He made us breakfast. Then he put on one of his two suits (black or dark blue). He left for the office a little before eight, and was invariably home before six-thirty. When he got in, he would kiss my mother, look in on my brother and I, and then talk with my mother in the kitchen about insurance while she cooked.

Was this what life as an adult would be like? I loved my parents. But there had to be something other than this to hope for when I grew up. Although I had no answer, I was definitely asking the question. And The Beatles, at least, had figured out an alternative.

George was my favorite Beatle. He wasn’t the most popular or the cutest, which was encouraging. He didn’t sing lead, which seemed daunting. He didn’t talk to the audience. And he played all the guitar solos, which were my favorite parts of the songs anyway. As far as I was concerned, George had the best deal of anybody in the band. Plus, he had long hair, girls loved him, and his music annoyed my parents. George made playing the guitar look like a very good idea.

But playing the guitar remained just that for me, an idea. I picked up the bass when I was 13 because the band down the street needed a bass player. Then I saw B. B. King on TV and the world changed. My idea had to become a reality. Through a neighbor’s divorce, I miraculously acquired a cheap electric guitar a few weeks later. I already had a bass amp, which would have to do for the time being.

I had a guitar and amp. But I also had a huge identity crisis. I wanted to be B. B. King. I wanted to be Black, wear a brightly colored suit, own a Gibson semi-hollow guitar, and sing and play the blues like no one else. This was a peculiar desire for an eighth grader living in a house in the Hartford suburbs to have, but there it was. I knew what I wanted out of life. And it wasn’t actuarial tables.

Not for the first time, my dreams ran up against an uncomfortable reality. Not only wasn’t I Black, I didn’t even know any Black people. (This would change later, but it was a significant obstacle at the time.)

Even worse, I couldn’t begin to sing the blues. I tried a couple of times when no one was home and the results were devastating. Clearly, I needed to scale down my dream a bit. For a while, I imagined that I would play guitar with B. B. in his band. He was the only guitarist on the TV show I saw. But if I could only meet him, perhaps he would see how much I loved his music and let me play with him when I got good enough.

At the time, there were a number of popular blues-influenced rock bands around. Most of them were British, but they were more my age. Not only was B. B. King Black, but he was obviously much older than the people who were in rock bands. And he’d clearly had been playing the guitar for a long time. Doing what he did seemed impossible, though I was able to figure out some of the notes.

The guys in rock bands couldn’t have been playing all that long. Sounding like them seemed much more attainable. Plus, girls my age liked them. (When I mentioned blues to one of my big crushes at the time, her response was, “Blues? Only old Black people who work in the cotton fields in the South like blues.” This was not the reaction I was looking for.) My dream had to be reconfigured.

So, when I actually started learning the guitar, Jeff Beck, then in the Yardbirds, was my new role model. He stood off to the side of the stage with his Esquire and his smirk, reeling off continuous streams of brilliance. Then as now, Jeff had a great haircut and an air of offhand mastery that I found really appealing. I sat down with “Jeff’s Boogie” and slowed it down to 16 rpm on my Woolworth’s record player. I figured if I could play “Jeff’s Boogie” I could play just about anything else. And it sounded something like blues, but cheerful and not as deep.

Much to my surprise, with a bit of work the licks fell under my fingers and the guitar started to make sense to me. After two weeks I could play almost all of it. (Though a couple of the overdubs confused me as I didn’t know which part I was supposed to play.) Playing the guitar was clearly something I could do. And I’d figured it out by myself without a teacher or written music. I was hooked.

As a terminally unpopular kid, doing something that other people my age thought was cool was extremely appealing. Plus, I loved it. I loved the sound. I loved the feeling of the strings under my fingers. And I loved the feeling of triumph when I figured out something that I really wanted to learn.

The next step was playing in bands. There were quite a few of them around, though they only played locally. It was unclear how one made the jump from CYO mixers (where the nuns walked around with rulers cut down to seven inches to monitor the distance between dancing couples) to the Ed Sullivan Show, the pinnacle of mainstream show business success at the time. But if you didn’t sing, it was obvious that you had to be in a band of like-minded people your age, at least one of whom could sing a bit.

So, I played in bands. I’d always enjoyed team sports and there were a lot of parallels. Plus, the chances of severe injury were somewhat lower. I played in bands for eight years before someone asked me to play on a recording session, much to my astonishment. The person who asked me was the great reggae singer Horace Andy and the record turned out to be his Seventies classic, “In The Light.”

As an avid reader of record covers, I knew what session musicians were. But it had never occurred to me to become one. I was never a hippie, but I was quite idealistic. I believed that playing only music I truly believed in, in a band with fellow true believers, was the only way to go. Session players, I thought, were hacks. I imagined them as old, bitter guys who hated popular music but were good enough to play it when required. Playing music you hated sounded a lot like working at the Aetna.

I didn’t want to be a hack. But I didn’t want to miss a chance to play the guitar either. So, I said yes.

When I bought a copy of the album, there was my name (albeit misspelled as “Bashford”) in the fine print on the cover, along with the names of all the other musicians. I looked at it for quite a while. My name was on a record. I wasn’t just somebody who played bars and high school dances. My name was on a record. A record with a somewhat oddly designed cover on a small label, but a record nonetheless. There was independent confirmation that I existed, and had played guitar on a record. It wasn’t just a dream any longer.

I assumed that Horace would immediately put a band together consisting of the people who played on the record and we would go out and tour. This was not to be, though it was discussed. Then Clem Paddyfote, a Hartford bandleader, asked me to play on his recording session, even though I was not a member of his group. Not only did Clem put my name, correctly spelled, on the back cover, he took a picture of us and put that on the front cover! I wasn’t that happy with how I played on the record. But I couldn’t complain about being properly credited for it.

Now my name was on two records, with two different sets of musicians. Once was an accident. Twice was something else. I then recorded with a band I was playing with, Billy and the Buttons, and did another recording session for an excellent songwriter and piano player, Bob Genovesi. The recordings weren’t issued at the time, but they sounded like records, not demos. I also did some recording at Trod Nossel, a well-known Connecticut studio, as part of my audition for the Scratch Band, a gig that I didn’t get.

By this time, I was a bit more acclimated to the studio process, and a bit less terrified. As much as I hated hearing my playing, there was something rewarding about hearing it on big speakers. And the thought that the results might be pressed into vinyl and purchased by the less discriminating was very intriguing.

However, I still thought of recording as incidental to gigging as a way of making a living. At the time Connecticut had a truly thriving live music scene; a lot of people I knew were making pretty good money doing nothing else.

So when I went to Jamaica in 1980, much to my astonishment I realized that the musicians I wanted to play with rarely appeared live. I assumed that Sly and Robbie and Lloyd Parks played in bars, and that I would find out what bars they played in and try to sit in. No such luck. Kingston in 1980 was in a state of siege. Live music was almost nonexistent. The guys I wanted to play with were doing recording sessions, not playing in clubs. So I knew I had to start playing sessions too if I wanted to work with them.

The great producer Henry “Junjo” Lawes took a chance on me a month or so after I arrived and hired me for a session with Roots Radics.  Within six months I was doing recording sessions regularly. I also had joined the very popular Lloyd Parks and We The People Band, so I was doing live shows as well. Producers and artists came to watch the band, liked what they heard, and started hiring me. So did some of the artists the band backed on stage.

All of a sudden, I had a session career. I learned an incredible amount about music very fast. I made very good money for the time and place. Best of all, I got to play with almost all of my heroes, just as I had dreamed might happen. In the process, I had become one of those people whose name shows up on records a lot. I haven’t stopped doing sessions since. I did two last week.

It’s strange how things work out. When we first moved to the Bronx, we were friends with a hippie couple who had lived on the Farm, a huge commune outside of Nashville founded by one of the original Haight-Ashbury people. They had a band that played defiantly original music, no covers. And they were quietly aghast at my willingness to play weddings, bar gigs, sessions, or whatever to feed my family.

Although they were too polite to say so directly, they had real questions about my integrity, or lack thereof. I was obviously talented, so why was I doing this? Wasn’t music supposed to reflect your deepest thoughts and feelings? What was I doing playing music, and worse, recording, just for the money?

It wasn’t only hippies who thought this way about session men. As an avid reader of Hit Parader magazine in the late sixties and early seventies, I remember very well the prevailing attitude about using session men on records. It was perceived as inauthentic or plastic. (Remember when your career would have been over if you sold a tune for a car commercial? Ha!) I even convinced myself that the Beatles played all the instruments on “Sergeant Pepper,” and was baffled at the session credits for outside musicians on “Rubber Soul.”

I can understand this prejudice against hired session guns. I do think that musicians should have ideals (like anybody else) and try to live up to them. But this attitude kept a lot of great and historically significant groups of players like the Funk Brothers and the Wrecking Crew, to name just two examples,  from getting the credit they deserved.

The older guys in the Maytals suffered from this practice tremendously. They played on probably half of the records cut in Jamaica from 1966 through 1974, when Toots got signed to Island and they started touring with him, which cut down their session work. Jamaica was one of the largest recording centers in the world during this period, so that meant these guys made a lot of records, very few of which had their names on the jackets.

Reggae uses a lot of the same bass lines over and over, and Jackie Jackson, Toots’ bass player, created many of them. The bass line in the Staple Singers’ “I’ll Take You There” is a note-for-note copy of one of his lines from a hit instrumental called “Liquidator.” For quite a while the Maytals drum chair was shared by Paul Douglas and Winston Grennan, up to Winston’s death in 2000. Both of these masters played on thousands of records without credit, and Winston in particular was very bitter about it.

I loved Winston (I played in his own band off and on for sixteen years). He was one of the great characters in the history of music, like a cross between Art Blakey and the Tasmanian Devil. In addition to his reggae credentials, he had played with just about everybody you could imagine in 70s jazz and R & B, but could never remember their names. You would have to prompt him. “Yeah, mon, me play wid dis famous jazz trumpeter for a minute. Him call me fe sub a Montreux Jazz troo im drummer did sick. Me cyan remember him name.”

“A Black guy or white guy, Winston?” I don’t generally refer to people by race unless it’s necessary, but I thought this might help him narrow it down.

“American Black mon. (Jamaicans are very careful to differentiate between Caribbean and American Blacks.) Old time bebop mon. Him wicked. Play very fast and high.”

“Did he have a funny-shaped trumpet, like somebody bent it?”

“Yeah, mon. It sound great.”

“Dizzy Gillespie?”

“Yeah, mon! A dat him name! Great musician, mon. Very funny guy and him very fair with the money.”

Now if I had subbed on a Dizzy Gillespie gig at Montreux, you would have to hit me over the head to make me stop talking about it, and I certainly would remember his name! Winston, being Winston, had forgotten.

However, if you asked Winston about any record cut in Jamaica between the time he started recording and the time he came to the US in 1974, he could tell you who played drums on it and where it was recorded. If he had played on it, he could also tell you everybody else who was on the session. He could also tell you if the producer had paid him or not!

One day at sound check he was particularly vocal about the injustices of life and all the records he played on that he didn’t get credit for, and all the younger, more famous reggae drummers who had copied various aspects of his style. All of these complaints were completely justified, but we’d heard them before. Once or twice. Everyone in the Maytals had suffered similar injustices, and we were all used to Winston venting about them occasionally. But for some reason, on this particular day Winston was really getting on Jackie Jackson’s nerves.

Jackie stood at the side of the stage with his arms folded and a pained expression, looking at Winston like a disappointed older brother. I watched him listen silently to Winston’s monologue for several minutes. Finally I edged over to his side of the stage. I said, “Jackie, you played on easily as many records that  you didn’t get credit for as Winston did, if not more. How do you feel about it?”

Jackie looked at me for a moment. Jackie is a man of few words, but like the notes in his bass lines, they are extremely well chosen.

“Anderson (as he calls me when he is being formal), If me play pon a session, mi know seh that mi play on de record. De artist knows mi play pon fe him record. And God know seh mi play pon de record. Who else need fe know?” And that was the end of the discussion.

For quite a while record companies, at least most of them, were meticulous about crediting musicians appropriately. But now that recorded music is streamed or downloaded instead of being purchased on CDs or vinyl, the issue of being credited for session work is back with us again. How can you tell who played on a digital download? I guess it’s back to obscurity…or relentlessly taking photos during the session and posting them on social media…I don’t know the answer.

It’s human, I think, to want credit for what you do, particularly if you have a performer’s ego, which I do. But whenever I get discouraged about this state of affairs, I remind myself of Jackie’s wise words and tell myself: “God know seh mi play pon de record. Who else need fe know?”

Keepers Of The Flame: The Blue Frog, Arno Rocha, and Wild Jimmy Spruill

Posted on by abassford

It started, as so many things once did in New York City, with an ad in the Village Voice.

“Blues Musicians Wanted! Club in the Bronx seeks musicians and bands for blues seven nights a week. Apply to Arno at the Blue Frog, 3340 Jerome Avenue, Bronx, NY.” I was just back from a three month tour of New Zealand, Australia, Japan, Hawaii, and the rest of the United States. That year, 1992, had been my most successful period of my life as a musician in New York, and I was feeling good about things. There was some money in the bank, the bills were all paid, and I wouldn’t have to look for work as an office temp for at least three weeks. This was living large, Bronx style.

“Why don’t you go check this out?” my wife Elizabeth said, pointing to the paper. “You know you love the blues, and here’s a club right here in the Bronx where people are playing it. We should go tonight. Bethany can babysit.”

“How much can they pay bands to play blues seven nights a week in the Bronx. It’s probably a bunch of kids. It doesn’t make any sense.”

“Come on. We haven’t been out since you got back. If it looks like a waste of time, we’ll leave and find an Irish bar. We have money for once. It might be work for you.”

Work. The magic word. Work. All musical employment is temporary, unless your name is Keith Richard or Michael Jackson. Musicians are always out of work. We all have our buttons, and as my wife and partner of long standing, Elizabeth knew exactly where the big red one in the center of my forehead was, and just how to push it. We were going to the Blue Frog. There might be work. Besides, it would be nice to see somebody else play music for a change.

Thus began one of the strangest experiences of my musical career, which is saying something. Neither of us could have possibly imagined the peculiar and unique world we were about to enter; the world of Arno and the Blue Frog.

The Blue Frog turned out to be a medium-sized bar on the east side of Jerome Avenue, near the end of the #4 train at Woodlawn, the last stop in the Bronx. If it had been five storefronts further north it would have been in Yonkers. A white plastic sign with, of course, a blue frog sculpture over it announced its presence. Next door was a vacant lot; on the other side a machine shop, which at one point in its existence the Blue Frog might also have been. A dubious-looking factory employing the developmentally disabled called “The Institute of Applied Human Dynamics,” a truly mediocre pizza shop, and another bar called the Woodlawn Café were its neighbors to the north. The machine shop, a Spanish dress shop, and a bodega, all of which were closed at night, took up the rest of the block to the south. Across the street was Van Cortlandt Park. Even for Jerome Avenue, the neighborhood was particularly gloomy, as only a New York City neighborhood in the shadow of the El can be.

Once inside, we saw a large room of unfinished wood. A long bar took up most of the right hand wall. A pool table was located to our left, and about ten wooden tables with chairs were scattered more or less randomly in front of the stage, which took up most of the back of the room and was about four feet off the ground. It was Tuesday night, and the room was about half full of people, most of whom were men with instrument cases. A table full of working-class gay women sat quietly near the stage on the right. Another table of single women, definitely not gay, who had obviously been there since happy hour, hooted and howled over their drinks as they whispered comments to each other while pointing at the musicians who were setting up on stage.

The bar was nearly full; Elizabeth and I found the last two stools, next to a small, swarthy man who could have been Aztec, Italian, Greek, Puerto Rican, or any combination thereof. His shoulder-length, greased black wavy hair was tied back in a ponytail with a rubber band, and like almost everyone else in the bar, he wore a work shirt, old jeans, and sneakers. Unlike many of them, he looked like he’d done hard labor at an early age. He was obviously in charge; several people were waiting to talk to him while he alternately gave instructions to the young, obviously inexperienced homegirl trying to tend bar and a dark-haired, good-looking man in his late thirties with a fine mustache who was bringing cases of beer up from the basement.

“Are you Arno?” I asked. “I saw the ad in your voice about musicians.”

“Yeah, I’m Arno. This is my place. What do you play?”

“I’m a guitar player.”

“Too bad. We have a million guitar players here. What I really need is bass players. I can’t find any blues bass players.”

“My husband plays bass, too.” Elizabeth chimed in, skilled tactician that she is. This was a considerable exaggeration as far as I was concerned. I did in fact, own an inexpensive Squier electric bass, purchased in a wild burst of rock star extravagance with the proceeds from a show I played at the old Felt Forum right after I moved to New York in 1986. Up to now I had only used it to play on my own songwriting demos; it had never occurred to me to try to get work with it. I didn’t even have a proper bass amplifier. In the seventies, I had played bass in a Latin jazz band, but that was a long time ago.

“Are you any good?” Arno demanded.

“Yes, he’s an excellent musician,” Elizabeth responded quickly before I could figure out how to frame a more informative answer.

“I need a bass player for my Tuesday night blues jam. We have jams on Tuesdays and Sundays.”

“What does it pay?”

“I pay twenty-five dollars for the jam. If you play here in a band I pay fifty dollars a musician, but depending on who shows up for the jam you might only play the first set and hang around all night, or you might play all night if no bass players come. I have to have a trio in-house so that the people who come to jam always have enough for a band. Are you interested?”

“I don’t work for less than fifty dollars a night.” (Note: This was a long time ago!)

Arno looked at me challengingly. “Well, then, maybe this isn’t the place for you if you’re that kind of musician. But this is the only place in the Bronx where you can hear blues every night of the week.” He had a hint of an unusual accent, and a very intense stare.

I thought hard for a minute. It was, after all, work, and I wasn’t really a bass player. Perhaps I could get paid while learning the instrument. That could lead to more work. “I don’t normally play for that kind of money, but I like what you’re trying to do here. When would I start?”

“Next week. Be here a little before nine. I have an amp here; you don’t need to bring one.”

“I’ll be there.” The bass player problem resolved, Arno turned his attention elsewhere, and Elizabeth and I addressed our beers. We split after a set of ordinary sounding blues jamming by a variety of assorted characters who came and went rapidly.

I spent most of the next week playing the bass along with my blues records. I already knew hundreds of blues tunes on guitar, so it wasn’t a huge stretch to play them on the bass, but I had absolutely no right hand technique. Bass is best played with the fingers, and I was a pick-style guitarist. This wasn’t going to be easy.

On Tuesday, I turned up at the appointed time. The drummer, Tom, was the bandleader along with a guitarist whose name escapes me. He talked me through the opening three numbers and, quaking with terror lest I be exposed as a fraud, I set to work. The evening passed quickly. Arno came in halfway through and sat in on guitar, and dozens of musicians passed on and off stage, each playing two songs. Some were brilliant, most of them weren’t. At the end of the night, Arno paid me and said, “I need a bass player for Sundays too. If you can do that for twenty-five, I’ll pay you thirty for the Tuesdays.” I took it. After all, it was work, and I do love the blues.

Within a month I was playing bass at the Blue Frog at least three nights a week, and sometimes as many as five. I’d be dozing on the couch and the phone would ring. “Andy, it’s Arno. Can you get down here right away. The bass player didn’t show up and we have to start in ten minutes.” It turned out that very often bass players would accept a Thursday, Friday, or Saturday night gig at the Frog and then bail at the last minute if they got something more lucrative, like a wedding or bar mitzvah.

“I’ll be there in fifteen, max.” The Blue Frog was seven minutes from my house by car, but I liked the idea of at least brushing my teeth before going on stage. I did appear in some pretty casual outfits at times.

“Thanks, Andy, you saved me again.”

Through playing so often at the Frog, l met dozens of musicians, many of whom had their own bands and were under the impression I was a bass player. Lots of them had gigs elsewhere too. I took them. It wasn’t touring with a major act or playing the Felt Forum, but it was, after all, work, and I was pretty busy.

Working for Arno wasn’t the easiest thing in the world, though. He was a complex, tortured soul with strongly held ideas on music and a number of other topics, many of which were demonstrably wrong. At different times he told different stories about his background and upbringing, but the common threads were that he had started playing guitar in the sixties, that he had been in the Vietnam war, and that he had grown up in an agricultural area of California. Arno had some strange stories about working in the porn district in Times Square and seeing sex slaves held in dungeons there. He also said he had done lots of psychedelics, which was believable, and that he had constant nightmares related to his war experiences. We didn’t know anything about PTSD then, but I’m sure that Arno suffered from it, among other things.

Arno loved the blues with all his heart and soul, and, given what I knew about his background, I could see why the music appealed to him. Sadly, however, he was a limited, inflexible guitarist and an ordinary singer. He also had, like many people in the blues scene, very rigid opinions about what was “real blues” and what wasn’t. Real blues, according to what I could deduce from Arno’s running commentary on the musicians at the jams, was blues played in the Chicago electric blues style of the late forties through the early sixties. No more, no less. Arno was, of course, aware that other, older blues and rhythm and blues styles existed, but they didn’t interest him. Nor did he take the updated blues records on labels like Malaco and Ichiban very seriously, in spite of the fact that both the artists and audience for these records were black and some of them sold very well at the time.

Lots of the younger musicians who frequented the club tried to play in the flashier, more rock-like style of the white blues artists like Eric Clapton or Stevie Ray Vaughn. Fender Stratocasters abounded onstage, and one particularly devoted fellow named Alan actually had a large , detailed portrait of SRV, including cowboy hat and Strat, tattooed on his upper right arm. Alan wore leather vests without shirts, even in the dead of winter, as well as a cowboy hat and leather guitar strap for maximum Stevieness. He could play and sing a lot like SRV too. There were lots of others who seemed to think that the blues had started in Texas in 1980 with the release of “Texas Flood”.

Arno didn’t think much of these guys. His heroes were Little Milton and Elmore James, and he had trouble concealing his distaste for the Stevie clones. However understandable, this was a bad idea, since they made up most of his clientele, and a lot of them got annoyed with Arno for various reasons and eventually stopped coming to the club.

Arno had other business weaknesses as well. For someone who loved the blues so much, had a black girlfriend (who we never saw), and ran a nightclub in a black and Latino neighborhood, Arno knew very little about what black people wanted in a night on the town. Having worked in black bands most of my life, I know that their audiences like to dress up and go someplace special to see a show. The Blue Frog, with its unfinished wood, naked tables, and bare walls, was anything but special. It was probably Arno’s idea of what a Mississippi roadhouse looked like in 1955, or as close as you could get to that decor in the Bronx forty years later. No northern urban black person I knew would have been caught dead bringing a date there, unless they were a musician who wanted to jam. And the people in the neighborhood didn’t care a cent for the blues. They liked hip hop and R&B. Nearly everyone who went to the Blue Frog came there from somewhere else, some as far as Bay Shore or upper Westchester.

Furthermore, most successful nightclub people are capable of turning on great amounts of charm at a moment’s notice, however despicable they might actually be. Arno was, like the Blues Brothers, on “a mission from God” to tell the world about the blues; he wasn’t a meet-and-greet type. No matter what the cost, he couldn’t hide his feelings, and it hurt his business. What also didn’t help was that, however peculiar his ideas, he had a lot of personal integrity. Unlike most bar owners, he always paid the musicians in full no matter how little money he made, and most nights he didn’t make much.

The Blue Frog was a losing proposition; I could never figure out how he kept it going, even with his rent at $800 a month. Then, one night during a break, I asked the question aloud to some of the other musicians and they collapsed in hysterics.

“Didn’t you know? Arno’s a slumlord!”

“What?”

“Yeah, a slumlord. He owns an apartment building in the South Bronx. That’s how he can afford to keep this place open.” I knew Arno lived in the South Bronx, but this was news to me. The contradictions of making your living by renting a building to poor people while running a nightclub dedicated to the music they produced partially as a result of the experience of dealing with slumlords…No wonder Arno was tortured.

He also was an alcoholic, which I didn’t realize until I had been working there about a year. This may seem strange, but for all my years of working in music I had never been in a band with anyone who had a drinking problem, so I didn’t pick it up right away. Arno also did most of his drinking by himself after the place closed, which made the extent of his problem somewhat less obvious.

But whatever his foibles, Arno did have a real dedication to the blues and an obsessive desire to run a club that presented them in the Bronx seven nights a week, no matter how indifferent the world, and even the neighborhood, might have seemed to this dream.

A lot of the bands Arno booked into the Frog consisted of young white musicians emulating the legendary masters with various degrees of expertise. But he also personally knew a lot of older black blues musicians and hired them at the club whenever he could. New York has never been a major blues town like Memphis or Chicago, but there were quite a few competent original blues men who had ended up here for one reason or another and, though well advanced in years, were still capable of playing and singing convincingly. I got to play with a number of them during the course of my time there, and this was one of the unexpected fringe benefits of the Blue Frog experience.

Although I was instinctively offended by Arno’s musical dogmatism, I had to admit that there was a vast difference between the original bluesmen and their young followers, both in style and substance. This difference was easily audible but became even more obvious as I tried to play with them. It was clear that they were trying to produce music according to different guidelines than we were. The difference wasn’t purely racial; younger black musicians with backgrounds in funk or R&B sounded as out of place at times as I felt. What was going on here exactly?

My early academic training was in history, and as a consequence I was taught the importance of original sources in trying to understand an issue or a period. Here I was, working with living, breathing original sources. I had no excuse.

Having played professionally in Jamaica for five years, I had already confronted this issue in a different context, and, I thought, fairly successfully. Authentic reggae musicians played with me, and hired me to play with them. Was I a real reggae player? Could you tell I was American by listening to me without seeing me play? Not if I didn’t want you to know. I was a real reggae player in a way that I was not a real blues player. Yet I had been studying the blues long before I ever heard reggae, and blues is an American idiom.

This didn’t mean that the older bluesmen didn’t like playing with me; most of them enjoyed my musicianship as far as I could tell. But it didn’t mean that they would have called me a blues player either. Shortly, I was to meet someone whose opinions on the subject I am still pondering.

One night, after I had been working at the Frog about eighteen months, I noticed a tall, older black man playing pool with Arno during the Sunday night jam. By the way Arno related to him, I knew it was someone he respected, but he didn’t have an instrument with him nor did he express much obvious interest in the music.

Tuesday, he returned and came to the jam. Arno introduced us. “Andy, this is Wild Jimmy Spruill. You’ve heard of him. He played the original version of ‘Kansas City’ by Wilbert Harrison.” I had, in fact, heard his name and was familiar with the song, which is graced by one of the great rock guitar solos of the fifties. Jimmy unpacked his guitar, and I got the first hint that he was no ordinary player. He had a Gibson Explorer, a very expensive guitar which he had personally customized by sawing off its top wing, completely destroying its resale value.

Jimmy plugged in, we counted the tune off, and the deal went down. From the first note it was obvious that he was the real thing. I was in the presence of a true master. He played with a metal thumb pick and his index finger, using lots of treble and a truly vicious attack. There was so much depth, soul, and groove to his playing. You could hear the years of experience and miles he had traveled in every note he hit.

After a couple of songs, Arno asked me to switch from bass to guitar. Although Arno thought my blues bass playing was more authentic than my guitar work, he knew that guitar was my main instrument. He was obviously hoping for a guitar duel, but Jimmy was on a much more highly evolved musical plane than your typical blues guitar slinger, and something about the way I was playing had caught his attention. I also immediately realized that this was a night for music, not grandstanding or gymnastics. We jammed for a long time to a largely empty room; two very different people with a lot to say to each other, but, perhaps, little idea of how to open the conversation.

I have very clear memories of how the night felt; a sense of unspoken thoughts and questions which hovered over and around us like a cloud of smoke as we played. At the time, I didn’t know much about non-verbal communication, but looking back on the experience, I realize that we were speaking to each other about things I still haven’t sorted out consciously. We both had stories to tell.

When we took a break, I asked him a polite question about his background, and he launched into a brief monologue. Like many musicians, he spoke like how he played; in his case, clearly, thoughtfully, and deliberately, with a thoroughgoing seriousness.

“I’m from North Carolina. I lived there all my early days. I play the real blues, right from the red clay dirt. That’s all I can play. I fake other things, like jazz and rock and roll, but really what I play is the blues, country blues but louder. See how I pick, with the thumb pick and my big finger here. That’s a country thing; you don’t learn to play like that in the city.” He paused and looked at me.

“Now you, you don’t play blues. I don’t know what it is you play.” He paused again and looked at me hard. It was obvious that he was trying to sort out exactly what he wanted to say and was trying hard not to offend. “You play good, don’t get me wrong. You’re a good musician. You play from the heart. I feel what you’re doing. Both on the guitar and on the bass. But it isn’t the blues.”

I didn’t respond. I was trying to digest what he had just said, in light of what I had been experiencing onstage. A part of me would have liked to hear him say that he thought I was a great blues player, but I knew that he was right. I had stopped trying to be a blues player in high school and decided to learn as much as I could about music instead. Whatever I am, blues isn’t exactly it. Jimmy was comfortable with my silence.

“I don’t play much anymore. I could if I wanted to, but my wife doesn’t like me to travel too much and I did a lot of it when I was young. I make good money gambling. I go to Atlantic City for a few days and win some money and come home. They aren’t looking for anybody like me to fool them, but I can count the cards and figure out the games. I can hustle pool too, but I don’t get greedy. I make the money I need and that’s fine with me.

I fix things, too. I can panel your basement or build you a garage. I do sheet rock, drywall, anything like that. I just try to stay busy. I love music, though. I really do.” He took a long pull on his cigarette and looked across the room at the old guitars on the wall.

We played for a long time after that. A few minutes later, an old New York studio musician named Stan Free walked into the club and the mystery got deeper. Stan was our drummer Barry’s father-in-law and a living legend. In a long and varied career encompassing thousands of recording sessions, he had played with everybody from Charlie Parker to the Association to the NBC Symphony. Now retired, Stan played only when he felt like it; a couple of tunes at parties, a benefit for a Hebrew charity, a friend’s daughter’s wedding. He had been threatening to come to the blues jam for some time, but neither Barry nor I ever really thought he would make the trip up to the Bronx from his beautiful apartment on the upper West Side.

But there he was, a short, dapper gray-haired man in a beautiful coat and expensive wool scarf, grinning like a wood sprite. He carefully folded the coat and set it on the bench next to him as he sat down at the cheap electric keyboard on stage. “Hi, Barry, Andy, you’re Jimmy? Arno? Stan Free. You cats are sounding good. Let’s play some blues.”

We resumed. A Jewish jazz pianist from the lower East Side, his drummer son-in-law who ran a shop selling gourmet ice cream next to the Hartsdale pet cemetery, a black guitar picker from the clay dirt of Carolina, a Vietnam veteran from the San Joaquin valley on bass, and me, a Connecticut prep school graduate and reggae musician, played a couple of songs which might have started out as blues, but acquired a lot of other hues along the way.

The music we produced was so interesting that not even Arno could complain about its lack of purity. I have never heard anything exactly like it. True to form, Stan got up after a couple of numbers, but it felt right to stop. Comparing notes after the set, it turned out that Jimmy and Stan had actually played together before, on some rock and roll record dates in the fifties, but hadn’t seen each other for almost forty years until that night.

It also turned out that Jimmy and I lived in the same neighborhood, a few blocks from each other, and frequented the same doughnut shop, though at different times of the day. We both realized that we had seen each other numerous times over the years without knowing that we were both musicians. “Think of all the playing we could have done all these years, Andy. I have a little studio in my apartment. We could have been cutting tracks. Cutting tracks. Give me a call sometime when you aren’t busy.” Sadly, I never got around to it.

Shortly after that night, Arno defaulted on the mortgage of his apartment building and the Blue Frog closed. I never saw a human being get as drunk as Arno did at the all-night jam which took place on the last night the club was open. I didn’t see Arno for some time, although I heard through the grapevine that he had stopped drinking and was going to AA meetings.

Jimmy died a few months later. He had taken a Greyhound back to North Carolina, perhaps realizing that the end was near, and expired en route. Traveling without identification, his body remained for several days in a small Virginia town until his panicked family finally traced his route and the authorities figured out who he was. Around the same time, Stan also passed away. I went to the shiva at his apartment on 97th street, where I met his wife for the first time. Barry and his daughter Vicki thanked me for coming, and we reminded each other about the jam. It turned out that one of Jimmy’s last acts on earth had been to build Barry a soundproof practice room in his basement in Hartsdale. “Every time I play my drums, Jimmy’s right there. It’s a great feeling.”

A month or two after Jimmy’s death, Arno called me. “Andy, I need your help. I want to do a benefit for Jimmy’s family. He didn’t leave his wife with very much. I got Tramps to give us a night and lots of the fifties artists he played with are going to show up. We’re going to film it too, and if we sell the film, Jimmy’s family will get more money. Will you play bass?” I didn’t hesitate.

It was a truly amazing night of music. I played a set with Lavern Baker, the great R&B diva who helped make Atlantic Records in the fifties with her string of hits, and actually tried to sue the white singers who copied her style for copyright infringement. In her seventies and confined to a wheelchair (her legs lost to diabetes), she sang like an eighteen-year old girl and danced sitting down while storming through “Jim Dandy,” “I Cried A Tear,” and “Tweedle-Dee-Dee.” I played “Tossing And Turning” with Bobby Day and “Peanuts” with Little Joe Cook. Jimmy had played guitar on the original records.

Dozens of new and old blues and R&B musicians came out of the woodwork and sat in with each other in various combinations. Everybody had something lovely to say about how much Jimmy meant to them and what he had done for them. It was everything Arno had ever wanted the Blue Frog to be, although it was taking place in somebody else’s club.

The show closed with Rosco Gordon, an old R&B singer who was in a band with B. B. King and Johnny Ace called the Beale Streeters in Memphis in the fifties. I actually had played guitar on an album for Rosco produced by the legendary Jamaican producer Coxsone Dodd, and knew him to speak to from seeing him around the studio. At the time, I didn’t understand why Coxsone was so excited about an eighty year old artist, although I thought that he had some nice tunes.

But when Rosco got behind the piano, he lit into an off-beat groove that was so powerful and pure I actually got a vision. I could see Rosco as a barefoot child, walking down the back roads of Mississippi, hearing this music in his head before he ever got near enough to an instrument to try it out.

And as I was there on stage, being a working musician, trying to follow a song I didn’t know in front of a whole lot of people and listening to Rosco, I had an incredible realization. What he was playing was the same basic ska groove that reggae comes from, and I had dropped perfectly into it without even thinking. I suddenly realized that I knew the song we were playing, and had heard it dozens of times in Jamaica without knowing the title, or who the artist was.

Then it dawned on me that Rosco’s song was, in fact, older than reggae itself, and that he was one of the original inspirations for Coxsone, the Skatalites, and in fact, the whole reggae idiom. It was a profound moment.

I thought, “I am now touching the very root of this tree that I have devoted my life to studying. I am at the root of this particular tree. There is no prior source. I have played with the Skatalites; I have played with Lynn Tait; I have played with nearly all the originators of reggae who are still alive. One of them is in my band. And Rosco was before any of them. I am touching the very root of the tree.”

As I was playing, I saw my hand on the side of the tree in my mind’s eye. I saw it giving off a greenish glow.  There was no time to do anything other than observe, I had an artist to accompany. And then Rosco’s set was over. I quietly packed up and said goodnight to Arno, leaving as quickly as possible so as not to be distracted from the experience.

Although I had been in a bar all evening, I was too caught up in the events of the evening to realize that I was incredibly thirsty. So, when I got back to the Bronx, I stopped at the local Optimo store for some orange juice, still dressed in my best suit and tie in true R&B tradition. It was 4:45 a.m. I had to go to work in a few hours; another day in the life of a working musician with a family. 

As I was walking past the newspapers at the front of the store, a young couple stopped me.

“You were playing at the benefit for Jimmy Spruill, weren’t you?” said the woman. I was very surprised; she looked much more like a Babyface or Freddy Jackson fan than somebody who would be into fifties rock & roll.

“Yes, I was.” I said, noncommittally. I wasn’t sure where this was going.

“I’m his daughter, and this is my husband. We’ve seen you around the neighborhood. Thank you so much for what you did for us. May God bless you and your family. It was such a beautiful night for my father’s memory. We loved him so much. We will never forget you.”

“Thank you. It was an honor to play for him.”

“Get home safe.”

“Goodnight.”

I got my bass and my orange juice out of the car and walked through the snowy February night to my building. It had been quite an adventure, and I’m not sure that I’ve made sense of it yet. After all, how often do you get to touch the root of a tree by answering an ad in the Village Voice?

Professionalism: Advice To Young Musicians

Posted on by abassford

Now that I am a musician of, shall we say, a certain age, I find that younger musicians and artists ask me for advice fairly regularly. I find this a bit puzzling. Though I’ve been playing music for a very long time, and have been successful at it by my own standards, that hasn’t translated into either money or fame to any significant degree. However, I have learned a few things along the way. These are some principles that have worked for me, and I’m sure they will work for you. A lot of them translate well into other areas of life besides music.

  • If you are working for someone else, be a solution, not a problem. Life is full of problems, try not to add to them. Solutions are what people want.
  • As a working musician, you have three basic assets: your reliability, your ability to get along with people, and your playing ability. In that order. Think about it. If you’re the bandleader, do you want the adequate player who’s there at start time, is polite to everybody, and is happy to be there? Or do you want the genius who shows up half an hour late, gets into an argument with someone at the venue, and acts like he’s doing everybody a favor by playing with them? I live and work in New York City. There are a lot of people who can really play here, and more arrive every day. That doesn’t explain why musician A works and musicians B, C, D, and E don’t, even if they play better than A.
  • If you say you are going to do the gig, do the gig. Don’t cancel at the last minute because someone offers you ten dollars more to be somewhere else. (See #1.) I’ve actually seen people do this. A lot of what people hire you for is reliability. So be reliable. Being a reliable person and a great player is a potent combination. You’ll make up the ten bucks down the road.
  • If you know you are going to absolutely hate the gig, don’t take it! Find some other way to make money. You’ll be happier, and so will everyone else. I recently worked with a world class player who repeatedly made it quite obvious to everyone involved, including the leader, that he was only there for the money. His attitude was so bad that he didn’t even want to stick around to fix his parts at a recording session because he had something of his own happening the next day and was worried about getting enough sleep. I’ll play with this guy again if necessary, though I’d be happy never to see him again. But I will never under any circumstances recommend him. I wouldn’t be surprised if everyone else who experienced his behavior feels exactly the same way. Most of your work will come from other musicians. So be someone that people are happy to see on the gig.
  • The vast majority of gigs you will do are not glamorous. (I’ve run into some very well-known musicians in some unlikely situations.) Don’t be dark about it. Deal with it. Find something about your playing that you can work on until it’s over. You can always work on your tone and your time, for example, no matter what the gig is.
  • Excellence is a habit. Every time you play with other people, or in front of people, is a chance to advance your career. Give 100% no matter how lame the situation is. Sooner or later someone will notice your work and the lame situations will start to fall away. Be prepared. Know the material and write yourself charts or notes if necessary. Even when I’m working with artists who don’t read music or send charts (which is most of them), they really like it when they realize I have charts. It sends a message that I care about the gig, which I do. It facilitates rehearsals as well.
  • The great percussionist Larry McDonald is the source of this one: “Communication is the currency of the road.” If you are late, communicate! Unless you are dead or in surgery, there is no reason why you can’t tell the bandleader or client that you are running late. They are going to be upset anyway. Providing either inaccurate or no information about your arrival time isn’t going to make that go away. Be honest about when you will get there. If you give them accurate information in a timely manner, they have options. They can start on time without you. They can call a sub. They can talk to the client and renegotiate the start time. If they have no idea where you are, all they can do is stare at their phone. If you communicate, there is a solution. If you don’t communicate, you make the problem worse.  I see people screw this one up all the time, including a lot of pros who should know better.
  • Don’t play too loud for the room, or the gig. I’ve replaced more than one guitarist who made this mistake. Wouldn’t you rather be working and feeling a bit uncomfortable about your sound than sounding great at home with your amp cranked? I would.
  • Show up with your gear working and your instrument properly intonated and set up. Carry spare strings, batteries, a tuner, cables, a mic, pedals, a music stand, a light, and a backup amp. (In a perfect world I’d carry a backup speaker cab too, but that’s not viable for most things in NYC.) The state of my car trunk is a running joke among people who know me, but when something goes wrong, even for somebody else, I often have a solution in there. If you have a MIDI cable for the keyboardist/bandleader, he’going to remember. I have one, even though I don’t use MIDI for anything. (See #1.) Stuff happens, but try to have an answer ready when it does.
  • We all have opinions about other musicians. Be really careful about where and to whom you express them if they are negative. Word travels fast, and it doesn’t help your career. Don’t blow smoke either. If a compliment is insincere, most people can tell. And don’t spread gossip. The world doesn’t need to know everything you know. When in doubt, lay out!
  • Everyone has an ego, even if you don’t see it. (I have to thank the late B. B. King for this valuable insight.) Behave accordingly.
  • If you have to correct someone’s playing or attitude on the gig, do it as discreetly as possible, ideally one on one during a break. (I’ve worked for people who did the exact opposite, over the microphone, making sure everybody within earshot knew there was a problem. It can be very effective, but it leaves scars and it isn’t necessary.)
  • At some point during your career, someone won’t pay you, or will short you on the money. You have every right to be angry about this. But put a time limit on how long you are going to be angry. Then let it go. Anyone who won’t pay a working person for their labor has much worse problems than you do, whether they know it or not. Why let them live inside your head? Don’t work for them again and focus on the positive things you can do to replace the money you should have made. There are always things you can do to get more work. I know people who are consumed with bitterness over what happened to them in 1966. It doesn’t help.
  • Learn how the music business works. Most musicians aren’t interested in business, including me. I find minor sixth chords, for example, much more interesting than publishing deals. But if you don’t learn where the money is, how it flows, and where your place in the chain is, you’ll get screwed a lot more than necessary. Even if you just play in a band or just play for other people, you are in business and are technically a small business yourself. Be able to find your way around the playing field.
  • Good manners are important. I’m constantly amazed by how far “please” and “thank you” go when applied consistently. There are people out there who think that bad manners convey “attitude,” “street cred,” or “artistic integrity” and are somehow romantic and desirable. Whatever. Admittedly there’s a certain appeal about someone who constantly gets away with being an awful human being and even gets rewarded for it. (See Trump, Donald, or Brown, Chris.) We all have moments when we think that would be fun. But to me there’s nothing sadder than an aging bad boy or bad girl who used to be all that and no longer is. They tend not to work very much either. Folks remember.
  • Develop some sort of financial plan. I dedicate different income streams to different ongoing expenses, including retirement. (I learned this trick from the late Coxsone Dodd, reggae producer extraordinaire.) The vast majority of musicians have little or no money for retirement. So you have to set that up yourself. This is what I do, based on my income sources and expenses. Your plan will probably be different depending on your sources of musical income. Cash payments for gigs go into savings for estimated tax. Cash payments for private lessons and songwriting and publishing royalties go into savings too. These income streams are for retirement, so eventually I take them out of savings and put them into better investments when I get a minute. But in the meantime they are earning interest. Payments to PayPal go to equipment purchase and maintenance. CD and digital music sales go into album promotion. Payments by check (usually the largest sums) go into checking for personal expenses.  If you’re just starting out, it’s a good idea to take a little bit of money out of every musical service you get paid for, no matter how small, and put it in an envelope for retirement. Don’t raid the envelope for anything! Saving for retirement is a habit, just like musical excellence. This seems impossible at times, but when you’re my age you’ll be happy you did something.
  • Declare income, take deductions, and pay taxes. Keep records and save receipts (this is much easier now in the digital world, you can photograph things.) Get an accountant that understands the music business to help you. This will actually save you money; they’ll find things to deduct that wouldn’t occur to you. You’ll get some of it back in Social Security when you retire, too. In the immortal words of Copeland Forbes, legendary reggae manager, “You don’t have to tell the government everything. But you must tell them something.” I tell them everything; I sleep better.
  • Keep up with whatever is going on now in music, especially if you hate it. Don’t get stuck in your era. Admittedly this gets harder as you get older. But it really is good for you, particularly if you do session work. And keep practicing!
  • Have your own project happening, no matter how small, at all times. It could be a band, a recording project, a solo artist project, an experimental jam, whatever. Doing your own thing is good for your mental and emotional health. So consistenly dedicate some time to it. Doing your own thing also helps you learn about the business when you try to get it out there.
  • Be honest in your interpersonal relationships outside of music. I prefer monogamy myself. It’s one less thing for you and your partner to sort out when you get home, particularly if you are touring constantly. But that isn’t for everybody. Some people are fueled by the stimulus, conflict, and excitement of sexual adventure. And there are plenty of opportunities for that in the world of music. If fidelity is not for you, don’t lie to yourself or anybody else and pretend that it is.