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?