Dear John, I doubt very seriously if anyone has ever said anything bad about Miss Bonnie. She has a birthdaycoming up and I thought she wouls be much more fun to read about than Covid. She's been playing them Blues all her life and ain't about to quit. Still under lockdown at my house but kudos to you who venture out to support what live music is available during this trying time. We'll just keep on keeping on...there has to be an end. Meanwhile, no hugging, wash your hands and wear a mask. All simple gestures that might save you or the one you're with. Have a week. Sincerely, Jim Crawford - PBS |
BONNIE By Paterick Doyle "I love that double-time shit!" says Bonnie Raitt, grinning behind a piano. The singer-guitarist has just led her longtime band through a furious impromptu take on Ray Charles' "Mess Around." Raitt, 66, has a reputation as a tenacious perfectionist, but today at her rehearsal studio in North Hollywood, she's loose and mischievous. At one point, she sets aside a sheet of lyrics for a new ballad to prove she doesn't need them - but then breaks up laughing when she can't remember the first line. "So much for losing the training wheels!" she says. After practice, Raitt heads down a hallway deeper into the studio; there's a chore she's been meaning to get around to. Her guitar tech opens a big, musty locker packed with old instruments. "This is over 30 years of people laying guitars on us," she says. She opens a case to reveal an acoustic Jackson Browne gave her, and another containing a guitar that belonged to songwriter Stephen Bruton, a close friend who died in 2009. "I'd been meaning to go through these for years and figure out whether to give them to charity, or what," she says. "But then I moved away and my family got sick. Raitt is referring to a painful time that began with the deaths of her parents (she lost her mother in 2004, her father a year later); in 2009, her brother died after an eight-year battle with brain cancer. "I was really depleted," she says. "You go back and relive your relationships with those people, and when there's multiple losses and illnesses, it can be almost overwhelming." After her brother's death, Raitt, who tours year-round and plans her career in five-year stretches, told her band she was taking a year off. She started seeing a grief counselor and, for the first time since she hit the road in 1970, watched all four seasons change in her Marin County backyard. "I needed to take some time to sit down and fall apart," she says. That reflective period - and the joy she found when she returned to the road in 2011 - shaped Raitt's new album, Dig in Deep, her first LP with newly written songs in more than a decade. "I have always felt so sorry that I couldn't be a better this or that for my family members," she says. "And I know they were probably just as sorry I couldn't be what they would've liked me to be." Raitt has lived in Northern California since 1991, but she feels at home in L.A. She grew up on Mulholland Drive, not far from her rehearsal space, the daughter of actor John Raitt, who had lead roles in Carousel and Oklahoma! during the golden age of Broadway in the 1940s and 1950s. She fondly recalls hour-and-a-half school bus rides through the San Fernando Valley and attending Quaker meetings with her parents, whose love of music and social justice helped draw her to the blues: "It became an anomaly when I was 18 or 19 - people would say, 'Isn't this odd that a little redheaded daughter of a Broadway singer from Los Angeles is playing Robert Johnson songs?'" Raitt kicks back on a worn-in couch with a piece of double-chocolate cake, which she ordered for her bassist's birthday. "Mmm, tastes like gluten!" she says, eating it straight off a napkin. Someone mentions that the Rolling Stones are rehearsing nearby, and Raitt recalls how she took a semester off from Harvard to tag along on the Stones' 1970 European tour (Raitt was dating the manager of opening act Buddy Guy). She missed class registration on the road, and her parents, angry, stopped supporting her. "That's why I started playing," she says. "I had to make a living. I've got the Stones to thank for it!" At 23, she landed back in Laurel Canyon, becoming a regular on the L.A. club scene with friends like Tom Waits and Little Feat. "We all sang and played on each other's records and hung out, dated each other," she recalls. "We'd start at the Troubadour and then go to somebody's house to keep the party running." She was an idealistic Harvard college student-until a few incomparable blues musicians turned Bonnie Raitt's destiny on its ear. "I think people must wonder how a white girl like me became a blues guitarist. The truth is, I never intended to do this for a living. I grew up in Los Angeles in a Quaker family, and for me being Quaker was a political calling rather than a religious one. "In 1967 I entered Harvard as a freshman, confident-in the way that only 17-year-olds are-that I could change the world. My major was African Studies, and my plan was to travel to Tanzania, where President Julius Nyerere was creating a government based on democracy and socialism. I wanted to help undo the damage that Western colonialism had done to native cultures around the world. Cambridge was a hotbed of this kind of thinking, and I was thrilled. "Playing guitar was one of my childhood hobbies, and I had played a little at school and at camp. My parents would drag me out to perform for my family, like all parents do, but it was a hobby-nothing more. Then one day a friend called and told me that blues promoter Dick Waterman was doing an interview at WHRB (the Harvard college radio station) and asked did I want to come meet him." Bonnie remembers. "Dick was a leader of the blues revival, and he happened to live in Cambridge. Dick and I became close friends, much to the chagrin of my parents, who didn't expect their freshman daughter to be running around with 65-year-old bluesmen. I was amazed by his passion for the music and the integrity with which he managed the musicians." In her sophomore year Waterman moved to Philadelphia, and his community of musicians moved with him. "Something inside me told me that I couldn't not go with them. These people had become my friends, my mentors, and though I had every intention of graduating, I decided to take the semester off and move to Philadelphia. I went to my parents and to the Radcliffe admissions office and explained how I would never again have the same chance to learn not just about music but about life. It was an opportunity that young white girls just don't get, and as it turns out, an opportunity that changed everything." After her semester off, she went back to school, but that little bit of performing had whetted her appetite. "Then Dick called and invited me to help out on tour with the Rolling Stones. I made a second trip to the admissions office at Radcliffe and said, "I'm going to take a leave of absence, but this is only going to last a year." Imagine being 20 in 1970-wouldn't you have gone on tour with the Rolling Stones? "I still had to support myself, and that fall I was opening for Fred McDowell at the Gaslight in New York when a reporter from Newsweek spotted me. After that, a few record company scouts came to hear me play and I got a recording offer from Warner Brothers. I made my first album, and I guess it wasn't a fluke, because now I'm on my 16th. She never went back to school, and I never got to Tanzania. "But through my music I was able to contribute to political and social causes and to speak out on issues that are important to me. To this day I don't feel that I compromised. My decision to leave Harvard to go to Philadelphia with those bluesmen certainly changed me, but it was like being 13 years old and having only enough money to buy either the new Beatles record or the Bob Dylan record. It's a big choice, a deciding moment, but ultimately either path brings surprises and magic. Raitt is approaching her 30th year of sobriety. She started attending AA meetings in the mid-Eighties after losing her deal with longtime label Warner Bros. and going through a difficult breakup. Her first "sober album," 1989's Nick of Time, was a multiplatinum success that won her three Grammys. "I remember the change in her when she stopped drinking," says Browne. "It was like she just flipped a switch and this power happened in her." Raitt is still a big draw on what she calls "the Americana circuit." She adds, "My end of the music business doesn't rely so much on looks. It allows you to age more gracefully than the mainstream pop stars that are total babes. People are snarkier about them getting older. It's just terrible. So I'm actually relieved that I'm in the character actress end of the world, where I can just get more seasoned and people go, 'Oh, well, look how mythical she's become!'" Most days, at home, Raitt spends mornings hiking with friends, and then works from her home office with a staff of four. She has touring down to a science, looking online for hotel deals and doing her laundry at theaters with washers and dryers. Today, she's wearing motorcycle boots with zippers - she doesn't ride, but they're easier to get off at airport security. Raitt's tour dates often include benefits for progressive causes, like safe energy and campaign-finance reform. She also finds time for the romantic relationship she's been in for more than a decade, her longest since her eight-year marriage to actor Michael O'Keefe ended in 1999. "It's not a joined-at-the-hip relationship," she says. "I like my independence. I have a full life." In March, she'll begin a two-year tour. She's already planning daytime adventures like seeing music at New Orleans Jazz Fest and exploring old railroad tracks that have been converted to bike paths along the East Coast. "They're usually under a canopy of trees or along a river, so it's really beautiful," she says, smiling. "You get to see a lot more when you're up in the daytime." |
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| Out & About Tuesday, November 3 Waiting out the virus: Cold Shott & The Hurricane Horns www.coldshott.com The Sugar Thieves www.sugarthieves.com Gary Zak & The Outbacks www.outbackbluesband.com Hans Olson www.hansolson.net Rocket 88s www.rocket88s.net JC& The Rockers www.thejukerockers.com Carvin Jones www.carvinjones.com Hoodoo Casters www.hoodoocasters.com Rhythm Room ÂÂÂwww.rhythmroom.com ÂÂÂÂÂÂÂÂÂ Nina Curri www.ninacurri.com Paris James www.parisjames.com Mother Road Trio www.motherroadtrio.com Blues Review Band Reverbnationbluesmanmike Mike Eldred www.mikeeldredtrio.com Big Daddy D & The Dynamites Facebook Cadillac Assembly Line Facebook Innocent Joe and the Hostile Witnesses Facebook Chuck Hall Facebook Pop Top Facebook Wednesday, November 4 Thursday, November 5 Hans Olson, 6 p.m., Handlebar, Apache Junction Mike Eldred Trio, EVERY THURSDAY, 7 p.m., Kazamierz, Scottsdale Friday, November 6 Blues Review Band, 6 p.m., Voodoo Daddy's, Tempe Leon J, 1:30 p.m., DA Ranch, Cornville Saturday, November 7 Leon J, 1:30 p.m., DA Ranch, Cornville BluZone Duo, 6 p.m., Voodoo Daddy's,Tempe Sunday, November 8 Leon J, 3 p.m., Pima Plaza, Cornville Mike Eldred, NOON, Sanctuary, Phoenix Monday, November 9
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Moved? Changed email addresses? Please let us know of any changes in your address, email, or phone number so we can keep you informed about the Blues community in Arizona. Email us at: info@phoenixblues.org or write to: Phoenix Blues Society P.O. Box 36874 Phoenix, Arizona 85067 |
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