 Still Kickin'
by Mark T. Gould
Some people play the blues. Some people have the blues. But, legendary singer Nick Gravenites is different. He's a bluesman. " Being a 'bluesman' is the total blues life. It has to do with philosophy," the 67-year-old Gravenites said in a recent interview with Sound Waves. "The life, in general, doesn't ask much from you in terms of personality. It doesn't ask that you be a genius, or a saint. You could be a thief, you could be a pervert, you could be an alcoholic, all of that stuff, and, many (bluesmen) are, but they just ask that you be able to pay the stuff. That's all." "It's not a demanding career," he continued." Just be a good player, have a knack for the playing. It's an easy, slothful kind of life. But, to be successful, you have to have a combination of smarts and luck." For Gravenites, it has clearly been a more than four decades career of smarts, luck, and incredible talent. Now, after a short sabbatical away from the music business, he's returned, as one of the featured performers in the "Chicago Blues Reunion." Along with vocalist Tracy Nelson, keyboardist and longtime friend Barry Goldberg, guitarist Harvey Mandel and original Butterfield Blues Band drummer Sam Lay, among others, the band has released a combination CD/DVD on July 12, and hits the road this summer for several shows, including an appearance at B.B.King's Club in New York City, which will be Gravenites' first show in the Northeast in several years. The "Blues Reunion," he explains, started out as a one-off benefit and grew from there. "It was a little after 9/11, and the San Francisco Blues Festival had a show scheduled, and, of course, very few people showed up, and the Festival was in dire financial straits, so Steve Miller and some of his rich friends decided to do something to try to help them out," Gravenites said, chuckling. "Steve said he would play there under the name 'Chicago Blues Reunion.' And there was me, Charlie Musselwhite, Barry (Goldberg), and who ever else was around from the mid Sixties. It was a giant success, the show went very well, and the Festival was back in the black. "Then, we went to Chicago, without Miller but with Charlie and Tracy Nelson and Sammy Lay, and did a similar thing at the Chicago Blues Festival, " he said. "We just kept it going, minus Miller and Charlie, who had their own careers going. We decided to keep the group together, we all get along, which is pretty unusual in this business, we all had 40 years of this under our belts. We're all survivors and managed to make a life for ourselves." "It is a romantic notion and it was how it happened. We were having a ball," he said. "We weren't being assaulted, we weren't being threatened. Those were the dream times, not only for the white guys learning the blues, but also for the players who were getting out of the ghetto and into the white society. "They (the black bluesmen) were curious about us, too. It was that interaction, that two-way street," Gravenites added. "It wasn't just listening to the records and learning how to play. It was getting to meet these people and dealing with them as humans. That was the difference between, say, Mike Bloomfield and Eric Clapton. Eric learned his stuff from records and playing a little with some blues people who came over from Chicago, but we dealt with them as people, shared a bottle of wine with them. "Chicago was pretty much sealed up, racially, there was very little race mixing, but I wasn't scared, he said. "The culture was different then, there wasn't all this shooting, bombs and machine guns, in the black neighborhoods or the white neighborhoods. There was fighting, sure, people would duke it out, but there wasn't the murder all the time. "Hey, I was like a hoodlum then, I was armed most of the time. I was the original 'Blues Brother,' stoned, drunk, crazy, hanging around the ghetto. People left me alone. I enjoyed it. My life wasn't in danger. It all changed after people were assassinated, particularly Martin Luther King. It'll never happen again, it was a dream time, an absolute explosion of creativity." And, Gravenites said, the dues that were owed to the originators, like Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, and a host of others, were paid back. "Most of us spent many hours paying back those people for what they taught us. We had a responsibility to try to help if we could," he said. "We did the 'Fathers & Sons' album. I produced a couple of albums for Otis Rush. Mike Bloomfield was essentially responsible for getting B.B. King out of the chitlin' circuit and into the Fillmore, playing for the white audiences. He did that single-handedly. Michael was responsible for the white blues scene in Chicago, getting those players to come to the North Side." It was a time, and a situation, Gravenites said, that would never happen again. And, it gave him a perspective on the blues as a career, for a bluesman. Yet, he hesitates, given the lifestyle, to recommend it to others. "I don't know...I'm not really a careerist kind of guy. Making a living playing blues is not my favorite topic," he said, laughing. "How to make a living playing blues is 'play country and western.' Everybody loves the blues, but you can go broke trying to play it. Blues is your passion, your inspiration, I've heard that from many people, but jeez, it's hard to make money off of it." And, those formative, early days gave Gravenites a personal perspective on the late Butterfield and Bloomfield, his two running buddies at the time, musicians he played and jammed with on many nights, but, for whom, careers would be cut short by the temptations of the night and the road. " 'Butter' was a very tragic person. You can always find some kind of justified craziness for some people, you know, Janis Joplin, Michael (Bloomfield), various other people in the business, but for Paul it seemed particularly tragic," he said. "You know, Janis and Michael, they were both crazy people, and that's the lifestyle they chose. But, for Paul, it was more pitiful than anything. I didn't feel any pity for Janis or Michael. Paul just made a lot of bad moves and none of them worked out for him. "Paul and I started playing together when he was 15, 16 years old, in the late Fifties. I first heard him at the Folklore Society at the University of Chicago. He was playing some harmonica, doing folk songs. I wasn't particularly impressed with his playing in the early days because nobody was really any good, other than Mike Bloomfield. We were just learning out stuff, learning our craft. He (Butterfield) wanted to be a professional musician, but he didn't get really good at his instrument until about 1963. He got really good by then. "Bloomfield had the passion for playing. The guy just had talent, and he also had some training. He took some guitar lessons. I don't think Paul (Butterfield) ever took a harmonica lesson," Gravenites continued. "Mike had a knack for sounding exactly like someone. Like Brownie McGhee, for instance. Same authenticity, same finger style, same chording. That was really hard to do." "Most people could get close, but Mike could play it the way it was supposed to be played. He had a real passion for accuracy and authenticity that was lacking in most other people. He was like a student of music," he said. "He ran a small coffee house in Chicago and he'd hire the players that he wanted to learn from, like Little Brother Montgomery and Big Joe Williams. He'd hire them just so he could see how their fingers moved. He learned from the people who invented it." Gravenites' friendship with Butterfield and Bloomfield, who joined forces in the original Butterfield Blues Band, enabled him to be present when that group backed Bob Dylan, in the infamous "going electric" show at the Newport Folk Festival, 40 years ago this summer. "I was still a street guy at that time, hanging with Butter, my old friend, and I'd had a band with Bloomfield just before he went with Butter. I knew all the guys in that band, I used to sit in with them," Gravenites recalled. " I also knew their manager, Albert Grossman, so I was part of the entourage (going to Newport). I drove out from Chicago with them. Butter wanted friends and fans with him (when they played Newport), he wanted some support." "I had no idea that Dylan was this hot bed of all this, you know, going electric. I mean, all the bands I knew had been electric for years. Albert said to me, 'you drive him (Dylan), you're the driver,' " Gravenites said. "Bob didn't say a single word to me. He obviously had a lot on his mind. He (Dylan) was always a mysterious, poetic character, I liked him for that. Bloomfield had introduced me to him at folk clubs in New York before that. He was just a normal, nice, Midwestern, Jewish guy, with manners." It was a difficult day, Gravenites remembered, not only for Dylan, but also for the Butterfield Blues Band. "A lot of the vested interests didn't want to see these white kids playing the blues, they wanted to see slaves with axes," he recalled. "There was a lot of controversy in the air, a lot of booing of Dylan. They wanted to hear the old folk songs. It was kinda weird, but we were used to weird." A couple of years later, Gravenites joined another racially mixed band, the incredible Electric Flag, which, in 1967, released "A Long Time Comin,'" which remains one of the finest, strongest records of its time. The band imploded soon after that, which, looking back, seems to be no surprise to Gravenites. "It was like an artificial group. It wasn't an organic group that had been together for a long time. A lot of the people didn't know each other," he said. "There were a lot of personality conflicts because we didn't know each other as people, never mind as musicians. It was a mess. There were too many drug problems, too many career ambitions. The band really only lasted about nine months. It was a little spark and then it was gone. "It was good album. I remember that some of the gigs we did were spectacular. Some of the rehearsals we did, at the end when only a few people were hanging around, was some of the best music I've ever heard in my life." For now, then, Gravenites will concentrate on the "Chicago Blues Reunion," which has thrust him back, at least to some extent, into performing and traveling again. "I retired a couple of years ago, for about two years," he remembered. "I said, 'that's it, man, I gotta get the mud outta my soul.' I was burned out. I had nothing left. I needed a couple of years off to get the smell of death off of me. I'd playing gigs in bars and clubs, just like a lot of my heroes used to do." "Think about how many years those black blues players played, with no one knowing who they were or what they did," he said. "What does a guy do? When you play blues, you play it whether you are successful or not. So far, so good. I'm ready to go on the road again. This is the way I want to spend my old age." And, if his career is any guide, he will continue to be successful, playing the music, and living the lifestyle of the bluesman, that he was taught in his sweet hometown of Chicago, those many years ago. |
