Audio By Carbonatix
Conventional wisdom has it that the blues is undergoing yet another “revival”– witness the success of such artists as Robert Cray, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and the Fabulous Thunderbirds. Cray has made it big by injecting pop, soul and gospel into his urban blues style. Vaughan seems to rely more on flashy, neo-Hendrix technique than on blues roots. The Austin-based Fabulous Thunderbirds sound more like clones of ZZ Top with each new recording.
The irony of this blues revival is that it appears necessary for the musicians to dilute the blues element in their music in order to achieve that success.
It depends on how much you want to bend. Guitarist Ivan E. “Buddy” Reed is one blues player who hasn’t, and it’s exacted a toll on his career. Now he’s returned to his Phoenix base to try to put things back together.
Reed, 41, is familiar to many Phoenicians as the original guitarist and front man for local bluesmasters the Rocket 88s from about 1982 to 1984. He has recently returned to the Valley with the hope of rejuvenating his musical fortunes with KJZZ disc jockey Bob Corritore’s band, the Blues Keepers.
“I’ve never thought about giving up the blues for rock ‘n’ roll,” says Reed. “In fact, the term `rock ‘n’ roll’ has been pretty badly misused since about 1959. The true, real rock ‘n’ roll is an extension of the blues. I don’t use that term because it gives people the wrong impression, but I consider myself a rock ‘n’ roll guitar player in the truest sense of the word. One is just a modified version of the other.
“It’s been a frustrating struggle, but it’s such a part of me, I don’t know what I’d do instead of playing blues. I’d stop playing altogether before I would change the style of music that I play. I couldn’t change that any more than I could change the way the wind blows.”
Reed got his start over twenty years ago during the first “blues revival” as a member of Bacon Fat, a legendary Southern California outfit led by veteran harpist-vocalist George “Harmonica” Smith and his apprentice, Rod Piazza. “I got a lot of good experience playing with that band–we played with a lot of greats in the blues world,” says Reed. “And George Smith was a super nice guy, a real character, that’s for sure. He and a lot of those old blues musicians had a lot of the old vaudeville influences in their act–he’d come up with stuff that didn’t mean anything to anybody else but him or the chosen few around him. He was really goodhearted, didn’t have a big ego, was real generous–a great guy.”
Bacon Fat caught the attention of British record producer Mike Vernon, who was busy promoting British bands like John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, Fleetwood Mac, and Savoy Brown in addition to European tours by visiting American bluesmen. Vernon ended up producing four albums by the group on his Blue Horizon label and brought it over to England for a tour in 1970. Although it was an exciting time for the young musicians, just barely out of their teens, they weren’t always happy with the recorded results.
“He [Vernon] was into using all these effects, like wah-wah pedals and all that jive–I like the music played straight,” Reed says. “I was embarrassed by some of that stuff–here we had a real chance to really show what we were as a blues band, and here we are, stuck in the studio with these weird ideas these guys are trying to come up with. That’s not what the blues is all about. Blues is like traditional folk music to me, interpreted your own way.”
By the early Seventies, the blues boom was over, however, and the members of Bacon Fat found themselves scrambling for gigs in Southern California. The band was part of a rock ‘n’ roll revival package tour, backing up performers like Joe Turner and Big Mama Thornton, when Reed decided to make a change: “We were on one of those tours when we hooked up with Little Richard–they were getting ready to make some changes in the band and the gig was offered, so I took it.” Reed spent the next six months as Richard’s guitarist, traveling throughout the South and spending several weeks in Las Vegas.
But the same problem cropped up. “It was fun for a while,” says Reed, “and then it got to be a drag, ’cause I’m a blues player, you know. But I could not pass up an opportunity to play with Little Richard, one of my favorite idols of all time.”
Reed returned to Southern California, but it wasn’t long before he was back on the road in a different band. It was in a bar in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he first met current Rocket 88s Bill and Susie Tarsha, who had a group called the Muskadine Blues Band. “Bill was great–he blew my mind on the harp,” Reed says. “They invited me to their house, and the next thing I knew, we were playing together. We played a bunch of festivals, played with Muddy Waters, Junior Wells, and Buddy Guy, and had a lot of fun.” Reed stayed with the group for about two years, traveling all over the eastern half of the country, before returning to California where he’d left a wife and daughter.
In California, he contacted bassist Jerry Smith and drummer Richard Innes, both former members of Bacon Fat, and began to play gigs as a front man and leader for the first time. This trio evolved into an acoustic quartet called Gutbucket, which played a mixture of blues and “old-timey” country music. Eventually, Gutbucket came to Prescott, Arizona, and Buddy once again hooked up with the Tarshas, who had moved to Phoenix to play the blues. Thus, Buddy Reed and the Rocket 88s were born.
They even brought Reed’s old mentor, George “Harmonica” Smith, out from Los Angeles to play some memorable gigs at the old Chuy’s in Tempe and at Warsaw Wally’s in Phoenix. In 1983 the band released one album (Short Dress Woman, on Trash Records), but Reed and Jerry Smith left the band to return to California.
A lot of the group’s fans have wondered why Reed left. He explains: “A big part of it was, I wanted to move back to California because I really missed my kid [his daughter Ruby, now twelve]. I hadn’t seen very much of her, and that’s a real heartbreaking thing.” But Reed doesn’t deny that there were differences within the group: “Bill and I are two different people, and that’s two different, fairly strong egos in that band, and we have our own ideas as to where we want to go musically.” (However, the two musicians remained friends, and Tarsha was instrumental in encouraging Reed to return to Phoenix this year.)
From 1984 to 1987, Reed played throughout Southern California and Arizona fronting a trio called the Rip-It-Ups; an album called Tough Enough was released on a small local label in 1985, but it received poor distribution, and the group eventually disbanded. “Me and Rod Piazza,” Reed says, “are the only guys from Bacon Fat that are still playing music for a living–of course, Rod’s been successful at it [with his current band, the Mighty Flyers], while I’ve been here and there, just tryin’ to hang on.”
There are the occasional hot moments–like a big blues festival Reed was part of last summer in Italy–but he sounds frustrated and a little bitter about the twists and turns of his career. “I’ve been fortunate in a lot of ways, in that I’ve been accepted by a lot of people, and I’m real grateful for that–but as far as getting invited on things that I’d like to be invited to, where I should be invited on, because other people that were in their diapers when I was recording on Blue Horizon . . . but Phoenix has always treated me real nice, and I’m grateful for it.”
Despite the setbacks, he sounds optimistic. “The situation with Bob Corritore seems real good,” Reed says. “He’s an easy man to get along with, and he’s a great harp player. Our other two guys in the band, that I guess Bob’s been playing with for about six months, Paul Meyer [on bass] and Gerry Kendrick [on drums], are real good players–they’re real open, and I think we got a chance to do something with them.” Reed says the band’s name will change from the Blues Keepers to Buddy Reed and the Rip-It-Ups featuring Bob Corritore. The name change is prompted by the reissue of Reed’s Tough Enough album on the British Red Lightning label. “It seems like the thing to do,” Reed says. “All the American blues labels are so jaded now, it’s impossible to get on a label–but the Europeans, it’s the same old thing. If you can’t get recorded here, they’re willing to take you in over there.”
When he’s on this side of the Atlantic, Reed’s planning to play the blues primarily in the Valley.
“I think in this town, there’s a chance where I’ll be able to play music for a living,” Reed says. “That’s why I’m here, that’s why I came back, because I’ve done better in this town than I’ve done anywhere else. . . . I’m not looking to make it big, I just want to play music and make a living–that’s all I want.
