THE ROADS ARE CLEAR and dry across the palm of mitten-shaped Michigan on the last Sunday night in January. It’s quiet in East Lansing. Some of the student joints on the edge of Michigan State University are already dark at 8 o’clock. Yet two miles west of campus, on a weathered strip of Michigan Avenue, there’s no room to park, sit or breathe at the Green Door Blues Bar.
The partyers look away from their Budweisers long enough to cheer the Whoodoo Band, six middle-aged musicians dressed in black and clinging to a dream. The dance floor, where bandanas, tight jeans and butt grabs are in vogue, fills as lead guitarist Kevin Nichols swings his red and white Fender Stratocaster and begins singing:
Got a long way to go, but I got me all night/ Road atlas map with Tennessee in my sights /Half-pint of whiskey, I’m down to two cigarettes /I could sleep right now, but I ain’t done ridin’ yet! /
Cuz I’m going down to Memphis/And I’m headed straight for Beale/Gonna get knee-deep in blues/Gonna see just, see just how it feels!
Sendoffs like tonight’s are under way all over the U.S. Whoodoo is one of more than 120 local qualifiers headed to Memphis for the International Blues Challenge–the self-proclaimed “largest gathering of blues artists in the world.”
The annual event, launched 21 years ago with just a dozen acts, now has competitors from eight foreign nations and 32 states (though no acts from Chicago). The contestants will vie for the title of “Best Unsigned Blues Band” and more than $25,000 in cash and prizes. In an age of cellophane pop stars created by record companies, the Blues Foundation stages the contest to revive the up-from-the-Delta calling that led Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, B.B. King and so many others to grow this distinctly American genre of music.
For Whoodoo, it’s a return trip, a chance at redemption after failing to qualify for the final night of competition last year. And it’s a gut check, a time to ask themselves whether they’re good enough to chuck their day jobs and grind it out on the road. The Green Door is the third gig in a self-booked, two-week tour with stops at a roadhouse in Angola, Ind., a bowling alley in Alpena, Mich., top clubs in Cleveland, Louisville, Indianapolis, Cincinnati and, in four more nights, Memphis.
For these two weeks, Nichols, 41, isn’t a graphic artist; he’s just “Kev,” the songwriter. Jim Kaiser, 37, isn’t repairing those diagnostic machines you look into at the eye doctor’s office; he’s “Jimmy the Bulldog,” a keyboard player in mirrored shades and black fedora. The round, 43-year-old drummer isn’t writing mortgages; he’s Rex “The Other White Meat” Hambone. The bassist, Mikey Shafley, 45, has traded the knit cap he wears in a chilly cleaning-supply warehouse for a leather porkpie hat. Fifty-three-year-old Linda Rose is long gone from the Las Vegas casinos where she carted drinks for more than 20 years. Instead, she’s doing what she believes she was always meant to do: Play harmonica.
And, right now, T.C. DeLisle, 55, isn’t an auto mechanic; he’s a grizzled slide-guitar player.
“If I never pick up another wrench, it’s too soon,” he says the day after the Green Door gig.
He’s in what’s left of T.C.’s Garage, his shop southeast of Lansing in the village of Napoleon (pop. 1,250), where front-end alignments start at $49.95 and Whoodoo’s CD is on sale for $15. Two employees now fix the cars. T.C. mostly stays in back, where he has transformed half of the auto bays into his own blues club, the BLUEStage.
The BLUEStage habitually loses money. It stays open mainly because a raucous party last summer raised $14,900. After more than 30 years in business, T.C. has no savings. When it’s too cold to stay in the Airstream behind the BLUEStage, he and his wife, Jacqui, live in a 200-square-foot room above the garage.
“I sit in the club at the end of each show and get that magic little buzz-it’s like ‘Field of Dreams,’ ” T.C. says. “My retirement plan, if I can’t fend for myself, is to rob a bank, walk across state lines, and turn myself in. That’s three hots and a cot in federal prison for the rest of my life.”
The band’s finances aren’t much better. The Memphis tour will bring in enough to break even-$2,500 and a few free meals and hotel rooms. If they could just make the finals in Memphis, get some notice, book better gigs on bigger stages, they figure maybe they could stop punching clocks.
The band sets out from the BLUEStage on Tuesday morning, crammed into three vehicles: T.C.’s van, which has 257,000 miles and a “BLUZMAN” license plate; an old Pontiac minivan; and a $3,900 Winnebago they call the S.S. Whoodoo. The destination is Fat Fish Blue, a Blues-themed barbecue joint in downtown Cleveland.
The bar is all but empty for happy hour. At 8 p.m., Kev breaks into Whoodoo’s opening song, “Bringin’ Home the Blues,” but Hambone’s drums and Mikey’s bass echo wildly off the concrete walls of the deserted club and the sound man hasn’t a clue how to fix it. The second set isn’t much better. It opens with a table of lubricated accountant types yelling for “Stairway to Heaven.”
The only encore is an argument with the manager over the band’s drink tab. Fourteen hours after leaving home, after gas, lunch and cocktails, Whoodoo’s $350 fee leaves each musician with well below minimum wage.
The next night’s venue is Stevie Ray’s Blues Bar in Louisville, situated across from a cold storage warehouse. The bar’s walls are covered with posters of blues greats-Stevie Ray Vaughan, of course, Jimmy Reed, Big Mama Thornton, dozens more. There’s no pool table, no video golf, no kitchen, no store full of shot glasses and T-shirts-no diversion from the stage. Jimmy sits at the bar drinking a Bailey’s and coffee.
“As bad as last night was, I’d still rather do this than anything else,” he says.
Linda nods. “I’ve had so many jobs I didn’t want to do.”
She’s fought a deep cough and runny nose for days. Now a cold sore blooms across her upper lip-right where the harmonica must run-but she pays it little mind.
“This isn’t adversity,” she says. “I’ve seen adversity.”
A girlfriend in Pasadena, Calif., gave Linda a harmonica when she was 14 to entertain herself on the walk along the railroad tracks between their houses. Soon, Linda started hearing licks in her head and liberating them through cupped hands. With visions of a stage career, she ran away from home, using a fake I.D. to sneak into a San Diego club for her first gig at age 17.
ut life got in the way. There was the birth of a daughter and a move to Vegas, where she began working casino floors, from the Golden Nugget to the Mirage. The harp licks grew more infrequent, though she occasionally sat in at a back-alley blues joint. It was there in the mid-1970s that Willie Nelson heard about her in between gigs at the Golden Nugget. He introduced himself in the Keno parlor where she was working, and they wound up playing together that night at a packed dive bar by the airport. Soon, the movie “Honeysuckle Rose” revived Nelson’s career. Linda stayed in the Keno lounge.
Eventually she moved to Michigan and married a former Marine named Bill Taliaferro, who encouraged her to resume her music. She ended up at the BLUEStage after asking a music shop for the nearest open microphone.
On stage, she still displays the toned calves of the cocktail waitress. Her black bangs vibrate as she wails. In her most intense solos, she lurches forward, eyes closed, and cries over Whoodoo’s three guitars.
“There really is a zone,” she explains. “I call it opening the gate. The hair rises on your neck; you become something larger than yourself.”
It’s another sparse crowd at Stevie Ray’s Wednesday night, but the soundman’s a pro and the band is cooking: Kev grinning and skipping in mid-song; T.C. cracking jokes, resting his slide guitar across his small boulder of a belly, working the neck with the ring finger of his left hand, goateed mouth open, bushy eyebrows furrowed as the strings talk back to him. Mikey picks and smiles, his eyes hidden by Blues Brothers sunglasses. It’s a fine paid rehearsal for Memphis.
Road cuisine is a heart-clogging succession of grab-and-gos and Thursday’s lunch at a Tennessee truck stop is no exception: corn dogs, thickly breaded chicken thighs, and, for Mikey, a wicked combo of fried gizzards and chocolate doughnuts. The food goes down easily. But as the caravan enters Memphis, the near-miss at last year’s International Blues Challenge still sticks in Whoodoo’s craw.
They had come to Beale Street fresh from winning their qualifying round in Detroit. Nervous at first, they quickly overcame it and hit their stride the first night. The rules of the Blues Challenge are simple: 10 venues, eight acts each. Each act gets 30 minutes on stage both Thursday and Friday. Judges score the bands on talent, blues content, originality and stage presence. Ten bands-one from each bar-advance to the Saturday night finals before an audience of record company reps, booking agents and hundreds of the most enthusiastic blues fans on the planet.
Concluding their Friday night performance, the band members were sure they’d made the finals after several of the judges pulled Kev aside and told him to be ready to play Saturday.
But when the finalists were announced, the Whoodoo Band was not among them. Kev still smarts at how the judges misled him. “That’s a cruel thing to say to somebody when you end up standing there for 90 minutes waiting for them to call your name and it never comes.”
This year, the band members hit neon-drenched Beale Street shortly after dark on Thursday. Kev is strolling uphill, guitar case in one hand, his girlfriend Stacy’s hand in his other. A cacophony of blues drifts out of Wet Willie’s, Alfred’s, The Rum Boogie CafZ, Mr. Handy’s Blues Hall.
Long past his days as an all-conference high school basketball guard, it’s as if Kev has consciously conjured the blues into his life. In the past year, he’s taken to smoking a pack of Marlboro Lights a day and traded a comfortable three-bedroom ranch with his wife and two daughters for a trailer down the road from Jackson State Prison. It’s Stacy’s place, a home that shows the wear of a 30-year-old single mom trying to keep it together for three kids on a bartender’s wage.
Kev’s marriage had been coming apart for some time. When he found the BLUEStage three years ago, it became his sanctuary. After last year’s trip to Memphis, he told his family he needed to be away even more, needed to get more songs out of his head. They felt stabbed and told him they’d long considered themselves to be in line well behind his music. All the while, Stacy, the pretty blond behind the bar at the BLUEStage, was smiling at him. After a gig last June, the flirting turned to more and, as one of Kev’s songs goes, wrong felt so right.
Even after the divorce is final, Kev plans to pay most of the bills at his old house. The checkbook is the easy part. Emotions are where he’s overdrawn. He’s in love again, but the final thing he thinks about every night in Stacy’s bed is the fracture with his kids. Haunted by that strain, he briefly quit the band last fall, just as Whoodoo was playing at its tightest. But he couldn’t stay away. His songwriting has never been better. The lyrics often come in the middle of the night. He records them on his voice mail so sleep doesn’t steal the words.
Kev and Stacy turn into Club 152 near the top of Beale Street. The first band thumps out bass-heavy rhythms while another plays upstairs. Whoodoo settles into a long table up front with a view of B.B. King’s place across street. They’re loose. T.C. lights a Camel, looks around, and declares himself happy to avoid the second floor.
“Lots of stairs,” he grins into his Jim Beam. “I’ve got three fat guys in this band to worry about-and a chick who wears bad shoes!”
There’s a jumble of guitar cases as Whoodoo prepares to follow some guys from Oklahoma. Linda strolls across the dance floor, revealing a tight black dress under her trench coat, and steps onstage holding two plastic cups: Jim Beam for calm and a shot of Cuervo Gold to numb the cold sore. She takes in half the tequila, looks down at husband Bill and gives the thumbs up.
Finally, after Cleveland and Louisville, they’re singing to a crowd again. And it’s growing. “Bringin’ Home the Blues,” gets two judges tapping out the rhythms on their scoresheets. The third judge sings along-“I never look for trouble, it always looks for me”-by the middle of Whoodoo’s second number.
Six songs in 30 minutes. The third one is the killer. “Angel,” it’s called and starts with Kev letting out five lonely notes-C quickly into C-sharp, a bent E note, F-sharp and A-reminiscent of legendary guitarists like Albert Collins and Stevie Ray. . .
You try to tell me you’re an ang-eh-eh-eh-lll/ But I don’t see you when I dream. / Yeah, you try to tell me you’re an ang-eh-eh-eh-lll, / But I don’t see you when I dream. / Unless we’re talking ’bout nightmares. / The kind that make me wake up and start to scream.
Kev’s shaved head is glazed in sweat. Linda leans inches from his Stratocaster, moaning through her harp, opening her gate. Kev steps forward for his solo, a minute-long, back-arching, up-and-down-the-guitar-neck dance. The bulging crowd pushes forward in a roar as he ends the solo with a snarled question:
“You FEELIN’ this yet?”
One more verse to go. It’s one of Kev’s late-night voicemails.
You’re just a DEVIL, baby!/ Yeah, you’re just a devil baby, / With a hellfire burnin’ in your veins. / Cuz only a devil kind of woman, / Could leave such a long, long trail of pain.
They own the camera-flashing crowd again on Friday night. And when the lights go up, a guy walks to the stage and shouts to Kev: “Man, you were great, you’re like a wild horse up there. You need a bigger stage!”
“I’m workin’ on it,” Kev tells him.
The long hours till the finalists are announced begin to unwind. Kev starts a series of beers. Jimmy sits against a wall with his black fedora over his eyes. Linda twirls a red rose husband Bill bought her.
Finally, at 2 a.m., an official walks to the mike and starts breaking hearts. “OK, we’re going to announce finalists in alphabetical order by club:
Alfred’s . . . Debbie Ritter & 4-40;
B.B. King’s . . . The Teeny Tucker Band;
Blues City CafZ . . . The Kory Montgomery Band;
Club 152 . . .The Whoodoo Band.”
Mikey leaps first. Linda pumps her fist: “Yes!!” Kev jumps into Stacy’s arms, let’s out a deep, guttural yell-” HAAAAAH! HAAAAAH!”-careens to a dark corner and dances a jig. They all tumble into the street and skip back toward the S.S. Whoodoo, laughing, hugging, laughing some more as Mikey stops in the street and offers his best Mary Tyler Moore: a twirl, toss of the hat, and a falsetto verse of “We’re gonna make it after all!”
Eighteen hours later, the 750 seats at the New Daisy Theater are sold out by the time Chip Eagle, publisher of Blues Revue Magazine, sets the finals in motion. “If there is a street of dreams, its name is Beale,” he shouts.
It’s a four-hour parade of done-me-wrongs as sassy keyboard players and cocky guitarists try to one-up each other after “Lady Sunshine,” an oversized Detroiter in a cherry dress, opens the night to cat calls: “My husband don’t love me, he only wants what’s under my dress,” she wails.
Whoodoo draws excellent position-the seventh slot. But the number seven has no mojo for them tonight.
Taking the stage, they explode into “Goin’ Down to Memphis.” But it’s too loud, and the crowd is a little overwhelmed by the combo of T.C.’s slide guitar and Kev’s Stratocaster. On “Angel,” Linda’s blowing as hard as she can, but the mix is off, the crowd can’t hear her. They fix the sound for the closer, “Wrong is Alright,” but it’s too late. Though the applause is good, good isn’t good enough tonight.
The winner turns out to be Jimmy Gilmore, a South Floridian with a B.B. King sound. He stands grinning with his trophy as Whoodoo loads up their gear out back.
“Well, I guess we can’t quit our day jobs yet, eh?” Hambone concludes.
Six cities, nine gigs and 1,600 miles in 11 days and they still have two more shows to go. T.C. has scored a fistful of business cards-maybe enough for another tour. Kev, though, is deflated. He takes three heavy steps into the S.S. Whoodoo, slumps next to Stacy and reflects on Whoodoo’s perfect sound back home at the BLUEStage .
“I’m done with competitions,” he says. “I just wanna play. I just wanna play.”
