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All Ages
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Jim Chilson on Resurrection of The Deep Blues Festival
Interview Via Triggerman at the always terrific Saving Country Music
After a one year hiatus, the legendary Deep Blues Festival will be re-emerging this year on July 16th in Cleveland, OH. Deep Blues ran for three years under the vision of Chris Johnson up in Minnesota, but because of financial concerns, had to be discontinued last year. This year the torch has been picked up by Jim Chilson of the blues band the Ten Foot Polecats, Ted from The Scissormen, and others to make sure the legacy of Deep Blues remains alive.
The first three years of the Deep Blues Festival forged a strong music community from both a fan and musician perspective, and was seminal in creating the underground/independent roots movement that exists today. Jim Chilson was kind enough to give me some of his time to talk about why he decided to rekindle the Deep Blues flame, and about the difficulty some blues-based bands find being accepted in the traditional blues music circles.
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Triggerman: One of the primary things that helped form the underground roots movement was the Deep Blues Festival. There was no Deep Blues Fest last year. This year you’re starting anew. What made you decide to re-start the Deep Blues Festival?
Jim Chilson: Just for the love of the music of course. Basically we saw a big empty hole when it faded away and there were a lot of disappointed people, and a lot of them were the musicians themselves. Chris Johnson has put together a great festival over the last few years. It gave a home to blues that was not liked in the typical blues circles. It was great to see all these musicians for around the world coming together and discovering each other, as well as the fans coming from all over the world. It’s a big financial burden, as Chris Johnson can tell you himself. He lost quite a bit, and that’s the reason it didn’t happen last year. When I was talking with Ted of The Scissormen about touring this summer and we were trying to figure out some spots and what not, he said “Let’s try to get a festival going.” I said “OK great!” He called Chrish Johnson, asked him if we could use the name and he said “Go for it.”
Triggerman: When you mention blues, your average Joe six pack might think of BB King or Eric Clapton. The blues the Deep Blues Festival was emphasizing was the blues that had fallen through the cracks: the punk-infused blues or the dirty blues. You also had bands like Those Poor Bastards and .357 String Band, bands that if you hear the music, don’t fit intuitively together, but you put them all in one place and they all work together.
Jim Chilson: It’s very open-minded people as far as the music goes. There’s no barriers. If you’re making good music, people like it. The blues societies are a weird thing. They seem to put up these barriers and say “This is blues, this is not.” That’s why it’s nice to see this (Deep Blues Fest), to see people open to whatever you’re creating. Because you could say blues is the first American music. From rock n’ roll to country and bluegrass. So it’s frustrating to see those barriers go up by the blues societies, because it’s infused in everything.
Triggerman: I find it funny that you’re saying certain blues circles don’t really see your music as blues, because I see Ten Foot Polecats as pretty straightforward blues. Maybe you bring a little more energy, but you’ve studied blues, you play on 5 strings, you don’t have a bass player. And you’re trying to cultivate a sound from a very specific part of the country.
Jim Chilson: Yes, our basis is North Mississippi Hill Country blues, which I think is a lot more open sounding as far a blues goes. It’s groove music. For some people, blues music is a lot of visuals. If you come out and you’re not in your fedora and pin stripped suit, you don’t have a bass player, they don’t think you’re blues.
Triggerman: To me, when it comes to purity in music, the first question I ask is, “Is there a tie to the roots of that music?” If there is a litmus test, that would be it. And if I look at the lineup for the Deep Blues Festival either this year or previous years, that litmus test would be covered by all these bands. And depending on your perspective, you could say some of those bands fit that test better than bands that are more widely popular for playing the blues.
When it was announced that the Deep Blues Festival was no longer going to be happening, I read this quote from MA Litler, a filmmaker out of Germany that has stuck with me on ninebullets.net.
"I reckon most visitors of the Deep Blues Festival agree that the masses have a piss poor musical taste and that’s where the problem lies and will forever lie: It’s mostly drivel that sells, and the good stuff gets filed under “obscure”. The little man inside my head tells me that Chris Johnson knew this from the get go and did it all anyway. To me that is more heroic than doing something based on the belief that it will prosper. Like Dylan Thomas, Chris raged against the dying of the light…but Chris, folks get what they deserve…and they did not deserve Deep Blues."
I found that to be prophetic, about how the most beautiful things in life seem to be taken from us one by one as the years pass by. But I wonder what your perspective is on looking at putting this festival together. Can Deep Blues be an annual event?
Jim Chilson: Everything depends on the fans these days. And there’s a lot of great fans in this scene. To consistently keep this going we need to try to get the word out to more people. I know that’s always the toughest thing to do. Yeah, I’d say we got to go slow, and hopefully we’ll get lucky and something will hit, and make it a great event for all these blues musicians.
Triggerman: Having never been to the Deep Blues Festivals, when I research them, I find above and beyond just the music itself, I find a very deep community that was created from those first three festivals.
Jim Chilson: You hit it on the head. This is a very tight knit community. When you play your set, what happens next is you go down in the crowd and talk to people. Everyone’s together on this.
Deep Blues Festival 2011 Lineup:
LEFT LANE CRUISER (FT. Wayne, IN)
SCISSORMEN (Nashville, TN)
TEN FOOT POLECATS (Boston, MA)
THE STAVING CHAIN (Toledo, OH)
MARK PORKCHOP HOLDER (Chattanooga, TN)
MOLLY GENE ONE WHOAMAN BAND (Kansas City, MO)
OLD GRAY MULE featuring CW AYON (Austin, TX and Las Cruces, NM)
CASHMAN (Nashville, TN)
THE MISERY JACKALS (Akron, OH)
JAVIER & THE INNOCENT SONS (Minneapolis MN)
THE BLUES iS NOT DEAD: The New Blues Underground Rises Up by Ted Drozdowski
1.27.2009
When music fans talk about underground sounds they’re usually referring to indie rock, electronica, crunk or some other cutting edge form.
But now blues has become a new force in the international music underground — deep, dirty, old-fashioned blues from the hills and Delta lands of Mississippi. But this blues has a new-fangled twist, incorporating influences of punk rock, Sonic Youth-style dissonance and even funhouse mirror versions of other roots forms like bluegrass and old-timey mountain music.
Community Web sites like MySpace and LiveBluesWorld have become the jungle telegraph for these bands and their fans, as well as more traditional outlets like college radio and fanzines. But the human nexus for hundreds of these groups is an unassuming music fan from Minnesota named Chris Johnson. As the founder and driving wheel of the Deep Blues Festival, which will convene for its third year July 15 through 19 in Minneapolis, he is in regular touch with the new generation of underground blues bands and their fans throughout the world.
“The blues is not dead, and there’s a lot of potential for the blues to grow and be a thriving genre again,” said Johnson. “The variety and musicianship of the bands that have played the festival is amazing — from one-man bands to goth country blues to apocalypse blues to all kinds of duos and hybrids. Jack White, when he did Son House’s ‘Death Letter’ years ago with the White Stripes, was one of the first of the younger guys to really incorporate elements of dissonant, punk-informed rock into blues. Now there are people doing this in every corner of the western world.”
The one common denominator these musicians share is a love for the blues albums produced in Mississippi in the ’90s by the Fat Possum label. Those recordings, especially the early albums by R.L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough, capture a form of the music rarely heard before Fat Possum made recording contemporary North Mississippi and Delta artists its mission.
“What excited me about this music was that it was so different,” said Johnson. “It was raw and immediate and went all the way back to the roots, and artists like R.L. and Junior had so much character.”And yet, because of the music’s deep roots, its primal link to popular rock and roll was also obvious, so Johnson, like many others, was able to make the connection between bands he’d grown up hearing, like Z.Z. Top, to the rhythmically intense sounds of Kimbrough and Burnside.
Next came his discovery of artists like the Black Diamond Heavies, Scott H. Biram, and Bob Log — younger independents making music under the influence of Kimbrough, Burnside, and their hill country kin, including Jessie Mae Hemphill and Othar Turner. So Johnson, a former insurance man, was inspired to become a festival promoter.
“I have no other experience promoting shows, so it’s been a real learning experience and I’ve made mistakes,” said Johnson, “but I’ve also had hundreds of people shake my hand and thank me for doing this, so I know this music is really reaching people.”
This new, raw strain of hybrid blues offers deep roots to fans of traditional music. And while Burnside, Kimbrough, Hemphill and Turner are now dead, T-Model Ford, Kenny Brown, Elmo Williams and Hezekiah Early, and a handful of other Mississippians soldier on.
To younger audiences raised on indie-rock, “this music is different from the Chicago blues, 12-bar shuffles and Stevie Ray Vaughan imitators they grew up hearing,” said Johnson. “It’s raw, primal and exciting, and it moves you with its honesty. If people are willing to open themselves up to something different, they’ll be rewarded.”
ELAM McKNiGHT & BOB BOGDAL - ZOMBiE NATiON
@ Facebook // OnLine
I've been following Elam McKnight since 2003 and his first album Braid My hair. I've always enjoyed his work because while he keeps one foot firmly in the blues, he has no issue with adding surprising little elements of hip hop, gospel, and rock and soul which keep things interesting and moving. This is McKnight's first album since 2007's terrific Supa Good.
I gave him a holler to see whats up.
The initial project with Bob, which was really going to be more acoustically based, and the follow up to Supa Good vein project all got "transmogrified" and commingled into what you have now: the beast that is ZOMBIE NATION. I kind of like the way it worked out. We did a live session at Bob's Place acoustically and then met up at the studio with Tom Hambridge one Sunday in Nashville. Did some overdubs over the preceding months and poof there you have it. I think the lay off made it more intense actually because I had been writing, stewing, plotting, and itching to put some things down properly and Bob also, so this really contributed to some of the intensity I think, that and Tom Hambridge beats the Hell out of the drums! Now we have a band that is pretty committed to making things work so things kind of have their way of rolling back into place. We have already laid the groundwork for the next joint in the studio so expect some things to be more regular in the coming couple of years, might be a few surprises along the way.
McKnight and Bogdal - Pojo's Place mp3
McKnight and Bogdal - Red Wheel Barrow mp3
I've been following Elam McKnight since 2003 and his first album Braid My hair. I've always enjoyed his work because while he keeps one foot firmly in the blues, he has no issue with adding surprising little elements of hip hop, gospel, and rock and soul which keep things interesting and moving. This is McKnight's first album since 2007's terrific Supa Good. I gave him a holler to see whats up.
Your last album Supa Good, came out in 2007. Where you been, man?
I have been being a father to a baby and I love that baby more than anything I could have ever dreamed up. Bob and I started working on our first effort together back in the summer of 2008 and I also had begun working on a similar project in the vein of Supa Good that previous fall with Ringo Jukes. I became a father and focused my energies on being the best one I could. We played a few shows here and there but other than that I wanted to be there for my child. That took and takes priority over any and everything in my world and gladly because I love being a father.
We talked some time ago about a follow up to Supa Good. As I recall you were leaning towards a darker, heavier stew of hiphop and blues. This album is straighter into a heavier blues vein. How did Zombie Nation come about?
The initial project with Bob, which was really going to be more acoustically based, and the follow up to Supa Good vein project all got "transmogrified" and commingled into what you have now: the beast that is ZOMBIE NATION. I kind of like the way it worked out. We did a live session at Bob's Place acoustically and then met up at the studio with Tom Hambridge one Sunday in Nashville. Did some overdubs over the preceding months and poof there you have it. I think the lay off made it more intense actually because I had been writing, stewing, plotting, and itching to put some things down properly and Bob also, so this really contributed to some of the intensity I think, that and Tom Hambridge beats the Hell out of the drums! Now we have a band that is pretty committed to making things work so things kind of have their way of rolling back into place. We have already laid the groundwork for the next joint in the studio so expect some things to be more regular in the coming couple of years, might be a few surprises along the way.
How'd you get hooked up with Bob Bogdal?
What's his story?
Bob and I had known one another kind of like you and I had known one another, through online stuff, specifically
with Bob a site called Tweedsblues. He and I were both always on there ranting and raving about the same things. We got to know each other on some really long car rides to some shows and immediately "got along" which to me is crucial when playing with someone. I know there are some people out there that try to maintain a band or group thing with people they are not so fond of but for me, if it is going to be a long term thing, that is just impossible and Bob and I gel well, not just as musicians, but as friends. He is a great guy. He and I got hooked up back in 2008 when we met and played the Folk Alliance together in Memphis. We used that time to talk about doing something musically together and then started that summer working on an album. We did some shows together (Nashville and SXSW) and were selected in the summer of 2008 to represent the Sonny Boy Williamson Blues Society in the IBC as their acoustic duo act. We also played the King Biscuit festival together as a duo that fall. That same year I found out I was going to be a father so things kind of went on brief hiatus until I was at a point where I could give it the time it deserved.
with Bob a site called Tweedsblues. He and I were both always on there ranting and raving about the same things. We got to know each other on some really long car rides to some shows and immediately "got along" which to me is crucial when playing with someone. I know there are some people out there that try to maintain a band or group thing with people they are not so fond of but for me, if it is going to be a long term thing, that is just impossible and Bob and I gel well, not just as musicians, but as friends. He is a great guy. He and I got hooked up back in 2008 when we met and played the Folk Alliance together in Memphis. We used that time to talk about doing something musically together and then started that summer working on an album. We did some shows together (Nashville and SXSW) and were selected in the summer of 2008 to represent the Sonny Boy Williamson Blues Society in the IBC as their acoustic duo act. We also played the King Biscuit festival together as a duo that fall. That same year I found out I was going to be a father so things kind of went on brief hiatus until I was at a point where I could give it the time it deserved.
Tell me about the album title Zombie Nation and the cover art. What's it about?
Bob and I talk a great deal when we are traveling and one thing we are struck with is how people these days are very easily duped into ways of thinking that sometimes are not based in reality. Where that becomes frustrating to us is it creates all these figurative zombies stumbling around our country simply droning on about talking points that have been programmed into them. Discourse in America seems to be pointless, because there are certain segments of our country who only want to tear things apart in favor of starting from where we are and getting our act together. You want to ask them why, and have a discourse or discussion with some of these individuals, but they abdicated their minds a while back and are now, well, zombies. We can all be different folk and still sit down and have a reasonable discussion and healthy disagreements which can then lead to solutions. We cannot do much of anything if there is this big "group think" thing as an undercurrent the entire time. To simply discount something or an idea because you want to fit in and be part of a herd of some sort is dangerous and we are better than that in America, or at least we deserve better than that for ourselves and our children.
RE: The image:
We took that concept and elaborated on it with a bit of a shocking image from Bob which is basically a little boy who has been zombie-fied by all the nonsense that surrounds it. It was Bob's creation and I think he nailed a very classic image for a cover. The zombie child could maybe be seen as the end result of where the "group think" thing leads. Or he could simply be seen as the collateral damage that we are doing by not getting our act together and fixing the things that need fixing instead of walking around trying to eat brains.
RE: The image:
We took that concept and elaborated on it with a bit of a shocking image from Bob which is basically a little boy who has been zombie-fied by all the nonsense that surrounds it. It was Bob's creation and I think he nailed a very classic image for a cover. The zombie child could maybe be seen as the end result of where the "group think" thing leads. Or he could simply be seen as the collateral damage that we are doing by not getting our act together and fixing the things that need fixing instead of walking around trying to eat brains.
McKnight and Bogdal - Red Wheel Barrow mp3
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