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Scene

Friday, Sep. 04, 2009

Chicago Blues

The Arts

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Back in the 1960s, a group of white teenagers from Chicago ventured into the city's tough black neighborhoods to learn the blues.

After perfecting their craft with Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf, the kids grew up to perform blues licks with Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, Janis Joplin and Canned Heat.

Now in their senior citizen years, the performers are back together in the Chicago Blues Reunion band, coming to the Gallo Center for the Arts in Modesto on Thursday.

"We learned the blues firsthand," said Barry Goldberg, 65, the keyboardist. "We didn't learn from across the ocean or from records. We learned it from the masters."

Goldberg, who lives in Los Angeles, performed with Dylan and founded the Barry Goldberg/Steve Miller Band. He'll be joined by Nick Gravenites (vocals), who wrote "Born in Chicago" for Paul Butterfield and "Buried in the Blues" for Janis Joplin; Harvey Mandel (guitar), who recorded with The Rolling Stones and played with Canned Heat at Woodstock; Charlie Musselwhite, a blues-harp player who reportedly inspired Dan Akroyd's character in the "Blues Brothers"; and more.

Goldberg said he and the others discovered the blues on an obscure radio station at the end of the dial.

"We didn't know what this music was," he said. "It was captivating and mesmerizing, hypnotic and beautiful. It was so different than anything else we ever heard."

They met one another at record stores and decided to go as a group to the black neighborhoods on the south and west sides of Chicago to hear the music live. At first, the musicians and patrons of those clubs wondered if the white kids were cops. But eventually, they saw that they really loved the music.

Pretty soon, the artists started having the kids come up on stage with them. Audience members would pay 50 cents extra to see the novelty of white teens playing in the black clubs, Goldberg said.

"They were our extended family," Goldberg said of the musicians. "Not only did they teach us their music beautifully, willingly and wonderfully, but they told us their stories growing up on the Delta."

The teens' parents didn't understand their interest in the music and thought they were really strange, Goldberg added. They thought it was bad enough that the kids were listening to Buddy Holly and Little Richard. When they heard the howling and wailing of blues, the parents thought their kids had gone off the deep end.

The clubs' neighborhoods weren't the safest places, either. A man once attacked Goldberg with a knife, but that didn't discourage him from continuing to be a part of the scene.

"When you really love something and you want to learn something and you have an affinity of it, you're not aware of the danger," Goldberg said.

People who attend the Gallo show will get to share in the performers' passion for the blues.

"They can hear some of the old and some of the new of the blues and rock together," Goldberg said. "They can see how happy we are to play together and to relive those moments we had in Chicago."