I first came to know about the extraordinary Blues guitar player Lurrie Bell through a wonderful DVD put out by Delmark Records of Chicago featuring his dad Carey and himself performing in three different locations around town. Gettin' Up Live caught them at Buddy Guy's Legends, Rosa's, and in the comfort of Lurrie's living room one afternoon.
It was the scene in Lurrie's living room that really got me; it wasn't some staged shit like those, we just happened to be in the neighbourhood with cameras and sound equipment spots you see on "documentaries" about "Celebrities." No this was a planned thing when it was discovered that Carey would be singing and playing harp accompanied by Lurrie on guitar for that weekend.
Carey's health was failing, in fact he came out of a hospital bed to do the gig that weekend, so my feeling is that people just wanted to gather as much footage as possible of the two men playing together while there was still time.
It was the lack of pretence that made it so beautiful and so heartbreaking. During the shoot the camera would cut away occasionally to Lurrie's wife Susan Greenberg, a great photographer, trying to stop three kids, one of them Lurrie and hers, from running out to hang with grandpa. The music was great and the atmosphere was even better, which made reading the press material closely after I had written the review that much more distressing.
You see there was a ghost on that film; Susan Greenberg had died of illness the same month that the DVD was released. If that wasn't bad enough Carey was taken from Lurrie only a couple months latter, heart attack and complications brought on by Diabetes (The second song on the DVD is called "Gettin' Up" and Carey had written the day of their gig at Rosa's as he had just "Gotten Up" out of bed to come do the show).
Lurrie Bell's 2007 started out really hard and continued to be a rough ride right through the first half of the year. But I think that if you were to open a dictionary printed this year and looked up the word determination, he would be staring back at you with a small grin on his lips and a guitar in one hand and his little girl Aria in the other. The year's not even over and he's started his own record label (Aria, named for his daughter of course) and produced his first disc for it Let's Talk About Love.
When I was given this opportunity to send Lurrie some interview questions by email to coincide with the release of his new CD, I wasn't given any guidelines on what I should and shouldn't ask. Since he'd obviously taken steps to get past the events of earlier this year, it seemed obvious that I owed him the respect of honouring that commitment and wasn't about to start asking him about it. "Tell me – how's it feel to lose your wife and your father in the same year" just didn't seem appropriate.
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