(This is part Two of an Interview with Watermelon Slim – part one of which was posted yesterday at Blogcritics.)
For a time after you returned from the war you worked as a musician. You had some success with people like Country Joe Macdonald recording some of your songs. What made you turn your back on music as a career at that time? Did you keep playing while you were working your other jobs, or did you stop completely?
When I came back I worked as a lot of things: grunt labourer, forklift operator, political investigator, musician, and small-time criminal among them. I was really learning my craft, and my gigging during the 1970s was sporadic, wherever I could catch on, and I probably played more solo than band gigs over those years. I was listening to all the live and recorded blues I could find, and did sit in with people like John Lee Hooker and Bonnie Raitt—teaser gigs, in retrospect—made my cult item, Merry Airbrakes, in
1973, and eventually produced another cult classic, Richard Phillips's folk record Endangered Species, in 1980.
In the 1980s, I gigged semi-regularly, especially in Oregon in 1984-87, with various groups and people, including the late Canned Heat guitarist, Henry (the Sunflower) Vestine. I tried to establish myself in Europe in 1987 but without any backing, flopped, and was literally smashed up in Amsterdam, both in a fight and a motorcycle-bicycle accident (I was on the bicycle), and returned to the US and started trucking, playing with my Boston/Cambridge group the Old Dogs, including Washtub Robbie, for several years, and sometimes working with my old friend and later producer of Big Shoes to Fill, Boston's top-gun guitarist and all-around bluesman, Chris Stovall Brown. Bruce Bears, "Sax Gordon" Beadle, and David Maxwell were three of the outstanding musicians I worked with in that period of the late 80s-early 90s.
I was mostly inactive from about 1993 to 1998, just woodshedding while trying to keep my little family together. But after quitting a scuffling trucking career for the first time in 1997 to go to graduate school in Oklahoma, I began making the long push towards getting truly on the musical radar screen. I'm a very late-blooming musician, and I'm a scads better guitarist, in particular, than when I was doing my first Fried Okra Jones gigs around Stillwater, Oklahoma, in 1998.
So I've never really given up the idea of making my living as a professional musician. Cursed myself for following a dream until I was battered and half-toothless, sometimes. But after three-plus decades I have achieved some degree of mastery over my own styles, and I think that and my age are why people are taking me seriously now. And, I've lived what I play and sing. Not everybody in the blues can really say that today.
While we're on the subject of music, you are credited with being involved with writing a majority of the songs and Michael Newbury with their arrangement. When you write a song for the group do you come up with the lyrics and then all of you contribute to the music in rehearsal, or do you and Michael hand out charts for each of the parts?
I do hand out some charts when we're first learning new songs, but we don't use 'em very long—the guys are quick studies. Michael Newberry often determines the beats and tempos, and is usually the lead man on putting together beginnings and endings. He also plays guitar, so he can pass on helpful input to Cliff Belcher, the bass player, and Ronnie Mac McMullen, on guitar. But everyone contributes creative input, both in arranging and song writing. Michael so far has been my main song-writing partner, and Ronnie Mac has a couple of numbers that may appear on our next studio release.
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