November 7, 2017


Key to the Highway                 
2017-11-08      2-5pm                    

Canned Heat                                    
Cannonball Adderley                       
Memphis Slim                                                        
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We have some scratches on a few of today’s tracks, but here’s hoping you’ll find the music behind them worth it.
It had to be 1966 or 1967 that I first saw Canned Heat at the Bold Knight, a teenage music venue in Sunnyvale, and again at Spartan Stadium around 1970 in a show that also included Ike & Tina Turner, Albert King and, I’m pretty sure, Les McCann and Eddie Harris.  And one last time in Santa Cruz at the Catalyst around 1978, where I was hanging with an old jamming buddy, John Cassady, the son of Neal Cassady who was the cult hero protagonist in Jack Kerouac’s beat generation novel On the Road.  I’ll always remember being impressed by John’s modesty when the Doobie Brother’s Pat Simmonds walked away from our conversation and John said to the effect, “He’s in awe of me because of my Dad and I’m in awe of his guitar playing.”  John was always a pretty good guitar player, in my book.
Story two: so there I am Monday evening, listening to an intro to the PBS Newshour, and they’re telling me about an Independent Lens presentation on John Coltrane later that night and, having just completed this essay on Cannonball Adderley which mentions very briefly his time with Coltrane in the Miles Davis group, which in turn got me looking into inexpensive Coltrane box sets that were available.  Unlike Adderley and his Bop roots that I have come to kinda understand, Coltrane has represented why I used to feel that I didn’t understand Jazz at all.  It’s like I bite off a chunk of Jazz by taking a chance at the flea market or something and then having it take a few years to digest.  I have a Coltrane album or two but never really liked what I heard enough for much of a listen.  After viewing the TV show I still don’t know if Coltrane is for me because, while the snippets I heard (including some shots of Adderley with ‘Trane and Davis) were some very good playing, it just isn’t at the intensity of, say, the Cannonball you’ll hear today.  Still, I think I will look further into his post-1957 material when he got off heroin, and I certainly recommend you watch the documentary if you get the chance.
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Canned Heat pretty much came into existence through the love of the Blues belonging to its two lead singers, Bob “The Bear” Hite and Alan “Blind Owl” Wilson, both well-established record collectors and traders from the Los Angeles area.  Hite’s Topanga Canyon home had become a meeting place of like-minded folk and it was almost a natural extension that they should form a jug band in 1965.  Hite would be the main singer while Wilson would provide harmonica and bottleneck guitar, initially backed by drummer Keith Sawyer, bassist Stu Brotman and lead guitarist Mike Perlowin.  In just a matter of days, both Perlowin and Sawyer gave up and replacements were found in guitarist Teddy Edwards and Ron Holmes.
Another friend of Hite’s, guitarist Henry Vestine, asked to join the group.  The Sunflower, so called because at one point all the band members were apparently required to have a nickname, had previous experience with Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention until excessive drug use got him expelled.  Not long afterwards, drummer Frank Cook brought his jazz experience to the group, having played with bassist Charlie Haden and trumpeter Chet Baker as well as the Soul artists Shirley Ellis and Dobie Gray.  This was about the time guitarist Edwards went on to join Linda Ronstadt’s band, The Stone Poneys. 

Somewhere along the line the name Canned Heat was chosen, the street name of the toxic substance sold beginning in 1914 as Sterno for campfire cooking that became a secondary choice among some who could not afford alcohol, and the subject of a 1928 song by Tommy Johnson, Canned Heat Blues.  With its lineup pretty well set by 1966 (Hite, Wilson, Vestine, Brotman and Cook), Johnny Otis brought them into his studio just off Los Angeles’ Vine Street to lay down an album which would not be released until 1970 as Vintage Heat on Janus Records. 
While waiting for the band to amass some gigs, Brotman signed up for the summer with an Armenian belly dancing troupe out of Fresno, and when Heat needed a quick contract signing he was unavailable.  He would carry on in the World Music genre with David Linley’s Kaleidoscope.  A short term solution was found in Mark Andes, but after a couple of months he returned to his earlier band, The Red Roosters, which would change its name ultimately to Spirit.
In March 1967, the vacancy was filled by Larry Taylor, brother of the Ventures’ drummer Mel Taylor.  The Mole, as he was to be known, had plenty of background, having played live with Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry and recorded for the Monkees.  This was what the band needed and the next month they were in the studio for Liberty Records’ Calvin Carter who, in his former capacity as A&R man for Vee Jay Records, had recorded the likes of Jimmy Reed and John Lee Hooker.  A single with Rollin’ and Tumblin’ backed by Bullfrog Blues was released and the full album, comprised entirely of old Blues tunes, was released in July 1967.  Self-titled, the album charted #76 on Billboard.
Between the release of the single and the release of the LP was an appearance on Saturday, June 17th 1967 at the Monterey Pop Festival.  Along with a cover photo of the band at Monterey, Down Beat Magazine was quoted inside its covers, “Technically, Vestine and Wilson are quite possibly the best two-guitar team in the world and Wilson has certainly become our finest white blues harmonica man. Together with powerhouse vocalist Bob Hite, they performed the country and Chicago blues idiom of the 1950s so skillfully and naturally that the question of which race the music belongs to becomes totally irrelevant."  The group can be seen on the D.A. Pennebaker documentary while Bullfrog Blues and Dust My Broom appear on the 1992 25th Anniversary issue 4CD box set.
The band was busted in Denver after a police informant established that drugs could be found and, in order to come up with the $10,000 bail, band manager Skip Taylor had to sell off their publishing rights to Liberty Records president Al Bennett.  Canned Heat’s musical telling of the story can be found in the song My Crime from their second LP, Boogie with Canned Heat.
Frank Cook was replaced that year by Adolfo “Fito” de la Parra, his first gig being December 1st as Canned Heat shared billing with the Doors at the Long Beach Auditorium.  Fito, the last step to a long-lasting lineup, had been playing with the band Bluesberry Jam, which would become Pacific Gas & Electric.  Although not appearing on the artwork, de la Parra provided all the drumming for the second Heat album.
While Hite’s powerful voice was heard on most of the vocals, it seemed that Wilson’s falsetto was the hit maker.  On the Road Again, Blind Owl’s retelling of the 1953 Floyd Jones number from the Boogie album, received worldwide acclaim, earning #1 in most markets although only #16 U.S.  The band also got an opportunity to stretch out their solos on the eleven-minute Fried Hockey Boogie, which brought them the nickname Kings of the Boogie, even leading to later collaborations with the true Boogie King, John Lee Hooker.
In the spring of 1968, the boys brought Sunnyland Slim out of retirement and backed him on his album Slim’s Got His Thing Going On for a Liberty Records subsidiary.  To return the favor, Slim’s piano can be heard on the track Turpentine Moan from Heat’s second LP.
Now with some financial stability, the band’s managers Skip Taylor and John Hartmann (along with Gary Essert) took over a Hollywood club and named it the Kaleidescope, unofficially making Canned Heat the house band and host to many of the touring Rock bands.  The band played to an 80,000 crowd at the First Annual 1968 Newport Pop Festival and then, in September, embarked on their first European tour.  The month included concert and other appearances such as a TV appearance on Britain’s Top of the Pops.  At the German show Beat Club they lip-synched On the Road Again as the song climbed to #1 on almost the entire continent.
Their next hit, reaching #1 in 25 countries and #11 in the U.S., was another Wilson falsetto, Going Up the Country, instrumentally an almost exact duplicate of Henry Thomas’ 1928 Bull Doze Blues to which Wilson added new lyrics.  It came from the October released double album, Living the Blues, which really had less material than its predecessor once you removed the 19 minute Parthenogenesis and one entire LP for the forty minute Refried Boogie, a live expanded version of Fried Hockey Boogie recorded at the Kaleidescope.  Still, they did find room for an excellent version of One Kind Favor, the Blind Lemon Jefferson tune also known as Please See that my Grave is Kept Clean.  Recorded at the Kaleidescope around the same time was the confusingly titled Live at the Topanga Corral, released by Wand Records in 1971 because Liberty did not want a live recording.  The band rode out the year with a New Year’s Eve concert at Los Angeles’ Shrine Auditorium featuring Bob Hite coming into the arena on the back of a huge elephant which was painted purple dayglow.
Early in 1969, the band met Texas guitarist Albert Collins and convinced him to relocate to Los Angeles, even finding him an agent and introducing him to executives at United Artists.  Collins chose Love Can Be Found Anywhere as the title for his first UA album, a line taken from the Heat song Fried Hockey Boogie.

I picked up a copy of the July 1969 LP Hallelujah for a quarter at a flea market but never gave it much of a listen, but Melody Maker reported better with, “While less ambitious than some of their work, this is nonetheless an excellent blues-based album and they remain the most convincing of the white electric blues groups."  I doubt we’ll ever hear it because today’s show covers the first three albums plus the few Monterey tunes available, thus taking the cream of the crop, although later stuff with Harvey Mandel or their albums with John Lee Hooker might brings us around to take another look..    
A few nights after the album’s release, Henry Vestine and Larry Taylor had a falling out and Vestine quit.  They were at San Francisco’s Fillmore West so Michael Bloomfield and Harvey Mandel were brought in to jam away the next evening and, when both were offered the open position, Mandel accepted.  The band had a couple of more Fillmore gigs before Mandel would get his baptism under fire when the band was helicoptered in for their sunset performance on the second day of the legendary Woodstock Festival.  While the band was not shown in the documentary film, Going Up the Country was played as the theme under the opening shots and titles and was also included on the original triple LP.  Woodstock Boogie was issued on the follow-up double LP, Leaving this Town appeared on a special 25th Anniversary Collection and A Change is Gonna Come made it onto a director’s cut of the film, leaving only Let’s Work Together from the set still to be issued in some form.
Let’s work Together was selected from the Future Blues album as the single to represent their 1970 European tour (many tracks from which were harvested for a live album), but the band made sure the version by the song’s author, Wilbert Harrison, had an opportunity to impact the market before their own American issue was released.  Once it came out, it became the only Top Ten hit utilizing Bob Hite’s vocal.  The album Canned Heat ’70 Concert reached #15 in the U.K. but met with little enthusiasm at home, and shortly after the group’s May return Larry Taylor left to join John Mayall, who had moved to Laurel Canyon, and Harvey Mandel was soon to follow.
Replacing them was the return of Henry Vestine along with bassist Antonio de la Barreda who had played with de la Parra for five years in Mexico City.  The first project for this new lineup was the double LP Hooker ‘n’ Heat, co-produced by Skip Taylor and Bob Hite since Hite was not needed for vocal.  Hooker played solo on some tunes, in duet with Wilson’s piano or guitar on others (Hooker expressed that he considered Wilson “the best harmonica player ever) and backed by the full band on others.  It became the first album to ever chart for John Lee when it hit #73 in February 1971.  Despite the band’s successes, Wilson was exceedingly depressed, maybe even once trying to end his life by driving off the road to Hite’s home.  On September 5th 1970, as the band was readying for a Festival in Germany, word came that Wilson had been found on a hillside near Hite’s home dead from barbiturate overdose at the age of 27.  The Hooker ‘n’ Heat album had to be wrapped up after his death.
Years later, in 1978, there was a reunion and the album Hooker ‘n’ Heat: Live at the Fox Venice Theater hit the shelves in 1981.  For his 1989 highly successful album The Healer, John Lee invited many guests to join on a song each and Canned Heat was not left off the list.
To fulfill their September tour obligations and upcoming recording sessions, Joel Scott-Hill was brought in.  Historical Figures and Ancient Heads came out at the end of 1971, including what might be an interesting duet between Hite and Little Richard (Rockin’ with the King), but still the new lineup was not destined for longevity when de la Parra was not comfortable and wanted out, but Hite convinced him to stay and Scott-Hill and de la Barreda were let go instead.  Bob’s brother Richard Hite took over on bass along with Ed Beyer manning the keyboards and James Shane adding rhythm guitar and vocals as the final album for Liberty, The New Age, was distributed in 1973.
The band took on another European tour which is captured in part on the DVD Canned Heat Live at Montreux and also included studio sessions done in Paris with Memphis Slim on September 18th 1970, but it would be three years before the album Memphis Heat, after overdubbing the Memphis Horns of STAX Records fame, would make it to the shelves. The same French producer, Phillipe Rault, would have them in the studio again in 1973 with Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, creating his Gate’s on the Heat release.  They would later join Brown on stage at the Montreux Jazz Festival which has been caught on a DVD.
The band now without a label and $30,000 in debt, longtime manager Skip Taylor recommended they sell the future royalties for their existing Liberty material to the company and sign on with Atlantic Records before he himself left the band.  Atlantic’s 1973 album One More River to Cross gave the band a different sound by adding the Muscle Shoal Horns.  The sheer volume of drug and alcohol use by the band made it difficult for even noted producer Tom Dowd to get good material from them.  By the end of 1974 there was enough amassed for an album but Atlantic ate its losses and ended its contract before the record could be released.  Most of the material was soon lost in a fire but de la Parra was able to restore enough for a 1997 release, The Ties That Bind.
At a concert at the Mammoth Ski Resort, The Bear came unglued in a foul rage at the audience, leading Vestine, Shane and Beyer to remove themselves from the band, leaving only de la Parra and the Hites.  Replacements were found in late 1974 in pianist Gene Taylor and guitarist Chris Morgan, but Taylor left in 1976 as a result of an argument while on tour in Germany.  For a brief span, former Chicken Shack guitarist Stan Webb became a member, later replaced by Mark Skyer, but it was looking more and more like you couldn’t tell the players without a scorecard.  After an unsuccessful 1977 album for Takoma Records, Human Condition, continuing arguments brought about resignations from Skyer, Morgan and even Richard Hite in 1977.  I don’t know about the rest of the band, but Hite hired bass player Richard Exley, but he too left because of Hite’s excessive intoxication, returning occasionally as a personal favor when Hite found it almost impossible to find musicians.  At this point, Canned Heat amounted to only Hite and de la Parra.
De la Parra had become a partner in an East Hollywood recording studio through which he was back working again with Larry Taylor, who in turn brought guitarist Mike “Hollywood Fats” Mann and pianist Ronnie Barron into the Canned Heat scene, some of the best Blues players on the Los Angeles landscape.  A disagreement with Taylor caused Barron to leave, being replaced by the blind pianist Jay Spell.  In 1979, one of these iterations of the band played the 10th Anniversary of Woodstock, released in 1995 as Canned Heat in Concert.  Another recording for Cream Records put the band in more of an R&B vein, which displeased Fats to the point of walking out mid-project to be completed by Mike Halby.  Tensions with de la Parra and Hite combined with the change in musical direction caused Taylor to rejoin Mann in the Hollywood Fats Band.  Spell would bring in bass player Jon Lamb and Henry Vestine once again came back, this time to share guitar duties with Halby.
Another new manager booked the band almost nonstop on military bases around the States, Europe and Japan, but when he came home tired and still broke Spell left the band.  Lamb left after one more tour right before Christmas 1980.  Ernie Rodriguez came in as the new bassist in time to lay down the album Kings of the Boogie.  Hite was finally removed from the band (and his misery) when, on April 5th 1981, he collapsed of a heroin overdose on stage at L.A.’s Paladium and was later found dead at de la Parra’s home.  He was only 38.
Here is where I am going to step away from this soap opera, although I really wanted to earlier as Canned Heat became musically less and less relevant.  I shall overlook details of the numerous player changes that would occur over the next 35 years as well as the albums issued and only add some highlights from this point on.  Vestine got in a tiff with Rodriguez and was out again, replaced by Walter Trout until he signed on with John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers in 1985, opening the door once again for Vestine.  Halby left due to conflicts with de la Parra around 1984.  Taylor and Barron would return, but Barron’s and Vestine’s stays were short-lived, Vestine’s ouster much because of the return of Taylor.  Respected SoCal guitarist Junior Watson was in the group from the late 80s into the early 90s, by which time Harvey Mandel was ready for what turned out to be only a few tours.  Taylor couldn’t get along with de la Parra so he left.  Vestine and Watson came back and played together.  Skip Taylor took over management again and former members including Larry Taylor, Barron and Mandel helped put together the 1994 release Internal Combustion.  The next year a member, James Thornbury, left with no animosity after ten years.  Mandel was back in 1996, as was Larry Taylor.  Vestine, ailing from cancer, died after the final day of a European tour after which Taylor and Watson quit.
The band appears to be still together with three of its early members, all being in the band before Woodstock.  The only one who never left is drummer Fito de la Parra, who began in 1967.  Bassist Larry Taylor also joined in ’67 but had vast periods out of the group; his timeline in looks like this: 1967-70, 1978-80 1987-92, 1996-97, and 2010 currently.  Lead guitarist Harvey Mandel joined immediately before Woodstock, so his timeline would be 1969-70, 1990-92, 1996-99 and 2010 currently.  The fourth member of Canned Heat is multi-instrumentalist Dale Wesley Spalding, who came on board in 2008.
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Julian Edwin “Cannonball” Adderley was born in Tampa, Florida on September 15th 1928.  The family moved to Tallahassee when his parents acquired teaching positions at Florida A & M University.  His high school friends thought his appetite reminiscent of a cannibal, a nickname which morphed into Cannonball.  Both he and his brother Nat, a trumpet / cornet player, played in Ray Charles’ ensemble while Ray resided in Tallahassee in the early 40s.
Following his own music education at Florida A&M, Cannonball moved to Broward County in 1948 where he took the position of band director at Fort Lauderdale’s Dillard High School, staying into 1950.  Having constructed a fine performing reputation locally, he left the state in 1955 for New York City, encouraged by fellow altoist Eddie Vinson, intent on conducting his graduate studies at one of the city’s music conservatories.  These intentions were set back after taking his sax into the Café Bohemia one evening and being asked to sit in with Oscar Pettiford’s group in place of a tardy regular, impressing so much that word went out espousing him as the heir apparent to Charlie Parker.
He and Nat put together their own group in 1957 after Cannonball signed a contract with Savoy Records, but by October Miles Davis had recruited Julian into his ensemble just three months before tenor saxman John Coltrane’s return to the Davis group.  Trumpeter Davis, along with drummer Art Blakey and pianist Hank Jones, graced Adderley’s initial release, Somethin’ Else, followed up by Cannonball playing on Miles’ LPs Milestones and Kind of Blue.  Pianist Bill Evans, from the Davis sextet, joined the Adderley group on the next two endeavors, Portrait of Cannonball and Know What I Mean?
After departing the Davis group, Julian and Nat put together another quintet and maintained combos of varying sizes thereafter.  The most noteworthy members during the sixties included saxmen Charles Lloyd and Yusef Lateef, pianists Bobby Timmons, Victor Feldman and Joe Zawinul, and bassists Ray Brown and Victor Gaskin, and those are only the names familiar to me from a much longer list provided by Wikipedia; after all, Jazz is not my bailiwick!  Toward the end of the decade, the Adderley sound began to move away from its Bop roots in the direction of Electric Jazz.
Aside from his music, Cannonball appeared in a 1975 episode of the David Carradine TV series Kung Fu.  Four weeks after a cerebral hemorrhage, Adderley died on August 8th 1975 in Gary, Indiana’s St, Mary’s Methodist Hospital at 46 years of age and lies buried in Tallahassee’s Southside Cemetery.  Later in the year, Down Beat Magazine inducted him into their Jazz Hall of Fame.
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I first became aware of Memphis Slim through a desire to find music performed by Willie Dixon.  I already knew that Willie had written so many of the tunes recorded by the white guys like the Stones, the Animals, Paul Butterfield, John Mayall, etc., and that he wrote them originally for guys like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, Chuck Berry and others of the Chess Records ilk, and I was probably aware that he played bass on many of the recordings by those original artists, but I wanted to find some stuff where he really stood out.  In the late ‘60s I had a friend whom I considered my Blues guru, Bob Sidebottom, the owner of a comic book store on San Jose’s hippie row by San Jose State University who was a big time Jazz and Blues fan.  I asked him one time if he had any interesting Dixon stuff and he pulled out an album of duet work with pianist Memphis Slim, The Blues Every Which Way, which was long out of print.  He wanted ten bucks for it and I wanted it enough that I paid it, the most I have ever paid for a piece of vinyl.  You must forgive the scratches from much use on less than the best turntables, but there couldn’t have been a better example of Dixon’s virtuosity than this where he could come out as more than just a backing instrument in a band, and you will be able to make your own decision when we play quite a bit of it on our first Memphis Slim set.  Slim and Willie often played and toured together during their long careers in small group settings, sometimes with a drummer and a guitar player and occasionally with a horn or two.  They were also the backbone of the earliest American Folk Blues Festival concerts in Europe which Willie helped a couple of Germans set up beginning in 1963.
Slim became one of the large number of black musicians who toured Europe and found the treatment he received so much more respectful than he was used to that he made it his home, only occasionally returning to the U.S. for tours and sessions.  He did much recording around his home in Paris and the album that forms the second Slim set is such an item, recorded in the south of France.  The notes aren’t specific about the date except that it might be as a part of a 50th anniversary concert for le Hot Club de France (presumably the album title) in 1983.  He is joined by percussionist Michel Denis and one of the early female saxophone players, Evelyn Young, who also sang on one track.  The idea that it was at said concert is backed up by the CD including about half its songs by unnamed artists with guitar and harmonica with little or no piano.  These tracks might even be better than those chosen but since they don’t appear to include Slim I did not include them today but likely will when I share a fifth Wednesday show with Gil.
I have lots more Memphis Slim material so I will not try to fill out his biography today but just speak of things relevant to today’s music.     enjoy
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Since it is still relatively new, I thought I’d mention that KKUP is now streaming on the internet and, while it is still in a developing stage, we have been putting out the word.  I’m not all of that good with high-tech stuff, but it seems pretty easy to access.  If you go to our website at KKUP.org you will see on the home page a strip of options immediately above the pictures of the musicians the next to the last option being LISTEN ONLINE.  By clicking this, it brings up a choice of desktop or mobile.  I can only speak for the desktop but after maybe a minute I was receiving a crystal clear feed.  As already mentioned, this is still a work in progress and we are currently limited to a finite number of listeners at any one time.  I mention this so you will be aware to turn off the application when you are not actually listening.  (I put the player in my favorites bar for the easiest of access.)  Now we can reach our listeners in Los Gatos and Palo Alto, even my family in Canada.  Let your friends elsewhere know they can now listen to your favorite station, and while they have the home page open they can check out our schedule.
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World in a Jug
Big Road Blues
On the Road Again (demo version)
Evil Woman
I Wish You Would
It’s a Mean Old World
The Hunter
Evil Goin’ On
   Canned Heat   27mins

Minority
Straight Life
A Little Taste
Blue Funk
Limehouse Blues
   Cannonball Adderly   27mins

4 O’clock Boogie
Choo Choo
John Henry
After Hours
One More Time
Now Howdy
C Rocker
   Memphis Slim & Willie Dixon   24mins

Rollin’ and Tumblin’
Dust My Broom
Bullfrog Blues
My Crime
Whiskey and Wimmen
One Kind Favor
Pony Blues
My Mistake
Fannie Mae
   Canned Heat   35mins

Spontaneous Combustion
You Got It!
Bohemia After Dark
   Cannonball Adderly   22mins

All By Myself
Going Back to Memphis
Do You Think I’ve Got the Blues
Christina
Bye Bye Blues
   Memphis Slim   10mins

Fried Hockey Boogie
   Canned Heat   11mins

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