An Evening of Blues That Helped Me Get Over Mine

Astrologers speak about a “Saturn Return,” a time in life where you return to your roots.  Even if you don’t believe in Astrology, the concept of revisiting old passions, buried at the side of life’s road, makes sense. 

After losing a husband of 25 years, a guitar appears in an antique shop.  Broken strings, dusty and cracked – like you – so you buy it, a sign of “new times, new possibilities.” You haven’t played in 40 years and your guitar calluses are long gone. You tell friends, “music is my next horizon.”  You tell family that you’re searching for your last chapter. They think you’re crazy.  And you wait in your rollercoaster grief for some kind of direction. From the wind, astrology, or anything like a new path.

One day, a Santa Barbara based musician friend, Michael Rider sent an “urgent” request to join him that evening for Rick Estrin’s appearance in Santa Barbara. The Blues Foundation and Santa Barbara Blues Society sponsored event was a “rare sighting” and apparently a “must see.”

While I rushed to get ready, YouTube gave me the lowdown about this form of uptown blues that took legends like Willie Dixon and Muddy all over Europe during its mid-20^th Century heyday.

It’s a kind of “talk growling” that’s “thick in the dirt” is one description of the Chicago Electric Blues sound that borrowed from Delta Blues, emerged during WWII and gained joyous traction after. It was billed as a bubbling musical stew – an uneasy blend of acrostic and electric gravelly sound played through a stage amp that often-created loud distortion and swagger. Like most folks who know pigeon-poop-all about genres of blues, I expected my Saturday night musical sojourn to be a rousing, rowdy show of ragged, sultry music you could clap and dance to….

I could not have been more wrong. 

* * *

While I dreaded the idea of driving an hour from Ojai in a rainstorm, I grabbed my Snoopy umbrella and leap-frogged over the torrent racing through the gutters. I felt exhilarated: Maybe this bluesy unknown would be an adventure. 

There was no nearby parking, but luckily, the rain stopped, and I found a spot blocks away.  “No parking, a good sign,” I thought, as I recalled the corny but robust fun I’d had Contra Dancing in this same space a month ago.

Indeed, the brick building is a celebrated sanctuary for music, dancing, culture, and social intercourse.  Smiley Blues Society volunteers ushered everyone in. I suddenly felt vulnerable; it seemed like everyone there was with a significant other.

A droplet of rain fell on my face, or it might have been a tear, as I hustled my way to join a long-forgotten part of my humanity. 

Now inside a hallway, two volunteers searched for my name on the guest list. Another friendly volunteer approached.  She balanced an oversized pickle-jug container on her arm — like it was a parlor guitar – and she tossed two orange earplugs into my hand.  “Is this going to be loud?”

“That’s why I am handing out the earplugs, dearie!” She said in a deafening, conspiratorial tone. I took the earplugs. I picked up my press pass and launched through the final series of doors to look for my pal Michael.

I noticed that the rain, splooshing out of the gutters into the drain pipes at the side of the building, created a kind of blues rhythm, as the technical staff and roadies completed setting up the stage. Michael saved me a seat near an open door in the back.  Michael is an actor – known for Road House, but he’s also a killer guitarist, poet and bass and harmonica player.  I hadn’t seen him for a while, and it felt good to have him give me a friendly bear hug and the 411 on Estrin’s band. 

I began taking notes: He said, “What separates this music is the amp, which only those in the know would recognize.”  Uninitiated, I asked why. “A new, improved generation of stage amps helps so Estrin’s harmonica won’t sound like a kazoo with nasty distortion in a hall this size.”

“Oh,” I said, stifling a laugh, as if I kind of understood. Then added, ”Standing room only; that’s a good sign.”

As I took my seat, Michael gave me a cheery warning: “This could be life changing.”  I shot back, “Well, music almost always is.”

Then Estrin appeared. Resplendent in his form-fitting, silvery-pewter suit.  His stage presence, and command of his audience was charmingly spot on. He was part Sinatra, part Jimmy Durante, part Mick Jagger as he strutted across the stage.  Mic in hand, he pulled on that harmonica like a hooker at a truck stop – only stopping to stare out at his bemused, rapt audience. He warmly shared gravelly-voiced stories about love and lust: old timey, blues history, folk stories that celebrate being human in a world gone seemingly completely mad.

Michael said one thing that distinguishes the CEB genre is the verbal patter, “You don’t hear every word but are still swept away.”

For me listening to it for the first time, I felt a contemporary pulse within Estrin’s groove; maybe even some undeclared roots of rap… Chicago pedigree.  One might go as far as  to say it’s rapture-talking-grandpa-blues, with Estrin and his Nightcats introducing a new kind of musical steak — marbled with vocal grit, snapshots interjected from lives lived, blown through a kaleidoscope of breathy harmonica wails, cooked, crooked and aged but served rare.  Like a memorable meal with great conversation, or a great evening of comedy, Estrin’s observational word-walking was inspired by past mistakes in love and current longing to connect, laced with the tragedy of today – COVID, WARS, WAGES, and wagers… including sober beats sliced dirty, leaving gaps for each virtuoso members’ solos to underscore the possibility of joy in a world gone mad. 

Was that what it was like back in CEB origin days post WWII?  As humans, especially now, we need and crave truth in entertainment, something that takes us to our heart and stops us there for a moment to find it.

As Michael suggested, “The blues and the sonnets have much in common: there’s a discernible rhythm in both blues and sonnets, leaving an amiable format to jump off into improv. The blues is an American Haiku form.  And Shakespeare and Muddy Waters have this in common – the heartbeat groove. Shakespeare’s is iambic pentameter  -|  -|  -|, same as a Chicago Blues groove…”

His words stopped me.  Shakespeare and Muddy and meter – I thought about the vibrations under everything.  I thought about research I had read about for another article I was writing, on how the four-beat meter of a horse’s gait can help heal an autistic child.  Were we all assembled here and healing some kind of communal, global grief – longing for the past but desperately needing to integrate the present?

Mid-set, I finally relaxed. I settled into my seat. And as I noticed a wife grab her hubby’s hand, I thought about how many times I had grabbed my husband’s hand, walking in streets all over the world, teaching film and writing. Sadly, while we both loved music, we had only gone to very few concerts together.  Busy careers.  And, as I began to sway to Estrin’s unique groove, I smiled knowing that music, especially blues, can find its way into that secret place to heal all woes — at least temporarily.

Devo Cutler, writer/producer/educator, co-author of Dating Your Character… A Sexy Guide to Screenwriting, moved to Ojai a year ago to reinvent herself through music and writing about how art can heal grief and trauma.