warehouse@esva.netIt started out as a New Orleans bar crawl, and turned into a grand tour of Southern rock 'n roll shrines. It wound up as a compact disc that consumed big chunks of a Virginia trio's lives.
The disc is "Not Nice" by Guitar Slim Jr., a New Orleans rhythm and blues veteran. The Virginians are Billy Sturgis, an Eastern Shore businessman; Art Wheeler, a Charlottesville pianist and harmonica player; and George Wayne Weeks, a Richmonder who makes his living marketing wines and spends much of his spare time making music.
Guitar Slim Jr., whose real name is Rodney Armstrong, is the son and professional namesake of the Mississippi blues man who briefly struck gold in the 1950s with "The Things I Used to Do." and earned more lasting renown as a pioneer of electric blues guitar.
Armstrong hasn't scored a hit on the order of his father's, although his 1988 album "The Story of My Life" was nominated for a Grammy Award. He has carved a niche for himself in the year-round party that is New Orleans nightlife. Nowadays, his regular gig is Ernie K-Doe's Mother-in-Law Lounge (named for K-Doe's 1961 hit).
Sturgis first encountered Armstrong on a trip to New Orleans in 1992. He invited the singer-guitarist to play at a party he gives each year in Franktown, an Eastern Shore farming community that was once home to blues great Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup.
"When Billy heard Slim sing 'Try a Little Tenderness,' he knew he wanted to do something with him," Weeks recalled in a recent interview.
Weeks caught the bug even earlier. "When I heard him do 'Turn Back the Hands of Time' (on the 1988 album), I was ready to track him down and work with him."
Easier said than done, it turned out.
In 1993 Sturgis and Armstrong made a deal to make a disc. Sturgis dispatched his old friends Wheeler and Weeks to New Orleans to begin recording. The twosome found a performer very much wedded to the city's "let the good times roll" ethos. Fixed schedules were alien, and rounding up musicians came down to knowing a friend who knew a friend who might be free to play for the session.
Tracking down players took Slim and his producers on wee-hours excursions to some of the roughest dives in a city that routinely tops the national charts for homicide. "And finding these guys was no guarantee they'd show for the [recording] session." Weeks said. "More often than not, we'd end up using players the studio called in."
The bulk of the album was recorded in September 1993 at Soundservice New Orleans, with Marc Hewitt, a longtime collaborator of Allen Toussaint's, at the controls.
"It worked two different ways," Weeks said. "Slim would come in and do his own thing. We got "I Feel So Bad,'Steal Away' and some of his father's old songs that way, usually in one or two takes.
"For the other songs, Art would get together with the drummer and bass player and craft the rhythm tracks, and then bring in Slim to sing and play over them." That approach was used for tunes new to Armstrong, including a couple of tracks, "If You Think That Jive Will Do" and "I Want You," by Wheeler and Weeks (who, for musical purposes, styles himself George Wayne).
Weeks found Armstrong "the most naturally talented person I've met in my life. I don't think he's ever practiced a scale in his life, but his ear takes him where he needs to go."
Meanwhile, Sturgis decided the album would be enhanced by using the Memphis Horns, famed for their backup of many R&B hits of the '60's. "Let's use legends if we can affort it," he reasoned.
Off to Memphis: Wheeler and Weeks did most of their work with the horn section in Ardent Studios - "the ultimate spit-and-polish recording studio," as Weeks described it - but reserved one night for Sun Studio, where Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perking cut their pioneering "yellow Sun records."
This holy of holies of early rock is little changed from the '50's. "If you can imagine Lorraine Hardware with recording equipment, that's what it looks like," Weeks said. "A Storefront," but still an album credit with considerable cachet.
The pair returned to Virginia with an embarrassment of richies. "We over-recorded." Weeks said. "We had four or five guitar solos per song." "We didn't realize how much work we were making for ourselves."
They also faced a tough call artistically. Was this to be a straight blues album like Slim's 1988 disc, or more stylistically open-ended in the blues-meets-R&B-meets-rock/funk vein that has been marketed as blues in recent years?
Back to square one: Sturgis wanted the album to include "Try a Little Tenderness," the tune that had smitten him to begin with. Weeks was opposed but gave in, a concession he's now glad he made.
"But that was the beginning of our departure from 12-bar blues," he said.
In crafting a production, Weeks said. "one of the things I was trying to emulate was the success of 'Smoking Gun'," the rock-infected blues disc by the Robert Cray Band. "At the same time, I knew a lot of people don't like such departures from blues."
"You come down to a trade-off between having some pop, user-friendly material and knowing you'll turn off some people when you go above or beyond the [blues] genre."
The producers' notes include a page identifying piano styles Wheeler used on each tune. His references range from "Bill Evans/Oscar [Peterson]" and "jazz/bebop/Herbie Hancock" to "Jelly Roll Morton/Walter Davis/Jimmy Yancey" and "Ray Charles."
The recording saga reached its climax far from New Orleans bars and Memphis shrines. The final mix was made at the Master Sound studios in Virginia Beach, whose master engineer, Robert Ulsh, gave "Not Nice" a clean, aerated sound not at all like the gritty density of classic Southern R&B records.
The album, on Sturgis' Warehouse Creek label, was finally released in February, with promotional efforts such as a World Wide Web site (http://www.esva.net/~warehouse/) up and running for a couple of months and national distribution just getting under way.
How's it doing?
"Pretty good locally." Weeks said. "Nationally, too early to tell."
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