Walking with Mr. Lee

"David, the saxophone may not be your instrument."

With those gentle words, Lee Allen convinced me to try playing guitar or harmonica or piano or kazoo, anything but the tenor sax. I was about 15 and Lee had already given me a couple of sax lessons when at the end of our last lesson he made his pronouncement on my saxophone abilities. I was a bit crushed to have my sax hero ...

Amanda

A few years back, knowing full well that I couldn't come anywhere near Waylon Jennings classic original, I agreed to to record a version of AMANDA for a Waylon tribute CD. Maybe for private sentimental reasons or maybe because the bittersweet, middle-aged angst lyrics of the song have always appealed to me, I went into the studio and gave it a shot.

AMANDA was written by Bob McDill, a successful...

Seeds

Well, what can you say about Bruce Springsteen that hasn't been said? Looking past his iconic status, massive success and legendary live performances, I guess the only thing I can say that really matters is that he is simply a great damn songwriter. For us songwriters that is ultimately the only thing that counts.

Back in 1997, I was in Austin producing one of the Derailers...

Boss

While the Carpenters are the most famous musical group to come from my hometown of Downey, California, I have to admit they aren't my favorite. Through the years I've come to appreciate Karen's melancholy vocals and admire Richard's arranging chops but, none the less, to me the greatest band to have risen up from Downey's old orange groves and new tract homes of the early 1960's were The Rumblers. And their signature ...

On My Way Downtown

The first time I heard Peter Case sing ON MY WAY DOWNTOWN was some years back when he'd just finished writing it. I was in the audience at a "new song" workshop featuring Peter and a few other songwriters. We've all heard of "love at first sight," well, for me this was love at first hearing. The song knocked me out then and it still does.

My version of ON MY WAY DOWNTOWN was originally...

Albuquerque

This version of ALBUQUERQUE is a tribute of sorts to my best friend and spiritual advisor, the late Chris Gaffney. For many years this old Link Davis Sr. song was a staple of Chris's barroom gigs with his great band, The Cold Hard Facts. I dug this funky, little blues song so much that Chris and I talked through the years about recording it together but, sadly for whatever reason, we never got around to it. Oh well. During a recent rehearsal with my band, The Guilty Men, we started reminiscing about Chris and before long we ...

Who Will Buy the Wine

WHO WILL BUY THE WINE is an outtake of sorts from WEST OF THE WEST, my tribute CD to California songwriters. Its composer was Billy Mize, who is one of the true pioneers of West Coast country music and the Bakersfield sound in particular. A true unsung honky tonk hero.

Gerald Haslam, the noted California novelist/essayist/ historian and Bakersfield native, told me that local folks, back in the early 1950s...

Man Walks Among Us

The first record I ever owned was EL PASO by Marty Robbins. I was four or five years old and forced my mother to buy it for me after hearing the song on the radio. The first mechanical thing I ever learned to operate was our family record player just so I could play EL PASO over and over and over and over again. To this day if I'm in a barroom or a diner, and EL PASO is on the jukebox, it's a damn safe bet what the first song I'm punching in will be. I often wonder whether the reason that I'm drawn ...

Two Lucky Bums (Memorial Edition)

I had another song prepared for this months download but with the recent sudden and tragic passing of my best friend Chris Gaffney, it just seemed proper to re-release TWO LUCKY BUMS. Nothing could better express what Chris's friendship meant to me than this duet I wrote for the two of us. This version is a bit different than the previously released one. Just a few days before Chris died, I added two old pals of ours to the track, David Jackson on the stand up bass and Don Heffington on the drums...

Those Lonely, Lonely Nights

This month's song is very, very special for me. Last December, Chris Gaffney joined me on stage with The Gene Taylor Blues Band and sang Earl King's classic 1955 blues ballad, THOSE LONELY, LONELY NIGHTS. As great as Earl King's original recording is, Chris and I have always loved the version by Johnny "Guitar" Watson also cut in '55. Besides a typically passionate vocal, Watson's version features one of my favorite guitar solos of all time - as simple and effective as a Zen haiku or a punch...

Drunk

Who says a song needs more than one chord? Rhythm and Blues pioneer Jimmy Liggins didn't think so and his 1953 jump blues hit DRUNK, a tribute to the joys and travails of inebriation, certainly proves it.

Jimmy Liggins was the guitar playing brother of another R+B legend, pianist/singer/songwriter Joe Liggins (composer of blues standards like THE HONEYDRIPPER and PINK CHAMPAGNE) and Jimmy was also ...

Perdido Street Blues

There are many ways of playing the blues and this is one of them. Back in the early days of jazz they would've called this approach to blues, "viper music." That term always sounded pretty good to me.

PERDIDO STREET BLUES was composed by the under appreciated Lil' Hardin Armstrong (the one time wife and pianist for Louis Armstrong) and was originally recorded back in 1926 by clarinet master Johnny Dodds...

Mobile Blue

Sometimes people argue over who is the greatest living songwriter or who is the greatest male or female songwriter or who is the greatest songwriter in Texas, Nashville, New York, California or wherever. Usually the songwriters that these people bestow the "greatest" title on is whomever is the current critical darling songwriter of the week. And they may very well be right, I don't know. I always abstain from these kinds of discussions because songwriting ain't baseball or football. Songwriting can't be discussed...

Variations on Earl's Rumba *( a tribute to Earl Hooker)

VARIATIONS ON EARL'S RUMBA is The Guilty Men's Tribute to one of our favorite guitarists, Earl Hooker. He's a legend among blues musicians, for peerless technique, his clean slide guitar style as well as his fluid single string picking (his playing is also respected outside the blues community - master Celtic/Folk/Rock guitarist Richard Thompson told me that Earl Hooker was one of his favorite guitarists - Now, that's high praise!). From his earliest recordings at Sun Records, through the many tracks...

Highway 61

Over the years I’ve crossed paths a few times with perhaps our greatest living songwriter, Bob Dylan. I’ve even had the great fortune to play music with Dylan a couple of times. I’ve always felt that he picked up where Woody Guthrie, Robert Johnson, Hank Williams, and Jack Kerouac left off and moved American music and culture into the future. He’s still doing that.

When UNCUT magazine asked me to record “Highway 61” for ...

Peace

”I first heard Willie Dixon's PEACE back in the early 1980's, when The Blasters were booked on to the PBS music show Soundstage. We had an hour to do whatever we wanted so we invited Carl Perkins and Willie Dixon to be our special guests. With Carl we performed various songs dating back to his time on Sun Records and with Willie we backed him up on older material he'd written for Muddy Waters and Howling Wolf. But then Willie wanted to do a new song he'd written...