Got my TV up for repo,
Same for the stereo too.
The lawyer sent the paperwork I got to sign,
And it all has got to do...
With losin' you,
With my losin' you.
Lordy I know it's got to do
With my losin' you
As "FOPs" (Friends of Pearl) probably know by now, I got a blues jones that goes way back (see, for example, Hellhound on my Trail). Some of you may remember my earlier writings about Lampano Alley, the Pinoy-true blue seventh wonder of the musical world ensemble often referred to as "Asia's Blues Band" (see Sweet Sweet Music). As promised in last month's column, following find a free association/rambling random reflection on their newly released album, Songs from the Alley, featuring just for fun the classic heartbreak lyrics of a tune written by none other than Binky Lampano himself. (I'm spinning this out as quickly as possible while listening to the disk in order to distribute advance copies of the column at tonight's launch party/gig at Kidd Creole in Greenbelt 3; so hang on to your horses, a-waaay we go...)
When I wrote Sweet Sweet Music, I had been regularly catching Lampano gigs at the Hobbit House. the traditional home of folk, rock and blues music located down Mabini way. At the time, Lampano was doing lots of covers of classics by folks like Willie Dixon, John Lee Hooker and Brook Benton, a sprinkling of deep blues, and a few originals. My immediate take on Binky was that he was the veritable reincarnation of Muddy Waters, what with his deeply authentic voice, intuitive just off-the-beat phrasing, and intriguing stage presence. Unfortunately, Lampano Alley has been in hiatus the last three years as Binky went to the states to care for his ailing father (who has now crossed the River Jordon) and Tom Colvin (AKA Tomcat, past master of the Mississippi Sax) began splitting his time between the Philippines and Mexico. Now, however, they have come together for a brief period for gigs around town and are - at long last - releasing their CD. It is a revelation, both in terms of production quality and content of the all-original sound track (it has also led me to reassess the Muddy parallel in favor of broader characterizations).
However, classifying Lampano Alley is not an obvious process given their diverse influences. The band has a strong R&B flavor, with diverse jazz and blues influences intersecting in strange yet elegant combinations. Of course they are electrified, but their phrasing is so sharp and the sound so wraparound warm that it almost sounds acoustic. There's always a little of that Delta-filtered-through the smoky Chicago bar influence , but I seem to have picked up on a bit of New Orleans (Dr. John), Kansas City (Jay McShann) and West Coast blues (Lowell Fulsom, Philip Walker, Charles Brown). The band's sophisticated mix of swing, blues and advanced harmony is about as good as I've ever heard, and that covers major bar hanging-out and friend-of-the-band roles earlier in life in towns like the Big Easy, San Francisco, Nashville, and Los Angeles.
Although Binky's voice is often out front, the band is always oh-so-tight with him, and the intuitive interplay of Tomcat's vibrato harp, Edwin's razor-sharp guitar riffs, and Simon's just-right off-the beat bass shuffling along makes one wonder how the heck this band sprung up in Old Manila.
Guess it just had to be.
Like myself, Binky grew up in a religious environment (see Yuletide Reflections and Faded Memories). But not of the Catholic variety, rather reflecting the Baptist missionary influence. The Reverent L.D. Woosley, a good ole boy Baptist preacher who subscribed to the Book of Hebrews' admonition to "provoke unto love and good works," journeyed to Manila in 1954 to save a few souls, and ended up staying until his death almost half a century later and building the Bethany Baptist Church from a fledgling congregation down on Taft Avenue into a thriving network of over 100 churches and numerous Bible colleges in the Philippines. Binky grew up in that setting and learned to sing joyfully in a choir ("Therefore the redeemed of the Lord shall return and come with singing unto Zion; and everlasting joy shall be upon their head: they shall obtain gladness and joy; and sorrow and mourning shall flee away", Isaiah 51:11). In fact, Binky's singing style sometimes reminds me of preachers I have known... Of course, he didn't just listen to church music. He listened to lots of jazz, R&B, Van Morrison, James Brown, Stevie Wonder, Bob Dylan, and there's a little bit of each of them in his much-evolved voice today.
Binky started singing with Manila bands in the mid-1980s, most notably with Dean's December (they had three well-received albums) and the Newly Industrialized Combo (NIC) beginning in 1992. At around that time, Tom Colvin, an erstwhile professional at the Asian Development Bank, was regularly jamming with featured bands at a series known as "Weekends Live!" at the Atrium. Stephen Lu, a well-regarded producer, introduced Colvin to Binky Lampano - they jammed, magic happened, and the rest, as they say, is history. Colvin's jams with NIC soon led him to take on the highly appropriate moniker "Tomcat".
Lampano Alley started gigging in 1996, with a long run on Saturday nights at the Hobbit. Unfortunately, Lampano's current reunion tour has a certain melancholy quality to it, as Binky will soon be returning to LA to pursue his business degree (a sad commentary on the inability of one of the country's most gifted artists to carve out an economically viable living here doing what he loves to do and what he does better than damn near any blues singer I ever heard) and Tomcat will be off to Mejico again.
Maxed out on my credit
Seen my life go down the drain
I got a message from the bank
That tells me so
Though I cain't just don't explain
Why I'm losin' you
Why I'm losin' you
Lord it just can't just damn explain
Why I'm losin' you
One of the great experiences of my teenage years was the first time I heard the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. By the late 1960s, a fair amount of derivative white blues was being marketed throughout America, but it tended to be either solo folk music or enthusiastic (but not particularly good) covers by British invasion bands like the Stones, Yardbirds, and the Animals. Then along came the Paul Butterfield Blues Band...
Butterfield was a young white boy with the gumption to play mouth harp in seedy blues clubs on the South Side, near the University of Chicago where he was a student - obviously something you could only pull off if you were damn good. The racially integrated band, playing 'lectric Chitown blues with intensity and grit, obviously worshipped the Hoochie Coochie Man (Muddy).
Butterfield himself, significantly influenced by Junior Wells, Little Walter, and Big Walter Horton, developed a unique harp style featuring much longer and drawn-out phrases than your typical Chicago blues harp player. His heavily amped Mississippi sax sounded a whole lot like Little Walter, but also owed a musical debt to James Cotton's rich tone and lung power; he also used his hands actively for nuance and effect, something Tomcat would later turn into a trademark in the Philippines.
Speaking of Tomcat (here's another one of those eerie intersections in unknown time and space), he had grown up in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. After graduating from college, Tom was drummer for a jazz quartet, which became a long-time hobby in between pursuing his "real" career as English and History teacher. He went on to study education and history in graduate school at Duke, then went on to teach for a dozen years, but always with that musical back story.
When he was 30 or so - a couple of years after I heard the Butterfield Blues Band and started searching for the roots of the white boy blues - Tom was driving along a highway somewhere on the Atlantic seaboard when he heard a band come on the radio, a slightly latter-day Butterfield group, during a period when Butterfield had evolved from the original straight Chitown blues of the original incarnation to a bigger sound featuring a couple of saxes and heavily jazz-like charts. Butterfield himself let it all hang out in long, drawn-out, jazzy solos, very far indeed from the typical riff-based blues playing...
Tomcat immediately saw the light - he knew that playing the harp was in the cards for him. I reckon the rich, vibrato-laden acoustic style he employs today originated on that long-forgotten radio broadcast about three decades ago.
Need no medication
I know I'm gonna be alright
It's just another case of never missin' the water
Till the well ran dry
Though I cain't just don't explain
Why I'm losin' you
Why I'm losin' you
Lord it just can't just damn explain
Why I'm losin' you
Aside: Returning to that theme of gospel and the blues, I've always had a thing for both types of music, even though in the deep South in the early years of this century the two were considered totally contradictory (never the twain shall meet, see Legba and Aswang). There were many traveling bluesmen in the South; they lived a rough and sinful lifestyle, traveling from town to town singing in juke joints ("jooks", generally nothing more than a sharecropper's shack with the front room furniture removed so folks could dance while the bluesman played). They always had lots of women and were notorious for getting shot at and such by jealous husbands and girlfriends (the most famous/notorious being Robert Johnson, who was poisoned by a jealous girlfriend).
The Reverend Gary Davis, born in South Carolina, recorded some blues on '78 vinyl back in the 1930's but never made much money at it. When he got saved he said "I ain't a-gonna sing no blues no more" and didn't. He spent the next 25 years singing on the streets of New York City and preaching in storefront churches, although he was originally re-recorded by musicologists like Moses Asch starting around 1955. In the early 1960s, one of Peter, Paul, or Mary (I forget which one) heard him singing "Samson and Delilah" and "If I Had My Way" on the street. They recorded his "If I Had My Way", allowing him to buy himself a house on Long Island that he called "The house that Peter, Paul, and Mary built".
Reverend Davis' incredible projection of voice and instrument, the raspy, loud singing style and the rhythmic pounding on the guitar, reflected decades of singing on New York streets. I've always loved the way the Reverend could segue in and out in a duet with the box, talking to her (the guitar) and tenderly calling her "Miss Gibson".
In that same vein, I've always been a fan of the Reverend Robert Wilkins. He began recording with Ralph Peer of Victor Records as early as 1928, then with Vocalion, he recorded on a field unit in Memphis. Among other songs was "That's No Way To Get Along", which the Rolling Stones covered and renamed "Prodigal Son". Wilkins, by then an old man, earned not a centavo, as the copyright had been usurped by a music publishing house.
In 1935, Wilkins was already tired of witnessing violence occurring around the edges of his jook joint gigs when he got saved and joined the Church of God in Christ. He promptly became a preacher specializing in faith healing and herbal remedies and turned away from "the Devil's Music". However (and here's the good part), he kept right on playing the same licks on his guitar while adapting the lyrics to praise the Lord (like changing "My Baby" to "My Lord"). Now that's flexibility!
My favorite is probably the Reverend Louis Overstreet and his sons with the congregation of St. Luke's Powerhouse Church of God in Christ, rockin' Black Holy Rollers recorded by Chris Strachwitz, founder of Arhoolie Records, in 1962. In the late '50s, Reverend Overstreet had spent his evenings driving around the bad neighborhoods of Baton Rouge, Louisiana until he found a sufficiently seedy locale, whereupon he took his amp and electric guitar our of his beat-up old car and talked the bartender of some beer joint into letting him string an extension cord inside. He then proceeded to preach, pray, shout, and sing to the pounding rhythm of his guitar and various percussion instruments (snare drum, tambourine) played by his four sons, trying to save the souls of the sinners and keep them from spending eternity in fire and brimstone territory.
Man may lose all his possessions
All the letters to his name
He gives a sweet hot deal to the devil himself
Just to be with you again
When he.s losin' you
When he's losin' you
Gotta be with you again
When he's losin' you
To close this ramble out, and to make specific reference to the "Losing You" lyric that I'm hooking this Pearl around, I've always been a sucker for a good heartbreak song. Many of my favorites tend to fall in what most would deem the hick category, whether that be Commander Cody ("my dog died just yesterday, and left me all alone; the finance company dropped by today and repossessed my home; but that's just a drop in the bucket, girl, compared to losin' you, I got the down to seeds and stems again blues"), Dwight Yoakum ("It don't hurt when I fall down from this barstool"), or any of a dozen Hank Williams or Willie Nelson gems.
Binky does it up just right in this song, which is Track #3 on the disk. His distinctly wry sense of humor reminded me a whole lot of the seeds and stems again blues. Lead guitarist Edwin Vergara and bassist Simon Tan drive the endeavor. Edwin's tone is clear as a bell, smooth chords and a pealing lead, with plenty of openness in between phrases due to the clean style. Simon's groove is nonpareil, with more than a few surprises for those expecting a standard straight ahead beat (i.e., excursions into off-the-beat jazzlike places, counter-rhythms where you least expect them, but then realize they had to be there as an organic whole). The band is fleshed out by sax players Rancis de Leon and Dan Gil and long-time Lampano collaborator Butch Saulog on keyboards.
Jeez, I just realized that Binky also has a touch of Mark Twain influence in there somewhere, I'm thinking of a Pinoy Huck Finn, given the gospel influence filtered through the latter day blues, and the music with its various and sundry hints of seduction, betrayal, double entendrés, evangelism and the missionary spirit, and self-realization. Anyway, to purchase the album, contact Tomcat directly (Tomcat@i-next.net) or visit http://www.narecords.com/lampano. The disk will also be available at the Magnet Gallery/Magazine Stands at Greenbelt 3, Paseo Center, ABS-CBN loop in Quezon City, Music One [Megamall and Greenbelt 3] and Tower Records, Glorietta.
Down to my last drop of whiskey
Hear the bartender yell last call
I got to move along
But I can't just seem to find my feet
But that don't compare at all...
To my losin' you
To my losin' you
Hey that don't compare at all...
To my losin' you
Credit: "Losing You". Lyrics by Binky Lampano; Music by LAMPANO ALLEY.
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