ADAM GUSSOW TALKS OF HIS NEW ALBUM

The Harmonica Interviews presents…

A D A M  G U S S O W 
an interview by Jeff Silverman

        PROLOGUE:  Let's be frank, Adam Gussow is not only a great blues harp player, an accomplished 
        author, an innovator and trailblazer with regards to online harp lessons and much more, he's also a 
        good friend of mine.  Why do I lay that out there?  Well, for one, it's nothing to be ashamed
        of  (Adam is surely laughing right now) and secondly if I show any favorable bias in the 
        interview below it is truly unintentional.  Adam and I agreed that our conversation would be candid 
        and wrapped around the introduction of his new solo release "Kick and Stomp".

        Adam's history is well documented both in his book "Mr. Satan's Apprentice: A Blues Memoir" as 
        well as in countless interviews: White kid from Rockland County, NY, Ivy league educated, 
        dropping out of Columbia grad school to play harmonica full time on the streets of Harlem with Mr. 
        Satan Sterling Magee during some of the most turbulent times for race relations for NY - the mid to 
        late 80's.  Busking his way across Europe, being an apprentice of the late great NY blues harpist 
        Nat Riddles. The Blues credential go on and on with recordings, concerts, festivals the 
        earning his PhD and now a full time professor at Ole' Miss, in Oxford, MS deep in the heart of blues 
        country.  Coming full circle, Dr. Gussow has recently release his first solo - literally solo - album as 
        a one-man-band with just him, his harps and a kick box providing the soundtrack....

 

H411: Hey Adam, its Jeff. How are you? 

Adam: Hey Jeff. I'm doing fine.

 

H411: I was actually listening to your recordings last night as I was stuck at the airport in Denver for four hours.

 

Adam: Oh boy.

 

H411: Solo project. Diving right into it. Obviously the reason I thought it would be appropriate with the release of your solo album is  a lot of people would like to hear directly from you on not only what motivated you to do the project but also, cut by cut or song by song, what your intention was and where you were going with it.

 

I know in some of the emails you've released you've given a cursory description of why you decided to do it and why you decided to do it on your own and solo. But um, going into more detail, what was the motivating factor to do it as a one man band or even just do it as a one man band on some of the cuts and then bringing in outside musicians on others? The message seems to be its consistent throughout the entire album.

 

Adam: Yeah, yeah. I have to give props to the guy who was the engineer on the project who I ended up giving basically co-producer credit to. It’s credited to Adam Gussow with Bryan W. Ward. He's really important to this whole project. He's a guitar player. He's a self-described “Jesus guy.” He's a founding member of a group called Bone Pony. I had never even heard of Bonepony. All I knew is there was this guy with kind of semi-longish hair who was open about the fact that he was a “Jesus guy” and a former almost rock star with a dollar deal on Capital Records at one point in his life, happily married and he has a bunch of kids and he's living in Water Valley, Mississippi, kind of retired from that rock star life of ten years ago.

 

I realize I'm not talking about my album, I'm talking about him but he's part of a duo out of Water Valley with an album called Porch Funk. This is a guy who basically saw me playing at a street fair in May and was fascinated by what I was doing as a one man band and pursued the connection. We ended up exchanging a couple of emails and then I decided, for whatever reason, that it was time for me to make a record as a one man band. At some point in early July I emailed him and he said “Hey dude, if you ever wanna’ make an album I've got this place called the Tone Room.”  It’s basically in a medical supplies building. The guy who owns the business set Bryan up and said 'Here's your sinecure. If you feel like recording some bands do it. Here's $50,000 worth of mics.' These are two aficionados of old mics. The studio my album was recorded in, by day the building houses fifty people who sell medical equipment in a little out of the way place in Oxford Mississippi, outside of town. We had to do all of the recording after five o'clock because that's when everybody goes home and you can crank things up. Its not a studio with isolation, its an office room basically, with lots of baffles and incredibly good recording equipment and incredibly good mics. This guy had done the whole guitar/percussion thing and then the kind of stomp board thing a lot, and he “got” what I was about and I think that is so crucial. And then he was charging a ridiculously reasonable rate for recording. When I realized this, I went and visited with him and he said 'Dude, I get you. He's my co-producer. We really hit it off.

 

This is not irrelevant to the content of the album because what it took for me to produce a harp-driven one man band album was – a guy who knew music, a guy who was a musician, a guy who was really intuitive, and a guy who could make the right suggestion at the right moment. A guy would not let any stress on my part get in the way. It’s like the stars aligned very quickly and very powerfully and so I basically showed up at this ad-hoc studio kind of thing with a list of about fifteen songs that I thought I would choose from. I was in effect self-produced so he had me just set up – if you'd like I can talk about the mic'ing arrangements because it’s kind of interesting...

 

H411: Yeah, that would be great.

 

Adam: I was afraid he was going to want to isolate each amp and each thing and he was like no dude, just put things how you feel most comfortable. So I set up the two amps that I use – they're both early 60s old tube amps. A Kay 703, a pretty small amp with one eight-inch speaker; a Premier Twin-Eight with two eight-inch speakers, and the mic that I've been using for 20 years which is a Shure PE5H high impedance, a fairly natural sounding mic with a pretty good bass response for a dynamic mic.

 

H411: The Premier is the one that has the two metallic looking grills across the front?

 

Adam: Yeah, that period during the sixties when amps were taking their cue from the space program. <laughs> Put a fin on it – or make it look like its a monster or an alien.

 

Anyway, I just basically set up the way I would normally set up and he built a box over my kick drum unit to isolate it. I was extremely comfortable. It was exactly the kind of setting where I would have the amps – just out in the room, not against the wall but sort of just out there. And then what we did is we close mic'ed the two amps... we also put one room mic about eight feet back from the amps and about six and a half feet in the air. We mic'ed the kick with two different mics.

 

H411: The mic that was in the air.. was that almost to simulate the effect that someone was standing in front of you listening?

 

Adam: Yeah, what we call room mic'ing, so the idea is you want to kind of stereo.  What was interesting is we actually did a few songs that night. The next day his partner came in – the guy who set him up in the studio, who also has really good ears – he's not a musician, he's just a guy who loves recording stuff and has money.

 

He looked and he listened and he said 'You need a second mic, so we put a second mic. The harps were close mic'ed and there were two room mics that were roughly aimed at the harp amps. And that turned out to be the key. We got a much better sound. The songs we did with the early takes we just threw away. And then over a period of three different sessions I did the whole album. And... that's what we did. It was quick to record, quick to mix

 

H411:To be able to cut the album so quickly I assume there was a lot of preparation that went on before you went in... You had an idea of how you wanted to perform each cut.

 

Adam: Good question. Yeah, most cuts. There were a few where I needed to figure things out and for me one of the most interesting cuts in that respect was one of the originals - an instrumental called Shaun's Song.

 

H411:  Yes, lets start with Shaun's Song, which I found myself playing over and over last night in the airport..

 

Adam: Okay, but I suppose I should start off with one other thing. The whole album – there was an element of subjunctive tense, or the conditional the album was partly to prove to myself that a harp-powered one man band could produce a whole album and that in fact it was a legitimate form. The liner notes were my way of also trying to explain it, because, if you think about the history of one man bands, overwhelmingly, they consist of a guy with a harmonica in a neck rack. That's the distinction. It's Dr. Isaiah Ross, its’ Jesse the Lone Cat Fuller, its’... I don't know who else...  It's Terry Harmonica Bean. It's a guy who plays guitar in the blues tradition... occasionally somebody who plays piano maybe, but there's always a harmonica in a neck rack and there's some kind of a stomp board or some kind of percussion thing. So I was thinking to myself this whole time that I need to prove myself. I told him, and he said 'Dude, you don't need to apologize,' but there was an element of let’s see if we can mic this and create a sound so that it actually works. And 'works' means a couple of things. Does the listener feel there is something missing? Or is a space opened up that's actually musical, so that if there's no guitar there it’s actually okay. I can't remember what the second reason was, but that was the first thing.

 

H411: Interesting when you were talking about the tradition of the one man band... I don't even know if the one man band terminology is appropriate but I'll use it…with the guitar and a neck rack, a stomp box or a stomp platform... Classically – so far as the things I've listened to - the harmonica is used acoustically.

 

Adam: Well sort of. Or else there's a mic. Here's what it's not: it’s not gripped with both hands - that's the distinction.

 

H411: Right.

 

Adam: And that's what makes what I'm doing unusual. It’s not unique because actually my friend Deak Harp was doing this before me. But yeah, it's almost always acoustic.

 

H411: But because you're the only instrument...

 

Adam: I'm not using my hands to do anything else.

 

H411: As you're not accompanying yourself. Do you think it also mandated making the harp fuller, making its presence more felt because there was no other accompanying instrument besides the harp.

 

Adam: Well yeah. One of the things I've learned over the past year of doing this… and I've only been doing this since June of last year and first public performance was August of last year... If there's no guitar, is first of all the harp doesn't actually have to be in perfect tune, if an occasional note is slightly flat you don't notice that. There's more space – much more space – opened up.

 

One of the things that you discover is that when you're singing in the harp-powered one man band configuration without loop pedals or anything like that it’s just voice and thump and crash. There's nothing behind the voice but percussion and for me that was potentially the weak link. So part of this whole project was to try and figure out what kind of sound did you need to have for the harp, how do you EQ it, and what kind of reverb – how much? How little? If there's too much reverb it sounds fake, but if there's not enough then the harmonica sound dies out too quick or the vocals die out too quick and the listener becomes conscious of it. So we were extremely careful. I was obsessive about how much reverb we used on each cut little increments as we mixed it down to try to get it exactly right so the rate didn't sound artificial and yet it filled in. It may sound strange to devote that much attention to it, but it’s not as easy as sitting down and thumping and playing.

 

H411: It’s not like doing a call and response with somebody else where you can overlap and do it, whether it’s consciously or unconsciously.

 

Adam: There's no overlap. I guess the effects kind of fill in slightly. And it’s not artificial if you want to make it sound right. There were some cuts where there was much less reverb because I wanted a deadened sound, especially the one dirge, Mr. Cantrell, which is really a very mournful lament. I wanted it really down. But there’re others where you want a different kind of effect so that was part of what we were trying to do.

 

Adam: I guess I should start with Shaun's Song.

 

H411: Please do...

 

Adam: That particular song was the most satisfying song on the entire album, except perhaps for Good Morning little School Girl, which was its own kind of epiphany, and I'll tell you about that in a second.

 

Shaun's Song is interesting because it’s jazz blues but in a way that I don't think has been done very often, maybe not at all. I don't know. The melodic vocabulary, the palette of tones, of scale degrees I used is straight out of the blues. Its root, blue third, fourth, flat fifth, fifth, flat seventh... and that's pretty much it. Couple of major thirds... There's no jazz changes, there's no jazz tonality and the rhythm is very straight – just boom-shh ht, boom-shh ht. But the rhythmic concept behind the melodies is completely jazz. Listening to Sonny Rollins back in the early 60s when he would do sax, drums and bass, that was revolutionary at the time. No chordal instruments. I didn't consciously think of Sonny Rollins, just afterward I thought is all that listening to him... it was enough. There was no chordal instrument, it's just kind of a thump and a little bit of chord implication and then you're going to do a lick and then play it again with a variation and then play it again and stretch it out one and a half times as long as you did the first time and then permute it in a different way. That's what was going on. It was the closest I'd come... I remember running through the woods here in Oxford and playing that song in my head and trying to spin out those melodies because my feet would give me the beat. So I tried to spin them out... what would happen, and I really felt like the way a jazz artist might feel. Not the way a blues artist would feel, the way a jazz artist might feel trying to find a new language. I said I'm trying to find a new language and I don't know what it is, and that of course is exactly where a jazz guy would want to be. It’s like you don't quite know what it is, you just kind of vaguely hear a little something. When I actually came into the studio with it I told Bryan I don't have any idea what this song is supposed to be.

There's basically an A part, a B part, and then the A part again, and I can play those, those are easy enough but I don't know what the solo is supposed to be. I have no idea. And he said “just play it”. <chuckles> Very zen, you know? And then I got in the right frame of mind. I think it was the second day of real recording. It was hot, like 95 degrees. I came in out of the sun, it was air conditioned and I was ready to stomp and play. I did one song and it was the right moment to do that song and it just kind of spun itself out – totally surprised me where it all went. To go back and listen to it, it feels very organic.  When I listened back I thought... that's what it was supposed to be. And it ends at just the right moment. The moment when I ran out of ideas at the very end is when I went back to the head and did A-B-A and ended it. And I didn't know how I was going to end it. That was true of many of these songs.

 

Crossroads... I didn't know I was going to end it the way I did. Crossroads ends with “I believe I'm sinking down” and the hold thing and then at the very end it’s flat 7th tonic – boom – boom – you're down, but you rise at the very end.

 

H411: Crossroads ends unexpectedly, which I found entertaining. At the end you're wailing in the high register, and I don't know what words I can use to describe it – it felt like you were going into another place when you were playing.

 

Adam: Yeah, I was definitely in my zone by the end of that song. In fact, the funny thing about that song... you know the blues is supposed to be about feeling. I wasn't happy with my vocal performance when I finished that song. When I listened back originally I thought the vocal performance was... I was unsure of it. BUT, I really felt it and I was almost crying at the end of the song. It was very strange thing to realize that I had that much feeling.  It was like... I had no idea where that came from.

 

H411: Interesting...

 

Adam: Part of what happened on that song of course, I actually sang the thing about Sterling Magee. Because after all, I played for many years with a guy who called himself Satan or Mr. Satan, so when I do that song and I talk about Sterling Magee, I'm standing at the crossroads, I hope he’ll stop for me. That's obviously a very different way of invoking the devil than the traditional way – I'm saying basically I've got a friend, a guitar pal, a guitar soul mate – and I'm at this

crossroads. What's the crossroads? I think on this album the crossroads is more about love. There's a whole narrative arc to the way I sequnece the songs.

 

H411: And even though you've been performing all over the place, cutting an album really separates your identity from the Satan and Adam identity. I don't know if it was intentional or if it was conscious, but it does. It says okay, here is my solo work, right?

 

Adam: It absolutely does. The weird thing about it, of course is – well - on the one hand, it is my first solo album, the first album in my own name. Adam has been there since our first cassette in 1990, but this is the first one with the name Gussow on the cover.  But then again, the curious thing is that I end up making this first album as a one man band. Of all things to choose! If you talked to me two years ago, I’d never have thought that this is the way it would happen. So there's a weird kind of... I can imagine somebody saying 'Oh, I get it. Right. He's not playing with Satan and Adam anymore so, of course, let’s be a one man band.' It sounds completely calculated.

 

But nothing could be further from the truth. I wasn't the slightest bit interested in experimenting with one man playing when I filmed the YouTube video of Deak Harp being a one man harp-powered band. He's the first one I'd ever seen. In Clarksdale, I think in 2008, I went over and saw him. I filmed him, and then he said 'You wanna’ sit down and try it?'  I sat down, couldn't do it. It didn't interest me. I mean, I tried it but his rig was not right for me. Last thing in the world I was interested in. I had no desire to recapitulate Mr. Satan and myself. None of that. It wasn't until Brandon Bailey just out of the blue said 'Hey, Mister Gussow, I've got this little wooden stomp board that's kind of like a wooden block. I'm going to send you one because I've been using one and it’s really kind of cool.'  He sent it, and I tried it. On the one hand it wasn't the optimal sound. On the other hand, the moment I started doing it... within two days I had uploaded my first video. I figured out a version of Crossroads. I couldn't stop playing with it.  I thought this is so cool! The beat is what I needed all this time.

 

H411: It puts you in a place, or at least it gave you the foundation for being able to listen, as opposed to someone else who might just decide to do it, who's a talented harp player but maybe hadn't played in a full band or more to the point, it allows you to really make that arraignment work for you as you’ve worked in a similar setting on the streets of Harlem, yes?

 

Adam: Here's what I gained. I gained a ridiculously unfair advantage as I move forward.

 

H411: Right.

 

Adam: The thing is, I was there when he was playing one high hat cymbal with no wooden board. I remember his earliest days as a one man band and I grew with him as he added a second cymbal after six months of playing together. I actually got sick – I remember this, it was March of '87, I got sick for two weeks and didn't play with him in Harlem. And when I came back he had added another cymbal and a wooden board. He was like 'Mister, it’s tough. Playing one is hard, playing two is harder, but I'm gonna’ get it.”.  So I was there as he slowly mastered it. And then, he basically flowered within two years of first adding a second cymbal. So I know the growth process and I have it in my musician's memory standing next to somebody who was transforming himself into a full fledged one man band. And I would say I'm not in full flower yet. And the reason I know that is because I know that when he started he was only doing what I'm doing. So I'm saying like wow, if I keep this up new stuff is just going to work it's way in, and that's really an exciting place for a musician to be in.

 

H411: Except you're coming in from a different angle – just from someone who's listened to the Satan and Adam music. From my perspective you were the horn section and lead guitar player and often times the melodic element where a lot times he was, because of the way he played, the rhythm section, and the bass player and the percussion of the band – for lack of a better way of looking at it.

 

Adam: No. That's very true.

 

H411: It’s just very interesting. You certainly had your prep school for these moments now, right? You certainly had your Blues SATs and you had your Blues school.

 

Adam: Yeah. So a couple of things start to happen when I perform and I try to sing and play percussion and play the harp. One is, and I think one reason why, in retrospect, why I was so galvanized adding the rhythm was that it WAS adding that thing that, without him around, I hadn't had. That was one thing.

 

Of course, I can't sing like him, but I think I'm going to try to and that will be fun. It will be its own challenge. What I got from him, though, was that crash down, blasted out ending. That sort of crazy flutter thing with both feet – that's what he used to do. That's coming very naturally to me because I was always playing harp on that and now I just slap on the cymbals.

 

I have to be honest. There's not a very wide range of grooves that I do on this album. I only do three grooves. I do a shuffle – I like to think I'm Mariano Rivera. I have one pitch! He has the cutter, and whatever sets up the cutter. I've got the shuffle groove, which I do differently than Sterling did. I've gone back and listened to Satan and Adam stuff to hear what he's doing – can I steal some beats from him? Its a weird way to listen to your own music, you know? And then I have basically, a left-right, left-right. The other one would be both feet at the same time. He did a lot of that – boom, boom, boom – and a couple of variations and that's what I've got. I'm looking for other grooves. I've decided I'm going to take a lesson from some pro drummer at some point. I want him to sit down and say 'Here are a couple more things you could be doing,' because I'm running out of ideas.

 

H411: I think its interesting because in Philadelphia last year when you had your solo spot and did two or three songs you were experimenting using both feet up there  more in terms of being playful with Sterling who was sitting in the audience watching. Its’ interesting that now it’s comfortable and now you're “there.”

 

Tell me about Kick and Stomp. From the first note it’s blowing your hair back.

 

Adam: The opening cut. Its one that I came up with only a couple of weeks before the recording session. In fact I did a YouTube video.  It was a harmonica pattern that I evolved to accompany a song he used to do on the street in Harlem and I had forgotten about it for a long time but a couple years ago I did a YouTube thing and I called it the Harlem Riff. Somebody recently pointed out that it bore some resemblance to the way that Howlin' Wolf played and I'm sure that somewhere back in there - because I did listen to some Howlin' Wolf – I didn't consciously copy him. What I wanted to show on the opening cut... I wanted to make sure I laid to rest once and for all the question of – do you need a guitar? Here's something there's almost no pause at all. It’s just harp, and its percussion. It’s a driving beat, I wanna grab you so you don't have any moment to say 'Oh listen to all that empty space. So it was high energy, and that was a song where I also didn't quite know the shape it was gonna’ take and I did a couple of test takes and I also had no intention of ending it like that until I got to that point ...it came out. I thought about Stevie Ray Vaughan in that cut very much. It’s a little bit like what I do with Charlie Hilbert in Cold Shot (demonstrates riff vocally) and it’s a little bit faster than that. It’s a real high energy kind of song. I didn't know it was going to be called Kick and Stomp until I had to name the album and I decided the cut would be called that.

 

H411:  It’s a great opening because it draws you in. If you have any love for harmonica-based music whatsoever it moves you through it.

 

Adam: Well good! I didn't want you to notice there was no guitar. I thought if I could put a cut out there right away that laid that issue to rest so that somebody would say 'Okay, it’s full and it grooves... Now what?'

 

That of course explains why I put the second cut that I did, which is Good Morning Little School Girl. Can I talk about that?

 

H411: Please, I'm interested in your thought processes – how you’re

similar to how a skilled band lays out their concert song list …

 

Adam: The song sequence... I actually was very deliberate. Here's the deal with Good Morning Little School Girl. I couldn't get it right. I did seven takes of that, and not like that. I did seven takes of it straight over two or three days. I love the harp part, it’s an unusual tune – it’s not a twelve bar blues.  I've done it for years but I haven't sung it for years. That's only fairly recent. That's one that Charlie Hilbert used to sing and I would play it with him, so for me its like a deep Mississippi blues with that slightly oblong shape that characteristic of the Mississippi Blues, like Catfish Blues.

 

But I kept slowing it down. When I'd play it, I couldn't keep the beat steady and I had no idea why. There are dangerous moments in the studio where an hour goes by. Usually it costs you a lot more than it cost me with Bryan, but an hour goes by and you realize you've done three takes, you've talked about them, you've listened to them, and its not working. I had that two nights in a row. Bryan finally said... [Adam pauses, laughing]. He didn't say dude every time, but he said  'Dude, I'm gonna’ make a suggestion. If it’s falling apart, let it. If that's what's happening then you know what? That's a strength…go with it.' 

I said, what do you mean? And he said 'Stop and start. I mean, let it fall apart... and then pick it up.' And I said, 'Really?' And as I said really, I was walking over to my harmonica case, I was getting the Jim Beam pint, and I took a big gulp and said 'Really? Then that's what I should do.' And then that laugh. And I think I did one take of that and he said 'Oh, you were so close to there.' And I said Okay man, if you really want it, I'm going to give it to you. That's what I did. I did it all the way through, I stopped, and said 'Was that okay?' and he said 'You got a hit.' (laughs)

 

I don't have a hit, but it was unlike... I've never been a stylist as a vocalist. I've never let the cat out of the bag as a stylist And even the fact that I named myself in the song….Adam... Adam's a little school boy too. I'd never done that ever in any performance of that song or any other song of mine.

 

H411: Right.

 

Adam: And so that kind of tells you what was happening, that I was really letting something out that I had not ever let out.  I mean, in a different way, not in a deep feeling way, not like a dirty old man. I'm not into little school girls!  I thought this was more like there’s a fourteen or fifteen year old kid who's dancing around the girl trying to get her attention, and then he gets her attention and then they stop and she goes 'I ain't going out with you.' That's how I heard it actually when I listened to it, how I felt it. But that's the song.

 

H411:  I like at the end of the song how you slow the tempo down. It just really grinds to a halt and you take it back over again and it grabs ya’. It’s a nice.

 

Adam: Well it shows you what a harp-powered one man band can do and that's why I love it, because its to the other extreme from Kick and Stomp. In Kick and Stomp I'm going to go right down the middle of the highway at 119 miles an hour, and you're gonna’ feel that – the line's gonna’ unspool in front of you. We're just gonna’ slam it. And “Schoolgirl” is very different. This is like, because I don't have a drummer, the percussion can totally express me, at every moment. And that's a revolutionary idea and I hope that somebody will hear that cut and go 'Wow, a duo or a band can't do that, or only with great difficulty – how could they? They'd have to really, really be inside each others head.'  If I had a drummer, I couldn't do that. Every moment of that song could express... me – with percussion and breaking the beat, and I thought that's cool, so that's why I put that second – because it was just totally different from the first.

 

H411: What made you decide to do the Cream tune, “Sunshine of your love”?

 

Adam: Well, I love it in performance. It’s really fun to do and I've gotten good reactions from it when I've performed it live. It belongs there, because we've opened with an original that's still a fairly traditional blues groove, we've followed up with an old traditional tune done in a new way, I start to become a fire breathing modernist. One of my pet peeves with blues harmonica playing, as a lot of people seem to imagine it these days, is that it seems to some extent. People seem to have a really hard time, in terms of repertoire, in terms of stylistic approach, aesthetics, getting beyond the great classics of the fifties and I wanted to decisively do that, in terms of what the record was projecting, and this song does that. I mean Cream... it’s blues rock, it’s British guys and it’s also a natural tune for crossharp because of the way its groove-heavy, because of the way there's a tension set up between the way the percussion set up is carrying the groove and where the harp is placed in the thing, there's a really nice tension set up. So it’s like there's call and response on a micro level between the harp and the percussion. It’s kind of syncopated, and then at a certain point the accents are at exactly the same place and I liked all of that. It’s also one that I sang for the first time back in January. I used to practice it on my runs and in a recent performance I sort of forgot one of the verses. But this time I nailed it.

 

H411: It’s funny. I've read several books, including his own book, about Clapton and Cream over the years and Clapton often says one of his favorite blues artists or one of the artists who influenced him most was Little Walter.

 

Adam: I didn't know that.

 

H411: He talks about his favorite blues guitar player far and away is Buddy Guy and how much he loves Buddy Guy's work with Junior Wells, so whether you intentionally did it or not, you tipped your hat to Eric Clapton.

 

Adam: I have to say I'm a huge fan. Clapton was one of my earliest influences. That's the other thing, and it makes sense, in a weird way. I was a guitar player as well as a harmonica player and I spent hours with Cream and especially with Derek and the Dominoes Live, playing along with his solos. But lately, when I got into this song within the last year, I went on YouTube and found some wonderful videos of Cream and I was just transfixed by an early in-studio performance these guys did  - much slower. And I just thought god, why shouldn't a modern blues harp player take off on Clapton?

 

Here's a couple of other things that might not be obvious about the song. One of the advantages of the one man band format – if somebody is going to think about doing this – you've got to have a strong groove and a steady groove, independent from the harp playing. You've got to keep that strong beat. I'm still getting it but more or less I have that.  Second requirement: you've got to know how to go with the changes. If you're going to pull off an album like I've put out there you've got to be able to imply in your solos fairly strongly where the changes come. Otherwise its just a bunch of noodling. And yet you want to have a lot of latitude, a lot of choices on how you show that the IV chord is in effect. How you show you're in the V-IV cadence. How you show you're in the turn around. All those things have to be part of your armory. Otherwise, there's no chord changes behind you and its boring. The cool thing I discovered in concert, and one of the great things about a harp-driven one man band, is that when you want to break that frame and just riff for days and forget about chords and just go off, you can do that. Cream didn't always do that. Jack Bruce was always back there. I think there were more moments when they stopped and it was just basically guitar with no backing at all. You can do that in this format. So there are moments in that song where I'm following the changes and tracking the changes, and then there are several periods in the song where I'm just stomp down tossing it off and forgetting about the chords completely, doing riff after riff after riff and versioning the riffs... kind of taking them and turning them inside out, repeating them, and turning them inside out again. I do that at the very end of the song. And also at the very end of the song you can do any kind of stomp down ending you want without having to worry about the drummer, looking over your shoulder. You ARE the drummer. I love that element of it. The ending of Sunshine of Your Love comes straight from watching Mr. Satan and playing with Mr. Satan for so many years.  You play one note and  go boomp-boomp-boomp as you hit the note.

 

H411: Right.

 

Adam: So each of those first three cuts shows a different element of who I am but also what the harp-drive one man band is capable of and that's why I started with those three cuts.

 

And the fourth cut, it’s obvious. With Every Day I Have the Blues, it’s time for a shuffle.

 

H411: The fourth cut brings me back to that New York groove. Even though it’s a shuffle it’s got that New York swing to it, the “Satan & Adam” sound

 

Adam: Yeah. You know, I hadn't thought about that but now that you point it out, the way that I do the swing there, although Sterling didn't actually do the upbeat. I basically hit the downbeat with the kick drum and the upbeat with the tambourine pedal. It’s very straight forward and simple. There's not even any percussion breaks at the end of choruses, which I really need to learn. That would be the next stage. I'll be honest, I don't even know how to do that so right now it’s un-inflected. But I think you're right. There's a ton of swing that I think came from organ. His form of swing... he was a piano player and organ player too. Most people don't know that.

 

H411: The feel for me was like I'm in the financial district having just left my office,  I'm walking down the Broadway, on the way to the 5 train, and I'm going on vacation. I'm done for two weeks. It brought me back to some of your older work in terms of the swing. If anyone listening to it is a fan of your earlier work, it’s going to bring them back. It really ties it together.

 

Adam: Yeah, yeah! It’s in the key of harp – it’s in an E flat harp, which is the highest harp I use on the album, which I never used with Sterling, so to extent this album was a chance to cut loose and try some new things... I use a wider range of harp keys…I use at least seven different keys I think. I use G, A, B flat, C, D flat, D and E flat. And I have one tune in third position on a C and one tune in first position on a C.

 

I wanted a sweet, swingy blues. That's not a down and dirty, nasty blues. That's a 'she's left me and I'm doing fine and I've got lots of energy and I'm gonna’ play it out Blues…

 

And I thought about William Clarke on some of those big octaves that I held – where it's just percussion and on an E flat you're doing a 3-6 blow. I said alright, I'm gonna play now and I did the 4-1up to the big octave and just kind of held it. Remembering how he used to hold those big octaves, get a deep sound sometimes... I wanted to show that side of the thing. And of course a lot of the high notes - I wanted to get a sound that was bright but full... That's a tricky thing. How are you going to play just an E flat harp and percussion and make it full... right? So there's probably a little more reverb on that one than some of them to fill it out.

 

H411: Yes, there is. It's funny, This is a busker's tune. You could be playing this in the subways...Anyway, tell me about the next song “PoorBoy”.

 

Adam: Well, basically you're pleading that you're pitiful. You're a poor boy a long way from home... And my baby's NOT dead and gone right now. She's alive and well, but God forbid that I have to listen to that tune some day and she's not. Part of what I wanted to do is put something out there for the... young or old harmonica student who may have suffered a loss, who may be in a place of loss. There's a few songs on the album that speak to that, and that's one of them.

 

If you think about the arc of the album, after the opening song it starts with a seduction song and then Sunshine of Your Love – you're kind of 'in it...' and then Every Day I have the Blues – she's already left! In the third song she's already gone. And then you're on Poor Boy, and you're a long way from home... I thought about putting these together – there's a very different texture on each one of them. Poor Boy is not quite a dirge, but by god, it’s slow, with a deep G harp, so its a big, monster kind of harp sound and it leads you into Shaun's Song. When I was structuring the album I meant that to be 'Okay, she's gone. Things are F'd up... time for some new thoughts. I don't know where I'm going. I'm crazy. I don't know what's going to happen next. I'd better just let out the weird shit.

 

And then its like, 'Okay, I'm on the move. And that's Going Down South. Which of, course is my own movement, too.

 

H411: That's the Hill Country Harmonica theme song, actually.

 

Adam: Yes, yes it is!

 

H411: Next cut - Buford Chapel Breakdown

 

Adam: That was a tune I did in one of my early YouTube lessons and I called it Not a Shuffle Blues. In fact I called it that during the recording session but when it came time to title it I decided that was a silly title.  When we went out to the crossroads in Lafayette County, Buford Chapel Road was the road that crossed left to right at a slight diagonal just before the crossroads.

 

Well, I recorded it for the first time sitting in my car just off Buford Chapel Road. I thought Buford Chapel Breakdown... it has a kind of a religious feeling. My wife said it's kind of like church. And it has Art Blakey's moanin’ in it.

 

H411: Yes, that's exactly right!

 

Adam : I didn't put that in the copyright. Please don't tell anybody. [chuckles] No, you can quote me. I kind of sampled that in. So a breakdown is kind of the word.

 

H411: I can see thirty people in a choir swaying, clapping, shaking their tambourines – so yeah, I'm with ya’.

 

Adam : Well you know, if you lost your baby, you've had the crazy thoughts, you're going down south, you end up down South... it would kind of be natural that southern church vibe would be somewhere in the journey. Its one of the places you're going to touch, whether you go to Al Green's church in Memphis, the Tula Baptist Church, Topola, Primitive Baptist Church outside of Oxford so... Buford Chapel... James P. Johnson had Carolina Shout, I thought, let me give it kind of a Southern-ish title and also breakdown – a breakdown is moanin' in the middle.  There's a guy who lost something here.

 

H411: And Buford Chapel brings you back to standing tall too..

 

Adam : And a breakdown. And then I go from Buford Chapel Breakdown to, what to me was the emotional core of the whole album, which was Crossroads Blues. And that’s very much how I thought about it when I sequenced it, although that's a song somebody else might have said. “Hey that's a song a lot of people might want. We ought to put it more up front.” I  wanted to hold off and make that the place the album is going to. And the song that follows it (Mr. Cantrell) was the logical one for me. It was a Satan and Adam tune. The melody was one I did on the recording we had on Mother Mojo and again, here's a place where I simply did it without Sterling on guitar. I played the same kind of thing I might have played with him but I'm playing it solo, with percussion. Its a dirge. Robert Blyigh talks in Iron John about how a lot of men go through 'a time of ashes' when everything falls apart, and I think that's what Mr. Cantrell is. Sterling used to say he named this thing Mr. Cantrell after this sad old man he knew who didn't have much going for him.

A young man can feel like a sad old man I suppose, so to that extent, Crossroads ends with “I believe I'm sinking down,” and then you're down. Bryan was kind of funny when I played it back for him. He acted like he was kind of drunk and said 'Dude, the beat is so funny, I feel like I'm taking one step at a time and I'm gonna kind of fall over.' I think I thought a little bit about Big Walter Horton. The harp is real front and center and its all about the texture. It’s very intimate in some way and that's what I wanted with that tune.

 

H411: It works.

 

Adam : It’s very organic. There was one total clam of a note in that where the note kind of just wheezed and I could have used Pro Tools – we have all these digital ways of airbrushing stuff out – and I didn't, because I listened to it and thought... there's something so pitiful. I thought the realness was the right way to go.

 

If I could say one quick word about the whole aesthetic of the album... we live in a time with everything being computerized and airbrushed and best foot forward. The one thing I'll say about his album is, it’s live in the studio. We did a couple of edits.  We took one chorus out of Crossroads and Sugar. And there were two punch-ins on The Entertainer because my mouth filled with spit and I needed to do it in three takes. (laughs) Other than that there's no overdubs, we didn't use Pro Tools on my voice, or whatever you call the one that lets you raise the pitch a little. The advantage for the listener, I suppose is intimacy. I was flattered by an overseas participant on my blues harp forum who talked about my mistakes and then he said, 'You know, when I listened to it again suddenly I felt like I was listening to an Alan Lomax recording' and I thought. You know, if I made it to the point where I'm just doing field recordings of myself and that's acceptable, that's a good place to be – where just try to make music and it is what it is.

 

H411: I'm sure, and this is getting off topic slightly... You have a lot people who have watched you and listened to you over the years - your online lessons who may never have met you, or may have exchanged occasional emails with you - but feel like they know you because the lessons are very personal. They don't know you but they feel like they're friends with you. I think that happens to a lot of people who put themselves out there that way. Howard Stern talks about it all the time. He was very honest and all of a sudden he has two million intimate friends who think they know him. And to some extent, he says, they do. It can be a confusing situation for them. But I think on the album, because it is intimate, I think for your students, or online students, or fans who have seen you – it works. When listen to Down Ain't Out...

 

Adam : Down Ain't Out... I titled it after I played it. What that is, is a six-minute, unaccompanied, Little Walter-style solo. It’s a shuffle blues on a D flat harp. I did that the same night not long after I did Good Morning Little School Girl and my engineer, who I had decided at that moment is my producer, was telling me 'You've got a hit. You've got a hit.'  Every musician wants to be stroked a little bit every now and then and... I'd had a few drinks. So I took another big drink and said 'You know what, I feel like playing now. I'm just going to roll tape, and the opening melody is something I took from a Houston Person record. I just started playing and let it spool out. It’s a sax jazz blues and I took that head, and I've done it for many years but I;ve never played it at that length solo although if I were playing on the street I realize that I might have to play solo but probably not that long. I'd had a few drinks. I'll be honest.

 

I was a little high on booze when I played that tune. You can't tell from the groove but when I listened to it the next day I said 'that one, we're not going to use.' The reason was, if you listen closely, there are two choruses that are not twelve bars long In the middle of a phrase, in the middle of the twelve bars I put in an extra beat and a half – or two beats – because I was a little drunk. But I didn't lose the groove. If I didn't tell you that, many musicians, like harp players, they'll be sure to notice that and go 'What?' and rewind it, because there's no way to count it. Its like somewhere in my musical mind I lost track. Now, that may be the true Mississippi touch and that's what I liked about it. I used to be frustrated when I blew harp with Mississippi guitar players, I used to joke about it. Mississippi blues and Mississippi players are known for putting in – like Honeyboy (Edwards), will put in extra space after the vocal. They do the single vocal line, and then play, and its not necessarily two bars after the vocal.  It’s very rare in New York. It’s unheard of if you're playing with other musicians because you’ll fuck em’  up, right?

 

H411: Sure…

 

Adam: … So when I listened to it the first time I thought 'I can't use that.' but the more I listened to it the more I thought 'well, nobody who's listening  to the beat will know. The beat is totally rock solid. There's just an extra beat or two in a bar in two separate choruses.  I said, that's perfect – paving new frontiers in one man bands. Here's one more thing you can do, one more way you can be free... if you have a little too much to drink and you make it a five beat bar – why the hell not? That was a very buoyant song and I felt good as I was doing it and hopefully that's what comes through.

 

H411: When you're sober its called fucking up. When you've been drinking its called innovative, right? [both laugh] But you're right. No one can probably tell.

 

Adam: Now they'll be looking for it. It’s not hard to find.

 

H411: Looking for Waldo, musically. Anyway, this segue ways into My Baby's So Sweet…

 

Adam: what's your thought on that?

 

H411: That's one of the cuts I didn't listen a lot to though it’s playing in my left ear right now.

 

Adam: All the other original Adam Gussow tunes on the album - Shaun's Song, Buford Chapel Breakdown and Mr. Cantrell - are all instrumentals. This is the only one with lyrics that I wrote. I will not claim that it is a memorable song. What it is frankly, its sort of like in the John Lee Hooker stomp down mode give me a strong groove and give me some nonsense words that I can work variations on for days so that I can get people to keep dancing.

 

H411: That's what I was going to say. As I listen to it now, it’s really a hoppin’ juke joint roadhouse tune.

 

Adam : “My baby's so sweet, my baby's so fine, my baby's so nice, like sugar and spice... My baby's so... and then fill in the adjective. It’s gibberish. But, within that there's some interesting structural stuff. It has the “hey” thing, followed by that kind of hit on the upbeat 2-5 draw, D harp kind of through down.  It's all energy.

 

H411 : From my perspective, it's also the most mainstream sounding tune. You couldarp k have a drummer, a bass player and a guitar player playing along with you on that song with ease. It’s a road house tune.  It'll get people dancing. From the moment you hit the first note people will stand up and dance because you can't help but tap your toes.

 

Adam: That was sort of the idea and I wanted to round out the album. That one took some editing. In the original full-length version of it I kind of sped up at one point and I had to cut that out. Bryan's a brilliant editor. We cut out the part that was a 'failed performance' and what remained works, works well enough.

 

H411: I like the simplicity of the structure. It’s the 'pop song' on the album.

 

Adam: Hmm, interesting.  And then Sugar... that's the house/techno track.

This is a song I've done for years as a medium slow swing, which is the way Stanley Turrentine does it. It was a song my band in college did. I used to play guitar chords behind that tune and I've played it on harp for years – third position, and I don't do many third positions tunes but its one of these melodies that fits really well in third position. The version with that beat was one I came up with back in May where I just suddenly tried a different beat and thought 'that's how it will work.' We added a lot of studio reverb and in the mastering process it was the one song where I said the the mastering engineer 'Come on, if I give this to you, can you gussy it up a little bit? He did just a little tweaking here and there. I wanted an interesting effect out of that. Some straight ahead blues people might not like that beat at all. Its like in the sequencing of the album, all of the emotional heavy lifting is over, let’s just have a drink and dance. Just shut up and dance. That's the vibe I wanted. So I wanted a groove that was a very non-bluesy groove, very techno, almost like a click track sound.

 

H411: Okay.

 

Adam: What I wanted was to almost fool somebody into thinking at first it was a click track and then a band. And then I wanted during particular moments, like when the harp falls out briefly early on, where somebody says 'holy crap, its just the same configuration. That's a whole other  thing that the one man band can do. He can be a chameleon. Again, the ulterior motive is, why the heck not take a smooth jazz standard that plays on smooth jazz stations all over the country and re-barbarize it, bring it back down into a one man band format and then that one man band do it in a way that makes it into a disco tune. That makes it new.

 

H411: Right. 

 

Adam: It’s not the same old Little Walter cover, and that was my ulterior motive. If your mind hasn't been blown at that point in the album, if you think you know everything that's going to be coming up, that should spin your head a little bit.

 

I guess that was one of the motivations for the final tune, The Entertainer. What's left to do that hasn't been done?

 

H411: I thought that was a completely different direction…

 

Adam: A completely different direction. That’s... okay, Gussow’s a modernist. I get it. And then I throw that at you and you're forced to say wow, you could put him and Joe Filisko on the same program and they could alternate – well at least Gussow would have one tune [laughs] that deserves mention with Filisko and Wade Schuman. There's nobody better at that sort of thing than those two guys It’s a first position BUT, one important difference, which is that it has over-blows in it. It’s basically the root of the blues, the ragtime period before the blues. You think Gussow's a modernist? He's going to take you back before the blues and do old time Americana. But it takes over blows to play. You come along and think Ha! He can do that stuff too. Then you try and you go I can't cover it unless I do overblows.

 

H411: You're doing some pretty cool stuff with tongue blocking in there as well.

 

Adam : Wade was the guy, I saw him in '86 when I was over in Paris. He was the guy who said  'you've got to go and get this alum on Yazoo “Harmonica Blues of the twenties and thirties, which I did and I had my mind blown. And I learned some of that from that album. I owe Wade thanks, actually.

 

H411: He's a member of Hazmat Modine, yes?

 

Adam: Yes. I knew him before Hazmat Modine  He was just a great player for that old style, and very expressive and very energetic. And I tried to do some of that, with of course, the kick. The image that I like is the clown waddling onto the stage when the whole thing is over, the one guy in the spotlight to send you home.

 

H411 Well Adam, I appreciate you spending so much time to me, I think this was really insightful to your solo project and to how you like to make music in general.

Adam: Jeff, you've given me an awful lot of shelf space here and I appreciate that.

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AFTERWARD:  Adam still lives in Oxford, MS with his wife and son.

His album is now available as a download from three place:  his websight, on CDBaby  and at iTunes.  (For some reason iTunes has categorized him as a "singer/songwriter," rather than as a blues artist.  Adam reports he's requested that they fix this mistake.)  Here are the links for his website and CDBaby:

http://www.modernbluesharmonica.com/kick_and_stomp.html

https://www.cdbaby.com/cd/adamgussow

The album is ALSO available as a CD, direct from Adam.  The two links for ordering the CD  can be found on the MBH page above.  Within about two weeks, the CD will also be available from CDBaby.