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Second of a three-part series.

PREVIOUSLY:

• MUSICAL MEMOIR: When Sunnyland Slim Tells You to Take Route 66, You Should Take Route 66

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The great blues guitarist Mike Bloomfield called me one morning at the hotel where I was staying in San Francisco.

“Paul, how many gigs have you played in your life?” Bloomfield asked. “Probably seven.” I said.

The night before I’d played drums with Bloomfield and the Chicago blues pianist and singer Sunnyland Slim at the Lion’s Share Club in San Anselmo. It was the second stop for the Sunnyland Slim Band on a 30-day Bay Area tour with Bloomfield. It was November 1972. I was 21, a recent dropout from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

“Well, it sounds like it,” Bloomfield said. “I can tell you have talent but you don’t have the experience to be playing with me and Sunnyland. I called Sunnyland and told him that you weren’t ready to play with us. I said I could get the best blues drummer in the San Francisco area to finish the tour.”

My heart sank. I felt devastated. Was I going to get fired and sent home, a total failure in the eyes of my family and friends in Wisconsin? At the same time, I knew he was right. I was in way over my head. He was considered the best white blues guitarist in the country at that time. I was a total rookie.

Bloomfield said, “Sunnyland’s answer was, ‘I brought the man all the way from Wisconsin. He stays but we are going to teach him how to play the drums.’”

Bloomfield then invited me, Sunnyland and Harry Duncan, our harmonica player and road manager, to his house for dinner that night. “Bring your snare drum and sticks,” he said. “After dinner you’ll ride with me to the show at the Keystone in Palo Alto and we’ll talk.”

Bloomfield lived in a house atop a hill in Mill Valley. In his living room, casually strewn with records, I set up my snare on a stand and placed the sticks across the drum.

Sunnyland took them and said, “Paul, you’ve got to learn how to play a backbeat like Dogman,” a blues drummer I’d never heard of. With a drum stick in his hand, he hit my Ludwig silver chrome snare hard. Then he hit the outer metal rim of the drum and the snare head at the same time, called a rimshot. It made a louder back beat with a sharper tone.

‘You’ve got to get a backbeat with a rimshot like Kansas City Red,” he said, another drummer I’d never heard of. “You can’t just be bullshittin’ tapping that ride cymbal like you’re playin’ jazz with Count Basie. You’ve got to DRIVE a blues singer with a backbeat!”

After dinner, I rode with Bloomfield in his car for the 75-minute ride to Palo Alto.

“Paul, I know you have talent and good ears for the music, you just need experience,” he said while driving south on Highway 101. “To become an excellent drummer, you need to study the origins of the blues and whatever music genre you want to play. You are what you listen to.

“If you want to play Chicago blues, you need to go back and listen to Count Basie’s Kansas City big band. Chicago blues musicians like Sunnyland play a lot of swing music. The harmonica player is taking the place of the horn section in a swing big band.”

That was a revelation. He told me to listen to the best studio bands and their drummers, like Al Jackson of Booker T. and the MGs and Stax Records, Roger Hawkins of Muscle Shoals recording studio, and Fred Below, the great Chess Records drummer in Chicago.

“Get the records of the seminal artists and drummers of the genres you want to play,” he said. “Go out and see great drummers.”

In 75 minutes he gave me a detailed road map of what I needed to do to become a professional drummer. He was generous and compassionate, something my damaged pride needed.

We still had another dozen shows to play with Bloomfield in the San Francisco Bay Area. Later that day, our bassist Joe Harper was sent home to Chicago because he was too sick to play. Bloomfield hired bassist Kip Maercklein, who had recently toured and recorded with Elvin Bishop

At the show that night in Palo Alto, I faced a different Sunnyland. He was impatient, sometimes even stopping in the middle of a song, glaring at me and counting out the time in front of the audience. He often did this when he drank too much whiskey.

It was beyond humiliating to me, more like excruciating.

The tour continued. I remember playing the Inn of the Beginning in Cotati and the rustic Town and Country Lodge in the Santa Cruz Mountains, a hippie haven.

Off stage, I experienced a fascinating adventure exploring San Francisco for the first time. During the day, Sunnyland, Harry Duncan and I would drive around the city with Slim. We’d visit record stores to see if they carried his records.

One afternoon, driving down the steep hill of San Francisco’s Gough Street. Sunnyland said, “There’s too many hills here! And there are too many Sans – San Francisco, San Jose, San Anselmo!”

I remember eating Chinese food for the first time in my life in Chinatown with them. I was 21, lean and had a speedy metabolism. I’d easily devour appetizers and two or more dishes.

“Paul,” Sunnyland said to Harry, “the man’s got more food on his plate than a greyhound can jump over.”

I hung in there playing show after show, with Slim occasionally glaring at me with disgust. I was having no fun, just surviving.

Finally, the last day of the tour arrived. We were set to play a gymnasium concert at the University of California in Santa Cruz, November 30, 1972. That morning Harry got a call from Bloomfield saying he was sick. Mike had already called his friend Elvin Bishop who agreed to play the show.

I remember a large university gym with about 3,000 people. While the band set up, Elvin introduced himself. I set up my drums in the center of the stage with bassist Kip Maercklein to my immediate left and Sunnyland to his left. Before the show, I noticed Sunnyland drinking whiskey. He kept sipping throughout the show. At one point he stopped playing, looked at me and started counting time on top of his piano with his right hand and shaking his head while the audience and Elvin Bishop watched.

I wished I was anywhere but there.

Kip whispered in my ear, “Your time is fine. He’s drunk. Just keep playing with me.” I was so thankful to the late Kip Maercklein for his immense kindness in that moment.

When we finished the show, I was thrilled the month-long ordeal was over.

Who Stole Sunnyland’s Money?

After the show Harry paid everyone, including Bishop. On the drive back to Mill Valley, where Sunnyland was staying with the great Chicago blues guitarist Luther Tucker, Harry drove Sunnyland’s car. Harry and my friend from Wisconsin, Carol Little (now Murray), were in the front. I was alone in the back.

The very-drunk Sunnyland was trying to count the money he was paid. It was spread across his lap. After we crossed the Golden State bridge, Sunnyland told Harry to pull over off Highway 101 near Sausalito. In a low, dark voice, Sunnyland said, “Someone stole my money.”

“Did you pay Elvin Bishop’s manager an extra deposit before the show?” Harry asked.

In his low, whispered voice, Sunnyland said, “I know who stole my money. Paul stole my money.”

“That’s ridiculous!” I angrily told Sunnyland. “I would never do that.”

“I brought the man out all the way out here from Wisconsin. I don’t know why, but Paul stole my money,” Sunnyland said.

“Paul didn’t steal your money,” Harry said. “Let’s get you home and we’ll talk about it in the morning.”

On the way back to our hotel in San Francisco, I told Harry that we were going to drive back to Mill Valley first thing in the morning.

“If he doesn’t apologize to me, I won’t ever play with him again,” I said. “I’ll never speak to him. I don’t care who he is. I’ve had enough!”

The next day we got up and drove to Luther Tucker’s in Mill Valley.

I knocked on the door. When Luther opened it, I saw Sunnyland walking across the living room toward me waving his hands above his head.

“Paul, I was wrong,” he said with a sheepish smile. “I was drunk and when I saw all those white people there, I started thinking, ‘Someone’s going to steal my money.’

“I thought about Kansas City Red and his hos. When they were afraid of some white man stealing their money, they’d put it in their pussies. So I put $50 in my shoe. When I woke up this morning, there it was.”

Sunnyland was born in Vance, Mississippi in 1907. He played his piano and sang at Southern lumber camps while white men drank and ate. He played music while traveling in the violently racist South in the ’20s and ’30s. I imagined he experienced many frightening things involving white men. Luckily, he was a strapping, six-foot-four man.

And I’m sure those Black Kansas City prostitutes had plenty of reasons to fear their white clients stealing their money.

In Luther Tucker’s living room, we laughed about it while drinking coffee. To say I was relieved is an understatement. I got my heart back relatively intact.

My relationship with him changed forever. He was never mean to me again on or off stage. He trusted me for the next 15 years that I played shows with him.

But it took three years before he trusted me musically. I had a lot of hard work to do to get good enough to play with him again.

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Next, Part Three, Redemption.

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Thanks to my editor, Pamela Long, and Julian DeMark for photo scanning. Find many more musical memories at my Substack.