When at the age of thirty, I arrived in Arizona in 1986, the city of Phoenix was not only my new home but a symbol of the process I was going through, that is, rising from the ashes. When I left Arabia, there was a two-year stopover in my hometown of Pensacola, where I tried my hand at the seafood business. Well...it stunk, and I lost my ass. And Jo-Mama wasn’t happy living in the Redneck Riviera—not her bag at all. Luckily I sold the business and got away clean. That was a tough two years, but I learned a little something about crawfish that becomes important later in the story.
Jo-Mama and I still had our digital duo from Arabia but it just wasn’t gettin’ it for me. I was yearning for a full band and started hanging out at some local blues jams. Phoenix was and still is a kind of “big city-small town”, and in a matter of months I knew most of the major players in blues, soul, jazz, and R&B. I joined, or actually helped re-form, a classic soul band called Nitekap, fronted by George Bowman, a Mississippi Brother who did James Brown really well—the real deal. We were a racially mixed outfit, with George up front along with a great black bass player who was always in trouble, getting stabbed at a Circle K or something. We had a crisp, tight Mexican drummer. And two horns plus me on guitar made up the Caucasian element. Jo-Mama eventually joined the band as an additional singer.
We did the traditional “R&B Revue”, opening each set with an instrumental featuring the horns; then a tune featuring me, one or two featuring Jo-Mama; then a big fanfare to bring up George, who would take the band through the rest of the set nonstop with tight segues between songs—all that. There was a good deal of showmanship, horns stepping in time, George doing his James Brown spin moves, and me calling out changes to the band. I learned a lot about entertaining in this phase of my music education, versus just playing one song after another to an audience.
Our regular gigs were in the soul and blues clubs of Phoenix, where Blacks, Whites, and Latinos mixed, and we had a helluva following. This got us a lot of nice private casuals that paid well. We also played prisons, air force bases, festivals, the whole deal. We were always busy, working three to four nights a week, and had many good times. We saw some scary stuff on the dance floor, especially when the carnies were in town and ready to party after a hard day at the county fair.
It was a rich time for me. I had just turned thirty and was loving the whole music scene. I had also gotten a new career going in real estate, and didn’t have to depend on music for income. This kept me in an upbeat mood all through the long days and nights that started at 9 am and finished at 2 am.
I stayed with Nitekap for a few years, expanding my street-level education in soul, R&B, and blues. But I eventually tired of the constant personnel problems that come with playing way down in the gutbucket aspect of life. I was eager to start my own band with handpicked, dependable players, blending everything I had learned musically from Florida, New Orleans, overseas, and now Phoenix.
As I mentioned earlier, there are a lot of veteran players in Phoenix. By this time I was good friends with people like Greg Warner who had toured with Dionne Warwick for years and also played on the 80’s TV show Solid Gold; Dennis Rowland, a jazz singer who was with Count Basie for several years; Chuck Hall, a smokin’ Texas blues guitarist who now heads up product development at Fender; and Francine Reed, an awesome vocalist who has sung on a ton of records, toured with Lyle Lovett, and been on Letterman and Leno a dozen times. Here's a shot of Francine. When I saw her in this one-piece leopard skin suit I said, "Damn, I sure would like to skin this cat!" Francine replied, "It's only got one zipper Crawdaddy, let's go!"
There was also some music royalty living in Phoenix ...Stevie Nicks, Alice Cooper, George Benson, Sam Moore, Glen Campbell, members of Kiss, Metallica, and a bunch more. The only reason I mention this is that these big artists had great backing bands, so there were a lot of journeyman players living here, for instance, the Lord of the Hammond B3, Joey DeFrancesco. Many of these players hung out at a couple of local “musician bars” like Bobby C's near downtown Phoenix and the Melody Lounge in south Scottsdale. Touring acts on the road knew about the Melody and would stop in there after their shows when in town. You could walk in the Melody and see artists as diverse as George Thoroughgood or Anita Baker sitting in with the house band in this funky neighborhood bar with ‘70’s naughahyde booths and pool tables behind the stage.
After we left Nitekap, Jo-Mama and I formed a band to compete in a state-wide blues contest. We named it Jo Dance & Fat Chance, a tongue-in-cheek reference to the odds of winning, but actually came in second and figured it was good enough to turn into a working band. Having already established ourselves in the Phoenix music scene, we were able to work steady in the clubs, and ran our real estate appraisal company together during the day. It was a helluva work pace--a typical work day & night was 18 hours--but that seemed to be our nature. But there was a price, because after twelve years together--the last few being really high stress--we had just burned each other out, and ended up getting divorced, amicable though it was. Jo was always very kind.
Jo-Mama left the band and I found a replacement for her, a kid prodigy singer named Jennifer Tozzi. Her father was Giorgio Tozzi, a famous opera and Broadway singer from the 1950’s. Jennifer was good enough to sing at the 100-year anniversary of Carnegie Hall in New York at age 18, and joined our band at age 22. She could sing pretty much anything pop, and really perform it. We turned her onto our generation of music and before long she was tearing up Aretha Franklin, Chaka Khan, and Bonnie Bramlett tunes.
Fat Chance continued on for another year or so, building a good head of steam, and playing pretty much any gig we wanted to. We even toured a bit, playing Colorado, Southern California, and way down in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, headlining Van Halen's Cabo Wabo Bar. I got to play through Eddie Van Halens' rig. It wasn't loud, it was f**king loud. Jo-Mama actually did that gig with us.
Fat Chance was one of the tighter four-piece outfits I ever put together. The drummer was Henry Lara from the old Nitekap band; bass player Rick Bogan was an in-the-pocket funk veteran from Philadelphia who also owned a recording studio; and our B3 player, Vaughn Smith, was a New Orleans veteran who had played with the Herman Ernst All Stars, a band that sometimes backed Dr. John. I played through a 145 Leslie and Vaughn had a couple of 122's, so when we both happened to turn on the fast rotor speeds at the same time on some tune like "Real Mother For Ya", it sounded like a teradactyl taking off in flight.
OK, so now the story behind my nickname. I mentioned awhile back that I learned about crawfish when I owned the seafood company in Florida. Well, one spring day in Arizona, a handful of friends, some of whom had recently moved to Phoenix from various places in the South, realized we were jones-ing for some crawfish. So I called one of my old suppliers back in Opelousas, Louisiana, who air freighted out 40 pounds, and we sho’ passed a real good time as they say down dehr in Louisiana. We just sat around a condo complex swimming pool, eating crawdads and drinking beer.
The next year we did it again, and the next, and the next, and it kept growing...by year five or six our backyard party had burgeoned into The Arizona Crawfish Festival, a fundraiser supporting two local children’s charities. By year nine we were sponsored by Budweiser and America West Airlines, and always made the evening news. We got a great local restaurant, Baby Kay’s Cajun Kitchen, to cook all the crawfish, corn, and potatoes, and we moved the event to the enormous Club Rio, a massize college bar in Tempe.
Some of the original crawfish gang were musicians, so the local music community was involved from the beginning. We always had excellent live entertainment at our all-day events. By year twelve, AZ Crawfest was no doubt the largest crawfish festival in the Southwest US, cooking about 5000 pounds of crawdads for 2500 people. That may not be much by Louisiana standards, but hey, this was Arizona, where crawfish were only something you saw once in awhile in a creek up near Flagstaff.
Here are some photos of just a few of the great local musicians that played our festival.
I had had my fill of mudbugs, but The Crawdaddy moniker stuck. It would be uncool to be called The Crawdaddy if I lived in Louisiana. That would be like calling yourself The Gangster if you lived in Chicago or New York. But here in the Arizona desert I guess it’s okay. I definitely play some New Orleans funk, but not Cajun music per se, so when people ask, why "The Crawdaddy?”, I happily proceed to boast about the enormous crawfish festival I was a part of all those years.
Jo-Mama and I still had our digital duo from Arabia but it just wasn’t gettin’ it for me. I was yearning for a full band and started hanging out at some local blues jams. Phoenix was and still is a kind of “big city-small town”, and in a matter of months I knew most of the major players in blues, soul, jazz, and R&B. I joined, or actually helped re-form, a classic soul band called Nitekap, fronted by George Bowman, a Mississippi Brother who did James Brown really well—the real deal. We were a racially mixed outfit, with George up front along with a great black bass player who was always in trouble, getting stabbed at a Circle K or something. We had a crisp, tight Mexican drummer. And two horns plus me on guitar made up the Caucasian element. Jo-Mama eventually joined the band as an additional singer.
We did the traditional “R&B Revue”, opening each set with an instrumental featuring the horns; then a tune featuring me, one or two featuring Jo-Mama; then a big fanfare to bring up George, who would take the band through the rest of the set nonstop with tight segues between songs—all that. There was a good deal of showmanship, horns stepping in time, George doing his James Brown spin moves, and me calling out changes to the band. I learned a lot about entertaining in this phase of my music education, versus just playing one song after another to an audience.
Our regular gigs were in the soul and blues clubs of Phoenix, where Blacks, Whites, and Latinos mixed, and we had a helluva following. This got us a lot of nice private casuals that paid well. We also played prisons, air force bases, festivals, the whole deal. We were always busy, working three to four nights a week, and had many good times. We saw some scary stuff on the dance floor, especially when the carnies were in town and ready to party after a hard day at the county fair.
It was a rich time for me. I had just turned thirty and was loving the whole music scene. I had also gotten a new career going in real estate, and didn’t have to depend on music for income. This kept me in an upbeat mood all through the long days and nights that started at 9 am and finished at 2 am.
I stayed with Nitekap for a few years, expanding my street-level education in soul, R&B, and blues. But I eventually tired of the constant personnel problems that come with playing way down in the gutbucket aspect of life. I was eager to start my own band with handpicked, dependable players, blending everything I had learned musically from Florida, New Orleans, overseas, and now Phoenix.
As I mentioned earlier, there are a lot of veteran players in Phoenix. By this time I was good friends with people like Greg Warner who had toured with Dionne Warwick for years and also played on the 80’s TV show Solid Gold; Dennis Rowland, a jazz singer who was with Count Basie for several years; Chuck Hall, a smokin’ Texas blues guitarist who now heads up product development at Fender; and Francine Reed, an awesome vocalist who has sung on a ton of records, toured with Lyle Lovett, and been on Letterman and Leno a dozen times. Here's a shot of Francine. When I saw her in this one-piece leopard skin suit I said, "Damn, I sure would like to skin this cat!" Francine replied, "It's only got one zipper Crawdaddy, let's go!"
There was also some music royalty living in Phoenix ...Stevie Nicks, Alice Cooper, George Benson, Sam Moore, Glen Campbell, members of Kiss, Metallica, and a bunch more. The only reason I mention this is that these big artists had great backing bands, so there were a lot of journeyman players living here, for instance, the Lord of the Hammond B3, Joey DeFrancesco. Many of these players hung out at a couple of local “musician bars” like Bobby C's near downtown Phoenix and the Melody Lounge in south Scottsdale. Touring acts on the road knew about the Melody and would stop in there after their shows when in town. You could walk in the Melody and see artists as diverse as George Thoroughgood or Anita Baker sitting in with the house band in this funky neighborhood bar with ‘70’s naughahyde booths and pool tables behind the stage.
Jo-Mama left the band and I found a replacement for her, a kid prodigy singer named Jennifer Tozzi. Her father was Giorgio Tozzi, a famous opera and Broadway singer from the 1950’s. Jennifer was good enough to sing at the 100-year anniversary of Carnegie Hall in New York at age 18, and joined our band at age 22. She could sing pretty much anything pop, and really perform it. We turned her onto our generation of music and before long she was tearing up Aretha Franklin, Chaka Khan, and Bonnie Bramlett tunes.
Fat Chance continued on for another year or so, building a good head of steam, and playing pretty much any gig we wanted to. We even toured a bit, playing Colorado, Southern California, and way down in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, headlining Van Halen's Cabo Wabo Bar. I got to play through Eddie Van Halens' rig. It wasn't loud, it was f**king loud. Jo-Mama actually did that gig with us.
Fat Chance was one of the tighter four-piece outfits I ever put together. The drummer was Henry Lara from the old Nitekap band; bass player Rick Bogan was an in-the-pocket funk veteran from Philadelphia who also owned a recording studio; and our B3 player, Vaughn Smith, was a New Orleans veteran who had played with the Herman Ernst All Stars, a band that sometimes backed Dr. John. I played through a 145 Leslie and Vaughn had a couple of 122's, so when we both happened to turn on the fast rotor speeds at the same time on some tune like "Real Mother For Ya", it sounded like a teradactyl taking off in flight.
OK, so now the story behind my nickname. I mentioned awhile back that I learned about crawfish when I owned the seafood company in Florida. Well, one spring day in Arizona, a handful of friends, some of whom had recently moved to Phoenix from various places in the South, realized we were jones-ing for some crawfish. So I called one of my old suppliers back in Opelousas, Louisiana, who air freighted out 40 pounds, and we sho’ passed a real good time as they say down dehr in Louisiana. We just sat around a condo complex swimming pool, eating crawdads and drinking beer.
The next year we did it again, and the next, and the next, and it kept growing...by year five or six our backyard party had burgeoned into The Arizona Crawfish Festival, a fundraiser supporting two local children’s charities. By year nine we were sponsored by Budweiser and America West Airlines, and always made the evening news. We got a great local restaurant, Baby Kay’s Cajun Kitchen, to cook all the crawfish, corn, and potatoes, and we moved the event to the enormous Club Rio, a massize college bar in Tempe.
Some of the original crawfish gang were musicians, so the local music community was involved from the beginning. We always had excellent live entertainment at our all-day events. By year twelve, AZ Crawfest was no doubt the largest crawfish festival in the Southwest US, cooking about 5000 pounds of crawdads for 2500 people. That may not be much by Louisiana standards, but hey, this was Arizona, where crawfish were only something you saw once in awhile in a creek up near Flagstaff.
Here are some photos of just a few of the great local musicians that played our festival.
Charles Bond
Donnie Dean
Rochelle Raya
Dennis Rowland, from the Count Basie Orchestra
Tracy Mortimer, Nevis Truitt, Johnny Rapp, Dave Trippey, S.E. Willis
Walt Richardson
S. E. Willis
Al Ortiz, bass player for Stevie Nicks
Chuck Hall, Head of Fender Product Development,
and Diana Lee of Sister Sledge
and Diana Lee of Sister Sledge
Andy Gonzales
Joey Trujillo
Chris Gough, New York Mo-Fo
After twelve years we were exhausted from putting on the event—it was like planning a giant wedding for a demanding daughter. We had to start prepping for the next year’s event just a few months after we had finished to prior one. So my drummer buddy Greg Warner, who had been involved since inception, was good enough to train the charities who had been receiving the proceeds all these years, on how to put the event on themselves.
Greg Warner, of Dionne Warwick and Solid Gold TV fame
The Crawdaddy
I had had my fill of mudbugs, but The Crawdaddy moniker stuck. It would be uncool to be called The Crawdaddy if I lived in Louisiana. That would be like calling yourself The Gangster if you lived in Chicago or New York. But here in the Arizona desert I guess it’s okay. I definitely play some New Orleans funk, but not Cajun music per se, so when people ask, why "The Crawdaddy?”, I happily proceed to boast about the enormous crawfish festival I was a part of all those years.
Fat Chance disbanded in 1995 after a nice five-year run, and we had turned over the crawfish festival to others at about the same time. Something inside clicked and I didn’t really want to perform in clubs anymore. I was in my early 40’s and my divorce had forced me to re-evaluate some things. I pulled out of live performing, scaled back my real estate business, and went into a pretty deep process of self-exploration. This led to returning to school to eventually get a masters degree in Classical East-West Philosophy of all things.
I became a teacher, counselor, and writer, and didn’t associate as often with the old crowd I used to run with. It wasn’t an elitist thing, it’s just that when you focus on something as radical as I was doing, you have to remove distractions and really get into that new world all the way. To me it was just like wood-shedding on guitar—hole up in your bedroom and practice, practice, practice. Lucky for me, all my friends seemed to understand what I was doing and just gave me the space to do it. I can never thank them enough for their strong, quiet support.
Fast forward ten years and here I am in my mid-fifties, back into music again, the one constant that has weathered come-and-go careers, relationships, bands, crawfish festivals, and everything else. My CD’s are getting some radio play and positive reviews in Europe and the States. I still go out occasionally and sit in with friends’ bands in the local club scene. Through the various spirals, I have found a way to blend three things I love to do into a combination of activities that fuel, inspire, and challenge me daily:
Urban real estate pioneering, that is,
rehabbing funky old buildings in central Phoenix...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWdiaQKzTRg
rehabbing funky old buildings in central Phoenix...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWdiaQKzTRg
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Self-discovery education, counseling, & writing:
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Crawdaddy Music: Creative tinkering in my studio,
Crawdaddy Music: Creative tinkering in my studio,
focusing on composition, recording, production,
Life is pretty good.
This completes the Crawdaddy Music Roots series...whew!
Here is a link to another Crawdaddy tune off my second CD, Luxury Muscle:
Posts
I cannot say how fascinated I am with the story that is your life. The drive, the depth, the adventure...I hope that each day you wake up and smile if for no other reason than that you are living a grand life.
ReplyDeleteThank you for sharing all of this...(and such cool photos!!)
Thanks Lisa...digging your posts as well. You have a great writing voice for your topics
ReplyDelete