BLUES GUITARIST COLLINS SHIFTING INTO HIGH GEAR

Albert Collins’ career has been on the upswing since he signed with Alligator Records in 1979, but recently he has shifted into overdrive.

The veteran blues guitarist, who appears at the Belly Up Tavern tonight and at the Music Machine on Friday, jammed with George Thorogood at the Live Aid concert, worked with David Bowie on the “Labyrinth” sound track and is featured on a live concert home video, “Further on Down the Road.”

Collins will make his movie debut playing a blues musician in “Adventures in Babysitting” this summer, and he just chalked up his first Grammy for “Showdown,” an album that also featured fellow blues guitarists Johnny Copeland and Robert Cray.

“A Grammy covers a lot of things, from what I’ve heard,” Collins, 54, said during a recent phone interview from San Francisco.

“People say it gets you into better rooms along with some of the heavies, and some say your money goes up. I don’t know,” he chuckled, “but I’m going to check into it.”

Collins was no stranger to his collaborators on “Showdown.” He had given Copeland some pointers in the late ‘50s, when Copeland was starting off in Houston.

Cray, who decided to play blues after Collins performed at his high school graduation dance in 1971, often backed Collins on Pacific Northwest club dates during the mid-’70s.

Collins grew up in Houston around jazz musicians and traditional blues men like Lightnin’ Hopkins (his cousin) and John Lee Hooker. He quickly gravitated toward the horn-driven Texas blues sound after hearing artists such as Gatemouth Brown, T-Bone Walker and B. B. King. He formed his first band in 1952 and spent the rest of the decade playing throughout Texas.

The title of his first single in 1958--”The Freeze”--established a Collins trademark. Virtually all his songs for the minuscule Kangaroo and Hall-Way labels sported “cold” titles, including his 1962 million-seller “Frosty.”

The frigid nomenclature extended beyond the song titles. Collins’ stinging lead guitar style, produced in part by his use of an unusual tuning that a cousin had taught him, was dubbed “The Cool Sound.” And unlike most blues performers, Collins’ early records were almost exclusively instrumentals.

“Instrumentals sold real good during the middle ‘60s after Booker T. & the M. G.’s had ‘Green Onions’ out (in 1962),” Collins said. “I knew I was no singer, so that hit me just right.

“When I had a big band around Texas, I always had a girl singer with me and some of the guys in the band could sing. I always stuck to my instrumentals, but the trend changed so I had to try and come up with some lyrics.”

Collins moved to Los Angeles in 1969 after meeting the blues-rock group Canned Heat and worked the rock concert circuit on the West Coast. He recorded several albums for Imperial, Blue Thumb and Tumbleweed, but the records flopped commercially and Collins was without a record deal for most of the ‘70s.

He survived by constantly working the Pacific Northwest club circuit until hooking up with the Chicago-based Alligator label.

Collins’ first Alligator album, “Ice Pickin’,” garnered a Grammy nomination in 1979. His latest, “Cold Snap,” sports an all-star lineup ranging from old idols (jazz organist Jimmy McGriff) to new acquaintances (noted New York session players the Uptown Horns).

Another Collins trademark is high-energy live performances. His shows usually conclude with Collins storming through the audience--and, on club dates, out the door into the street--trailing a 100-foot guitar cord. It’s a trick he developed to emulate the “bar walking” showmanship of R&B; saxophone players like Big Jay McNeely.

“I used to go pay my money and listen to blues players, and they’d be playing slow tunes all night and I’d get sleepy,” Collins said.

“I felt the audience would be the same way because, playing for a young audience, they got a lot of energy. They want to move and actually, I’m not young but I’m not old, either, and I like to move.

“I got so disgusted one time that I said, ‘I will not get up on stage and charge people to see a show and then take a drink out of a bottle, smoke a cigarette, play a tune and wait five minutes to play another one.’ I can’t do that. I’d rather not play.”