BLUES GAIN MORE FANS AT LONG BEACH FESTIVAL

The record opening-day turnout for the eighth annual Long Beach Blues Festival made it clear Saturday that headliner Robert Cray’s recent commercial success has brought a lot of people closer to the blues.

For Bill Wallace, however, Cray’s drawing power had just the opposite effect. “Normally, I’d be sitting up there by where the barbecues are,” Wallace, 62, said, reclining in a beach chair parked near the rear of Cal State Long Beach’s north athletic field, home of the festival.

But even though he was 50 to 100 yards farther away from the stage than at previous Long Beach festivals he attended, Wallace, like most of the estimated 8,500 people on hand Saturday, didn’t complain too loudly about the bigger crowds. “I couldn’t come both days so I had to make a choice,” Wallace said. “One reason I came today is to see Cray.”

In surveying the scene, Mighty Flyers bassist Bill Stuve--attending as a fan, not a participant--was only too happy to see the visible gains blues-based music has made since 1986.

“It’s been a great year for Cray, the (Fabulous) T-Birds . . . Bonnie Raitt got back on the charts,” Stuve said. “When we played the festival in ‘82, we opened up at 11 a.m. and the Cray band followed us. Now five years later they’re headlining. Who could have guessed? It’s a crazy business.”

With a lineup topped by Cray, the opening bill of the two-day event was designed in part to showcase the blues from early traditional styles up through the most contemporary incarnations.

The line-up covered almost every style and derivation of the blues imaginable, from Lonnie Brooks’ caustic Chicago blues through Katie Webster’s fiery, Professor Longhair-inspired New Orleans piano playing to musician-historian Johnny Otis’ rollicking big band R&B; revue. (Sunday’s bill was topped by B.B. King and Etta James.)

In declaring a musical winner of the day, the nod would go not to Cray, despite his characteristically smooth-yet-muscular set, but to the astoundingly varied and moving performance by Clarence (Gatemouth) Brown.

The Louisiana-born, Texas-reared veteran guitar innovator deftly shifted stylistically between clean and quick finger-plucked single-note leads and powerhouse chord-crunching riffs, not only within the same song but occasionally within the same phrase. And for good measure, he tossed in some pure jazz in a hopping version of Duke Ellington’s “Take the ‘A’ Train,” turned to fiddle for a short Cajun waltz, then returned to guitar for some blazing be-bop licks in “Pressure Cooker.”

Katie Webster, known as “The Swamp Boogie Queen,” also galvanized the crowd with her colorful solo performance, which mixed steamy traditional blues with powerful renditions of such pop hits as Otis Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness” and Stevie Wonder’s “I Wish.”

William French, a 22-year-old English major at Cal State Long Beach, knew little about the blues prior to Saturday, but following Cray’s set, French was sold. “I live on campus so I just decided to come over,” French said. “I like the diversity of the music. That guy playing country music on the electric violin (Gatemouth Brown) was really good.”