James Harman Band Savors Its ‘Inspirinment’ From Barbecue

There isn’t any royal road to blues success, and James Harman’s career has followed a harder, more winding trail than many. But that doesn’t mean he can’t eat like a king.

“Extra Napkins,” the new album by the James Harman Band, is a tribute to the joys of pure blues music and to the sticky, sauce-stained pleasures of authentic Southern barbecue.

The pure blues is in the grooves. The playing is so forceful and gritty, so natural and free (and so lacking in distortional considerations of marketability) that it recaptures the aura, atmosphere and sound of the definitive Chess blues records of the ‘50s. It’s safe to say that anyone with a feeling for the blues will find plenty to savor on “Extra Napkins.”

The love of barbecue, meanwhile, is splattered all over the album cover, which shows the Orange County-based Harman Band feasting at its favorite spot, Burrell’s Rib Cage in Santa Ana. Fred Burrell, the chef and proprietor, gets a special credit on “Extra Napkins” for providing “inspirinment.”

Harman, a 42-year-old singer and harmonica player who hails from Anniston, Ala., will front a revamped band lineup tonight at the Coach House; it will be the group’s first local show since the departure of longtime members David (Kid) Ramos and Willie J. Campbell.

The other day, Harman sat on a picnic bench in the side yard that serves as Burrell’s “skylight room,” and where a barbecued chicken breast, attacked with two-handed enthusiasm, served as the moment’s inspirinment for reflections on the links between good food and good music-making.

“We derive pleasure from this food instead of just nourishment,” Harman said, his relaxed drawl assuming the earnest tone of a logician’s discourse. “A lot of the creation of music is based on attitude. How you play has a lot to do with how you feel, and how you feel has a lot to do with what you ate. I don’t think I’ve known anyone in my life who played jazz or blues who didn’t like country food.”

Actually, blues is only one of the things you’ll find on the Harman Band’s combo plate of a song list. Other, equally unpretentious forms of roots music include R&B;, soul and rock ‘n’ roll. Harman was a teen-ager when he began his career as a traveling musician. When he arrived in Southern California in 1970, figuring the chances of success were better here than in his previous base in Florida, the mealtime pickings weren’t quite so rich as they are at Burrell’s.

“We lived on macaroni and cheese and Kool Aid for a year,” he recalled between bites of chicken. “It makes me really appreciate this.”

Unlike “Those Dangerous Gentlemens,” the fine James Harman Band album released early this year on Rhino Records, “Extra Napkins” wasn’t intended to break the band with a large, mainstream audience.

“Every other record I’ve made has been (financed) with money from somebody wanting to make it some kind of commercial success,” Harman said. But “Extra Napkins” came about when a blues lover simply told the band to go out and make the best straight blues album it could. The aficionado was Bob Rivera, a construction company owner from Orange who runs a small blues label, Rivera Records, as an avocation.

In 1985, Harman said, Rivera approached him about making a record. “He said, ‘I’ve watched you singing the blues, I can tell that’s what’s in your heart. I like your records, but none of them captures the thing you get when you just play the low-down blues.’ ”

From 1985 to 1987, the Harman Band followed a double tack, interspersing straight blues songwriting and recording sessions with the more mainstream-oriented work that emerged on the Rhino album. The band captured an old-fashioned blues sound by using old-fashioned equipment that engineer Jerry Hall, a veteran of Motown Records’ heyday, had squirreled away over the years, Harman said.

“We were working in studios with millions of dollars worth of digital equipment, and we put it all out the way and brought in a bunch of ‘50s tube microphones.” Positioning the microphones to get an airy, true-to-life ambiance like those old Chess recordings, the band cut loose with enough personality and immediacy to make its blues project far more than an archival exercise.

“Extra Napkins” is only the first sampling from those sessions, Harman said. He says the band recorded enough additional material to yield four more albums of straight blues, one each year for the next four years. Harman said the remaining tracks include more performances by Michael (Hollywood Fats) Mann, the highly regarded guitarist who died in 1986 after moving from the Harman Band to the Blasters.

Harman expanded his reach recently with a six-week national tour that took him to the East Coast for the first time in the ‘80s, including a show in Birmingham, Ala., that he said was his first appearance in his home state since he moved to California. That reach will extend farther in October and November, when the James Harman Band will play its first European tour, a 25-date swing through Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Holland and Belgium. Harman said two songs from “Those Dangerous Gentlemens” also have been picked for movie sound tracks, with “Kiss of Fire,” a hard-hitting Bo Diddley-type stomp, chosen for an upcoming film starring Jodie Foster and Kelly McGillis.

Still, Harman’s road is far from easy. Shortly before the recent national tour began in June, he found out that guitarist Kid Ramos and bassist Willie J. Campbell, mainstays of his band since the early ‘80s, were calling it quits. “Kid in the last year became a ‘born-again’ Christian, and his spirit for playing in front of people who were drinking had kind of grown thin,” Harman said. “Both of those boys just got married, and they didn’t want to do it any more.”

“I went through all the questions with them,” Harman said. “‘Are you sure? You’re stepping out of the picture just as the light’s coming on.”’

Harman isn’t insensitive to the hardships a touring musician faces in sustaining a family life. When his own sixth wedding anniversary comes around next month, he’ll be away on tour again. He says he schedules time off around the birthdays of his sons, Jimmy, 3, and year-old Jordan.

“It’s hard, but he’s doing what he likes to do, and he’s been successful,” said his wife, Ella.

The new band members, broken in on the recent tour, are bassist Junior Valentine, 33, a Bay Area player who came to Harman on the recommendation of Mighty Flyers’ drummer Jimi Bott, and Joel Foy, 36, a veteran of the William Clarke Band and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ band. Harman said he had enough regard for Foy’s playing to hire him immediately when he called to say he was interested. They join Harman and Stephen T. Hodges, the longtime Harman Band drummer who has played on several Tom Waits albums.

“I’ve known 200 guys who were good players but they just couldn’t stick it out,” Harman said. “They’d get to 25 or 30, hit that security crisis, and they’d get married and go get a job. Then you get guys, this is what they do. I’m here. This is what I do. I wish Willie and Kid the best. There still is a James Harman Band, and there always will be a James Harman Band.”

The James Harman Band, the Delgado Brothers and Juke Logan and Bill Lynch play tonight at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano in San Juan Capistrano, starting at 9 p.m. Tickets: $13.50. Information: (714) 496-8930.