Her Band Playing in Sunset Beach : Davies Wants to Be an Icebreaker for Women Playing Blues Guitar

By the end of the 1960s, fiery and accomplished performances by the likes of Eric Clapton, John Hammond and Paul Butterfield had pretty well answered any doubts as to whether a white man can play the blues.

Twenty years later, Debbie Davies is coming up with her own answers to a socio-musicological question that hardly ever gets raised in the almost exclusively male domain of electric blues guitar: Can a woman play the blues?

For almost a year, Davies has been a member of Albert Collins & the Icebreakers, one of the world’s high-profile touring blues bands. In roadhouse one-nighters and at major festivals on three continents, Davies, 36, has played second guitar alongside Collins, a veteran bluesman whose steel-toned solos have been cited as a key influence by such star players as Robert Cray and Stevie Ray Vaughan.

“In the blues scene, as a woman playing an instrument, I’m definitely still a rarity,” said Davies, who will lead her own band Monday night at the Sunset Pub. Consequently, in the eyes of new audiences, Davies’ small frame may look like a big question mark when she steps on stage. But the straightforward, six-stringed answer is right in her hands.

“Even on the road with Albert, when I walk into a club with the band, the (club personnel) think I’m somebody’s girlfriend,” Davies, a forthright, ready talker, said recently from her home in Van Nuys. “I’ve seen guys going, ‘Oh, sure.’ It’s something I’m accustomed to. But once you play, it’s done and over. You’re a player, and everything’s fine.”

Davies followed the same path to the blues guitar as most bluesmen who grew up in the ‘60s, starting with the British rock invaders who proclaimed their love for black American music, and later tracking down the British players’ seminal, pure-blues influences.

Growing up in Tarzana as the daughter of two musicians, Davies encountered her first obstacle on her path to the blues right at home.

“I begged my parents for an electric guitar, and they wouldn’t go for it,” she said. “They said girls don’t play electric guitar. They were hoping if I stayed on acoustic guitar, I would study jazz.”

Davies said she went to college in Northern California “to get away from the pressure of wanting to do music that wasn’t acceptable for my family and their whole extended circle of friends.”

She earned a psychology degree from Sonoma State University, but her true major was the blues, which she pursued by singing in a local band and making her first steps as an electric guitarist.

“I told everybody in the band I was really serious (about playing guitar). Most of the other guys thought it was a big joke, except for my boyfriend,” who was the group’s guitar player. “I had to go through those early years alone, except for the one or two guys who would take me seriously.”

Davies seized upon the single widely known role model for a woman interested in playing, as well as singing, the blues: Bonnie Raitt, who combines sassy vocals with a masterful folk-blues slide-guitar style.

“Seeing any performer that you love means a lot, but it always meant more to me because she was a woman,” Davies said. “A woman doing what you want to do--it was a spark of inspiration.”

After paying her dues in blues bands and pop groups in Northern California, Davies returned to Los Angeles in 1984, searching for more promising musical opportunities.

“I just hit the pavement,” she said. “I went to every blues jam I heard about and went to clubs all over the city, sitting in.”

Davies struck up a jam-session friendship with Coco Montoya, guitarist for John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, that turned into a romance (the message on their home answering machine announces that “You’ve reached the home of the Breakers. Which Breaker do ya want, the Icebreaker or the Bluesbreaker?”).

Montoya helped Davies hook up with Maggie Mayall & the Cadillacs, an all-female blues band led by John Mayall’s wife that won a following on the Los Angeles club circuit before breaking up in 1987. Montoya is also a close friend and musical associate of Albert Collins, who had been Montoya’s mentor when he was breaking into the blues circuit in the 1970s.

Through Montoya, Davies got to jam with Collins’ band on several occasions. Then, in April, she got a surprise call: Collins wanted to add a second guitarist to his band, and would she be interested in the job?

For Davies, it was a dream come true. It meant 7 months of touring during 1988, with shows in Europe, Japan and all across the United States (the Icebreakers are off the road now, Davies said, while Collins prepares to record his next album).

“(Collins) has been so good to me. He throws me all kinds of solos, and if the mood strikes him, he’ll want to battle back and forth with solos,” said Davies, whose primary job is to play rhythm guitar and front the Icebreakers for the traditional blues concert warm-up segment before the star comes on stage.

“It’s like going to school each night,” she said. “They’re all hot, hot players, veterans of the blues scene.

“The only thing that’s unpleasant at times--or different than the response the men get--is that sometimes (after a show) people in the clubs feel they can be a lot more physical with you as a woman,” Davies said. “They want to hug you, put their arms around you.”

Davies said she politely gets across the message that, “ ‘Wait a minute, I’m a professional and I’m working. I’m not another chick in the bar.’ I have to send out signals, use body language, that immediately establishes that professionalism, (that says) ‘I’m glad you like what I’m doing, but no, you can’t come up and give me a big kiss on the lips.’ ”

In the course of her touring, Davies said, she seldom comes across other women instrumentalists who play electric blues. She mentioned Joyce Grimes, a bassist who plies the R&B; club circuit in New Orleans, and Joanna Connor, a guitarist who toured with A.C. Reed and the Sparkplugs, a Detroit-based blues band (Connor recently recorded an as-yet-unreleased album for Blind Pig Records, a small Chicago label).

Toss in Bonnie Raitt and a couple of highly regarded piano players, Katie Webster and Marcia Ball, and you have a fairly comprehensive list of the women who have gained national attention as blues/R&B; instrumentalists.

Davies said she has not had problems adjusting to a road musician’s life, which includes sharing Collins’ 1967 touring bus with eight or nine men.

“I’ve always been a tomboy who hung out with the guys, anyway,” she said. “I never sat around the house and played with dolls. I wanted to do the aggressive, fun things.”

For now, Davies said, her goals are to continue playing with Collins and to get a chance to record her own album (she also plays in Montoya’s band, which, like her own group, appears regularly at the Sunset Pub in Sunset Beach).

With her wide exposure as an Icebreaker, Davies has begun to reap some benefits from the novelty of being a woman in a traditionally male situation. Guitar publications have feature stories about her in the works, she said, and reviews of live shows by Albert Collins & the Icebreakers tend to single out the performance of Collins’ guitar sidekick.

“There definitely were times when (being a woman) was kind of a hardship, but now it’s like the tables have turned,” Davies said. “Now that I’m out there on the circuit, I’m getting more press than the other members of the band. It’s one of the ironies of life. If you hang in there long enough, the tables will turn.”

Debbie Davies and her band play Monday from 8 p.m. to midnight at the Sunset Pub, 16655 Pacific Coast Highway, Sunset Beach. Admission is free. Information: (213) 592-1926.