Learning the Finer Points of Electric Blues at The Classroom

Music leaks out the joint like smoke from a house fire.

You can hear it from the parking lot--the black puff of a dominant seventh curling up the walls of the auto parts store next door, a red-hot minor third landing on the roof of the drive-through dairy.

It’s night in the deep south--nearly to Roscoe, which is about as far south as possible for a place in Northridge.

And wedged into an aging strip mall is The Classroom, a bar finally living up to its name after many years. This is where players now go to learn the finer points of electric blues.

Guys who work days as plumbers or bill collectors or salesmen wait their turn to sit in with the house band on Thursdays, the bar’s open blues jam night.

For these part-time musicians, playing with a good, live band is like a playground pickup player getting a chance to come off the bench for the Lakers. George Plimpton grabs his ax and wails way cool.

The sign-up list by night’s end will total about 40 musicians--drummers, singers, guitar and bass players--of various abilities. They each get to play one number, sometimes two.

Figure that everybody brings a friend or two, and they all buy cocktails while they wait, and you get an idea why open jam nights appeal to bar owners.

But this night, nobody else cares much about the money. People are here for the blues--the disarmingly simple, peculiarly American three-chord sequence that through the years has been twisted into a hundred different shapes and colors.

Like haiku, and newspaper writing for that matter, the art is found within the form.

“We play jump blues,” says Jerry Sikorski, an L.A. music scene veteran and one of two singer/guitar players in The Classroom’s Thursday night house band, the Casey Blues Band. “There’s some blues where guys are singing about how they lost their baby. We’re singing about how we found her.”

Translation: You can dance to it.

Later into the evening, some couples do ditch their red Naugahyde perches to take a couple of turns on the barroom floor, showing off dance steps from the time of big-finned cars, had bourbon, fat steak and horizon-less optimism.

On stage, the house band uses instruments and amplifiers that have also changed little from the 1950s, a vintage amalgamation of old woods, vacuum tubes and paper-cone speakers. It’s solid, made-in-the-USA stuff, mostly designed and built by the late Leo Fender in Fullerton long before anybody could even name a Japanese car, much less own one.

Sikorski’s old, red Gibson guitar is from Kalamazoo, Mich.

The crowd favors beer, leaning toward Budweisers bottled at the brewery a couple of miles east. And almost everybody is a smoker, puffing away happily in one of their last safe havens outside of AA meetings.

The Casey Blues Band opens with a 20-minute set, while prospective players fill the sing-up sheet. Bandleader Tim Casey says he persuaded the bar’s owner to try an open blues jam about nine months ago. Other blues bands play Friday and Saturday nights.

“I’m trying to make the Valley the blues capital of the world,” Casey says. Like nearly everybody in the 7-piece band, which includes the three Reseda Horns, Casey grew up in the Valley.

Besides spreading the blues, Casey is also “looking for the record deal thing.”

Guitar-player Jesse Dreamer moved to L.A. from Fresno a couple of months ago for the same reason. He plays a note-for-note copy of the song “Red House,” the signature blues song of Jimi Hendrix.

Besides copying the music, Dreamer plays behind his back and then with his teeth in imitation of Hendrix, considered the last great blues guitar innovator.

“Basically, I’m looking for exposure,” said the 36-year-old Dreamer.

Billy James, 46, of Topanga, brings his Stratocaster guitar onstage and lurches into an off-time shuffle that the band fights to keep on track.

“I see this as paying your dues,” said house band bassist Don Chamberlin during a break.

Bandleader Casey adds with some pride, “If anybody wants to play, we’ll back them up.”

A welcome surprise this evening is harmonica player Tetsuya “Weeping Willow” Nakamura, who moved to the Valley about six months ago from Japan. He lugs in an amp and a suitcase full of harmonicas--”harps” in this crowd.

“There’s a lot of people listening to the blues in Japan but there’s no money in it because the clubs are small,” says Nakamura, who met his American wife while working at a Japanese nightclub.

When it’s his turn, Sikorski leads the band in a song that begins, “I met a fine beautician, in a fine condition” and Nakamura plays an exceptional solo, shaking his body and bobbing his head while blowing his harp.

His amp, a 1959 Fender Bassman, is like the Holy Grail for electric blues players because of its warm tone, and Nakamura uses it well. The band makes him stay for a second tune.

“It’s an original,” he says proudly after his performance.

Leo would be pleased to know his work is still holding up.

Jimi too.