Two Sides to Every Setback : O.C.’s James Harman Says Hardship Makes His Blues More Authentic

With Eric Clapton dishing out an acoustic, down-home version of “Layla” seemingly every hour or so on VH-1 and MTV, with patriarchs such as John Lee Hooker and Buddy Guy enjoying resurgent popularity, with blues festivals sprouting like cabbages and the legacies of long-buried blues men and women re-emerging from record company vaults, blues music seems to be in fine shape.

That doesn’t make things easier down in the trenches, where James Harman earns his living.

At 47, Harman is the dean of the Orange County blues scene--the leader in time logged, hard miles traveled, quantity of music issued, musical lore absorbed and stylistic mastery achieved.

Harman absorbed Southern blues and R & B growing up in Anniston, Ala., and Panama City, Fla., and started playing the blues for money in 1962, when he was 16.

Since 1975, the singer-harmonica player has been based in Huntington Beach. Over the past dozen years or so, Harman has gone national and international, winning a following of hard-core blues fans with his folksy charm and his knack for writing original songs that draw on the blues tradition in all its diversity.

Sitting outside a Huntington Beach taco joint earlier this week, Harman spoke of how his own trail is getting harder, even as the blues turns into a growth industry.

Harman sees ups and downs in everything, though, and tempers his gripes with an outlook that is primarily upbeat.

Yes, it’s tougher to tour and make money in a recession economy, but he also finds something authentically blues-like about not having things come too easily. That glut of blues and R & B reissues from the ‘30s, ‘40s and ‘50s makes it harder to compete if you’ve got a new album of your own to sell (as Harman does with his latest, “Two Sides to Every Story”).

But that resurfacing wealth of blues tradition is also making for a more knowledgeable audience that can appreciate Harman’s authentic tapping of roots.

One result, Harman says, is that he hears a lot of very young blues players who have a feel for the real stuff--one of them being Ted (Kid) Morgan, a 21-year-old guitarist from Minneapolis who has been with the James Harman Band about a year. (Harman said he fired veteran Joel Foy, his guitarist for the previous four years, when the two had a falling-out over business matters; rounding out the current edition of the Harman band are bassist-guitarist-sax player Jeff Turmes, whom Harman describes as “my right-hand man,” and a transplanted Texan, Esten Cooke, on drums.)

On the downside, Harman says, the rising profile of the blues is drawing some newcomers whom he finds “corny”--his all-purpose epithet for that which is wrongheaded, foolish, inauthentic or otherwise misbegotten.

“In Chicago, it’s just corny,” Harman said, reflecting on a recent visit to the hub of the urban blues, where he played on a festival bill.

“You walk down the street and 14 bands a night will play the same song. C’mon--tell your own story. They think the blues is an easy way to go to play music for a living. Being a blues person used to be an oddity. Now the opening acts are either like the Blues Brothers”--i.e., something manufactured--”or some rock band that just got a haircut and bought a bowling shirt.”

“If you go into jazz or blues with stars in your eyes, thinking, ‘I’m going to be famous, I’m going to be a star,’ you make a joke out of yourself to start with,” Harman concluded. “Go on ‘Star Search’ if you think you’ve got something that special.”

The reality these days, he said, is that blues bands on the national club circuit have to cut corners and scrape for a living.

“People are broke, people are scared. They’re not going out like they used to, and they’re not drinking like they used to” because of tighter drunk-driving and age-restriction laws.

“Now, with people nursing a 7-Up all night, (club owners) want part of the door,” instead of the traditional split in which bands would keep the ticket money and the establishment poured drinks for its share. “It’s getting scary. God, I’d hate to be a new guy with no name starting out today.”

Harman, who is married and has sons age 6 and 8, has cut back on such touring amenities as hired drivers and roadies to do the heavy lifting. “I don’t like carrying amplifiers out at the end of a night and putting ‘em in a trailer,” he said. But in tough economic times, he finds himself doing just that, and other non-musical chores.

“You see me now on break selling T-shirts and CDs and hats. If I didn’t, I couldn’t afford gasoline and a motel room. But this is better. You get too lazy when it gets too easy,” he said.

Those seeking a musical gloss on the hardships of the road can turn to “Do Not Disturb,” Harman’s 1991 concept album in which he sang the blues about a life of early wake-up calls, distance-strained marriages and other pitfalls of the traveling musician’s life.

For all the gripes registered on that album, “I’m laughing all the way through it,” Harman said. “The tongue is firmly in the cheek.”

In other words, he has no immediate plans to change his routine, which he estimates at 180 dates per year. He does hope, however, that nature will prove more accommodating than it did last month as he toured the Midwest and the East Coast, dodging floodwaters and sweltering through a record heat wave.

On July 4, Harman played at the Mississippi Valley Blues Festival in Davenport, Iowa. To avoid a washout, he said, the event had to be moved from its usual site to higher ground at the municipal airport.

“It was pouring down rain,” he said, “but it still broke even. There were people there with a lot of heart, in raincoats and plastic wrapped around them in the middle of summer.”

All of which makes Harman happy enough to spend some time at home before heading out again for a tour of the South. It’s a working stay, of course, including a show tonight at the Heritage Brewing Co. in Dana Point.

Harman said he has never considered relocating to a more famous blues locale, such as Austin, Tex.

“You couldn’t make me into soup and squirt me into Austin,” he said, reaching for one of the many Southernisms that pepper his mellifluous, drawling speech (Harman said he got the squirting-soup saying from his mother).

“I’m happy here. I’m five minutes from the beach, I’ve got palm trees in my yard, I’m sitting here eating great tacos. I’m having a nice time.”

Harman’s fun-loving side comes out regularly on his latest album, which has a laid-back, easygoing feel as the players burrow into the blues on new songs played the old way.

It includes “The Clown,” a cool, jazz-leaning song that gets downright bizarre as Harman charts the strange, albeit wry, workings of a cheated-upon male’s mind.

Imagining himself mortified unto death by a woman’s unfaithful ways, he suggests she have his body stuffed and dressed in a clown outfit, so she can prop it up by her bed as a warning to the next trusting suitor who comes her way.

“It came to me when I was riding back from San Francisco one night,” Harman said. “I pulled out my tablet and wrote it down and put it back in my suitcase and said, ‘Nobody wants to hear this.’ ”

Harman said he started singing it casually during a 1991 session for Black Top Records, the New Orleans blues and R & B label that has issued his two most recent albums. Label boss Hammond Scott heard it and lobbied for it to be on Harman’s next album.

Harman said that “Two Sides,” out two months, already has outsold the previous Black Top release, “Do Not Disturb.” He isn’t sure why but says it might have something to do with the odd approach taken to album packaging.

The plan, he said, was to do a straightforward cover using his own photograph. Then Harman’s old buddy, Billy Gibbons, leader of the star rock band ZZ Top, got hold of the artwork.

Harman said that Gibbons, who was visiting with him last winter in Huntington Beach, came up with the idea of putting the image of a vintage Fender Dual Professional amplifier on the cover--an image that only musical-equipment aficionados would readily recognize--and began suggesting other touches.

Given Gibbons’ track record in shaping video iconography and elaborate stage sets for ZZ Top, the most high-concept of blues-rock bands, Harman listened to him. As part of Gibbons’ design, the inscrutable symbol, “44,” appears on the cover. Harman said the number was suggested as a good-luck charm after they had consulted with a numerologist.

“It’s Gibbons’ idea. It’s mysterious. It’s different. Gibbons says old No. 44 is the good luck mojo” that has led to the album’s improved sales. “I’m going, ‘Maybe it’s ‘cause my picture’s not on it.’ ”

Under the pseudonym “Justis Walkert,” Gibbons receives credit for “Creative Vision” on the album. Harman said they also have written some songs together, which may surface in some unspecified projects.

For his own next step, Harman contemplates a change of direction from the low-key “Two Sides.” Along with “Extra Napkins,” from 1988, and “Do Not Disturb,” the album is the third in a sequence of studio releases in which he has burrowed deeply into the blues past, producing new, original music that sounds as if it could have been made 40 years ago.

There’s another side to Harman, though. In 1987, he issued “Those Dangerous Gentlemens,” a strong release on Rhino Records that was geared for album-rock radio but went unjustly ignored.

Harman said he hasn’t given up writing songs along the lines of the rock-slanted material on “Those Dangerous Gentlemens,” which featured the twin-guitar work of the late Michael (Hollywood Fats) Mann and David (Kid) Ramos, two mainstays of the Harman Band through most of the 1980s.

“To me, it’s an ongoing piece of work. If I write a song that’s more radio friendly, and I’m not on a record company that would use it, I write it and put it away,” he said.

Anything written along those lines would have been stowed away the past five years, as Harman pursued an ultra-traditional tack on labels catering to a hard-core blues audience. But he insists that being traditional is not the same as looking backward.

“It’s brand new songs, songs coming out of my head. I don’t consider it preserving anything. To me, (the traditional blues) is something that’s never gone away. I consider it all viable sounds, textures to use.”

“But I’ve done that, and I really want something a little harder edged,” he added. “My next album is going to be very hard, and not nearly as traditional. Meaner, a much tougher attitude.”

* The James Harman Band plays tonight at 9:30 at the Heritage Brewing Co., 24921 Dana Point Harbor Drive, Dana Point. $5. (714) 240-2060.