Copeland Feeds on the Energy

Sometimes it seems that the people who have the most trouble getting used to blues festivals are blues musicians. With years of practically living in dark smoky clubs, their music echoing off dank walls until closing time, some blues players might just be disoriented by such festival features as daylight and fresh air. Some may just be numbed by decades of grueling touring, so much so that they fall right into their rote “how you all tonight?” patter at festivals, even if it’s high noon.

Not so Johnny Copeland. The Texas Twister has howled through more than his share of clubs since the early 1950s but on a festival stage, he usually just kicks his gritty intensity up a few more notches until even the sun is no competition for him.

“It takes more energy to play a festival,” Copeland says. “But for me it’s easier to get that energy because you know there’s all those people out there hearing you.”

His onstage impact could be seen a few years back at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. Down in the pit in front of the stage, a British photo-journalist actually fell over backward after lensing the ferocity with which Copeland approached the microphone. “My God,” he remarked, righting himself. “It looked like a lion was coming at me!”

Copeland doesn’t exactly slough off his smaller audiences, either. He played a show at Bogart’s about four years ago when there were, at most, 40 people in the club and he proceeded to burn up the stage with soul-saturated vocals and incisive guitar lines.

Speaking by phone last week from his apartment in New York City, the Louisiana-born, Texas-trained 56-year-old explained: “I always try to give 100% each time I work. Sometimes I fall short, but at least the effort is there. And I don’t think you find bad gigs where there’s a blues audience, because they’re so appreciative. There might only be two people there, but they let you know they appreciate what you’re doing.”

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Copeland began receiving international notice in the early ‘80s, after three decades of hard work and modest regional successes. Starting with Rounder Records’ “Copeland Special” album in 1981, he introduced himself to a new generation with a distinctive style of blues that mixed earthy emotion with a willingness to experiment, and he was acclaimed as a fresh, vital force.

Drawing from Southern soul music, he stretched beyond the chordal confines of most blues. Fans didn’t seem to mind: He has won four W.C. Handy Awards, the Grammies of the blues world, along with an actual Grammy in 1987, shared by Robert Cray and Albert Collins for the “Showdown!” album.

His most notable musical excursion was “Bringing It All Back Home” in 1984, on which he played with African musicians. He had toured the continent two years before and had fallen in love with the people. “I’m hoping to go back soon. My friend Kenny Neal just came back from over there, and he made me feel so good. He said they still remembered me.”

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Here at home, he somehow got shunted onto the slow track in the late ‘80s. Even though he could still spend 200 nights a year on the road, he wasn’t getting the attention he once did. The same year he got that Grammy, he found his career drifting.

“There were little things like the business side of this falling apart in ’87. The company that had managed me for eight years fell apart, just disappeared, and left me out there hanging. So it was like starting all over again,” he said with a laugh that didn’t seem to fit the situation.

“Well, things will happen, you know? You can’t win them all. You may not win but one , but that one can carry you over if you play it right, so I don’t worry about it.”

Things indeed have come around for Copeland. He was signed last year to the Verve division of PolyGram and is soon to release his second album for the label.

The first, “Flyin’ High,” found him in some classy company--Dr. John, Buckwheat Zydeco and jazz hornmen David (Fathead) Newman and Hank Crawford, among others. Copeland said he has loved the sound of horns in the blues ever since he inherited Albert Collins’ horn-laden band in 1953, when Collins quit music for a time. Copeland also can be heard with a horn or three doing guest vocals on jazz pianist Randy Weston’s current “Volcano Blues” album, also on Verve.

His own new album--”Catch Up With the Blues,” due early next year--will feature the Memphis Horns along with guitarists Lonnie Brooks, Clarence (Gatemouth) Brown and Joe Hughes. Hughes, who also guests on “Flyin’ High,” was one of Copeland’s boyhood friends. They and pianist Floyd Philips, who still plays in Copeland’s band, formed their first group together in Houston at age 16.

He stuck with the blues through the ‘50s, though the regional success he found in the ‘60s was as a soul singer. Copeland said he hadn’t even thought about singing when he started out, and credits that for his distinctive style.

“I just wanted to play that guitar. Then I got in a situation one night where I had to sing. I’d never had no pre-thought about singing, but I tried it. And at least a style came out of it, where once you hear the style you know who it is. Had I done any pre-thought about it, I probably would have tried to sound like somebody else, someone who knew how to sing.”

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Among their many gigs, Copeland and his band often would back up zydeco pioneer Clifton Chenier when he’d come to town. Even though Chenier’s instrument was the accordion, Copeland learned some important musical lessons from him.

“I learned feeling from him. He had more feeling than any man I ever heard. Every note he hit was a deep, deep feeling that would go right through you, man.”

Copeland was signed for a time to the Houston-based Duke/Peacock labels, an organization as legendary for its tremendous artists as it was for ripping them off. He claims to have co-written the blues classic “Further on Up the Road” only to have the label give him no credit for it and take the song to Bobby Bland to record. Copeland doesn’t feel especially wronged, saying he didn’t regard himself as a songwriter then.

But ask him now whether he considers his guitar work or his singing to be his most expressive medium and he answers, “I think it’s the writing. That’s where it’s challenging for me, trying to say different things, but something that’s going to make someone feel good, rather than down.”

He likes to leave a bit of obscurity in his songs. “You don’t really have to say nothing to make a person think when he hears it. Let him think about it. The less you say, the better off you are. You try to get a feeling across. Like I’ll sing, ‘My baby, she act real funny, I feel like I’m dealing with a third party sometimes, I hear the words of someone else every time she tells me what’s on her mind.’ That makes a person think.”

Copeland has juiced up his blues with shots of soul music, African music and progressive jazz (Archie Shepp was featured on one of his songs) because he thinks the blues become stale if they don’t change. But he also thinks it isn’t just the music that has held the blues back from wider popularity.

“We never came up with the right kind of lyrics. The lyrics of the blues really just put ladies down, you know, and they don’t like that. That’s who buys the records is the ladies, you know. You can’t put them down.”

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There are elements of the past that Copeland misses. Much has changed since the days when he and others would pack neighborhood bars to see such local lights as Chenier and Lightnin’ Hopkins.

“When I started, it was all about going to clubs. The streets were full. Every night you gave a dance there would be a crowd. People didn’t stay at home like they do now with their home entertainment center and videos. That didn’t exist.

“And you know what’s really missing now? Years ago, you could go from Houston to Dallas to Austin and you’d have a whole other personality, from Dallas to (adjacent) Ft. Worth even. But when the television pooled everyone together, now the kids in Austin have the same attitude as the kids in New York, so there’s no individuality.

“You used to hear different styles out of different areas. Years ago, you’d wouldn’t have a problem figuring out Brook Benton from Jackie Wilson or James Brown. Their styles were so much different, because they were in their own areas without that communication there is now.

“Then I think about when the music was really personal. I think about my dad, when one guy would live on one farm and another guy on another. A song like ‘Baby Please Don’t Go’ might be going around and, man, you know my dad would be playing it one way and the next guy would be another way, with different words, because they might only hear it performed but once a week on a jukebox on Saturday. Then they’d go back to their farms and make up the words, because they couldn’t remember them.”

He doesn’t expect to see those days again, but he thinks the blues are holding their own pretty well in the modern world.

“We’re doing great now, man. There’s finally some nice contracts for the blues players. Hey, I’m on PolyGram, a blues singer. That’s saying a lot. In 1975, you couldn’t get $5,000 to record a blues album. I think we’re going to hear some great blues in the years to come.”