The Genre Has Been Around for Ages but as It Re-Emerges in L.A., Clubs Are Popping Up and Catering to Fans Who’ve Caught . . . : A Red-Hot Case of the Blues

If a man can make it in Los Angeles, He can make it anywhere; But you’ve got to have a used Cadillac car, Yes, boys, and you can’t stay square. --”L.A. Blues,” recorded in 1947 by Crown Prince Waterford *

This town has a bad case of the blues.

Not since the 1960s when such English icons as Eric Clapton and Keith Richards spearheaded the first blues revival has interest been so high in this unique music of desolation and joy.

The blues, with its history rooted in the African American slave legacy, blasts live most nights from an increasing number of clubs, including Babe and Ricky’s Inn on historic Central Avenue in South Los Angeles, the Mint on Pico Boulevard and B.B. King’s Blues Club, a tri-level club in Universal’s CityWalk where the blues go uptown.

Blues has been part of the Southern California music diet for years, but there has been an escalation of interest in the ‘90s as record companies reissued classic blues recordings in attractive new CD packages. The most notable was Sony’s Grammy-winning, 1990 box set of seminal recordings by blues legend Robert Johnson. The collection recently passed the 500,000 mark for U.S. sales--an impressive amount for such a recording.

Late-night blues beams all weekend from small, quirky, non-commercial radio stations, including Long Beach’s KLON-FM (88.1), and now even mainstream stations like KLSX-FM (97.1) and KSCA-FM (101.9) offer regular blues spots.

Mostly, however, the blues around Los Angeles is a live scene--packing clubs with fans and musicians who mix electrified Chicago style and country Delta blues with everything in between, including rock, soul, country and rockabilly punk blues. These musicians, in the main, aren’t reinventing the blues in bold new ways, but simply paying tribute to a classic style.

“I can’t get people in here on the weekends, they’re lined up out the door,” complains Rainer Beck, who owns Harvelle’s, a Santa Monica club that features live bands seven nights a week.

“Blues is huge . . .,” agrees Bob Resnick, a partner in Leadbelly’s, a new, 450-seat blues club slated for opening this fall on Santa Monica’s 3rd Street Promenade.

“We want to be really grounded in old-time blues and American roots music that grew out of the blues,” Resnick says. “We’ll be viewed as one of the three big ones: us, B.B. King’s and House of Blues.”

Of course, the House of Blues only features blues artists occasionally. What it banks on is the name, whose allure beckons eternal. To some, the hype has gone too far.

“Commercially, it’s hot right now, but the corporate guys are always the last to get onto a good thing,” says Jed Ojeda, a blues musician who manages the Mint. Established in 1937 as the Mint Jazz & Supper Club, the place slowly slumped into a neighborhood watering hole, then received an electric jump-start in 1991 when Ojeda started booking blues. The response, Ojeda said, was phenomenal.

“A lot of bands out there are trying to play the blues, and everybody’s trying to get a gig, but it’s hard to play it well,” Ojeda says. “The record companies are looking for young black artists to do this but the young black artists are into hip-hop and slick R&B.;”

While this is generally true, some of the newcomers have been attracting national attention. One is Kevin Moore, a Compton native who goes by the moniker Keb’ Mo and puts a contemporary spin on the blues. The material for his debut acoustic album--released last year by Epic’s newly revived blues label Okeh--was developed while playing regularly last year at Fais Do-Do in the Crenshaw District. It’s another homey club in L.A.’s live blues scene that serves up Cajun food as well as designer beers and espresso.

Another ‘90s blues ace drawing attention is Ray Bailey, a scorching fret-master who plays around town. A big, burly man of 37, Bailey sings blues standards as well as his own compositions on his album “Satan’s Horn” (on BMG-distributed Zoo Records)--the title coming from street slang for a crack pipe.

“There’s a core following of people who follow any blues that’s good,” says Bailey, whose jazz musician mother played with the Sweethearts of Rhythm, an all-female big band, during World War II.

“It’s been a part of my life all along. Any jazz-funk musician will tell you that blues is the focus and right now it’s wide open. Any time economic times are uncertain, people turn to the blues. It’s real, they can grasp on to it for solace.”

While dominated by male singers, the L.A. scene also boasts such outstanding female performers as Mickey Champion, whose blues/jazz phrasing evokes the mighty Dinah Washington. She currently plays most Thursday through Saturday nights at Babe and Ricky’s Inn.

The revival has also created an employment boom for older black musicians in Los Angeles, most of whom learned their chops from the great original blues masters, but have long labored in semi-obscurity or as background session musicians. Now in their 50s and 60s, these men are inching into the limelight at home and no longer have to drive to Tahoe or Berdoo for a two-night gig entertaining skiers and bikers.

*

There’s Louisiana Guitar Red at Fais Do-Do, who milled steel for 25 years at a local foundry and played for kicks and extra cash on weekends, backing up everyone from Pee Wee Crayton to Lowell Fulson. Now, the 57-year-old is in great demand for his own music, and it feels good.

“It’s great playing here, I live about five minutes away,” Red says, mopping his brow between sets. “These young guys, they got a long way to go and a short time to do it. But I’ve been arooouuunnnd ,” he says, swishing the word around like mouthwash before spitting it out.

There’s also Arthur Adams, a longtime session man who backed up Bonnie Raitt, the Crusaders and B.B. King and is now in front of his own band at B.B. King’s in CityWalk. Adams, 54, originally of Jackson, Tenn., relishes his turn in the sun.

“This is the most exposure I’ve ever gotten,” Adams says. “I love playing live. Young kids are into the blues and I’m trying to teach them the roots, where R&B; came from. But I mix it up because they want to hear you moan the blues but not all night. They want to hear you cry those songs, but not all night. Still, the foundation is always the blues.”

No one can say exactly why blues--and especially the electric, Chicago-style blues personified by Muddy Waters--is so hot today. Some attribute it to the cyclical nature of music, in which every sound eventually gets recycled and comes back into popular consciousness. Others say it’s a reaction--just the way grunge-rock was--to the slick, formatted music of the 1980s. But you don’t have to probe too deeply to find out what draws young fans to this classic genre.

“I haven’t heard anything like this since I was back in Texas, where there is a lot of good blues,” says Sean Thomas, 27, of Canoga Park, explaining why he frequents B.B. King’s club several nights a week. “It makes me feel good. My whole family listened to the blues so this is like home for me.”

You can find the blues all over town--from the Hollywood Athletic Club, which hosts a Blues Monday jam upstairs, to Q’s Billiards Club in Old Pasadena, which features the Bernie Pearl Blues Band every Tuesday.

But those who seek the source of L.A. blues still head to South Los Angeles, where Laura Mae Gross presides over Babe and Ricky’s Inn, a surviving remnant of that glorious era when Central Avenue, with its ballrooms, hotels and theaters, was the backbone of black cultural life in Los Angeles, a favorite haunt of Billie Holiday, Cab Calloway and Bobby (Blue) Bland.

Drop into Babe and Ricky’s any Monday night for $2 fried chicken dinners (with corn bread, black-eyed peas, salad and more) and an open-microphone blues jam, which draws local blues luminaries like Keb’ Mo as well as aspiring musicians.

“If they get a better job, they play there but they know they always have a place to play when they come back, this is home to them,” says Gross, kicking back in a red vinyl booth as the band belts it back.

John Mastro, the harmonica player for the band Mama’s Boys, agrees.

“It’s real popular and trendy now to play the blues but this is the real thing down here and I get to play with some real good players. Mama keeps it under control. And if she likes you, she’ll ask you to come back.”