Blue Collar Workers on a Mission

The first seeds of an indigenous traditional blues movement in Orange County were planted nearly 25 years ago, on the day Al Blake and Fred Kaplan met.

Blake was consumed with becoming a harmonica master like Little Walter, James Cotton or Junior Wells. Kaplan’s obsessive childhood love of the piano had led him to Otis Spann and other greats from the golden age of Chicago blues.

The two young white guys didn’t want to use blues to cultivate a hybrid rock ‘n’ roll form, as the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, Cream and others had done with often lucrative results. They wanted to trace the footsteps of the music’s Southern-born black originators.

In the ensuing years, Blake and Kaplan would play hundreds of shows together, find like-minded Southern California players, cut a record as members of the locally legendary Hollywood Fats Band and learn the hard way that, in business terms, unyielding blues traditionalism doesn’t pay.

Now Blake and Kaplan are back together to take another shot.

Blake is a bit craggier in the face and missing the flowing locks that made him look like a young David Lee Roth back in 1973. The stocky Kaplan sports a gray fedora where his corona of frizzy dark hair used to be. But their musical approach hasn’t changed. They remain committed to playing the blues in its most elemental, unadulterated forms. Only this time, they have a patron saint to help them.

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Kim Wilson, leader of the Fabulous Thunderbirds, is among those who have become prosperous and famous by translating the blues into rock-based music with mass appeal. But in the T-Birds, and even more so in a parallel solo career, Wilson has kept close to his blues roots. Now he is bankrolling Blue Collar Music, a record company so steeped in blues traditionalism that it aims to put out albums recorded only in the most fundamental way: in monaural sound, with a simple two-track recording machine and no overdubs.

The label’s first crop of recordings will be showcased tonight at the Blue Cafe in Long Beach and Saturday at Hop City Blues & Brew in Anaheim. The releases are “Mr. Blake’s Blues,” by Big Al Blake & the Hollywood Fats Band; “Signifyin’,” an all-instrumental album by Kaplan, and Wilson’s third solo album, “My Blues.” The CDs feature a crew of strong veteran sidemen from the Southern California trad-blues scene, including drummer Richard Innes and bassist Larry Taylor from the old Hollywood Fats Band and guitarists Kid Ramos, Junior Watson and Rusty Zinn.

“I was looking around to make an investment,” Wilson said recently, joining Blake and Kaplan to chat about the label’s launch. “After looking around, I decided the best investment I could make is in myself and in these guys.”

Long entrenched in Austin, Texas, Wilson moved to Laguna Niguel last year, mainly for family reasons but also to capitalize on the network of traditionally grounded blues musicians here.

No such web of musical contacts existed in Orange County when Blake and Kaplan hooked up.

“Zero. Absolutely nothing,” recalled Kaplan, a native whose early blues playing was limited to the room where he would retire after school to practice piano until summoned for dinner.

Blake, 52, fell for the blues while growing up in Oklahoma City. As a Southern California transplant, he found clubs such as the Golden Bear in Huntington Beach, the Ash Grove in Los Angeles and Sid’s Blue Beet in Newport Beach where he could see traveling blues greats and immerse himself in the history and techniques of traditional blues. Kaplan, 43, had swept floors at the Golden Bear during his teens to get close to the music he loved. When the two met through a mutual friend, each had an ally in his quest.

They formed an acoustic duo and landed a regular weekend gig at the No Exit Cafe in South Laguna. The duo became a trio on nights when Michael “Hollywood Fats” Mann would sit in. Fats was an L.A.-bred blues prodigy and the first white player hired as a touring member of Muddy Waters’ band.

“When I first met him in the dressing room of the Ash Grove, [Texas blues guitarist] Freddie King introduced him and said he was a great guitarist,” Blake recalled in his slow, gravelly voice. “I looked at him and thought, ‘There’s just no way.’ He had a long ponytail, and he wore polyester double-knit from Big & Tall and had a soft baby face. My first impression of him was as an overweight Tiny Tim. I said, ‘I’d love to hear you play.’ I wanted to dispel the myth. He picked up the guitar and started playing exactly like Lightnin’ Hopkins, to the laser nth degree.”

An equally skeptical Kaplan also declared Fats a musical genius after seeing him play with Waters. By 1974, the Hollywood Fats Band was in place, with Blake, Kaplan, Fats and the Riverside-based rhythm team of Innes and Jerry Smith, who had played with Rod Piazza. Taylor later replaced Smith on bass.

During its tenure from 1974 to about 1981, the band laid the foundation for a good chunk of the Southern California blues scene. But it did not prosper. It took three years to find a label willing to release its lone album, “Rock This House,” and that deal happened only because Taylor’s brother, Mel, had a contact through his gig as longtime drummer of the Ventures.

Fats moved on to the James Harman Band, then the Blasters, before he died of a heroin overdose in 1986. The night before his death, he had played a reunion show with the Hollywood Fats Band. There had been talk of reviving the group to ride a mid-’80s blues boomlet led by Stevie Ray Vaughan, Robert Cray and the Fabulous Thunderbirds.

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After the Hollywood Fats Band broke up in the early ‘80s, Kaplan had become a masonry contractor, led a jazz band and stayed active as a blues recording session pianist, backing such area notables as James Harman, William Clarke, Kid Ramos and Robert Lucas.

Blake had opened a store with Native American art in Laguna Beach, then moved into his current pay-the-bills work as a gardener. The blues remained a passion, though he didn’t perform often. A confirmed auto-didact, Blake augmented his musical reach by learning Delta guitar styles. Last year, he financed the recording of “Mr. Blake’s Blues” and learned that not much had changed. Five blues-oriented labels rejected it as “too traditional.”

Then came Wilson, who signed Blake and hired Kaplan as vice president at Blue Collar Music.

Wilson says each of his two previous solo albums on Austin label Antone’s has sold about 35,000 copies--a strong mark to shoot for on Blue Collar. He figures there are “a couple hundred thousand” hard-core trad-blues fans worldwide, and he aims to reach them. Strategy includes Blue Collar Revue tours next year featuring the whole roster.

They’ll be selling music that, on all three initial CDs, uses old forms as platforms for playing and singing that’s playful and vibrant.

“When it comes to tradition, we’re a little to the right of Attila the Hun,” joked Kaplan. “We want to stay within the tradition of the guys who created [blues music].” But, he added, that doesn’t mean repeating the same old thing or ignoring the need to stretch and improve. “I’m still an infant in my playing,” Kaplan said. “Some [landmark blues records] I’ve heard hundreds of times, and I still hear new stuff.”

Blake says that in patterning themselves after past greats, the Blue Collar players aren’t being any more slavish than the great Robert Johnson, who in the 1930s mined such guitar-playing forebears as Charlie Patton.

“Johnson is the most influential [but also] most identifiably influenced blues artist,” Blake said. “I can put him under a microscope and tell you where everything he did came from. He’ll take parts verbatim.”

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Blake’s hope for Blue Collar is that its records’ traditionalist slant will be a bridge carrying 21st century listeners to the 20th century’s most fertile musical form.

“If I can be a medium, a way for people to get to the right music [by blues originators], I would have accomplished my goal. We probably are as close to the traditional blues as you can get. If [new fans] hear us, they’re going to be more likely to go back to the source.”

* Kim Wilson, Al Blake and Fred Kaplan play tonight at the Blue Cafe, 210 Promenade, Long Beach. 9 p.m. $10. (562) 983-7111. Also Saturday at Hop City Blues & Brew, 1929 S. State College Blvd., Anaheim. 9:30 p.m. $10. (714) 978-3700.