South Side redux

THEY stride on stage like the grizzled veterans they are: a band of blues brothers (and one sister) whose roots reach back to the explosively creative Chicago South Side music scene of the late 1950s and early ‘60s. More than four decades later, they’ve come together as the Chicago Blues Reunion, channeling the sounds of one of the great eras in American popular music.

“We didn’t want to simply do a revival thing,” says keyboardist Barry Goldberg, who also produced “Buried Alive in the Blues,” the CD-DVD released by the band in mid-2005. “We wanted to show how alive this music still is.”

He insists that the band -- which includes guitarist singer Nick Gravenites, singers Tracy Nelson and Sam Lay, singer-harmonica player Corky Siegel and guitarist Harvey Mandel, with backup players Gary Mallaber (drums), Rick Reed (bass) and Zach Wagner (guitar) -- “isn’t anything like a super group, something that was put together for the sake of making money.”

After all, Goldberg adds with a laugh, “We knew money couldn’t be a motivation, since there really wasn’t any -- it was just the desire to get back together and feel the vibe and the love of seeing each other and hearing each other again.”

The DVD, which was recorded at an Illinois nightclub, captures that vibe via the Blues Reunion’s recent live performances and a series of interviews recalling the musically fertile early history shared by the players.

“We started to play together when we were teenagers,” says Goldberg. “Mike Bloomfield and Paul Butterfield, both of them gone now, and all of us would go down to the South Side of Chicago. We’d discovered the blues on our radios and we wanted to hear it live. So we were bold enough to cross lines where no white kids ever did in the late ‘50s.”

They went to hear the idols who became their models -- Muddy Waters, Otis Spann, Howlin’ Wolf and all the other figures then present in Chicago’s legendary scene. And they were greeted warmly, if a bit skeptically at first.

“At first we were like oddities in that neighborhood,” Goldberg says. “But our love and our passion for the music was so strong that eventually people like Howlin’ Wolf and Otis Spann realized we were really serious. It took a year before I played something that actually got a smile from Otis. But it was worth the wait.”

Goldberg and the others, grateful for what they received, musically and spiritually, from the generosity of the great African American blues artists, were eager to return the favor in some fashion, which they did by being instrumental in bringing them to the North Side, in introducing them to wider, cross-cultural audiences.

BUT the lure of ‘60s folk and rock music soon pulled most of the young white players away from Chicago -- Butterfield to form his own influential blues band, Goldberg and others to play with Bob Dylan, and eventually form the pioneering blues-rock band the Electric Flag.

“Everybody went their separate ways for years,” says Goldberg, who now lives in Los Angeles. He did film and television scoring and collaborated with songwriter Gerry Goffin on “I’ve Got to Use My Imagination” (recorded by Gladys Knight and the Pips) and “It’s Not the Spotlight” (recorded by Rod Stewart). But Goldberg refers to those efforts as one-hit wonders, adding that, eventually, “nothing was getting me off the way playing used to do.”

“So I figured,” Goldberg adds, “let’s try to go full circle, call the old guys, do what we did in the early days and bring the vibe back. I got ahold of Nick Gravenites and Harvey Mandel. On our first gigs, in San Francisco, we had Steve Miller and James Cotton. Then we got the opportunity to play at the Chicago Blues festival as a kind of reunion -- bring it all back to our own hometown to show that we’re still alive and can still play and enjoy each other musically.”

When Cotton and Miller left to do their own projects, Nelson, who was from Wisconsin, and very familiar with the Chicago blues scene, and Siegel, a Chicago stalwart, joined the band. The results have been extraordinary -- a revival that transcends the greatest hits formulas with music that is as alive today as it was four decades ago, its effect enhanced by the mature life-views that these veteran players bring to their performances.

The band has gone back into the studio to record an updated version of “Let’s Work Together,” a song that was a ‘60s hit for its composer, Wilbert “Kansas City” Harrison, and later for Canned Heat.

“We come from a golden era, a special, magical time,” Goldberg says. “And the best part of our performances, aside from the soulful feeling of seeing people our age who remember the old days, is the excitement of seeing young people discovering the blues.”

*

Don Heckman may be reached at weekend@latimes.com.

*

Chicago Blues Reunion

Where: Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano

When: 8 p.m. Friday

Price: $19.50

Info: (949) 496-8930

Also

Where: House of Blues, 8430 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood

When: 7 p.m. Sunday

Price: $20 to $22.50

Info: (323) 848-5100