Everybody's Singin' the Blues

1980, Age 8. "Every Day I Have the Blues," by B.B. King, from the album Singin' the Blues. 

B.B. King died this morning.

My guess is that there will be thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of tributes written about him over the next few days. About half of them will be titled, "The Thrill is Gone." A bunch of them will make a variation of the joke, "He just didn't wake up this morning."

King lived to be 89 years old, which is exceptional for a black man in America, and certainly for a blues musician. He was truly born in a different era, hailing from the Mississippi Delta in the early part of the 20th century and making his early career on Memphis' famous Beale Street. He was the Beale Street "Blues Boy" — the "B.B." in his name.

In many ways, it is not surprising that my Facebook feed is filled with thoughts, tributes, and remembrances of B.B. King. He was, after all, the "King of the Blues." But while many somehow understand that the blues is important in American music, I would guess that there are relatively few who listen to the blues on a regular basis, fewer still who buy blues records.

For most Americans, B.B. King was the face of the blues.

My parents weren't particularly blues fans. They listened to old swing and country music, for the most part. But they had this stash of records, many of them from the dry goods store that my granny helped run when she married her second husband and moved to Man, West Virginia. I would look through them for hours and pull out the more interesting ones to give a listen. It was a good cross-section of what was popular in America in the early 1950s. I found Johnny Mathis and Skeeter Davis and records with titles like, "Your Favorite Pop Hits on the Hammond Organ!" Among these were two copies of B.B. King's debut album, Singin' the Blues.

I should mention that both were extremely water-damaged and certainly not collectible in any sense. I think I gave one of them to my friend Chris. But I would put it on and give it a listen. It was the only blues record in the entire collection.

Years later, I found myself teaching music. I would ask if they knew any blues musicians and apart from the occasional kid with hippie parents who would offer up the name of Eric Clapton, B.B. King was the only one they could identify. But they all knew him.

I saw him once in concert, about nine years ago, on his 84th birthday. It was at the House of Blues and the audience was packed — standing room only. It was clear that few of them had more than a passing familiarity with his music, but they ate him up. My clearest memory was some college kid in khakis and a backward ball cap who insisted on shouting, "You are the king, sir!" at the show's quietest moments.

Americans knew B.B. King. They knew his guitar(s), Lucille. They knew he had diabetes, thanks to commercials he did for OneTouch Ultra. And they'd seen his face on Toyota commercials, too.

Part of King's legacy is no doubt due to the fact that he was one of the musicians who bridged the transition between blues and rock music. Eric Clapton performed with him often. George Harrison claimed him as a major influence, which can certainly be heard. So did Jimi Hendrix, though that may be a little less obvious.

His music was called "day blues" early on. It was the showier, glitzier cousin of Chicago's electric blues. While it didn't have the grittiness that many blues fans love, it did keep blues in the mainstream for some time.

Mr. King was the ambassador for blues music, performing for presidents and kings, prison inmates, and school children. His legacy is important for that reason, almost as much as for the music itself.

I'm always surprised when I meet people who claim to not like the blues. Back when I taught music, one of the central "big ideas" I wanted students to leave with was, "All American music comes from the blues." It doesn't matter if you like rock or hip-hop or punk or funk or country or bluegrass or jazz or metal — none of them would exist without the blues.

Yesterday I found myself driving for work and I put on The Cramps first record and noticed the familiar three-chord, twelve-bar blues form that musicians like King, Muddy Waters and their contemporaries popularized. It has become so much a part of the American musical memory that it's hard to imagine a time before the blues. The blues have become a form on which musicians as diverse as Charlie Parker, Bill Monroe, and the Ramones have hung their musical and lyrical ideas.

I've got three nights of gigs this weekend, playing punk, rock-and-roll, and soul music. I'll be sharing the stage with seasoned jazz musicians, kids with shitty guitars who started playing a couple years ago, and one R&B legend. It is not an exaggeration to say that all of them owe a debt of gratitude to B.B. King.

Long live the King.

I Dream of Wires

1981, age 9. Switched on Bach, by Walter Carlos.

I guess my background is similar to a lot of people who fell in love with music from a young age. I grew up in a house filled with music, my mom played piano for the church choir, and I started taking piano lessons at age 6.

Like a lot of kids, there were days I hated practicing. My mom would put this kitchen timer on top of the piano until I finished my requisite 30 minutes. I think I liked the idea of being a musician a lot more than actually playing the instrument.

I was okay, I guess, but not nearly as good as my twin sister, Sarah. She really came into her own on the piano and was the kid who was always winning talent shows and playing for school functions. She was gracing audiences with "The Spinning Song" while I was struggling to make it out of the first volume of Teaching Little Fingers to Play.

We switched teachers over the years as some moved away or others weren't the right fit. There was Mrs. Showalter, the preacher's dowdy wife, who moved when the church fired her husband. There was Mrs. Ward, who played organ at the church. We had Mr. Stewart, a cocktail pianist and junior high music teacher, a flamboyantly gay man in a very conservative Bible-belt town, who moved to Florida and died soon afterward. There was John Yurick, who has since become a good friend, an accomplished musician and composer who taught at the local music store.

The thing was, when I started really getting into music, I wanted to play the guitar. Guitar was what rock and roll musicians played. The Beatles didn't have a piano player.

My mom told me I was too young to play the guitar and that I could do that after I'd played piano for several years.

So I resigned myself to the keyboard for awhile, looking for any hint of its rock and roll soul.

I noticed that "Lady Madonna" seemed pretty focused around the piano, as were a lot of Paul McCartney's contributions to The Beatles. I learned that some people even called Billy Preston "The Fifth Beatle." Then there was David Bowie banging away on "Rock and Roll Star" and other tracks from the Ziggy Stardust record. I thought I even heard some organ on those Santana records my brothers played.

About this time I checked out a book from the public library called Musical Instruments of the World. It was really fascinating and had drawings and descriptions of every instrument I could ever imagine: balalaikas, citterns, Sicilian bagpipes, nose flutes, and erhus. They even had a section on "Modern Rock Music," that explained how an amplifier worked and the different pieces of a drum set. I was deeply gratified to find the keyboard instruments included as well, with a long-haired gentleman in platform shoes standing behind a Hammond B-3 and Fender Rhodes. But there was another instrument there, too, something I didn't recognize, with all kinds of knobs and weird cables connecting parts of it. It was called a "synthesizer."

When I read about the synthesizer, it sounded magical. Its sounds were produced entirely electronically, so it was a really modern instrument. Because of this, the authors told me, a synthesizer was capable of producing the sound of any other instrument. I read about the synthesizer made by Robert Moog, whose name I assumed, as I guess some of you have just now, rhymed with "fugue." It does not. It rhymes with "vogue."

So I started looking for synthesizers in the music I was listening to. I found bits and pieces, but nothing I could really hear that well. So the next time I was at the library, I strolled over to the bins where they kept the LPs and began digging. I found it in the classical section. It was called Switched on Bach by Walter Carlos Williams.

The record was already over a decade old, but the cover was fascinating. It showed a gentleman in full Baroque attire standing in front of cabinets housing panels of electronic modules and cables connecting various pieces. It looked like it should be used by NASA. I wrongfully assumed that the gentleman was Mr. Williams, unaware that Mr. Williams had begun living as Ms. Williams by the time Switched on Bach came out and had made the complete jump biologically by the time I held the album in my hands, financed largely by the record's success.

I took it home and listened to it. It was engrossing. It was classical music, familiar, accessible — but made with weird electronic sounds. There were tinkling sounds and buzzing sounds and swooping, gyrating sounds. There were thick, round sounds and piercingly thin sounds. It was all very interesting.

But it wasn't rock and roll.

So I kept my eyes and ears open, looking for the appearance of one of these fabled instruments.

Then something wonderful happened. It was called "MTV."

Synthesizers were all over MTV. The very first video I saw on the channel was "Words," by Missing Persons, and the singer, Dale Bozio, stood in front of a platform where a musician worked behind a bank of keyboards. But they weren't the only ones. There was Duran Duran and Human League and Flock of Seagulls and Depeche Mode and Devo. There was Prince, that enigmatic purple-clad sprite whose music was my sexual awakening, due in no small part to the catchy synth hooks that dominated the music, played live by "Lisa" and "Dr. Fink."

I had to have one.

I remember the very first synthesizer I saw. It was a Moog Rogue (that rhymes, in case you have forgotten) and it was at Don Elkins' Music on Valley Drive, where I went for my piano lesson every week. It was 32 keys in a black case with white lettering, a few simple knobs and sliders labelled with strange words: "Oscillators," "Modulation," "Contour Filter." I had no idea what it sounded like and it wasn't connected to any sort of amplifier in the store, so you couldn't even try the thing out. Yet in my mind, it was all electronic sex and rock and roll glory. Some kids wanted to be Batman; I wanted to own a Moog Rogue.

Some time after our school music teacher even brought in a friend, a local DJ, who demonstrated the Minimoog for us in the school cafetorium. I sat riveted. The encounter was brief, but it stuck with me.

There were mail order companies in those days that sold synthesizers. I'm not sure where I got the address for one — maybe in Keyboardist magazine. The catalogs would come in the mail to me and they were just pages upon pages of incomprehensible science projects. They were DIY kits for synth home hobbyists and you could buy and put together yourself these modular synthesizers of any possible size you could imagine. I couldn't imagine where to begin among the list of puzzling modules: VCOs, VCFs, LFOs, ring modulators, and so on. Then you'd have to get an amplifier of some sort to plug the thing in. And a "keyboard controller" that made no sound on its own. Oh, and I found out that these "analog" synths were "monophonic": they could only play one note at a time. My confusion grew.

Somewhere around this time I started playing guitar and saxophone, and my obsession with owning a synthesizer faded. I owned an electric guitar long before I owned a synth, and I was regularly playing saxophone in bands of various styles.

The MIDI revolution happened in the late 1980s and 90s, and once I went to music school, owning a MIDI keyboard than had access to banks of sounds was no big deal. I bought a cheap Casio and used it happily to play with sampled sounds and banks of soft synths. It was not quite the same thing, but it served my needs.

Then a couple of years ago, my cousin Zack asked me to play saxophone with his band. "And some keys." This was without ever hearing me play. I suppose he trusted that I knew what I was doing. So I started shopping around, asking questions, and looking into buy a synth — or maybe an organ. I wasn't sure yet.

I ended up with this very cool Casio XW-P1. Now, most people associate that name with cheap keyboards (see above comment) and this one is a budget synth. (I was less than broke when I bought it.) But it's the real deal: sampled sounds, plus digital synthesis that could be played with. It's been a great little workhorse. I like it so much that when it got stolen last fall, I bought another one.

It's completely opened me up creatively and I've started playing with the on-board sequencer and arpeggiator. I've discovered that timbre can be as great of a source for creativity as rhythm or harmony. I can spend hours at a time making new sounds, lost in my own little world.

Then the inevitable happened: I bought another one. It was called a Synthstation 25 and really it was just a little mini-keyboard controller I bought used for $19. You plug your phone into it and start a $2 app and all of the sudden you have a drum machine, a sequencer, and an analog-modeling synth at your fingers.

Then I got another one at Christmas. It's an Arturia MiniBrute and it's an actual analog synthesizer. (For those of you who are unfamiliar with the differences between "analog" and "digital," suffice it to say that digital is basically playing with computers and analog is basically playing with raw electricity.) It can make some pretty bitchin' sounds, man.

Then I got a Nord Electro 4, which isn't exactly what most people think of as a synthesizer, but has great organ and piano sounds, as well as samples of an old Mellotron — a type of pre-digital sampler that used little bits of tape.

I also got a little $50 Korg Monotron, which is basically a single oscillator and filer with a ribbon controller. It makes all kinds of delicious bleeps and bloops.

I'm really not a gear head, but these instruments just keep opening up new worlds for me. It's like being a painter and discovering that there are new colors you haven't ever seen, or even colors you can invent yourself.

All of which has brought me to this fateful day.

I'm wrapping up this blog post, then I'm making a payment to purchase my very first modular synthesizer. It's not been built yet. I've ordered it from a well-known company that specializes in this sort of thing. I spoke to the owner and chose each module myself: the power supply, the two oscillators, the two contrasting filters, the LFO — all of it. I even chose the case it comes in, which has blank spots, by the way, so I can keep adding to it.

I've not quite crossed the threshold yet into building my own modules, though on slow afternoons I imagine myself hunkered in my basement with a soldering iron, piecing together transistors and resistors, bringing the sounds to life for the very first time.

I also put a bid on someone's old Moog Rogue online.

Someone else can be Batman.