What the Blues Meant to This Suburban White kid
Blues master Robert Johnson corrupted me. I don't regret it.
My older sister was off to college, and I had taken over her room with my Sony stereo, speakers, and guitars. It was 1973, and I could shut the door, sip Jack, and explore the blues, a form of African American music created out of the poverty and racism of the Mississippi Delta region, around the 1870s, from work songs, ballads, field hollers, shouts, chants, and occasional spirituals.
I heard a muffler rattling and then silence as a car came to a rolling halt outside our home.
My mom, a frequent insomniac, was in the kitchen, grinding extra-fatty, estrogen-rich ground beef. I opened the downstairs backdoor to quietly let in Paul Mono, a gleaming-eyed, Russian-blooded shaman with long blond, sun-bleached, shoulder-length hair. He had on moccasins and was silent as a deer when he slipped inside with his guitar. He had a new album with him that he placed on the turntable, positioned diamond on black vinyl, and the most haunting voice and guitar began jangling.
Oh my god, a wailing that melded a haunted voice and guitar into one zapped through my skin into the tips of my fingers and toes and every neuron of my brain. It was raw. It cut into my bones.
The album, King of the Delta Blues, includes twenty-nine songs Robert Johnson recorded one day in 1936 and another day in 1937 in San Antonio and Dallas, Texas. The songs took me into his Mississippi Delta world of hell hounds, icicles hanging on trees, calves that needed to suck but got only blue milk, blues falling like hail, and waking up to the devil knocking at the door.
This was not the South, though; this was working-class white Los Angeles in the 1970s. Most of my closest friends I’d grown up with were uncomfortably comfortable racists.
I got lumped in with them because I played organized sports from Little League all the way through high school with them. I was still on varsity football but moving on. The blues were the antidote to the poison.
I pumped Paul for what he knew about Robert Johnson. There wasn’t much, he told me. He was born in 1911 in Hazlehurst in the Mississippi Delta. Poisoned at age twenty-seven in Greenwood, Mississippi. Within the system of racial injustice in which he lived, he was less than zero. No homicide case was ever opened. Buried in an unmarked grave.
Almost disappeared from history.
Except that Columbia record producer John Hammond released those twenty-nine tunes again back in the early 1960s when he produced Bob Dylan and urged him to listen to Robert before he recorded his first album.
Today, Robert Johnson’s work has become the unmovable bedrock foundation of modern blues and rock and roll, and inspired everybody from Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf to Albert King, Elmore James, Chuck Berry, Eric Clapton, Dylan, and the Rolling Stones.
THE DEVIL’S MUSIC
The blues isn’t church music. Ask any Southern Baptist Black preacher on Sunday morning when the basket returns light because of the rolling and tumbling the men were doing the night before at some roadside juke joint and you will hear the blues referred to as the “devil’s music.”
Robert Johnson embodied the mythology of the art, the man who went down to the crossroads and made a deal with the devil to become the world’s best blues guitarist.
That so little was known about him only fed our imaginations. I mean, we didn’t even know the true circumstances of his death.
LA BLUES
I bought a Robert Johnson songbook that came with the only known photographs of him. A cigarette dangling from his lips, guitar in hand, in one; he had tightly curled kinky hair—no lye. The other focused on those long, thin fingers that crawled the fret board like spider legs; he was sharply dressed in a pin-striped suit, derby hat tipped jauntily on his head, perhaps as he would dress to go in through the back door to entertain white folks at a private party at the Peabody Hotel in Memphis.
Before long, Paul and I were playing in bands together, anywhere we could, traveling all over LA, learning our craft, hanging with Smokey Wilson and Hollywood Fats at the Pioneer Club in South Central; John Lee Hooker and George Thorogood at the Sweetwater in Redondo Beach; and with Irish blues master Rory Gallagher at the Whisky a Go Go on Sunset.
We went anywhere an open stage or the blues were happening. Had guitar. Would travel.
It was the golden age of the LA blues scene, and we were out of control, wild, disillusioned, and in love with each other and our musical bond; we made good music together.
Paul had become my hilariously funny, blue-eyed, big brother, the best raspy-voiced singer/slide guitarist and performer I had ever played with. I was also his driver. There were two rules for riding in his Chevy: 1) passengers weren’t allowed to moon anybody and 2) we all had to avoid slamming doors.
I thought he had me drive him everywhere so he could drink more comfortably. But, as it turned out, there was another reason—one he didn’t like talking about. But one night, as we performed, I realized what it was.
That night, when we performed at a synagogue, Paul lorded over the crowd, audacious, strutting up and down the stage, expertly twirling the microphone, gold glasses hanging down on the tip of his Russian nose, blond hair over his forehead. He gazed out over his sea of love.
“Are you checking out the chicks when you’re looking out at everyone like that?” I said somewhat enviously after the show when we were sitting in the dressing room.
“Hey, I can’t see a God damn thing,” he told me. “It’s like being in a tunnel.”
He had retinosa pigmentosa, a rare genetic disorder that would lead to the loss of cells in the retina.
Even then, the back-door man was nearly blind, and his vision was worsening. I drove with love.
SUNDOWN-SEA BLUES
Paul went off to college, and I’d hitchhike up to San Luis Obispo with my guitar, and we would jam all night at his place, coincidentally on Johnson Avenue. We climbed Morro Rock together, and we were drinking some wine in the golden sun when he told me had an offer when he got out to work for a daily newspaper back in LA.
“Anyway, man, you’re leaving to go to school in New York.”
I remember how hard we hugged back then. And for a long time. It was kind of sad. We hugged each other way up there on the rock with the howling winds and watched the sunset, drinking wine, playing our guitars, singing a ballad called “The Sundown Sea” he had written in the key of G.
We didn’t know it then, but we were both so far from normal. What was life going to deal us?
The funny thing is, I guess, Paul turned out a lot more normal than me, at least for a while. I met him for lunch at an Italian restaurant by the Venice Pier near Marina del Rey. One of us was actually wearing a tie. He was the head of one of the graphic-design departments at the Los Angeles Times.
“The blues was low class,” he told me. “I had to get out of that life. I’ll put in my hours at the Times and get my pension, man.”
“Well, let’s play music,” I said.
“That was another lifetime,” he said.
I kept meaning to call. Got tied up with trying to save the world.
PLAGUE BLUES
Like everyone else living through the haze of these pandemic days, I am digging into my roots to survive the isolation of trying to stay safe. I began reading a new memoir, Brother Robert (Hachette, 2020), by Robert Johnson’s little-known stepsister Annye C. Anderson.
Fifteen years younger than Robert, in her nineties, Annye’s vivid memories of their joyful Memphis family is as close as I may ever get to knowing the real Robert Johnson and the racism he faced; she still has his cedar guitar chest and tells the story of how he grew up in the country with his mama, Miss Julia, who lost her husband Charlie Dodds when he was about to be lynched for talking to a woman on another plantation. Charlie fled to Memphis where he changed his last name to Spencer. Miss Julia met a sharecropper named Noah Johnson. That relationship didn’t last long but produced Robert who really never knew his biological father. It wasn’t easy for Miss Julia, having to make a living on her own with kids in tow, moving from one migrant camp to another. Miss Julia sent Robert to Memphis to be with the Spencers.
Robert loved Memphis, especially going to the movies and watching Ginger Rogers on the big screen. The family had a radio, and famous white and Black musicians and singers performed in Memphis. He was a cultural and musical sponge.
To get a sense of how cool a kid he was, just listen to the language in his songs.
He uses the word “doney” in “Dust My Broom,” which was taken from African Bantu, to refer to a woman who wouldn’t do work around the home; he ventured into hoodoo with “Come On Into My Kitchen” when he claimed to have taken the last nickel from some no-good woman’s “nation sack,” which African American women, including the prostitutes of Memphis, hung from their waist. It would be filled with money, feathers, or other magical items to maintain power over their men.
“You can hear his awareness of racism in his music,” Annye writes. “He doesn’t want sundown to catch him where he isn’t supposed to be. He’s telling you something. He knows if you wrong in the white folks’ neighborhood, they’ll harm you. White folks are afraid.”
BLIND MAN’S BLUES
The night I met Robert Johnson, we played at home against Crenshaw, a high school team from South-Central LA with some stellar Black athletes. We got a pre-game pep talk around 7:30 p.m., led by our quarterback. I sat with about forty other kids, all of us with shoulder pads, slumped in our desktop chairs. I grew up with the QB. His dad owned a paint company. This was the first year of busing in LA. Our team was a mix of Black and white players, and our QB with his shaggy brown hair was telling us we were going to kick ass on the Crenshaw players. Everybody, including the coaches, listened to him use the “N” word not once but repeatedly. The Black players sat with blank faces, but I knew they were feeling insulted and hurt.
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I left the locker room disgusted.
I lost interest in football that night.
We lost 19 to 13.
I played the blues with a vengeance in that darkened room; my fingers knew better than to hate.
“How could I be like them and disrespect John Lee Hooker, B.B. King, Lightnin’ Hopkins, and the other soul doctors who mean so much to my life?” I asked Paul as we took a break from playing.
The music of those men healed me from what society tried to rip away from me every day of my life.
“I don’t want to be like the assholes on my team, you know?”
“You’re a Jew in Redneck Land,” he told me; he winked, and we tipped glasses of Jack.
“I want to hang with Robert, Muddy, Howlin’ Wolf, Willie, Paul, and the rest of my gang,” I said, drunkenly.
“You better get some water,” he said.
I dizzily walked down the hallway, into the kitchen where my mom was wrapping beef patties in wax paper that she would store in the downstairs freezer for the next six years (ugh). She put her hands on her hips and looked crossly at me, wrinkly fingers wet with bloody entrails. I was happy to have learned a new song from Robert Johnson.
“What the hell are you looking at me that way for?” I asked.
My mom was tiny but formidable. Especially with a knife in her hand.
“We don’t know what you’re doing back there with your friend Paul,” she said, shaping a patty, trimming it, then turning to me, making sure I saw the tip of her point, “but we certainly don’t like your drinking. Don’t make your dad come back there.”
I just smiled.
Didn’t matter.
Devil already got me, mama.
Two deputies shot Paul to death in 2018 in Orange County, California. They claimed he went for his gun when they tried to enter his apartment. I read about it in the paper. He died from multiple gunshot wounds to the head, neck, chest, kidney, liver, and brain. Why would they shoot a blind man who loved the blues?
