Paul Geremia lives the blues  

By Tony Lioce    Providence Sun Journal 7/2/82

Paul Geremia walks into a record store in Chicago, a small store that specializes in music by obscure bluesmen. The clerk, a serious blues lover who's never met Paul, recognizes him right away. All the serious blues lovers know who Paul is.

A Rhode Island native who lives by himself in a Newport apartment, he spends a lot of time travelling around the country working the folk/blues club circuit, and he gets great reviews. One critic has said, "When Paul plays Leadbelly tunes, you can close your eyes and swear that it is Leadbelly himself." He's respected by and on a first-name basis with, people like John Hammond, Odetta, Dave Van Ronk and Taj Mahal.

Still, at 37, with 15 years as a professional bluesman and three albums behind him, he's travelling around in an 11-year-old Dodge with 136,000-plus miles on it, a car that needs oil as often as it needs gas.

Loading it with two guitars and four harmonicas, a small suitcase, a cooler, a box of tapes and a small, portable Norelco cassette player, he's his own roadie. He crashes on people's couches. He can, on a really good night, pull in as much as $250, but there are nights when he finds himself working for a small fraction of that. And sometimes he only gets work one night a week.

Ten years ago, when the blues revival of the '60s that inspired Paul already was a thing of the past, Rolling Stone praised his music but note his "precarious position as bright young newcomer to a wornout, tottering branch of the music industry," asserting that despite Paul's considerable talent, his career, from a commercial viewpoint appeared "generally unrewarding and unpromising." It wished him luck in what it saw as an inevitable race against "frustration and cynicism."

Things are far worse now than they were then. Interest in pure, old-time, country blues like Paul's - in all folk music, for that matter - has continued to wane. Later today Paul will learn from a club owner that even people as well known as Richie Havens and Ramblin' Jack Elliott aren't "drawing flies anymore." These days, there aren't as many blues clubs as there used to be. Meanwhile, Paul's expenses have skyrocketed.

The price of gas, of course, has more than tripled, but that's only part of it; harmonicas that used to cost $2 now cost $10. The neck of his six-string guitar, a 40-year-old Gibson, needs to be filed down and refretted, and he's just learned that it's going to cost $125, and he's not sure where that's going to come from. He no longer can afford to change his guitar strings as often as he would like.

But as far as that race with frustration Rolling Stone was worried about, Paul's still so far out in front that it's hard to tell if the race is even on. Paul Geremia is simply in love with the blues, passionately in love with them. Oh sure, it would be nice to have more money and comfort and security and stuff, just like it would be nice if club owners didn't pay Paul with bad checks as they sometimes do.

But stop playing the blues? "Actually," he says, "I do think about it from time to time. But only for about five minutes." The blues are the one thing in the world (well , except for women) that makes his eyes light up. His eyes are practically on fire right now, here in the record store as he spots an album of songs recorded in Chicago and New York between 1930 and '36 by a guitarist named Charlie Jordan and a pianist named Peetie Wheatstraw.

"Wheatstraw used to call himself the devil's son-in-law," Paul says with a giggle - not an "isn't that funny" giggle, an "isn't that tremendous" giggle. Often when he's listening to or talking about the blues, he breaks into that giggle.

Paul's got today off. He arrived in Chicago around noon from Grand Rapids, where he'd gone to visit some friends after arriving at a club in Ann Arbor - after leaving his parents' house in Johnston in the middle of Thanksgiving dinner and driving and driving and pulling over to the side of the road and sleeping in the back seat of the Dodge and driving some more - only to find out the guy had made a mistake and didn't want Paul to play after all.

The guy paid him anyway. "It's the first time I ever got paid for not working," he says, still not quite able to believe the whole thing happened. His first stop in Chicago was a bar called Dirty Dan's on Lincoln Street in the club district, where he drank four cups of black coffee and checked the newspaper to see who was playing in town.

It's a Tuesday, and Tuesdays are slow nights in the clubs. He grabs a newspaper and reads that Blind John Davis, an old bluesman and old friend, will be playing with S.P. Leary, Howlin' Wolf's old drummer - but not until tomorrow when Paul will be playing in Milwaukee. Damn, he'd really like to see John again. Paul goes to a phone and calls John to see if he'd be around this weekend when Paul will be back in town playing at Holstein's up the street. He calls Blind John Davis, an old bluesman and old friend, to see if they can get together.

Paul spends a good amount of his time on the road looking up old bluesman "to talk about the old days and learn about the music." The first time he looked up Blind John Davis he found him living in a garbage dump. "This guy had been a giant. He'd played with the greats - Sonny Boy Williamson, Big Bill Broonzy, all kinds of people. He's made some really significant contributions. And there he was, living in slop."

Paul talked some club owners into booking Davis. These days Davis is doing much better. Davis’s grandson, who explains that the old man is sleeping, answers Paul’s phone call. Paul says he'll call back later.

Paul asks the clerk in the record store if he knows anything about a guy named John Embry, whose name he'd spotted in the paper at Dirty Dan's in an ad for a club called B.L.U.E.S. The clerk tells Paul that Embry is a bass player, an old guy who's been around for years and who has played with lots of the giants. Paul's eyes light up.

Paul jumps into the car and drives through the rain as the weatherman on the radio warns of a snowstorm that left three-foot drifts all over Nebraska and now is headed this way. Paul thinks about all the miles he's got to cover in the next few days.

He gets to Emily Friedman's, where he'll be staying in a spare room. Emily is a writer in her mid-30s who was graduated from Berkeley and who now puts out a magazine. Come for to Sing, about the local folk/blues scene. A lot of the musicians who come through town stay in her pin-neat basement apartment, packed to the ceiling with books, records and tapes.

She's not home from work yet. Paul calls Blind John Davis back and reaches him this time, and they decide to get together Saturday afternoon. He takes his six-string out of its case and practices a while, coming up with a new lick for one of his songs. Then he puts the Jordan-Wheatstraw record on Emily's turntable. He's especially interested in the guitar-piano sound right now because when he gets back to Rhode Island he'll be going to the Normandy Sound studios in Warren to record a new album - his first since "Hard Life Rockin' Chair" in 1973 - with Del Long, a pianist he works with at the Colony Club on Thames Street in Newport on Monday nights. Paul DelNero, a bass player from Newport, also will be on the record, which will be released on Flying Fish, a Chicago-based label. Jordan sings a lyric about a man who mistreated his woman and wound up eating out of a garbage can. Paul giggles that giggles of his.

Emily arrives, and she and Paul head for a Mexican restaurant in the neighbourhood, where the mariachi band kicks things off with "Feelings." Emily's got to get up early in the morning, so Paul heads out without her to hear John Embry.

The club is long, narrow and dimly lit, and drinks are cheap. Embry, who has processed hair, is playing with three sidemen, two electric guitarists and a drummer who wears a fedora. The crowd spans a wide age group and is racially mixed. Some of the people recognize Paul, and Embry announces him from the bandstand.

The band is out of tune but plays with so much spirit that is doesn't matter. Paul orders a whiskey as Embry sings about women and tears that fall like rain. One of the guitarists, a young guy who calls himself "the Chocolate Kid" some nights and "Little Nick" other nights, is playing up a storm, dancing around with his guitar up on his shoulders behind his head, pushing Embry on to all kinds of heights.

"Can we play it like we feel it?" the Kid/Nick asks the crowd. 'YEAAHHHH!" the crowd roars. "Well, that's good," says the Kid/Nick, "because we gonna anyway, tee, hee. You can't play it like you feel it, you shouldn't bother."

The band launches into "19 Years Old" by Muddy Waters, a song about a girl who's "got a waist just like a baby chile," and it's hard to imagine the blues ever sounding better than they do right here, right now. Paul is going nuts.

Chicago was the first city in the Midwest that Paul ever played, back in '68 at a place called the Quiet Knight that isn't there anymore. His first album had just come out, and he'd been booked in for two weeks.

He'd been playing for five years, having started at 19, shortly after he heard Mississippi John Hurt at a Newport Folk Festival. "I wasn't even sure what he was playing," he recalls, "but I sure wanted to play it, too." Deciding to "let everything else slide," he dropped out of the University of Rhode Island where he'd been majoring in agriculture, borrowed a friend's guitar and started teaching himself how to use it.

Three years later he made his professional debut at the Tete a Tete, a coffeehouse that used to be on Thayer Street in Providence. Before long he was working Boston, Cape Cod and "basket houses" in Greenwich Village where he'd pass the hat. His first job for real pay in New York was at the Gaslight where people like Dylan had played.

Since then he's played all over the country and has made two tours of Europe. Learning about venues from musicians he runs into on the road, he books his own jobs, making phone calls several months in advance.

He's appeared at major folk and blues festivals and also has appeared - literally - underground, in "clubs" people without liquor and entertainment licenses operate in the cellars of their homes. The beer's in the refrigerator so leave a buck, throw some money in the other box for the guy up there playing guitar.

Paul listens to John Embry's band until the last gun is fired and doesn't get up until 12:30 the following afternoon. He makes himself a pot of coffee, and listens to some records - Jack Elliott, Willie Nelson, Professor Longhair, another New Orleans pianist names Joe Robichaux - before throwing a can of oil into his engine and starting the 87-mile drive to Milwaukee.

It's cold and grey outside as Paul travels the straight, flat interstate, passing gas stations, all-night diners and, as he crosses the Wisconsin line, what looks to be millions of cheesestores. He takes the downtown exit in Milwaukee and goes to John Strope's house, where he'll be spending the night.

Stropes, who's about Paul's age, is a guitarist who teaches on the faculty of the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music and serves a director and president of the Milwaukee Classical Guitar Society. he and his wife, Frankie Ullenberg, an artist and photographer, invite Paul to dinner, after which everyone listens to old 78s by Enrico Caruso (the first music Paul ever heard was Italian opera, at his grandparents' house) and Emmett Miller, one of Paul's real favourites, the man who wrote "Lovesick Blues" and "Big Bad Bill's Just Sweet William Now." Paul decides to include a Miller song, "Lovin' Sam the Sheik of Alabam", in his performance tonight at the Blue Ridge Cafe, a 200-or-so-seat bar in a first-floor corner of a downtown office building.

The Blue Ridge used to be a place for coffee, beer, wine and traditional folk music, but since the last time Paul Played there it has switched to full booze and added punk rock to the bill of musical fare. Business is business.

It's about two-thirds full tonight when Paul walks in, grabs a coffee at the bar, tunes his guitars and proceeds to the bandstand. He opens up with "Stomp Down Rider" about a woman who's "much too drunk for me," by Blind Willie McTell, who wrote songs in Georgia back in the '20s.

Another McTell number, a slower one called "Broke Down Engine" follows, and already it's obvious that Paul deserves his notices. Throughout the evening, his strong, spunky voice drips with wry humour one minute and jitters with tension the next as he sings of ramblin' and police dogs and jelly roll and undertakers and the devil and stealing chickens. Of women he surely loves but whose ways he just can't stand, of people who get in trouble just to pass the time. Of doin' the best you can.

He switches back and forth between his six-string guitar and his 12-string, which was made in the '20s and was in pieces when Paul found it; he glued it back together himself. Playing in a variety of tunings, he sets up real conversations between guitar and harmonica that, along with his voice, reach every corner of these songs and reveal them as the eloquent statements they are.

A good portion of his performance is devoted to faithful recreations of old, refreshingly and spiritedly raw country blues and jazzy rags with names like "The Death of Ella Speed" and "Stones in my Passway" and "The Way to Get the Lowdown" by people with names like Blind Blake and Barbecue Bob, with lyrics like "I love my whiskey more than some folks likes to eat" and "rats in my kitchen, mosquitoes all 'round my screen" and "I know this gal from Dixieland, she musta took lessons from a sewin' machine man 'cause she move it just right."

"I wouldn't dream of changing a word of those old songs," Paul has said. Between tunes, he tells audiences that one of the old songs is called "Savannah Mama" but the lyric is "I'm goin' to Savannah, mama," and another one is called "When You Left" but the lyric is "when yo' left side start to jumpin', I know something's wrong." Paul giggles that giggle again.

Among the songs Paul sings tonight is one by a man named Pink Anderson who'd spent 30 years performing in medicine shows before Paul found him living on a dead end street in Spartanburg, S.C., 72 years old, eating dog food. When Paul had been just starting out, he'd learned a lot from old Pink Anderson records he'd found in cut-out bins. Paul decided to get Pink a job in Newport.

When he got home, he talked to Dan Prentiss who owned a club called Salt that was on Thames Street then. They decided to drive down, get Pink and drive back with him. Pink hadn't been on a stage in 25 years. He drove the crowd wild.

"He did songs he didn't even know he remembered," recalls Paul. "We taped everything he did and afterwards I played some of the tape for him, and he said, "I didn't even know I still remembered that song!" Pink made good money and was able to take a plane back to Spartanburg. He'd never been on a plane.

Pink died not long after that.

Along with the old songs, Paul sings a lot of originals at the Blue Ridge. He's thinking about putting nothing but originals on his upcoming album. It's not that he thinks they're any better than the old songs. But he'd like to think that, by using old time phrases and images in new tunes and lyrics, he might help keep valuable musical traditions alive at a time when they seem to be dying off with all the Pink Anderson's.

The originals tonight include songs about love that's good ("She got ways to make a preacher hug the devil, make a cripple walk a country mile. Sure does my heart good just to see that little woman smile") and love that's gone bad ("Well, I tried to be your faithful only one, and I tried to feel like it's evil I have done").

There's one called "I Really Don't Mind Livin" which he says was written for all those people who think anybody who sings the blues must be miserable all the time, and some that could serve as Paul's state of the union addresses. One of these, "The Ballad of Ronald Reagan" is set to the tune of the old "Ballad of Jesse James." "I thought it was appropriate," Paul explains. "James supposedly robbed from the rich to give to the poor, while Reagan does just the opposite." The song notes that "Now the times have changed. The crooks ain't on the range."

The thing that really worries Paul about Reagan, he tells the audience, is that "no smart thief is gonna rob from the poor." The audience roars. Paul wraps things up after 24 numbers with another Pink Anderson tune, playing with his guitar up on his shoulders behind his head like the Kid/Nick the night before.

The manager gives him a little more than a hundred bucks, which is more than Paul had expected. It's been a profitable night for both of them.

The next day Paul gets up after noon; he'd been up till 3:30 in the morning going for whiskey and pinball with John Stropes and then sitting up in John's living room talking with him about old music.

John had asked Paul if he'd be willing to teach a guitar workshop at the conservatory the next time he's in town, and Paul said he'd be honored. John told Paul that Dave "Snaker" Ray, a great ragtime guitarist, had decided to give it all up and cut his hair and was selling insurance for his father now. Paul had shaken his head and said, "Well it's getting tougher and tougher to make it."
Is Paul worried about his own future? "I try not to think about it," he answers. "I don't want to end up being a welfare case. And if I ever tried to sell insurance, I probably would end up on welfare." He laughs, and then gets serious again. "I just want to keep doing what I'm doing as long as I can."

Heading for the interstate, Paul spots a sign for Brady Street, and it reminds him of yet another of the old songs he knows. "Must be somethin' maw-velous happenin' on Brady Street," he sings before putting his cassette deck up on his dashboard and sticking in a Charlie Patton tape.

The 270-mile drive to Indianapolis takes Paul back through Chicago, where he turns on the radio and hears his upcoming shows there listed among the weekend's musical highlights. It's dark as he crosses into Indiana, and the radio tells him he's about two hours ahead of the snow.

Once, Paul was driving a stretch of road like this through fog so thick he had to stick his head out the window to try to spot the dotted white line. Another time his fan belt snapped on him on the way to a show and he had to replace it, and he arrived at the club so covered with grease that "I looked like I'd just crawled out from under a rock."

Even though he always travels with spare parts, sometimes the car breaks down in ways he can't fix and he has to go to a mechanic, where he loses whatever profits he's been able to get from his shows. "The way I figure, though, I would've had to make the repairs anyway," he says. "If something's gonna happen, it's gonna happen. Pay now or pay at home, it's the same difference."

Unless he's really worried about the car, he enjoys travelling. When he was a kid his parents moved across the country and back again, and he thinks one of the reasons he started liking folk songs at an early age is that he'd "seen so much of the country and could relate to its music." He especially loves seeing the Rockies pop up after a long haul west across the Plains.

The thing he likes best about travelling, though, is visiting people, and right now he's really looking forward to seek Yank Rachel, a blues mandolin player who recorded with Sleepy John Estes in the late '20s. The chance to see Yank was the real reason Paul decided to play Indianapolis, where he's only getting paid $50.

Paul stops to eat at a truck stop 30 miles north of Indianapolis and calls Yank and tells him he'll be playing the Hummingbird Cafe tonight. Yank says he'll be there.

It's raining out as Paul parks outside the Hummingbird, a rustic looking barroom with 150 seats or so on the outskirts of town. Paul will be playing between sets by Townes Van Zandt, a country/folkie songwriter from Texas best known for writing a song called "Pancho and Lefty" that was recorded by Emmylou Harris. The place is about two-thirds full.

Paul, who knows more songs than he can count, plays a lot of things tonight that weren't in last night's show, like Lonnie Johnson's "No Hard Times" and Blind Blake's "Jones Oh Jones" and Jesse Baby Face Thomas's "You'll Never Find Another Man Like Me."

His set, highlighted by a tune called "Somethin's Gotta Be Arranged" that just might be the best song Paul's ever written, is a lot better than the opening set by Van Zandt whose tunes all sound alike and whose lyrics betray a tendency to whine about things.

But the audience, which listened respectfully to Van Zandt, talks through much of Paul's show. He later says he wasn't disappointed because he'd "sorta expected it" from a Van Zandt crowd. He is disappointed, however, when Yank doesn't show up.

Paul call Yank's house again and learns he isn't home. The bartender, who knows Yank, overhears the conversation and says, "Well, Yank must've run into one of those spring-loaded women he knows." Paul laughs and says "Yeah, well, first things first."

Still, he decides to hang around waiting. Van Zandt gets back on stage and proceeds to get falling down drunk, forgetting lyrics, even forgetting melodies halfway into them. The crowd still pays more attention to him than it had paid Paul.

"It bothers me," Paul admits, "that people will forgive him because of where he's from, whom he knows, what he did years ago. I could never get away with that.

"On the other hand, that's probably good for me. It keeps me in shape. Sometimes I think it's a good thing that I'm an Italian kid from Rhode Island. People look at me and say, 'How can this guy play the blues?' and I've always got to prove that I can do it. I don't have any of those fake laurels to rest on. That's probably very good for me."

Worried about the snow, he decides to drive back to Chicago tonight. He arrives as the sun is coming up.