Big Road Blues Show 9/16/18: Gon’ Play It For Lil’ Brother – Unissued Field Recordings from Axel Küstner 1972-1978 Pt. 2

ARTIST	SONG	ALBUM
Blind Boy Fuller	Pistol Slapper Blues	Blind Boy Fuller: Remastered 1935-1938
Little Freddie King w/Brother Percy Randolph	Walking With Freddie	Axel Küstner Unreleased Recordings
Arzo Youngblood	Bye & Bye Blues	Axel Küstner Unreleased Recordings
Arzo Youngblood	Goin' Up The Country Blues	Axel Küstner Unreleased Recordings
Arzo Youngblood	See See Rider Blues	Axel Küstner Unreleased Recordings
Arzo Youngblood	Swing, Swing	Axel Küstner Unreleased Recordings
Arzo Youngblood	Meet Me In The Bottom (take 2)	Axel Küstner Unreleased Recordings
Arzo Youngblood	Big Fat Mama Blues	Axel Küstner Unreleased Recordings
Arzo Youngblood	Prison Bound Blues	Axel Küstner Unreleased Recordings
Roosevelt Holts	Big Road Blues	Axel Küstner Unreleased Recordings
Boogie Bill Webb	Maggie Campbell Blues	Axel Küstner Unreleased Recordings
Boogie Bill Webb	Bill's Boogie Woogie	Axel Küstner Unreleased Recordings
Boogie Bill Webb	Dooleyville Blues	Axel Küstner Unreleased Recordings
Boogie Bill Webb	Rocky Mountain Blues	Axel Küstner Unreleased Recordings
Haley Smith	44 Blues	Axel Küstner Unreleased Recordings
Haley Smith	Katy Lee Blues	Axel Küstner Unreleased Recordings
Haley Smith	Katy Lee Blues	Axel Küstner Unreleased Recordings
Haley Smith	Eyesight To The Blind	Axel Küstner Unreleased Recordings
Haley Smith	The Train - Fox Chase	Axel Küstner Unreleased Recordings
Sammy Myers	Juke/When I'm Wrong, Baby	Axel Küstner Unreleased Recordings
Honeyboy Edwards	Big Fat Mama Blues	Axel Küstner Unreleased Recordings
Lee Jackson	Kind Hearted Woman Blues	Axel Küstner Unreleased Recordings

Show Notes:

 

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[Article continued from Gon’ Play It For Lil’ Brother Pt. 1]…

From Baton Rouge there was another Greyhound to Jackson, Ms. to attend a lecture by Bill Ferris that featured live music by Son Thomas and Clyde Maxwell. He remembers vividly staying at the four dollar a night Noble Hotel near the Illinois Central station. “It was a pretty funky place. …Somebody later told me all the people who want to commit suicide go there…” It was “straight out of a Charles Bukowski story,” Axel wrote in an article for a German blues magazine at the time. Right around the corner was Johnny Vincent of Ace records who Axel spent some time with. He spent the afternoon of Sunday, April 30th with Sammy Myers who he recorded and photographed. “Then I drove with him and the band to Bovina, Ms., for their show that night. On my return to Jackson that night, I caught the Greyhound to Chicago at 3 AM that same night.”

In Chicago Axel immediately called Joe Carter who told him to come over. He ended up staying with him five or six weeks. He found out that Sunnyland Slim and his girlfriend Big Time Sarah lived across the street and got to spend time with them as well. Despite a limited repertoire, “when he was really going it was great,” Axel said of Carter. “It was straight out out of the 50’s stuff, I really enjoyed listening to that stuff.” He also looked up Honeboy Edwards. “I mean I was just a young blues fan and I remember calling up Honeyboy, and he lived on the Southside, but it might have been hard for me to catch a bus out there, whatever, so Honeyboy came around and picked me up …I mean I thought that was incredible. …He lived by himself at that time but he had a lady visitor cleaning his kitchen, he said, ‘you know who she is,? the daughter of James “Peck” Curtis.’ And he took me into a little side room, you know, had a bed in there and on the wall it had all Polaroid photos of a great number of ladies in explicit or open situations.” Barely containing his laughter Axel says “I still regret not having taken a photo of Honeyboy in front of all these nude shots.” After taping him for a bit, Lee Jackson walked in to visit Honeyboy and he and Axel arranged a meeting a few days later with Axel recording several numbers. Sadly, Jackson was shot and killed by his stepson about a year later.

Joe Carter & Golden Wheeler, Chicago,Ill., 6/3/1978

From Chicago it was a Greyhound to Cincinnati to spend a few days with Big Joe Duskin. In the basement of Duskin’s home he recorded a few numbers by Pigmeat Jarrett. From Cincinnati it was off to Morristown, NJ to stay with his cousin Elisabeth who had lived there since 1971. At this time Louisiana Red was playing two nights at a little bar called Pop’s in New York City with a full band. He had met Red the year before when he had passed through Germany. “…He played Earl Hooker type of stuff with a wah-wah pedal and a slide guitar, really wild stuff, I don’t think he made any recordings like that for anybody …It was great, it was fun, Red was a good friend at that time. …All Red could do was play guitar and he would play for just hours and hours and hours, that’s all he could do. …To Red, his goal in life was to find the ultimate slide or bottleneck. He would make you go to junk yards trying to find old pipes and stuff that he could use as a slide/bottleneck. And even in later years, about 20 or 25 years after I had first met him in 1977, he would always tell me excitedly: ‘See, this is just like the one that Muddy used’ or ‘see, this is made out of brass, just like Earl Hooker’s’ and so on. He was just crazy in his own way, and I remember one time in 1980 in Washington, D.C. he played his guitar non stop for about 10 hours until his finger tips were bleeding. I think he told me one time: ‘I’m the only guitar picker can play 48 hours a day!’ …He would improvise stuff, God, he made one song totally stream of consciousness called “Blues From the Fifth Planet”, you know, I mean, really weird, bizarre stuff” Axel laughs. Axel was immortalized in one of those off-the-cuff songs called “Axel Boogie:”

Looka there, looka there, that man sttin’ there with glasses on
Well you know he ain’t, he’s a long, long way from home
But I’m gonna tell you now people, he gonna stay with Louisiana Red all night long
Well, he’s sitting there with a beer can drinkin’ his Miller High Life (2x)
Well I tell you he’s gonna be at my wedding, he gonna watch me marry my wife
His name is Axel, Axel that’s my friend
His name is Axel, way from over Berlin

“…Red was, it was wild situation with him, he would always get connected to different women and all kinda stuff so while I was in Washington D.C. he told me he was gonna marry a lady in Pittsburgh, where he obviously grew up. And so Larry and me, the harmonica player, went, it was a Muslim wedding in Pittsburgh so we went there for a few days for the wedding.”Axel could barley contain his laughter talking about Red. “…Red was half crazy, I mean he was a good-hearted guy …I first met him in 77′, like 20 years later or 25 years later whenever I would meet him, he only lived an hour from me in Hanover, he would tell me the same stuff he told me in 77′, so I would always say ‘man is this a time warp, is this 1997 or is it 1977′, there was no difference, you know. After awhile it was too much for me, you know. The years between 77′ and 80’ I spent a lot of time with him. I guess I still have 20 or 30 hours of recordings I made of him but after a while, I mean, it wore me out. …But when he was good he was good. …He was from the old school, totally that free approach. But he was even more freer than most other people I would think,” Axel laughs. An example of Red’s strange sensibility is a line Axel vividly recalls from a concert he taped in 1977: “In New York City I have trouble with the subway car/Jimmy Carter from the peanut farm, people don’t know where they are. “Now that’s what I call poetry” Axel chuckles.

Pigmeat Jarrett, Cincinnati, Oh., 6/14/1978

There were numerous strange coincidences along the trip, one of  which is Axel’s encounter with Flora Molton. Prior to coming to the States he was at a concert by the Mississippi Delta Blues Band who were touring Europe. Axel noted that the “tour featured two old sidekicks of Sleepy John Estes: mandolinist/guitarist James “Yank” Rachel (who had recorded with Estes way back in 1929) and harmonica player Lee “Tennessee” Crisp (who had backed Estes in 1952 at a session for Sun Records, which remained unissued at that time). Later that summer, when I stayed with Big Joe, we went to see Lee Crisp in Laurel, Ms..” The band was selling albums and Axel happened to peruse one called The Mississippi Delta Blues Band Live In Europe which had a collage of photos and noticed one of a black woman playing a resonator guitar with a slide and a guy with a big Afro blowing harmonica behind her. He had no idea who this was but the photo stuck in his mind. “The first day I walked up to the Fairground in New Orleans that same lady is sitting on a stage playing. She was Flora Molten. …I got to talking to them and they said ‘we have plenty more interesting musicians, come up to Washington, D.C. stay with us and we show you around’, which I did you know.” After he bought his car he drove up there spending two weeks. That’s how I met Flora and I stayed with Tim Lewis her guitar player, who was a film student at that time, and met John Cephas and Archie Edwards. …They all had fairly decent middle class lives, they didn’t live in poverty or bad living situations. Listening to those tapes Archie was probably one of the best I met on that whole trip. To me it was a totally great discovery. …Listening to the tapes I made that night at the barbershop, I mean, he played the traditional stuff, so he was a traditional musician, playing Blind Lemon stuff and Furry Lewis and Buddy Moss numbers, and you know, Mississippi John Hurt who he met in D.C. who met later in the 60’s. But he was also within that traditional framework, he was also creating his own songs, and they were all good.”

Axel next spent some time in Atlanta. “I stayed a few days there. I had driven down there from Washington, D.C. with Flora Molton’s harp player Larry Wise and we stayed there with another harmonica player, Larry Dixon, who is still active today. It was Larry Dixon who told me about the death of Juke Boy Bonner (he had heard about it from a Texas band who had played Atlanta shortly before – The Fabulous Thunderbirds?) and I immediately called Juke Boy’s sister, Lenora Preston, in Houston and she confirmed the sad news. I also tried to get in touch with George Mitchell, but unfortunately could not reach him, I guess he must have been out of town at that time.” He met up with Buddy Moss who he found friendly but someone who kept people at a distance. “I remember late on that afternoon he went out, wanted to get something to drink, maybe a half pint, pint bottle of whiskey or whatever. …I couldn’t make up my mind what I wanted to drink and Buddy got impatient and said ‘damn, you can never tell what these white folks want,'” Axel laughs. He also spent some time with Piano Red who had stayed with him in his hometown of Bad Gandersheim in Nov. 1977.

Flora Molton, Washington,DC., 7/7/1978

From Atlanta he drove six hours to Crawford, Mississippi, the home of Big Joe. Axel stayed with him for some two months, using Crawford as his home base for the rest of the trip. “To me it’s still amazing the dynamics between him and me.  …Joe lived in a little caravan trailer …it wasn’t a mobile home it was a caravan trailer like one you would hitch behind your car and go on a vacation trip. No bathroom, no running water. …It was a funky place, believe me.” There was no room in the trailer so Axel slept in a Volkswagen hatchback he a bought when visiting his cousin in New Jersey. “In Germany everything was fairly well-ordered I would say. Crawford, it was like a third world situation. I mean there were hardly any blacktop roads it was all gravel roads. Where Joe lived it was called Sugar Hill or Sugar Hill Road, there was no street sign, it was gravel. …It was no big deal for me, I absorbed it all.

By the standards of his all his relatives he was well off, he was rich. …He made me count his cash money at that time, he had forty brand new hundred-dollar bills in that wallet, that means four thousand dollars cash money. I doubt that any of his relatives had any money coming close to that amount. Joe couldn’t walk anymore so he would sit in his car all the time and drive around. And he had a little basket that he would have his high blood pills and all kind of shit in there …and he had a pistol in there, he had a bullet in a little pill-box so the pistol was not loaded. He was on the wheel, I was sitting next to him and his old auntie was sitting in the back. And he drove up where his brother stayed, his brother Coot, ‘hey Coot come here, come here’, Joe rolled the window down and Coot walks up there and Joe pulls out his pistol says ‘where’s my five, dollars man.’ His brother was really scared man, he had no idea the gun wasn’t loaded and his old auntie yelled sitting on the back seat yelling ‘don’t shoot him, don’t shoot him.’ And later on Joe just laughs it off: ‘I didn’t want to shoot him I just wanted to scare him a bit'”, Axel laughs incredulously at the memory like it was yesterday. “It was a whole culture of poverty”, Axel says, “no matter how much money he couldn’t escape or break away from that. …He lived on the edge his whole life, he never had much money.”

To be continued...

 

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The above article is drawn from a lengthy interview I taped with Axel plus numerous follow-up emails and phone calls to correct details and flesh out his trip. There’s some additional information he wanted to add and I’ve included it verbatim (outside of a few grammatical items) as it was sent to me:

 

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