Seasick Steve
WITH a name like Seasick Steve you wonder if things can get much worse for the homeless hobo from the Deep South, USA. But a stint on last New Years Eve Hootenanny with Jools Holland turned his fortunes around and now this world weary blues player is in hot demand. Millions watched as his raw, throaty brand of Delta blues cut through the complicated finesse of the evening bringing stonking good music back to its backstreet bar room origins. Using nothing more then a three stringed beat-up guitar and wooden box he calls the Mississippi Drum Machine he hammered home the hardship of those vagrant days so vibrantly and energetically he stole the show.
Since then it’s been a whirl wind of press interviews, appearances and performances, mainly on the festival trail all over Europe. Is he enjoying himself? “Hell yeah. I love doin’ what I’m doin’. I goes where they tell me an’ I play.” By ‘they’ he means his small entourage of press agent and his manager Andy Zammi. For a man who has had to struggle for most of his life you get a sense that he’s just happy to hand over the reigns to someone else and be looked after for the first time ever. The old blues man’s tale of woe begins decades ago when he left home via a window his step father threw him out of and he then decided he was better off on his own.
What about your mother, I ask, surely she’d be there for you? “Hell no. She was worse then him. She’d be mean, I was glad to get away from her.” So how did you survive, a thirteen year old child on your own, back in the depression era when no one had anything to give away? “You either survived or died. I don’t know how I got by. I know many others who didn’t make it.” Seasick’s music tells the tale, in his soul baring lyrics and raspin’ moonshine and mayhem tone. One track from his album Dog House Blues is Save Me and he beseeches you in haunting tones, ‘yeah who’s gonna save me, you not gonna take me’, sung in a low growl by a man for whom hard times is a way of life not a phase.
When Seasick was very young and his father was still around he encouraged Seasick to learn a few cords form Delta Blues player KC Douglas. He says: “My Dad played piano; he was a big boogie player, which was rare for a white guy back then. He played it before the war. My dad tried to teach me the boogie but I couldn't get my fingers over the keys and anyway I just thought guitars were it.” So his father sent him to K.C. who used to tell him stories about blues players and the Delta which got Seasick excited enough to want to learn for himself.
It stood him in good stead when, as a young teenager living on the streets, he got by through jumping freight trains with his battered guitar busking for a bit of change and picking up work where he could. “I played by instinct, I don’t do a lot of fancy stuff. I got influenced by what I heard in places like Memphis and Tennessee but for me it’s the story that’s important, I like to entertain.” It’s a skill he picked up standing on street corners hoping for spare change. “You gotta make a noise you know, catch attention and the guitar’s just something to keep it going. I learnt it all backwards but that way nobody sounds like I do.”
Every sentence from Seasick is in a Deep Southern drawl that mulls over the conversation as Southern Comfort moulds itself over ice. He is every inch the real deal, a honky-tonk Delta blues player in tatty dungarees, check shirt and long grey beard. He says he doesn’t like what passes for Blues now, and feels it’s all been whitewashed. “Blues is something you live man, you know what I mean? Not something you get to be an expert at. Like some so called blues experts, you never hear about blues anymore, why? Because it has become so whitewashed. The new stuff some kids are playing like the White Stripes, they use sounds like a kinda punk, folk, blues sound, that’s what will keep the music alive, something new.” It’s the closest he comes to being passionate for the hole conversation; blues is obviously deeply ingrained in his heart.
Living from hand to mouth is now a thing of the past for him since last New Years Eve. Up until then he’s had the odd club gig, playing to a few hundred at the most and then all of a sudden he’s playing in front of millions. How did it come about? “I was playing in the Tapestry Club in London when I got a call sayin’ that a producer from the show was gonna come by and hear me play. They’d heard about me, somebody told them to check me out. These two guys turn up but I wasn’t ready, I hadn’t done a sound check or nothing. So we just sat on the floor and I banged out a couple a’ tunes. I got a call next day to do the show.”
Why does he think his style of delivering the blues has become so popular now even though he’s been at it for decades? “Because it’s so raw, not at all fancy, not like some of this real complicated danceable music, its nothing like that. I just kind of bang on a gi-tar and sing raw music. It’s a crazy thing, seem to me people are real hungry for music. I don’t make up music, it’s all autobiographical, all about my life.” As songs titled Last Po’ Man and Hobo Low illustrate. Both are on his solo album Dog House Music which was recorded at home because his wife was worried about him. “I wanted to get down some of my songs but I got sick after recording my first album and my wife didn’t want me going out making music. So she said why don’t you do it here at home, just play it and record it. So that’s what I done, banged a few songs out in our kitchen.”
He has been married for 25 years and says that his wife told him they have lived in 57 houses in the years they’ve been together and he says: “It’s my idea of settling down, not like everyone else’s.” Perhaps not surprising after spending years jumping freight trains finding work here and there. But in the end he says it was the music that got him back into society. “After playing somewhere for a night you don’t want to go back and sleep under a bridge. You know what I mean? I wandered around America, worked at carnivals, sometimes I wished I could have gone to school. Me an’ some others I hung out with thought we could go to town and busk for a little money. I thought one of us could tap dance the other could sing and play, we’d make a little money or get arrested, one or the other.”
It has become one of the music’s industry’s great mysteries how this dime store gi-tar that even Seasick Steve refers to as a ‘piece of s**t’, can produce such a classy sound described by one music critic as ‘a spine-tingling delta blues guitar riff gruffly yowling’. One of his favourite tales on the road is how he got ripped off buying this guitar that Seasick calls his Three Stringed Trance Wonder. He cheerfully exposes his friend Sherman Cooper for what he calls a ‘stingy chancer’ for duping him in to paying $75 for the worn out instrument, when he’s only paid $25 for it the day before. Seasick vowed never to replace the strings and instead would tour the world telling everyone how Sherman had ripped him off.
He also plays a one stringed Diddley Bow using a slide, the whole thing consists of a two foot long piece of 2x4 with a guitar string nailed on. These, along with his wooden box he calls a drum machine, make up his musical instruments that produce a powerful sound. “Its blues down inside, that’s all I know, ol’ Delta blues, I got no lessons, my sound just evolved, don’t know what the blues police gonna make of it.” It is known that the music industry loves it, whatever it is. Radio DJ Joe Cushley describes him as one of the most charismatic performers you’ll ever see and said: “His voice is a mixture of gravel and molasses, a part hobo shout, part soul scream, part blues howl… and he can do spine-tingling quiet as well.”
Seasick Steve could tell many stories of sleeping under a billion star ceiling, maybe making a fire by a bridge or outside town somewhere and he says there was nothing else to do but tell stories, all of it lies, and then play a little music. All a far cry from his life now, although there are similarities, still travelling around, still playing music. He recently played three stages at the Glastonbury festival; the difference now is that the pay is good. He says he’s saving for his pension and he is quite unashamed in his marketing. There are even underpants with his face on them. So now the once ‘Hobo Low’ and ‘Dog House Blue’ man has had a change in fortune and as Seasick Steve says himself, ‘It’s All Good!
EP out this month It’s All Good
September 18th Spiegel Tent Dublin
September 30th Open House Festival Belfast