Blue Guitar Highway

Iko-Iko

  IKOIKO The summer of 2009 marked thirty years since my first gig in town at the infamous Skyway Lounge that would be followed by five thousand more gigs (and counting) on the highways and byways that led from there. It seemed only fitting to do an anniversary show. I booked the Parkway Theater at Forty-eighth and Chicago in Minneapolis, run by my old friend comedian Joe Minjares. As a play of words on AC/DC’s famous 1979 rock album Highway to Hell and a shout-out to the Skyway Lounge (not to mention Minneapolis’s largest urban skyway system in the world), I decided to call the show Skyway to Hell. It was scheduled for the day after Thanksgiving. I invited my A-list of favorite musicians and friends to play: Sherwin Linton (the Midwest’s answer to Johnny Cash), Tom Lieberman and Tim Sparks (two of my favorite guitarists), Gregg Inhofer (who can still sing “Whiter Shade of Pale” in the original key), Willie Murphy (piano-pounding godfather of the West Bank), Mari Harris (my favorite gospel singer), Sonny Earl (my blues partner), my old buddies the Cats Under the Stars, and my new friend, songwriter and guitarist Mary Cutrufello. Photographer Howard Christopherson spent dozens of hours putting together a ten-minute photo collage that ran while hockey announcer Greg Harrington, in a hilarious impersonation of Howard Cosell, read a piece I wrote as a prologue to a book. In the lobby were 55-gallon drums to collect food for the local food shelves, and next to them a bar that stretched almost the length of the room. By show time the place had sold out. Walking from the entrance to the stage, I opened with “Stranger Blues” on a wireless guitar, a tune I had played as an opener for almost every solo show over the years. At the end of the song I told the crowd: “This show tonight will be the story of how it took me thirty years to get from Seventh and Hennepin to Fortyeighth and Chicago.” People howled, and we were off to the races, all the musicians taking the tunes we’d rehearsed, and some we hadn’t, to new heights, surprising even ourselves at times. Originally scheduled to run IKOIKO   from 9 to 11 p.m., the show went on until almost 2 a.m. Cats band member Tim O’Keefe remarked a few weeks later, “The lights came up, and I have never seen that many drunken sixty-year-old women in my life!” It was the biggest night the theater bar had ever had, thanks in no small part to the Iron Rangers who came down for the show. I had started playing around town again, rebuilding my solo act, and pleased with the new iterations. Gone were the stage dives and climbing on tables like I did during my “Take no prisoners/swing from the vine” period, but on a good night I could plug in and jump the joint in a San Juan Hill state of mind, as long as it was preceded by a one-hour power nap before the gig. (I also never travel these days without my slippers.) The new style feels good. While all those thousands of gigs didn’t make me the richest man on the mountain, they have made me one of the happiest guys on the hill. I had met Big Jay McNeely—king of the tenor sax honkers—at a festival several years earlier. Big Jay is a direct link between rhythm and blues and early rock and roll. He’s also a madman in a good way, one flip-city-gone cat. He calls himself “a jazz musician who plays for dancers .” In 1952 he wore white gloves and highlighted his horn with a strobe light, two decades ahead of the fluorescent San Francisco light shows of the late ’60s. He’d climb the tables, walk the bar, and lead his dancing disciples out the bar, around the block, and back to the stage, squeezing the face off every Lincoln penny that people paid to see the show. That, my friends, is rock and roll. Big Jay was one of the headliners at that year’s blues festival at Famous Dave’s, where I was music director at the time. I had hooked him up with the Solid Senders, a local swinging blues and jump-swing band from town. They had played together before...