Did you know some really notable bluesmen regularly performed in Kent in the early 1970s? Real bluesmen -- not ya know -- some random dudes who played the blues. I'm talking about real, genuine, old bluesmen who not only were rooted in the story of the history of the blues, but real musicians who made noted contributions to the form. These were old guys --- African American guys --- men who had origins in the deep south who would go on to cut their teeth in the gritty clubs of Chicago. Men who by the time they played Kent had been getting audiences to both boogie to and be hypnotized by the blues for decades. All of them were veteran players, and some of these guys were at the very ends of their lives when they came to Kent to play.
Bluesmen like Johnny Shines, Hound Dog Taylor, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Son Seals, Big Walter Horton, Charlie Musselwhite, J.B. Hutto, the Queen of the blues Koko Taylor and many other notable blues players played the Kent Kove on North Water Street between 1971 and 1975. Some played one night only and others did multiple dates over multiple runs.
I'd heard fragments of stories for years about these bluesmen showing up in town, but it wasn't until I started looking at the old regional music papers from the early 70s that I began to see a plethora of ads for these shows. I hadn't realized how many of these folks came and played Kent -- there were dozens of shows that took place over the course of just 4 years.
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The earliest notable blues show there is a record of in the Kent Kove is for a fellow named Johnny Shines. Shines' music is fantastic, and he is most noteworthy for his 1935 travels --- touring the country and playing the blues with bluesmaster Robert Johnson. Shines shows up at the Kent Kove for a three night run in the spring of 1971, sharing the bill with both Robert Kidney as a solo act and The Numbers Band.
One of the first artifacts that I encountered when I was initially clued in to this history was a set of photos I came across on a website belonging to the local blues group Blue Lunch. Among a sizeable collection of snapshots of blues legends taken at the 1969 Ann Arbor Blues festival, there were 4 lone shots of Johnny Shines performing to what looked like a full room at the Kent Kove. They were cool looking photos showing that familiar (to me) blue psychedelic backdrop that I knew hung behind the stage at the Kove in the early 70s. Shines looked like he was playing a really old resonator guitar, and you could see behind him that there was gear set up for a band. I would later learn that was The Numbers Band's gear.
There was so much mystery in these photos. How did this bluesman who spent his formative years on the road with Robert Johnson wind up in the Kove? And what was this night of music like? Shines is one of these blues players who, when he goes really deep, can genuinely conjure up the almighty. Did he do that in Kent? Did people get that experience on North Water Street? Also, Johnny performed three nights while he was here. What did he do during the day? Where did he go? Who did he interact with? Who handled him? And what kind of experiences did those people have with him?
My first stop on this quest to get inside these pictures was to talk to Bob Frank, who was the photographer who took these photos a half century ago. Bob was a senior in high school and already a bit of a blues scholar when he made his way to Kent to see this rare performance. This is what Bob told me about his photos and about that night way back in the spring of 1971:
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Bob Frank on photographing Johnny Shines at the Kent Kove
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"Back in the spring of 1971 I was a senior at Shaker Hts. High School in Cleveland. That was a great year. Ya know when you are a senior you have a driver's license, the sophomore girls look up to you. Ya know you got your buddies and you are getting ready to graduate. It's a great time in life and it certainly was for me.
"By this time I was already a veteran blues guy. I had attended the Ann Arbor Blues Fest and I knew everybody -- I knew everybody in Cleveland. I knew Dave Griggs and Glenn Schwartz, Robert Lockwood and Bruce Cochran and Jimmy and all the guys who were a little bit older than me. I was playing in bands and I knew all those people in that scene. So when I heard about this action in Kent, it was just a matter of who can get a car.
"I remember my best buddy Terry picking me up to go down to Kent, and I remember we went down in his father's six cylinder Ford, and I remember it had the manual transmission on the steering column. Terry had an old National resonator guitar, which he had found somewhere, and he brought it down just to see if he could get Johnny Shines to play it -- And you can see those pictures show Johnny Shines playing Terry's guitar.
"I took a whole bunch of pictures that night, and I used that same camera that I took to Ann Arbor. I thought I had taken more photos than just these few that you see, but this is all that apparently survived since this performance. I remember taking these photos, and I remember that I actually started to piss Shines off because I was taking so many. At one point I went up and took a photo, and he looks up and goes, 'you got enough?' And so I didn't take any more after that. It was during the intermission that Terry took the guitar over to Johnny and asked him if he would play it, and Johnny said, 'oh yeah I haven't seen one of these in a while' and he just went up and played it for a set.
"As I recall, that evening he played electric guitar with The Numbers Band for the first set -- and he used this little Gibson LGO kind of guitar for that. And then for the second set he played acoustic with Terry's National. It was the only time I ever saw him play one.
Here's what Bob told me about Johnny Shines' visit to town and the early days of 15-60-75 at the Kent Kove:
"By the time Johnny Shines played The Kove, which was April 1971, I had opened a record store with then Numbers Band bass player Greg Colbert. The store was in Akron in an area called Spicertown, which was near Akron University. It was one of these university-type areas that had shops and bars. Our store was above a bar called Sun Grill, and it was next door to a place called The Turtle, The Duck and Cynthia, which was a clothing store/head shop type of thing. Both stores were on a second floor above the street.
"Anyway, they came to me because they wanted to know from me who they should bring in, because I knew more about these artists than anybody else did. I had spent some time in Chicago in 1967 and 1968, and I got to know about a lot of blues artists when I lived there. So I started making suggestions. I think I recommended Hound Dog Taylor and some other people. So Bob and Greg got involved with a guy named Bruce Iglauer who promoted blues artists out of Chicago, and he had founded and was the head of Alligator Records. So they started filtering these people through the Kove and Johnny Shines popped up.
"What I remember about the performances at The Kove is that he played alone, and then we (15-60-75) also backed him up for some of it. One of the reasons I remember him playing with us is that he didn't want to do it because he had a great band back where he played, and he wanted to bring them to Kent but somebody talked him into playing with us instead. He wasn't particularly anxious to have us back him up, so he just sort of played along.
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Robert Kidney on Mississippi Fred McDowell at The Kent Kove
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"So Fred McDowell stayed at that house in Akron. Same place we had Johnny Shines. I don't really remember when I found out he was coming to the Kove -- someone must have told me. I really didn't know very much about Fred McDowell at that time. The reason Fred McDowell came to the Kove was because The Rolling Stones had done one of his songs and he was touring. But again, I didn't know anything about Fred McDowell up until that point.
"So Fred stayed in the house -- in the same room that Johnny Shines did. The performances went from Thursday through Sunday -- a long weekend. My recollection of being with Fred McDowell, other than being on stage, is that he wanted me to take him to some places to do things. He wanted a new pair of shoes. He could tell by the kind of shoes I wore that I could take him to a place to get shoes he liked. So I took him to this shoe store in Belden Village, and they sold Stacy Adams shoes, which were very popular. And so we looked at shoes together, and we did some other things in the mall. And then I took him back to our house in Akron. We had been driving around in a Ford Galaxie, which was a car my Dad had given me.
"Now I don't remember if this happened before or after but we went for a walk up that alley. Out of the back of the house there was this alley and we walked up Burt Court, which was the alley right next to the house I was living in on Rhodes Ave. It's still there, and there were these little houses on it. And we walked by one of the houses and there were two women sitting on the front porch -- African American women. I believe we were coming downhill. And he spoke to them, and they were friendly. He may have gone in their house and left me standing there on the porch for a minute and then he came back out.
"So later on that day he said to me, 'I want you to go down to the store and I want you to get me some Screwdriver.' It was like a low alcohol drink. And I think they actually called it Screwdriver because it was a screwdriver (vodka and orange juice) -- ya know just a screwdriver, but I think you used to be able to just buy it under that brand name. So I went down and bought it, brought it back, and he said, 'now come on with me.' And I said, 'ok...'. And he said, 'bring your guitar' and I said 'ok...'. I had my acoustic guitar. We then went up and went back to that house -- the two of us. And we walked in the house and the house had an odd quality about it because it was essentially empty -- very few pieces of furniture; Very few items. The kitchen looked like no one cooked in there; It was completely baron.
"So anyway, he had told these women that he would come up and play for them. So we sat down and I started playing with him for them, and I said, 'would you like me to play harmonica?' and he said, 'no.' He hated harmonica players and I said, 'well I'm a pretty good harmonica player. You sure you don't want me to play harmonica?' and he said, 'can you do this?' And he took his slide all the way up the neck and started to play this run. And I said, 'no' and he looked at me like, 'ok -- then just play the guitar.' So I played rhythm, just like we did in performance at the Kove. And we were playing this music and he was doing these songs, singing for these women, and they were tapping their feet and we were having a nice time.
"All of a sudden two men came in...They come walking in the front door, and one of them was carrying about 4 huge bass fishes -- big fish. They had been fishing, and they were bringing home something to eat, and they were probably married to the women. And these two men wanted to know what the fuck we were doing there. They were not happy. So we got out of there, and we got out of there in a hurry. And I explained to them when they said, 'what are you doing here?' that I just lived across the alley, and they kind of quieted down a little bit because they realized I was a neighbor. But then they looked over at Fred McDowell and said, 'who's this guy?' and I said, 'oh he's staying with me. He's a performer, he's from Mississippi, and he wanted to play, so we're up here playing that's all.' But we ended up just getting out of there and then everything was cool. I think the kitchen in that house was so bare because they were so poor.
"So all of these instances of me hanging out and spending time with Fred McDowell have nothing to do with music. It had to do with Fred and I as people; as guys. There was no show business involved. And the thing in the house was extremely intimate. It was way way way inside of the culture. And his life and my life and who he was and who I was. It had nothing to do with anything else. I wasn't there because I was some white kid wanting to learn from the black guy. There wasn't any of that shit going on. It was just me and him. I didn't need to learn from him; I just needed to play rhythm -- back him up.
"For those Kove performances, I played rhythm, just like I did in the living room with him. He played an electric guitar and I also played electric. I also brought the band up for a couple of songs, and we played some stuff with him. But that was impromptu. That wasn't something that was planned. We never rehearsed. We never rehearsed with Johnny Shines either. They played what I asked them to play in the moment. Just like I do sometimes with the band now.
Johnny Shines
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The earliest notable blues show there is a record of in the Kent Kove is for a fellow named Johnny Shines. Shines' music is fantastic, and he is most noteworthy for his 1935 travels --- touring the country and playing the blues with bluesmaster Robert Johnson. Shines shows up at the Kent Kove for a three night run in the spring of 1971, sharing the bill with both Robert Kidney as a solo act and The Numbers Band.
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| Johnny Shines at The Kent Kove spring 1971. Photo by Bob Frank. |
There was so much mystery in these photos. How did this bluesman who spent his formative years on the road with Robert Johnson wind up in the Kove? And what was this night of music like? Shines is one of these blues players who, when he goes really deep, can genuinely conjure up the almighty. Did he do that in Kent? Did people get that experience on North Water Street? Also, Johnny performed three nights while he was here. What did he do during the day? Where did he go? Who did he interact with? Who handled him? And what kind of experiences did those people have with him?
My first stop on this quest to get inside these pictures was to talk to Bob Frank, who was the photographer who took these photos a half century ago. Bob was a senior in high school and already a bit of a blues scholar when he made his way to Kent to see this rare performance. This is what Bob told me about his photos and about that night way back in the spring of 1971:
Bob Frank on photographing Johnny Shines at the Kent Kove
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"Back in the spring of 1971 I was a senior at Shaker Hts. High School in Cleveland. That was a great year. Ya know when you are a senior you have a driver's license, the sophomore girls look up to you. Ya know you got your buddies and you are getting ready to graduate. It's a great time in life and it certainly was for me.
"By this time I was already a veteran blues guy. I had attended the Ann Arbor Blues Fest and I knew everybody -- I knew everybody in Cleveland. I knew Dave Griggs and Glenn Schwartz, Robert Lockwood and Bruce Cochran and Jimmy and all the guys who were a little bit older than me. I was playing in bands and I knew all those people in that scene. So when I heard about this action in Kent, it was just a matter of who can get a car.
"I remember my best buddy Terry picking me up to go down to Kent, and I remember we went down in his father's six cylinder Ford, and I remember it had the manual transmission on the steering column. Terry had an old National resonator guitar, which he had found somewhere, and he brought it down just to see if he could get Johnny Shines to play it -- And you can see those pictures show Johnny Shines playing Terry's guitar.
"I took a whole bunch of pictures that night, and I used that same camera that I took to Ann Arbor. I thought I had taken more photos than just these few that you see, but this is all that apparently survived since this performance. I remember taking these photos, and I remember that I actually started to piss Shines off because I was taking so many. At one point I went up and took a photo, and he looks up and goes, 'you got enough?' And so I didn't take any more after that. It was during the intermission that Terry took the guitar over to Johnny and asked him if he would play it, and Johnny said, 'oh yeah I haven't seen one of these in a while' and he just went up and played it for a set.
"As I recall, that evening he played electric guitar with The Numbers Band for the first set -- and he used this little Gibson LGO kind of guitar for that. And then for the second set he played acoustic with Terry's National. It was the only time I ever saw him play one.
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If you look at Bob Frank's photo of Johnny Shines you'll see that behind him the Numbers Band have their equipment set up. Also in the original advertisements, it lists Bob Kidney as performing with Johnny Shines in addition to The Numbers Band (15-60-75) opening for two of the three nights. It would only make sense that the next person I would need to talk to is Bob Kidney. I have easy access to Bob since I work for the Numbers Band, handling all of their social media and their flyers. So when I contacted Bob, he had a lot to say about these gigs with Johnny Shines, as well as all of the blues players who played at The Kove in this period. It turns out these gigs take us all the way back to the beginnings of 15-60-75.
Here's what Bob told me about Johnny Shines' visit to town and the early days of 15-60-75 at the Kent Kove:
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Robert Kidney on Johnny Shines at The Kent Kove
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Johnny Shines at The Kent Kove spring 1971. Photo by Bob Frank. |
"By the time Johnny Shines played The Kove, which was April 1971, I had opened a record store with then Numbers Band bass player Greg Colbert. The store was in Akron in an area called Spicertown, which was near Akron University. It was one of these university-type areas that had shops and bars. Our store was above a bar called Sun Grill, and it was next door to a place called The Turtle, The Duck and Cynthia, which was a clothing store/head shop type of thing. Both stores were on a second floor above the street.
"So Greg and I were making a living by playing with the band and running this record store. I ran it all day. It was just a blank room when we walked in there, and we turned it into something that was at the time very successful. And Greg -- I don't remember if he had another job at the time (he may have.) He had an office in there, and he was considering expanding the business and selling franchises of Cheap Thrills -- that's what it was called -- Cheap Thrills Records. Named after the Big Brother and Holding Company album. It was a non-profit record store and he got the idea from San Francisco. It wasn't actually non-profit, it was just very low profit.
"So I was working there with him, and we were also in 15-60-75, and we played at the Kove four nights a week. Also at that time Greg had bought a house in Akron at 200 Rhodes Avenue; It was on the corner of this alley known as Burt Court. And the alley is very significant. There were three or four houses on one side of that alley, and then the backyard of the house where we lived stretched up to the top of the hill. The houses in that alley are long gone now, but they sat all in a row back in 1971. There may have been another house up there, I do not remember. But it was a big house, it sat on Rhodes Avenue and it is still there. It had a big front porch -- it was huge. It had three or four bedrooms upstairs. There was a bathroom up there, and I had one of the bedrooms. So me, Greg and his wife Cathy all started living together. Before this, we were all living out in Wadsworth. Greg was a huge, good force in my life. He believed in me as a performer, and gave me a place to live. Before this, he let me live with him and his wife in two different apartments. And when he moved to Akron and wanted to start the record store, I moved in with them again into this huge house.
"One day in this period Greg came to me and he and Bob Petry (owner of the The Kove) put together an idea where they were going to start bringing Chicago blues artists into the Kove. And one of the reasons they wanted to do this was because these people came through the area. They would play Cleveland sometimes. I think Greg got the notion to do it because he was inspired by having gone to the original Ann Arbor Blues Festival in 1969, and this started happening after that.
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| Johnny Shines at the Kent Kove spring 1971. Photo by Bob Frank. |
"Johnny Shines played the Kove over the course of three nights. On the first night he played alone, and then the next couple nights he used us (Numbers Band) as a backup band for at least one of his sets each night. He played some stuff by himself; then we came up and played and I played harmonica.
So when Johnny Shines came to play, he stayed in one of the empty rooms in that house we were all living in on Rhodes Avenue in Akron. This was one of the things Greg cooked up to entice these people to play The Kove. We could offer them a place to stay free of charge so they wouldn't have to stay in a hotel.
"So Greg had to run the record store while these guys were in town, and I was the handler of these old blues guys -- it was my job to entertain them, and we did things together -- ya know we'd all end up at the record store etc. The one interesting thing that I did do with Johnny Shines was I took him down to a place called Kromhard Twist Drill Company on Sweitzer Ave. I think it's still there. It was a tiny little place. Like a two story brick building and when you walked in, there were all these tools. All kinds of tools -- and they had socket sets. Johnny Shines wanted a new slide, so we went in there and he bought a socket. He used a socket as a slide and he showed it to me and he said, 'I make a lot of money with this little piece of shit.'
"Shines was not a particularly open person. He was distant. Of course he traveled around and he didn't seem like he really wanted to know anybody too well. I remember after one of his shows, I took him to this party. We hung out and we all smoked pot and stuff in this living room. We sat around in a big circle and he talked to everybody -- he was holding court. Everybody was very enamored with him of course.
"And the whole thing about him traveling with Robert Johnson was to me at that time a sort of story he told. I didn't necessarily believe it. But I think it's pretty much accepted now that this did happen. There was not a lot of history then about those people unlike there is now. And that was one of the things that I found very interesting about Johnny Shines was that he projected in his image that he had traveled with Robert Johnson. It was part of his persona. And he played somewhat like Robert Johnson but not exactly like Robert Johnson.
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| Advert for Johnny Shines at the Kent Kove spring 1971. |
"One thing I remember about the run is there was this African American guy named Eli, and he was always showing up at the Kove. He always had some young white girl with him. He was a very distinct character. So Eli came up and he told me -- he said 'you know I talked to Johnny Shines about you accompanying him on harmonica' and I said, 'yeah, why were you doing that?' and he goes, 'Well I asked him about you and he said he couldn't lose you', which is a music term. To find out if anyone is good, you try to put them in a situation where they don't know what you are doing -- you lose them. And all it meant to me was this is bullshit. But beyond that, what I think it actually meant is that I understood the music so well that there was nothing he could do that I couldn't relate to. I mean I didn't go up there to prove anything; I got up there to play, and to have him play with the band.
"I remember it was a big crowd that came out to see him. You can see that in the photographs. There were a lot of people there. We played first and then he came up and sat in with us. I remember nobody was paying attention to us until he came onstage, and I remember the audience was enraptured with his guitar playing; It was interesting. If you look at the advertisements, it says that for one of the nights I played solo -- but I don't remember that. I may have played solo harmonica with him without the band."
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Some notes on Johnny Shines before we move on:
-- So that party that Bob took Johnny Shines to one night after one of the Kove gigs -- I was contacted by original Kove bar manager Joseph Vian who told me:
"Johnny and Bob Kidney came back to the house where I was living which was at 492 Lake Street -- (fellow Kentite and housemate) Dave Crislip had made a sweet potato pie. We did not get a free show but he told us some history about Robert Johnson and some other blues men in between bites of the pie -- which I think he ate over half of. As far as what Johnny Shines said about playing with Robert Johnson back in the day -- most of these blues musicians played a circuit of blues clubs in the south. One time they might be playing with each other then the next time it would be by themselves. Maybe a year later Johnny Shines came back and played the Kent State Folk Festival and I was backstage and got to listen in on a conversation between Robert Lockwood Jr. and Johnny. They talked about where they stayed when they would travel to play this blues circuit. Back then segration was law and very few of these rural towns had hotels for blacks, so they mostly stayed with relatives or friends of other musicians."
-- Want to know how important Johnny Shines was to the history of the blues? Do not miss this INCREDIBLE documentary called "The Search for Robert Johnson" available to stream right here. John Hammond Jr. scours the deep south in what looks like the late 1980s to find anyone still alive who was associated with Robert Johnson to get their stories before it's too late. Hammond spends a considerable amount of time with Johnny Shines, where he talks about their travels together in the mid-1930's. Again, you can stream that RIGHT HERE.
-- Also if you want to see some additional footage of Johnny Shines performing click here, here, here and here.
-- Also if you want to see some additional footage of Johnny Shines performing click here, here, here and here.
-- Also do please read Johnny Shines' essay The Robert Johnson I Knew right here.
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Mississippi Fred McDowell
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Bob Kidney had more to tell -- a lot more to tell. Just a couple months after Johnny Shines was at the Kove, another storied bluesman would blow through Kent: Mississippi Fred McDowell. For four solid nights Fred McDowell brought his American hill country blues to the Kove. And just like with Johnny Shines, Bob was made the point man to entertain McDowell. Additionally, Bob played with McDowell every night at the Kove accompanying him on electric guitar. Bob was just 23 years old and McDowell was 65 -- just one year shy of his death. Here's what Bob told me about his experiences with Mississippi Fred McDowell:
Robert Kidney on Mississippi Fred McDowell at The Kent Kove
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"So Fred McDowell stayed at that house in Akron. Same place we had Johnny Shines. I don't really remember when I found out he was coming to the Kove -- someone must have told me. I really didn't know very much about Fred McDowell at that time. The reason Fred McDowell came to the Kove was because The Rolling Stones had done one of his songs and he was touring. But again, I didn't know anything about Fred McDowell up until that point.
"So Fred stayed in the house -- in the same room that Johnny Shines did. The performances went from Thursday through Sunday -- a long weekend. My recollection of being with Fred McDowell, other than being on stage, is that he wanted me to take him to some places to do things. He wanted a new pair of shoes. He could tell by the kind of shoes I wore that I could take him to a place to get shoes he liked. So I took him to this shoe store in Belden Village, and they sold Stacy Adams shoes, which were very popular. And so we looked at shoes together, and we did some other things in the mall. And then I took him back to our house in Akron. We had been driving around in a Ford Galaxie, which was a car my Dad had given me.
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| Summer 1971 advert for Mississippi Fred McDowell at the Kent Kove. |
"So later on that day he said to me, 'I want you to go down to the store and I want you to get me some Screwdriver.' It was like a low alcohol drink. And I think they actually called it Screwdriver because it was a screwdriver (vodka and orange juice) -- ya know just a screwdriver, but I think you used to be able to just buy it under that brand name. So I went down and bought it, brought it back, and he said, 'now come on with me.' And I said, 'ok...'. And he said, 'bring your guitar' and I said 'ok...'. I had my acoustic guitar. We then went up and went back to that house -- the two of us. And we walked in the house and the house had an odd quality about it because it was essentially empty -- very few pieces of furniture; Very few items. The kitchen looked like no one cooked in there; It was completely baron.
"So anyway, he had told these women that he would come up and play for them. So we sat down and I started playing with him for them, and I said, 'would you like me to play harmonica?' and he said, 'no.' He hated harmonica players and I said, 'well I'm a pretty good harmonica player. You sure you don't want me to play harmonica?' and he said, 'can you do this?' And he took his slide all the way up the neck and started to play this run. And I said, 'no' and he looked at me like, 'ok -- then just play the guitar.' So I played rhythm, just like we did in performance at the Kove. And we were playing this music and he was doing these songs, singing for these women, and they were tapping their feet and we were having a nice time.
"All of a sudden two men came in...They come walking in the front door, and one of them was carrying about 4 huge bass fishes -- big fish. They had been fishing, and they were bringing home something to eat, and they were probably married to the women. And these two men wanted to know what the fuck we were doing there. They were not happy. So we got out of there, and we got out of there in a hurry. And I explained to them when they said, 'what are you doing here?' that I just lived across the alley, and they kind of quieted down a little bit because they realized I was a neighbor. But then they looked over at Fred McDowell and said, 'who's this guy?' and I said, 'oh he's staying with me. He's a performer, he's from Mississippi, and he wanted to play, so we're up here playing that's all.' But we ended up just getting out of there and then everything was cool. I think the kitchen in that house was so bare because they were so poor.
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| House at 200 Rhodes Ave in Akron where both Johnny Shines and Mississippi Fred McDowell stayed in the spring and summer of 1971. Photo by Jason Prufer. |
"For those Kove performances, I played rhythm, just like I did in the living room with him. He played an electric guitar and I also played electric. I also brought the band up for a couple of songs, and we played some stuff with him. But that was impromptu. That wasn't something that was planned. We never rehearsed. We never rehearsed with Johnny Shines either. They played what I asked them to play in the moment. Just like I do sometimes with the band now.
"As far as what we played, I didn't know his material at that time, so I don't remember much specifically about what we played those nights, but I do remember a few songs. The one we played with the band was 'Kokomo Me Baby' -- I remember that, and then just the two of us I remember 'Highway 61', 'Let Me Lay Down In Your Cool Iron Bed' and 'Worried Mind'.
"Then the strangest thing happened. People started commenting to me that I was doing the same thing -- shaking my head back and forth just like him. Sometimes if you observe someone's affectation you'll pick it up. But I started doing it and I wasn't aware that I was doing it either and I did it for years -- people were commenting about it. But I think I was doing it to shut out the fears that I was having about stage fright, failure and all those things. It allowed me to focus on the performance and what I was trying to communicate. And it wasn't until maybe the 1990s that I had a memory of Fred McDowell doing it. And I realized that I got it from working with him -- from sitting next to him those four nights in a row and watching him do it. He did it every fucking song.
"I remember when I was sitting next to him on stage that he shook his head back and forth -- from one side to the other. This was the whole time he played a song. And I thought it possibly had something to do with his concentration. What he was doing was -- these type of syncopations that these gentleman were playing and singing at the same time are very difficult. I learned myself over the years, some of the things I play on the instrument and sing at the same time are extremely complex and difficult to do. That is what fascinated me about this blues music when I first heard it at age 16. It's when I listened to someone like Lightin' Hopkins -- and it was only him and his guitar -- I was listening to the intricacy of his guitar playing and I didn't understand it. I couldn't comprehend what he was doing -- and he was singing at the same time in addition to playing the guitar in that manner. A lot of it was related to banjo playing. Banjo playing is extremely intricate when you get into that kind of finger-picking style.
"So this kind of performance requires an extreme amount of focus. But he was shaking his head back and forth I believe to shut out everything that was around him in order to focus on what he was doing. It wasn't like some act. I would be surprised if he was even aware he was doing it.
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| The alley behind the house on Rhodes Ave in Akron where both Johnny Shines and Mississippi Fred McDowell stayed in the spring and summer of 1971. Photo by Jason Prufer. |
"I remember we were up there at one point and he was losing the audience, because he was playing these slow dirges that he does. And I whispered in his ear, I said, 'Fred we better do a reel.' -- so he cranked it up. The thing is I knew the term, so he knew what I meant -- the term reel means a fast dance. So when I said that to him, he knew that he needed to play something fast. But it was that inside connection we had that allowed me to do that and allowed me to know that he could understand me. We then played a fast song and it brought the audience back -- they were all fucking loaded.
"I remember the last time I saw Fred -- I remember him leaving. We were at the Akron house. I don't remember why I didn't take him to the airport but I didn't. It may have been Greg who was driving him to the airport. But I was standing on the porch and he was leaving. The car was backing out of the driveway -- and he looked at me. He wouldn't take his eyes away from my eyes, and he said, 'so long.' But when he was looking at me that way, he was telling me that this was the last time I would ever see him. Which maybe he did with everyone, because he knew he'd probably never come back. You see, he enjoyed being with me. He enjoyed who I was. He had made a connection with me. And there's a lot of things he told me that have nothing to do with this bullshit music thing. He talked about what kind of a car he had and who he was and what his family was about. It was a very personal thing, ya know?"
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Some notes on Mississippi Fred McDowell before we move on:
-- Fred McDowell only lived for one more year after his run at the Kent Kove, passing away on July 3, 1972.
-- Some years back an article popped up on the Rubber City Review where a writer named Kevin Swan recounted seeing McDowell at Cheap Thrills Records, and then again at the Kent Kove during this 1971 run. You can read that piece right here.
-- Also, don't miss Mississippi Fred McDowell as part of the 1968 film Blues Maker. It's really fucking cool, and it's a real treat to see so much rare footage of him. Check that film out right here.
-- Check out some other cool footage of Fred McDowell here, here, here, and here. Also this right here is a great live recording from McDowell.
-- At the very moment that Fred McDowell was playing these run of shows at the Kent Kove, The Rolling Stones were riding high on what is arguably their greatest album Sticky Fingers, which had only been released a few months before. That album features the Stones' back barn version of Fred McDowell's "You Gotta Move." Listen to that version of the song right here. Also check out this live footage of the Stones doing "You Gotta Move" right here.
-- Also, this is great and has never been heard before. Below is a live recording of The Numbers Band (15-60-75) at the Kove from June of 1971 recorded by Larry Steele. This would be right between the Johnny Shines and Fred McDowell performances and will give you a taste of exactly what this band was about right in the heart of this period:
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Robert Kidney on Hound Dog Taylor and the Chicago blues in Kent
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"The thing about this is -- when I was in the navy in 1968 and 1969 I was stationed at Naval Station Great Lakes, which is located near the north side of Chicago. The woman who I was seeing at the time -- her sister and her husband happened to live on the north side of Chicago, and I would stay with them and, because of that, I saw a lot of blues acts. At that time I would go in to meet with Delmark Records founder Bob Koester every weekend, and he would take me places to see live blues. And if he couldn't go, he would send me somewhere. My thing was the slide. I wanted to see slide players. I loved all the musicians -- but I wanted to see slide because I knew if I saw it used I could learn how to use it better. Because, again, there was no written instruction for slide, and there was no way to know how these guys were doing what they were doing. You had to listen to it, and there is a huge distance between listening to something and doing it, and seeing something and doing it.
"But when I walked in, there was Hound Dog Taylor playing with this drummer, and he's just tearing the place up. It was great -- it was so powerful, and he was a crazy looking guy. He didn't look like a Hound Dog -- he was very skinny. When he got off the stage -- I was the only white kid in the whole bar, and I was leaning against the wall next to the stage looking to talk to him. So he got down off of there and we were talking back and forth, and I knew a lot about what he was doing, so he was wondering who the fuck I was. I told him I wanted to play slide and he says, 'so you love the blues do you?' and I said, 'I do love the blues.' and he goes, 'If you don't love the blues, you have a hole in your soul.' So that was my first encounter with Hound Dog Taylor --and that was before 15-60-75; before the Kove; before the blues acts at the Kove. It was in Chicago probably 1968 or 1969 and I brought all that shit I learned from Chicago home with me, not realizing that it meant anything.
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Richard Underwood on Hound Dog Taylor in Kent
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"I can't remember if it was that day or maybe the following day, but I actually stopped out at the Kent Motor Inn to see Hound Dog, and I had my roommate with me. So we get into his motel room and Hound Dog is there with his band, and I said to him, 'yeah, it's great getting to talk to you, and I am kind of curious about how you got your start' and he tells me this whole story about his beginnings. And he had that distinct speaking voice -- like a raised nasally kind of voice.
One thing that I recall talking to him about was when I told him, 'You know, you have a distinct style of playing.' -- a lot of Hound Dogs stuff is repetitious. So I asked him, 'How much do you practice?' and goes, 'Awe, man, you don't practice -- you play!! You play man!!' And I laughed and told him that as a fellow musician that's what I lived by all my life.
"At one point they started talking about --- I think it was Brewer that Hound Dog shot? Some years earlier, Hound Dog shot Brewer Phillips over something -- and I think it was for something stupid, but Hound Dog actually shot the guy. So at one point that got brought up between all of them. Then Hound Dog started saying, 'yeah, I shot him, he did something to piss me off.' For them it was just general talking back and forth.
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Jack Kidney on Hound Dog Taylor, Big Walter Horton and The Numbers Band in Kent
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"So there were three women and two guys in that house. I ended up marrying the woman I was living with at the time. Ya know it was high times; it was just how life was going in those days. I actually don't look at those times particularly fondly; it was pretty confusing. There were a lot of balls in the air and decisions being made and, ya know, I had my parents to deal with. It was exciting playing at the Kove and the place was packed and a lot was going on. The Vietnam War was shutting down and there was Watergate. All that was going on in this period -- and we were all still recovering from the shootings at Kent.
"I remember a lot about this time period. I remember things like (then Numbers Band drummer) Jay Brown's friends -- African American folks. I remember once there was this woman who came up to me and she goes, 'you look like you're playing in an orchestra. You look so serious.' And I said, 'well, I'm not an entertainer.' I was learning the craft, ya know? I was learning how to do what I was doing. I remember motorcycle gangs, transvestites, a lot of dope smoking, and people fucking in the club. I remember going into the men's room one night and these big, tall black guys from Akron were coming in there dressed like women. There were two urinals in that bathroom, and I remember taking a piss in one of them with this big, tall 'woman' taking a piss in the one right beside me. I was 19 and thinking, 'well this is different.' It was actually a good thing because it broke me a lot more into the real world and with what was really going on. I remember a lot of that kind of stuff. I remember meeting a lot of different kinds of people. It was almost an international kind of crowd.
"And when he finally came down --- he came down with S.P. Leary, who was a well known drummer in the Chess boys stable. S.P. Leary showed up on a lot of records. Anyway, he came down with S.P. Leary -- they came down in a station wagon, and S.P. Leary had all of his drums in the actual bass drum. You've seen bands set up -- they all have their drums in different cases. He had all of his drums and cymbals inside of one case. He walked down the stairs with this one big bass-drum case and dumped his drums onto the stage -- like unloading the trash. And then started setting up, and I'm thinking to myself, 'oh my god this is fucking S.P. Leary'. So Walter Horton was there and we talked to the guys and they set up, and I went home.
-- Also, I wrote a book about music and rock & roll and the likes in the city of Kent, Ohio -- and Joe Walsh wrote the foreword to it! You can preview/purchase it through Amazon right here.
HOUND DOG TAYLOR
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Easily the most beloved blues act that played the Kove in those years was boogie Chicago bluesman Hound Dog Taylor. Given the best information I have, Hound Dog Taylor played 16 shows at the Kent Kove over 7 different runs between July of 1971 and Memorial Day Weekend 1975. He was scheduled to play the Kove again in November of that year, but the shows got cancelled because he was too sick with lung cancer, which eventually took his life on December 17, 1975. His shows were packed, and on most nights he would whip the Kent audience into a boogie frenzy! So many people had Hound Dog Taylor stories. But the story of Hound Dog Taylor playing in Kent really starts in the late 1960s in Chicago. Bob Kidney continued his story of the bluesmen in Kent with how Hound Dog Taylor at the Kove got started.
Robert Kidney on Hound Dog Taylor and the Chicago blues in Kent
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"The reason Hound Dog Taylor was playing the Kove was because of me. And the story with that is when Greg Colbert and Bob Petry came to me asking about who they should bring to the Kove, I knew of Hound Dog, and I told them they should find out how to get a hold of him and have him play. Some people may come back and say that isn't true but it is.
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| Hound Dog Taylor at the Kent Kove circa 1971. Photo by Wes Race. |
"So like I said, when Bob Koester asked me where I wanted to go, I always asked him to take me to see the people who were playing slide. Once, he took me to see Otis Rush -- wonderful performer, wonderful songwriter. He wrote some incredible things, and Bob took me to this bar where he was playing and Otis Rush did not play slide. But Koester knew him and introduced me. We were talking and he invited me to come sit with him and his girlfriend. While we were sitting there, I told him how wonderful he was. I told him how much I liked his playing and how much I liked the song 'Double Trouble' --that's such a great song. So I asked Otis if he played slide and he said no he didn't. I told him I bet he could play great slide, and then he went back on stage and he actually pulled out a slide and started to play slide!
"So he must have played slide for something because he had one -- but his guitar wasn't set up for slide, at least not that night. The neck probably had pretty low action. He was a slick guitar player and a real character.
"So anyway -- one night Koester couldn't go, and he says 'I'm gonna send you somewhere to hear a really great slide player.' and I go 'really who is it?' and he goes, 'Hound Dog Taylor.' And I said, 'I've never heard of Hound Dog Taylor.' I had no idea who he was -- and at this time Hound Dog was unknown. He was just a Chicago guy. There weren't even a lot recordings of him at this time.
"So Koester says to me, 'I'm going to send you to the Flamingo Lounge to hear Hound Dog Taylor.' So here I am -- I've got my Dad's WW2 army jacket on and I'm walking down to the south side -- by myself -- to hear Hound Dog Taylor, which didn't really bother me too much. But, being alone in this part of the city can be pretty scary for anybody. But I had been very welcomed at any bar that I went to with Koester -- it was all very welcoming. I never got a cold shoulder from anybody. So I walked in this place and there was a long narrow bar. Bar on one side -- stools and then enough room for maybe four or five people next to each other down this long wall. And at the end of the wall at the end of the room it looked to be -- there was this stage, and it looked like it was built on top of phone booths. So if you took like four or five phone booths and you put plywood on top of them, that was the stage; It was that high. I don't even remember how he got up there.
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| Hound Dog Taylor at the Kent Kove May 1975. Photo by Richard Underwood. |
"So then fast forward a few years when we were opening shows for Hound Dog at the Kove -- by then I played slide in front of him. I had been playing slide for some time by then, and I didn't need his approval. I knew what the fuck I was doing; I was doing Elmore James, and I knew damn well I was kicking ass on it. I could feel it -- and I didn't care -- I had no fear about it; I knew I was good. So when Hound Dog came to town and started working with us, he said to me, 'Ya know, I like the way you play' and that was about all that was said.
"So I have one memory of Hound Dog that is really special, but it's so sad. One of the last times he played in town -- now, he had been around, and we had been around each other to the point where he was the guy I was sharing the stage with. We worked with these guys. I wasn't enamored with Hound Dog Taylor; He was a contemporary. He was a guy just like me -- playing in bars. Also he was older and he was doing some shit, and his fucking music was great. But he was a lot older, and he put his time in in Chicago -- he worked in Chicago. So why wouldn't he know his shit? And why would I know it? I'm a suburban white kid from Cuyahoga Falls. How would I ever get to where I could play slide like I do?
"But Hound Dog could sense that I was reaching for it -- and I was grabbing on to it. He knew it, and I think he found it fascinating; I think he got a kick out of it. So our relationship became like a camaraderie, but I didn't hang out with him; That wasn't my goal. My goal was not to hang out with these guys so I could grab a piece of history. These people were just there, and we were sharing these bills together. But --- Hound Dog came up to me one night after a show and he says, 'ya know -- why don't you come by where I am staying tomorrow before I leave. I want to have a talk with you.' and I said 'sure.' He was staying at the Kent Motor Inn; It was a room on the ground floor. So I go there and I knock on the door; It was probably about 11:00am or something.
"Ya know Hound Dog wore these sunglasses at that time. He never took them off. That morning he answers the door and there's no sunglasses on -- and his eyes were bloodshot -- all the way to the pupil on both of his eyes. So his eyes were completely bloodshot; He had no white in his eyes -- and they were moving back and forth at like a million miles an hour, so there was like some sort of nervous disorder going on -- they were moving like (makes a sound) du-du-du-du-du-du-du. Back and forth. And after I got over that, we started talking and he invited me in. He said, 'I wanted to talk to you before I go back to Chicago.' I said, 'ok.' Then he said, 'go over into the bathroom there and get me that glass and bring it over here.' And remember, this is like 11 in the morning or maybe even earlier.
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| Ted Harvey, Hound Dog Taylor, Lefty Dizz and an unidentified vocalist at the Kent Kove May 1975. Photo by Richard Underwood. |
"So I remember I went into the bathroom and they had one of those glasses in a plastic bag -- ya know the kind that they give you when you got your room. Anyway, I brought it to him, and he filled it 3/4 of the way up with VO -- for breakfast; It was some kind of whiskey, and while we were talking, he was drinking it -- and when I say drinking it, I mean he was not sipping it...he was drinking it. So he looked at me after he drank a bunch of it and said, 'I'll tell you something son -- I've only loved one thing in my life and that's that guitar,' which was laying on the other bed. 'That's the only thing I ever loved'. and I said 'really?' -- I mean what was I supposed to say to that. I must have responded with something, but I don't remember what it was. But then he said, 'But I want to tell you something --- you need to work on your timing, and you need to play a whole fuck of a lot louder. You can play a slide, but nobody can hear you, especially not in the back. But you can do it -- you can play.' I don't remember a lot more than that, but that tells you a lot about who that guy is. He summoned me there just to tell me that.
"As I remember, it was one of the last times we played together. I don't think it was the last time he played the Kove though. But it seems to me like it was the last time we shared a bill -- and by we, I mean The Numbers Band. Eventually his band didn't need us. So by the very end of his days visiting the Kove, he would play without an opener."
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Bob Kidney mentioned a man named Bob Petry several times during the course of our conversations about the blues artists at the Kove. Petry was the young owner of the Kent Kove from 1968 until it burned down in 1976. Having heard his name for years, I knew I had to track him down for this story to see if he had any recollections of these blues players at the Kove. I had to jump through several hoops to get to Petry; however, once we set up an interview, he talked to me glowingly about those days. I could tell they were very special to him. This is what he told me about the blues at the Kove:
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Bob Petry on the Blues at the Kent Kove
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Bob Petry on the Blues at the Kent Kove
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"The Kove sat around 400 but on a good Saturday night, we’d put 4000 people through there over the course of an evening. On any given night you couldn’t fall over in there because there were just so many people. For us to buy 400 cases of beer per week was completely normal back then.
"The blues was all in the Kove. I would send my buddy, Rookie, who I went to High School with, to Chicago, and he really knew how to spot talent. He knew what he was doing and that’s how we got those blues guys and that's how we got Hound Dog Taylor, who we had many, many times. Everybody just loved him. He would really get the crowd going. His music was really the right music at the time, and the audience would really, really get into it. You gotta remember, this is the era where there’s a lot of marijuana and a lot acid.
"There were some times, though, where Hound Dog gave us some problems – he’d drink too much. In between sets, he’d drink probably a pint of bourbon -- he would just pound shots. I remember one time when he was so drunk that he fell over on the stage, and his band members were trying to help him up -- that happened a couple times actually.
"The blues was all in the Kove. I would send my buddy, Rookie, who I went to High School with, to Chicago, and he really knew how to spot talent. He knew what he was doing and that’s how we got those blues guys and that's how we got Hound Dog Taylor, who we had many, many times. Everybody just loved him. He would really get the crowd going. His music was really the right music at the time, and the audience would really, really get into it. You gotta remember, this is the era where there’s a lot of marijuana and a lot acid.
"There were some times, though, where Hound Dog gave us some problems – he’d drink too much. In between sets, he’d drink probably a pint of bourbon -- he would just pound shots. I remember one time when he was so drunk that he fell over on the stage, and his band members were trying to help him up -- that happened a couple times actually.
"I remember there was another night where he had some problems outside on the street, and I had to get involved and it was not an easy situation. It came close to the police being there. He was having an argument with one of his own guys and he pulled out a knife! I had to intervene and tell him this was not cool. But he was a big city boy, and when you brought him into a college town and he'd get lit up, these things would happen. Hound Dog Taylor was a character but he was really good, and he liked it down at the Kove. He really loved playing for the kids – the college kids. On stage he was an entertainer -- that guy moved."
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Back when I first started working for the Numbers Band in 2011, I got to be involved in a very exciting project in which a gentleman named Larry Steele presented Robert Kidney with several piles of reel-to-reel recordings he had made of 15-60-75 at the Kent Kove between 1970 and 1974. They were a revelation to me in regards to the Numbers Band's evolution over the course of those early years. In and amongst those miles and miles of tape was a single reel of a recording Larry had made of Hound Dog Taylor in the Kove back around 1973. The recording clocks in at just 26 minutes, but it takes you right down front for one of those Hound Dog gigs. Not too long ago, I got to talk to Larry about that recording and about his experiences recording in the Kove.
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Larry Steele on recording Hound Dog Taylor at the Kent Kove
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"I talked to Hound Dog on this night -- I study astrology, so I asked his birthday - surprise, it was April 12th, 1915. I was surprised he was that old and out there playing & swinging that guitar around, drinking whiskey and smoking dope. I remember that he turned his back to the audience so they wouldn't see him doing that, which I found hilarious. He played the Kove more times when Brewer Phillips was gone, but his young guitar player replacement was not nearly as good, and Hound Dog seemed to sense that. I think I even recorded one of those shows, but it was so bad I didn't keep it. Brewer Phillips was the star.
"I had/have a big reel-to-reel recorder, and I would put it midway in a booth behind the long wooden seats that were down front. Then I had two different 40-foot mics stretched out to both sides of the stage, so I was getting everything in between onstage. Hound Dog seemed to be perfect. People were yelling and bottles were breaking. When you hear Hound Dog asking for 'the doctor', he meant for anyone to be the doctor and bring him his medicine - whiskey. That was a great night at the Kent Kove."
Larry Steele on recording Hound Dog Taylor at the Kent Kove
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"I talked to Hound Dog on this night -- I study astrology, so I asked his birthday - surprise, it was April 12th, 1915. I was surprised he was that old and out there playing & swinging that guitar around, drinking whiskey and smoking dope. I remember that he turned his back to the audience so they wouldn't see him doing that, which I found hilarious. He played the Kove more times when Brewer Phillips was gone, but his young guitar player replacement was not nearly as good, and Hound Dog seemed to sense that. I think I even recorded one of those shows, but it was so bad I didn't keep it. Brewer Phillips was the star.
"I had/have a big reel-to-reel recorder, and I would put it midway in a booth behind the long wooden seats that were down front. Then I had two different 40-foot mics stretched out to both sides of the stage, so I was getting everything in between onstage. Hound Dog seemed to be perfect. People were yelling and bottles were breaking. When you hear Hound Dog asking for 'the doctor', he meant for anyone to be the doctor and bring him his medicine - whiskey. That was a great night at the Kent Kove."
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You can hear that recording right here:
You can hear that recording right here:
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Over the years, Richard Underwood has told me stories about seeing various blues artists at the Kove -- and even photographing a few of them. As I dug deeper into my research on this subject, I knew that I had to contact Ritch in order to get more information. When we got to really talking, not only did he have great stories, but he had lots of photographs AND a recording that he made of Hound Dog Taylor in his motel room at the Kent Motor Inn. As we got deeper into the subject, I couldn't believe the treasures he was able to pull out. Like everyone I talked to about the old bluesmen in Kent, Hound Dog Taylor seemed to come up the most. The following are Ritch's recollections of his encounters with Hound Dog in Kent and at the Kent Kove.
Richard Underwood on Hound Dog Taylor in Kent
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"I remember for one of those blues runs that I was in downtown Kent just wandering around when I saw a station wagon coming from North Water Street, but passing through the light there at Main Street and moving onto South Water Street. I was on one of those corners there, and the car stopped, and some guy in the car goes, 'hey man, you know where the Kove's at?' And I go, 'yeah it's back this way -- you're going in the wrong direction you gotta turn around.' So of course I'm curious, so I followed the car down there. Ya know -- a bunch of black guys headed for the Kove -- it's gotta be a blues band. So anyway I get down there and I recognize that one of them is Hound Dog Taylor and I approached him and I said, 'Oh man Hound Dog Taylor how you doing man?' So we start talking, and he's saying that they are playing through the weekend there, and that they are staying at the Kent Motor Inn.
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| Hank Smith (15-60-75), Ted Harvey, Brewer Phillips Richard Underwood and Hound Dog Taylor during one of Hound Dog's runs at the Kent Kove circa 1971. Photo from Richard Underwood's archives. |
One thing that I recall talking to him about was when I told him, 'You know, you have a distinct style of playing.' -- a lot of Hound Dogs stuff is repetitious. So I asked him, 'How much do you practice?' and goes, 'Awe, man, you don't practice -- you play!! You play man!!' And I laughed and told him that as a fellow musician that's what I lived by all my life.
"I remember Hound Dog and his band talking to me about being black and problems they'd had with shootings -- and even problems with restaurants they'd try to go to that would refuse them service because they were black. It seemed like these were old stories they were telling me. He talked about staying in his element and not really wandering too far because you didn't know where things could go in that direction. We talked about musical equipment -- what amps he was using.
"I had brought a tape recorder into the motel room. I had one 60-minute tape with me, and I ended up getting this interview with him. Having that recorder there is what started the whole thing with the questions and all that. I remember asking him if I could record him for an interview and he said, 'yeah man. Go ahead.' We were there for hours. So that 60-minute tape got flipped so many times that I ended up taping over myself in the process. It just kept getting funnier and funnier, and I didn't want to miss this if it was getting better. We were drinking -- and I mean WE were drinking -- with Hound Dog. Drinking rum or whiskey. I think I ran down to the lobby to get a coke out of the pop machine to mix it, but these guys were drinking it straight. They had gone through a bottle, and then another bottle. They were drinking it straight the whole time we were there.
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| Ted Harvey weighs himself while Hound Dog Taylor points at the scale on stage at the Kent Kove - May 1975. Photo by Richard Underwood. |
"So then one of the guys brought up something about their weight, and then they all started arguing about how much each other weighed. They were being loud about it and trying to call each other's bullshit out on how much they were claiming that they weighed -- and this went on and on. I just remember my roommate, who was usually quiet and never said anything, looking over at me at this point wanting to get out of there. Ya know they had been drinking whiskey and talking about shooting each other (laughs). My roommate was getting a little nervous.
"Anyway, eventually we left, and I went home and I got the scale from my bathroom, and I brought it to the Kove later that night. So they're playing and I am waiting for, like, a break. When the break came, I go up to the stage with the scale, and Hound Dog just lights up and makes everyone get on the scale -- and you can see in the photos that's what is happening. But I remember when that was happening the people in the crowd were looking on confused, not knowing what the hell was going on. And then they went back into their little world again and started arguing on stage; it was really funny. I do remember Hound Dog telling one of the guys, 'your skinny bony ass don't weigh more than 100 pounds!' But then when he stepped on the scale, he did weigh more than 100 pounds and they just started arguing all over again.
"That was over Memorial Day weekend in 1975; it was the very last time Hound Dog played in town. I think he died about six months later. I saw Hound Dog at the Kove several times during those years but that time over that Memorial Day weekend at the Kent Motor Inn -- and then later that night at the Kove was the most memorable. He always had a crowd there. People were really into it clapping and cheering -- a lot of drinking. Hound Dog brought the party."
"That was over Memorial Day weekend in 1975; it was the very last time Hound Dog played in town. I think he died about six months later. I saw Hound Dog at the Kove several times during those years but that time over that Memorial Day weekend at the Kent Motor Inn -- and then later that night at the Kove was the most memorable. He always had a crowd there. People were really into it clapping and cheering -- a lot of drinking. Hound Dog brought the party."
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-- This is Richard Underwood's never-before-heard, 48-minute recording of Hound Dog Taylor and his band in the Kent Motor Inn -- Memorial Day Weekend 1975. The photo that accompanies this recording was taken by Ritch that day in the motel room:
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So as I had mentioned earlier -- I work for The Numbers Band (15-60-75). So it was only logical for me to talk to Jack Kidney about his recollections of the days with the old bluemen at the Kent Kove. He had told me some stories in the past but when I really pressed him further to give me his recollections of those days, he had a lot to say and he told me more details than I had ever heard before. This is what Jack told me about his experiences in those times:
Jack Kidney on Hound Dog Taylor, Big Walter Horton and The Numbers Band in Kent
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"The era we are talking about here that I remember is mid-1973 to mid-1975. These were the days when I had just joined the Numbers Band. The band had been playing the Kove since 1970, but I joined in March of 1973. I was really young -- age 19-21 -- so I had all of that angst that goes along with being those ages. I wasn't really sure what was coming down the pike at me. I was playing with my brother -- that was a good thing. I was living in a house on Elm Street between 43 and Franklin Ave with a bunch of folks, including this guitar player named Davey Fields.
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| March 1973 advert for The Numbers Band (15-60-75) plus Hound Dog Taylor and Luthor Allison at the Kent Kove. |
"The Kove was always packed, and I was making a lot of money. And that crowd was there to see us (15-60-75) play. Wednesdays and Thursdays were more packed than Fridays and Saturdays because that was when the door price went up.
"One thing I remember about this period was that I was getting to stretch out and play the Hammond organ and the harmonica -- and starting to pursue why it was that I was playing with my brother in the first place. I remember getting a piano at home and starting to work on my keyboards. I remember starting to play the saxophone, and that was kind of fun. I remember the crowd responses were good.
"Our repertoire at the time would have been 'Sea Cruise', 'Stolen Cadillac', 'Mona', 'Can't Judge a Book'. I was singing 'Don't Start Me Talkin'. I was singing a couple songs -- this was also the period that we started working on Bob's stuff. It was the beginning of what was heading into the Jimmy Bell period, so I remember doing 'Narrow Road' and 'Jimmy Bell'. Once people started getting back into the band, I remember getting serious about original material -- and I remember a lot of rehearsals for that. I started playing congas -- and I played those for a while.
"I remember all those blues players coming down in that era -- I remember that they were legends. And then I got a really quick lesson on how you can build someone up in your head to be a legend and, depending on how life treated them, they were beat up, ya know? When J.B. Hutto played the Kove, he had quit drinking and he was still solid. He had his wits to him, but Hound Dog Taylor pinned my ears back listening to him -- it was fucking amazing; it was the real deal. If you weren't there then you didn't hear it. He got dark and he got deep. Some of it got real African with it's pulsing rhythm. And I was sitting on the bench right in front of him; it was Hound Dog, Ted Harvey and Brewer Phillips. It was just a trio, ya know? I remember the whites of Hound Dog's eyes were yellow and he had cataracts. So the pupils of his eyes would vibrate like a tuning fork. When you looked him in the eyes, his eyeballs were vibrating and they were cloudy. I've looked at YouTube videos of him from back in the day -- when he was young, strong and wonderful -- and by the time he was playing his runs at the Kove, he was toast. But he could still fucking play. He had to sit down during his later performances -- and we all know what that's about.
"Hound Dog wasn't as bad as Big Walter Horton. That guy was just a mess -- and Walter Horton was my hero. When I realized that Big Walter Horton was coming down to the Kove to play, I was juiced. He played harmonica on these songs --- Jimmy Rogers put out an album called Chicago Bound and Jimmy was Muddy Waters' support guitar player -- I want to say he was Muddy's second guitar. And on this album, they reversed the band around so that Jimmy Rogers was fronting. Chicago Bound was the name of the album and 'Chicago Bound' was the title track -- I fucking lived that record. And in those days, I had always played (harmonica) and sung -- like a Junior Wells/Paul Butterfield kind of thing. But these guys were supporting players and vocalists, and I was learning how to do that in supporting my brother because he was the front guy. So I was listening as much as I could to Little Walter, Big Walter Horton, and figuring out that rubik's cube -- that rosetta stone -- of what the fuck they were doing.
"Big Walter Horton was on Chicago Bound, and he played the harmonica solo on 'Walking By Myself' -- and if you've never heard it, you should fucking listen to it because he's a fucking monster! I would put that record on while living in Kent in my apartment in Kent -- 408 East Main Street, above the tux shop -- and I put that motherfucker on and I learned it verbatim! And this was before I ever knew that I would encounter this guy at the Kent Kove! I had no idea that I would ever meet him, but I learned what he was doing; it was like going to school.
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| Summer 1975 ad showing many notable blues artists at the Kent Kove. |
"So it was time for the show. I lived within walking distance, and I went down to the Kove. We were going to open up, and I walk into the back room and there was an old Coca Cola glass -- 16 oz or 12 oz -- whatever it is -- and I kicked over an empty glass. And Big Walter looked at me and he said, 'hey boy, you just knocked over my VO.' and I said, 'I didn't knock over any liquor.' and he says, 'you need to fill that up for me.' I said, 'no problem.' So I went to the bar -- and I knew everybody of course. So Tonto or whoever filled up that whole glass full of VO -- it was whiskey, and it was cheap whiskey. I took it back to the back room and I gave it to him, and he drank the whole fucking thing.
"So we chatted for a while back there. I don't remember the conversation, but then he got up on stage and he was just fucking trashed. There was a dropped ceiling above the stage -- and you could reach up there. We (The Numbers Band) used to store our pot up in that dropped ceiling -- it was very conspicuous. One of us would get up in that ceiling in front of a crowd of 300 people, grab a bag of dope and take it back to the back room. So anyway, Walter Horton was holding onto the bars that were holding the pieces of the dropped ceiling up -- because he couldn't stand up. He was a big man. He was BIG Walter Horton, ya know? And he opened up with 'The Old Gray Mare is Back Where She Used to Be' and then he went on to 'Happy Birthday' and it was useless. He was useless. His bass player had the shakes -- like Parkinson's disease. And that dude was waiting to get a drink. It was an eye opener to me at 21 years old, ya know? That life can be that hard on really really talented people.
"I remember Brewer Philips was a great guitar player with Hound Dog Taylor and I'm sitting there listening to him play these bass lines and filling in all this shit and he's brilliant -- he was a cabinet maker. I did talk to him, and he told me he made cabinets in Chicago and he remodeled kitchens. That's what he did. His shoes were beat to shit, and he had these tuxedo pants on that were all frayed at the bottom. These were just beat up old men, and they probably weren't even that old. Hound Dog was probably only in his late 50s. I remember when he would take a break he'd say, 'I gotta go see a man about a horse.' (laughs) and I never quite knew what that meant.
"I remember really enjoying experiencing the performances of those old players. And then as I look back on it, I should have been paying closer attention. When you are 19 and 20 years old, you just think it's going to go on forever. So you don't cherish moments. And then you have to rely on your memory to cherish a moment because the moment has come and gone. I thought out of all of them, Hound Dog Taylor was the one who really fucking delivered. He was the one who cranked me up and got me thinking that 'this was the shit -- this is what this is about.' He was the one who really blew me away."
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Some notes here at the very end:
Some notes here at the very end:
-- As Jack Kidney stated, he didn't join the Numbers Band until March of 1973 -- almost 3 years into the band's residency at the Kove. He wasn't around for those nights with Johnny Shines or Mississippi Fred McDowell. But he definitely was there for many other nights with many other storied blues players. When Jack started, the Numbers Band had already made some changes in their sound and repertoire compared with that performance I shared earlier from 1971. Here's another recording of the Numbers Band (made again by Larry Steele) in the Kove -- this one is from Saturday, March 2, 1974. This would be right in the era that Jack talks about in his recollections above. Check that recording right here:
-- For those of you who are reading this who are not from Northeast Ohio and don't know the music scene here, I suspect it may have gotten a little confusing to read about 15-60-75 and The Numbers Band. Both names refer to the same band who have been playing these parts (and beyond) for 50 years. The real name of the band is 15-60-75. But early on, people couldn't remember what the numbers were in the band's name. So the public would dub them The Numbers Band, and that moniker has kind of stuck -- even though officially they are still 15-60-75.
-- Oh and while we are on the topic...The Numbers Band have a brand new album called Endure and you can stream it right here.
-- Numbers Band also did a live video stream from Jilly's Music Room in Akron really recently, and it SMOKES -- watch the full performance right here.
-- Numbers Band also did a live video stream from Jilly's Music Room in Akron really recently, and it SMOKES -- watch the full performance right here.
-- Joseph Vian who was the Kove bar manager from 1969 - 1971 had this recollection of Hound Dog Taylor:
-- Back in May of 1971, (Cleveland) Scene Magazine ran a small piece on the blues at the Kent Kove. You can read that right here.
"I am sure he appeared at the Kove twice while I worked there. Both times they drove from Chicago to Kent in an Olds 88 -- a big old land cruiser. On the front bumper he had gold paste-on letters that said 'Hound Dog'. One of the times they were in town I remember that Chuck Berry was in the hospital and Hound Dog said he had been to visit him and that he was doing alright. Then he played some Chuck Berry songs. Another time they asked me if I knew of any place in Akron that was 'after hours' -- they were going to be staying in Akron the next night. Later I asked if they had found a place in Akron and with a chuckle Brewer said it was cool so I guess they found what they were looking for. Another thing I do remember was Hound Dog saying to the crowd 'it’s nice to be here in in —' and then Brewer leaned over and whispered 'Kent.' They probably played so many gigs that at times it was hard to keep track of where they were at."
-- Back in May of 1971, (Cleveland) Scene Magazine ran a small piece on the blues at the Kent Kove. You can read that right here.
-- In September of 1975, (Cleveland) Scene Magazine ran a fantastic profile on Hound Dog Taylor, using his Memorial Day weekend performance at The Kove as their backdrop. You can read that story right here. Also, the Scene reviewed Hound Dog Taylor's March 9, 1974 performance at the Kove. You can read that review right here.
-- Check out some KILLER recordings and video of Hound Dog Taylor here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
-- Check out some KILLER recordings and video of Hound Dog Taylor here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
-- In Richard Underwood's photos of Hound Dog Taylor and the House Rockers taken over Memorial Day weekend in Kent, there are two photos showing a female as part of the band's crew. In one photo, she is actually singing with the band. Also, I think that's her voice you hear towards the beginning of Ritch's recording in the motel room. Any blues scholars out there know who this woman is? If you do, let me know in the comments.
-- Ritch's photo of Hound Dog Taylor in the Kent Motor Inn shows blues player Lefty Dizz front and center making a chord on that upside down guitar. Take a look at that, and then let me point you in the direction of this KILLER footage from 1981 showing Lefty fronting a band at the Checkerboard Lound in Chicago, with Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood backing him up.
-- Ritch's photo of Hound Dog Taylor in the Kent Motor Inn shows blues player Lefty Dizz front and center making a chord on that upside down guitar. Take a look at that, and then let me point you in the direction of this KILLER footage from 1981 showing Lefty fronting a band at the Checkerboard Lound in Chicago, with Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood backing him up.
-- Also -- blues scholars, I need your help. Who is the gentleman at the way right in the photo from inside the Kent Motor Inn motel room? At first, I just assumed it was Hound Dog's drummer Ted Harvey. But if you look at this photo and this photo taken later that night at the Kove you can definitively see Ted Harvey in the baby blue getup, and he doesn't look like the same person you see in the photo from the motel room.
-- The Kent Motor Inn no longer exists. The last vestige of the original motel was demolished probably around 2007. Here is the current street view showing what is on the property now.
-- As you probably have all figured out, Richard Underwood is a PROLIFIC photographer and archivist. Check out this series of photos he took of Mighty Joe Young at the Kent Kove in June of 1975.
-- As you probably have all figured out, Richard Underwood is a PROLIFIC photographer and archivist. Check out this series of photos he took of Mighty Joe Young at the Kent Kove in June of 1975.
-- Also, the complete known list of noted bluesmen (and one Queen of the blues) who played the Kove in this period are as follows: Hound Dog Taylor, Ted Harvey, Brewer Phillips, Lefty Dizz, Johnny Shines, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Big Walter Horton, S.P. Leary, Koko Taylor, Mighty Joe Young, Luther Allison, J.B. Hutto, Carey Bell, Eddie Taylor, Robert Lockwood Jr., John Littlejohn, Jimmy Rogers, Charlie Musselwhite, Juke Boy Bonner and Son Seals. If you know of any more, let me know in the comments.
-- If you want to know more about the Chicago blues, check this EXCELLENT 1970 documentary featuring many of the players discussed in this piece.
-- Also, the Kent Kove is long gone. It shuttered because two fires that took place in 1975 and 1976 reduced it to a big hole on North Water Street. More information about that fire is in this piece I wrote sometime back. You can see a current photo of what the space that occupied the Kove looks like now right here. And then here is the same photo marking where everything used to be. Also, here is the current street view showing the former site of the Kove. For a vintage view before the fires, check this footage of a "Ride Thru Kent" from 1971. You can see the old North Water bar strip, including an exterior shot of the Kove starting at the 1:53 mark.
-- If you want to know more about the Chicago blues, check this EXCELLENT 1970 documentary featuring many of the players discussed in this piece.
-- Also, the Kent Kove is long gone. It shuttered because two fires that took place in 1975 and 1976 reduced it to a big hole on North Water Street. More information about that fire is in this piece I wrote sometime back. You can see a current photo of what the space that occupied the Kove looks like now right here. And then here is the same photo marking where everything used to be. Also, here is the current street view showing the former site of the Kove. For a vintage view before the fires, check this footage of a "Ride Thru Kent" from 1971. You can see the old North Water bar strip, including an exterior shot of the Kove starting at the 1:53 mark.
-- Did you see any of these old bluesmen at the Kove? Who did you see? What do you remember? Let me know in the comments.
-- Have I mentioned I LOVE the band Archie and the Bunkers? Check out their awesome videos and music here, here, here, here, here, and here.
-- Also, I wrote a book about music and rock & roll and the likes in the city of Kent, Ohio -- and Joe Walsh wrote the foreword to it! You can preview/purchase it through Amazon right here.
Big thanks to Jack Kidney, Robert Kidney, Joseph Vian, Bob Frank, Wes Race, Dylan Tyler, Bob Petry, Heidi Tobin, Larry Steele, Brad Bolton, Richard Underwood and Matt Napier for their help on this piece.
