|
Red Wine
and Blues | by
Andrew Gilbert
The way
Boz Scaggs tells it, Kermit Lynch devised a perfect seduction. As Scaggs recounts in the album’s liner notes, he doesn’t exactly recall saying that he would record Lynch’s music, but it’s entirely possible that he did. “Life is good and life is long, it seemed, as talk turned back to the early days and heady haze that was San Francisco and Berkeley in the Sixties,” Scaggs writes. “Turns out Kermit had been fronting a band and writing songs back in those days, and he just happened to have a cassette around somewhere . . . . The next day Kermit seemed certain I had offered to gather some top musical talent.” Recorded during a series of sessions over two years at Scaggs’s Gray Cat Studios, tucked behind his San Francisco nightclub Slim’s, Quicksand Blues is a labor of love that comes off surprisingly well. The fact that Scaggs enlisted an A-team built upon Bonnie Raitt’s rhythm section tandem—bassist Hutch Hutchinson and drummer Ricky Fataar—means that every piece flows with an irresistible groove. From the opening track, “December Rain,” a stripped-down Delta lament which features passionate vocals by Youngblood Hart and puckish harp work by Applejack Walroth, the music feels vital, lived-in, and immediate.
The market for blues being what it is, there was never a chance that Lynch would have a hit album on his hands. But the CD has gained some attention from blues aficionados. Music journalist Tony Fletcher, best-known for his harrowing biography of the Who’s gonzo drummer Keith Moon, has some quibbles with Lynch’s retro sound, but generally praises Quicksand Blues. “ Performances and production alike are top-notch, ensuring that Quicksand Blues will earn favor with purists everywhere,” Fletcher writes on his Web site www.ijamming.com. “And most of Lynch’s songs, while simplistic, are also of quality.” During an
interview, Lynch recalls the murky beginnings of Quicksand Blues. “There
was some tongue-in-cheek in the way Boz described that evening but
it was pretty much like that,” he says from his spacious Berkeley
hills home on The Alameda, where he lives with his wife and two sons
(when not in Provence or Oahu, Hawaii). “In France that night
it finally came up that I had written some songs. We’d had something
to drink when I finally put the tape in, which probably worked in my
favor. I complained about my tapes, ‘God, they sound so awful,’ and
he just dropped this offhand statement, ‘Well, if you ever want
to get some better recordings of this, I’ve got a little studio
in San Francisco, and I can get some musicians together.’ ” Scaggs recorded
several more top-20 hits over the next five years, and then gradually
pulled away from the music business, recording only sporadically while
maintaining a fiercely loyal fan base. In 2003, he released But Beautiful,
an album of standards. Rather than drawing derision as a baby boomer
cliché, Scaggs acquitted himself with grace, backed by a first-rate
jazz combo led by pianist Paul Nagel. In 1997,
Scaggs and his wife Dominique bought property in the Mayacamas mountain
range, which runs the border between Napa and Sonoma counties. A passion
for wine led him to experiment with various varietal blends inspired
by celebrated Rhone Valley wines. Around 2002, through an introduction
by Lynch, Scaggs began working with John Olney, the vice president
and winemaker for Ridge Lytton Springs, just north of Healdsburg, to
produce a blend with Scaggs’s grapes that has won diehard fans
in the wine community. “ Like
many good, young wines, it tastes and smells rough-hewn, but shows
a rich character, great depth of fruit and should soften and integrate
with some time in the bottle,” Emert wrote in December 2004.
While production and plans to release the wine commercially are on
hold, the rocker has said he plans to dub his new wine brand “Scaggs.” “ I had never played,” Lynch says. “Those were the days when marijuana was just being discovered, and acid came along quickly. There was the feeling, at the beginning of the hippie movement, that a bunch of friends could just get together and start a band. Our drummer had never played drums. I had never sung, or played any instruments, but you could do it. I loved the music, and I just kept pursuing it with ever-changing band members.” His main vehicle was a band called the Roaches, a tip of the hat to the Beatles and a not-so-subtle drug reference. He started writing songs some of which he has revived for Quicksand Blues. One, a confessional tale of infidelity called “Dirt Road,” features a scorching guitar solo by Alvin Youngblood Hart. The country rocker “Live it Up” was inspired by the country music of Jerry Lee Lewis. Lynch sent a recording of the song to Lewis, back when he first wrote it, but never heard back. While Lynch loved music, he never enjoyed performing, and wasn’t drawn to the itinerant lifestyle of a touring musician. He can’t recall any favorite gigs, but the worst one stands out in stark relief. The band’s first significant job was at the long-gone Long Branch Saloon on San Pablo Avenue near Dwight. Not only was the room nearly empty, but between sets an oblivious bartender cranked up the sound system with the Who’s Live at Leeds, which had just been released. “We’re sitting there thinking, ‘Oh my God, where can I go hide?’ ” Lynch recalls with a sardonic smile. As the ’60s came to an end, Lynch had grown tired of trying to keep a band together only to lose musicians to drugs. Looking to get away from the scene, Lynch decided to bum around Europe for several months. With the central role of good food and wine, the continental lifestyle was a revelation. When he returned to Berkeley he decided to look for a part-time job in the wine business to make ends meet. “But people were all firing instead of hiring,” Lynch says. “So my girlfriend loaned me $5,000 and I opened a store in 1972. It was just going to be a hobby. I was going to get a band together again, I thought. But then the wine thing took off and took me with it.” His self-named shop gradually gained a reputation as the place to buy excellent, hard-to-find French wines, and he began importing and distributing his carefully selected vintages nationally. Recognition soon followed, as the James Beard Foundation named Lynch the “Wine Professional of the Year” in 2000. In 1998 he was awarded the French Ordre du Merité Agricole and last year the French government awarded him the prestigious Chevalier de l’Ordre National de la Legion D’Honneur. His book Adventures on the Wine Route: A Wine Buyer’s Tour of France (North Point Press, 1988), was named the Veuve Clicquot Wine Book of the Year. In 1998,
Lynch took the logical next step from selling wine, purchasing the
historic vineyard and estate, Domaine Les Pallières, in Gigondas,
Provence. With his business partner and friend Daniel Bruniers, of
the Domaine du Vieux Télégraphe wine estates, Lynch is
now producing wine himself, having reinvigorated the reputation of
already well-known Domaine Les Pallières wines. “ I dragged out the recording as long as I could, because I loved every minute of it, spending hours surrounded by these guys,” Lynch says. “I started really timidly, and Boz always tried to get me to sing, saying they’re your songs, you’ll sing them better than anybody else. I wasn’t at all convinced of that. But as it went on, I got a little bit more courageous.” Since the album’s release, Lynch has continued to work with drummer Ricky Fataar, developing demos for a possible second project. He’s even started writing new songs, as he’s found that Quicksand Blues has stimulated his musical imagination. Motivated purely by the pleasure he gets from honing a new tune and collaborating with other artists, Lynch has no dreams of grandeur. He already lives better than many rock stars, so he certainly doesn’t covet those trappings. “ I
think it’s cool that I don’t have to worry about succeeding
at the music business,” Lynch says. “I’ve never liked
performing. It went against the grain. I’m kind of a hermit,
so to get up in front of people and sing was always pretty traumatic.
But in the studio it’s not like that. With Ricky I feel this
rapport and I can really let go and, for better or worse, express myself.” |
For Lynch,
who wrote the vast majority of the songs when he was a rock singer
knocking around the East Bay scene four decades ago, the album wasn’t
so much the fulfillment of a dream as a godsend that put him back in
touch with his long-suppressed muse. Though he resisted at first, he
even contributed two vocals, growling his way through the evocative
title track and crooning the Nashville-inflected “Country Living,” with
backing vocals by Laurie Lewis and Tom Rozum.