The Como Chronicles
The Windy City Grille

Time now to get on down to the Windy City Grille. This was about the only thing that was planned for the entire excursion to the Holy Land Where Blues Began this time out and me and Bobert got spruced up at the rooms and fired up the long suffering Toyota and headed south on I-55 to the little town of Como to drink some beer and listen to Daniel play some electrified Mississippi Blues. As reported earlier, The Windy City Grille is an oasis of sorts in that area but we were somewhat surprised by the large number of cars parked along Main Street, as Como only has mebbe 2500 citizens living there. There is also The Como Steak House, which seems to be a popular place to eat in Como, but of course we were on a mission and there was no time to spare on eating, so we went through the doors to the Windy City and found that Mz.Darlene, the world's best tour guide, had reserved a table for us all right up by the band stand.

We met the the chef, who carries a meat thermometer in his sleeve always, and took our seats while Slick got tuned up with Mr. Terry Bean's harmonica. There was rumors floating that the regular drummer, Kinny Kimbrough wouldn't be able to make this gig and so Slick and Bean decided to just wing it between the two of 'em and started off with some blow yore socks off freightrain-about-to-run-over-yore-ass music. And this, gentle reader was the real thing at last. Daniel would be, I imagine in my addled brain, a little like trying to follow Lightnin' Hopkins, but Terry Bean had no trouble with it. The two of them filled the place with foot stomping, butt shakin' rhythm. Slick pounding the floor with his foot and flailing the old Les Paul Jr. while Terry blowed that harmonica.

Daniel's not out of his teens yet, and if you'd never heard him before you would never figure him for a blues musician. Once he starts up though, that all changes pretty fast and you will no doubt wonder how this has come to be. He controls the whole show somehow, he kids his audience and jokes around with them and makes them listen because they have to hear these blues that he's about to tell 'em about. And they do. The people are just nuts about him, this white kid from North Carolina who plays with a confidence of an artist three times his age. His songs come out of him spontaneously and are custom made each time he sings them, a talent that the old juke joint and picnic musicians were so good at doing. His guitar style is not like any other and Slick works it like three guitars at once without any modern noodling crap coming out of it, ya, sounds hard to do but it's true. It's as if this young man had never heard a record or artist play who was born after 1933. And then there's the foot, pounding out the beat non-stop thoughout, audible above the amplified guitar and harmonica, and infecting all who witness a Slick gig with much swaying and movement. He starts playing and dancing up there and it makes people get the hell outta their seats to join him. He's got them and there ain't nothin' they can do about it except get on with some dancing. You just can't not move something while this is going on. You just can't stop the grin and uncontrollable nodding of your head in time. It's hard to describe but they is something that flows outta him like a river and drags you off the safety of the bank and into the current. And people are caused to get up and dance on the floor to the music of only two guys sitting in chairs and playing from somewhere deep inside themselves. The effect of his music on folks amazes me everytime I see it happen. Muddy Waters had this and so did many other older bluesmen, as well as young Jerry Lee and Elvis. Whatever it is, Slick's got it too and knows how to use it.

I look around and notice that the place has filled up and a guy walks across the room during a break and sez to me, "Hey! Are you Tweed?" And it turned out that I was and he was none other than Dennis "Mempho" Brooks who'd drove from Memphis with several of the South Florida Blues Society members and they'd talked Ms.Jessie Mae Hemphill into joining them as well. Dennis had been good enough to let me use one of his photos of Richard Johnston for a review I did a while back and we'd emailed news back and forth for a couple years and it was good to put a face on him at last. And per usual he turned out to be exactly as he was in the emails and Tweedboard posts. Tweed'sBlues.Net, I am thoroughly convinced, attracts only real fine people to it as I have found no evidence to the contrary as yet.

I was lucky enough to be standing near by when a couple in the party decided to take some pics of Mz.Hemphill and for whatever reason I was told to get in the shot with her. And so I did. Mz. Hemphill carries a little dog, called "Sweet Pea", on her lap and didn't look like a possumdog at all but it looked more like a chihuahua so I figure Mr. Othar ran outta those pups before he got to JessieMae's house. They are surely everywhere else it seems.


I also get to meet my South Florida countrymen and woman who are having a good time and are a good bunch. Dar McCauley is the only blues DJ in all of South Florida and has a Sunday show broadcast on WKPX from a high school's transmitter down in Sunrise, Fla. I once won a Muddy Waters print on her show by being the first caller to identify a song of Muddy's in about three or four notes and it still hangs in the living room. They don't give her many kilowatts to work with and lately a foreign language church program has been walking all over her space on the radio dial so I can't tune her in anymore. Used to make up excuses to go to Home Depot a few miles south of here on Sunday mornings and I could listen on the truck's radio but that got to be a little expensive and I had way too many DIY projects started..

She's real nice and looked after JessieMae the whole time they were there. I am hoping that her show will be broadcast on the internet soon but money is needed for that to happen so if you happen to have loads of money and need to give some away and hear Dar worldwide you might go to her site BLUE AT HEART.COM and see how you can put them bucks to good use. She is a peach of a gal and runs one very fine blues programme which I could still enjoy if only WKPX was streaming on the internet, so help not only Dar and KPX but help pore Tweed as there is no other blues radio in all of South Florida. (End of the flagrant WKPX fundraiser plug, how'd I do Dar? Send me that pic of me and Jessie Mae!! )

After many budweisers, footstomping and hooting, more musicians showed up and then there were bass and drums backing up Slick and Terry and the music took us all further into the stream. People danced, clapped, yowled and Daniel & Company kept on rolling out one killer off the cuff song after another. At exactly 12:01 midnite Slick stops and tells us, "Allright y'all, it's time to take you to church." and churns out a ten or fifteen minute spiritual blues, Hill-Country style that really gets everybody going. One look around the Windy City showed me a roomful of smiling faces riveted to this young man and his music. He casts a web on his audience and they can't break free of it very easy once he catches them. They listen, laugh out loud, do the hootchy dance in various forms and go with it. He don't let up much and seems loathe to even take a break unless he pops a string, which he did and went on for the whole song and I never even noticed it was broke till he finished and said something about it.

Somewhere along the line, a woman dressed in faded blue denim was invited up to sing a song. Miranda Louise is a singer from Nashville and is well known in this region of Bluesdom. She belted out a Son House song, I would guess it mighta been "Death Letter", but I was getting a little sloshed and not being a very good journalist and certainly not taking notes. Anyhow she SANG that song like nobody's business. A very powerful woman for sure. I spoke to her for a couple minutes afterwards and I'm pretty sure she told me she was from New York originally but I could be mistaken....I am a pathetic reporter....Miranda if you happen to stumble upon this, please forgive me if I get all this wrong...She turned out to be a very pleasant soft spoken person which was a real contrast to the bluesbelter I had seen in action a bit earlier.
Note:I stand corrected and am informed by the Diva herself that the song was actually R.J.'s, "The Walkin' Blues" and am ready for a good ass kicking, which I no doubt richly deserve. ;~) [Tweed]
A foreign looking guy had arrived earlier with the bass player and it turned out that they had hauled ass from Oxford, MS, a hundred miles from here to do this gig at the Windy City. He had gotten a flute from the car and Daniel got him set up with a mic, and introduced him. He really was foreign, in fact he was a Russian who'd come to Mississippi to study blues music among other things I reckon, and he proceeded to blow that thing and it was good! The band drove him pretty hard and it turned out well and he got a good response from Mississippians in the audience. I am thinking that blues is the greater unifier of the world, drunken ramblings yes, but tonite is yet another example of it's power. He sat down looking as happy as a Russian is able to let on to be, but I believe he was shining bright on the inside.

Daniel and the Mississippi Band continue on the quest for the perfect real lowdown Mississippi Blues,and I had mistakenly thought they had found about every single one of them already, but they managed to locate four or five more before Last Call. The dancers are still up on the floor and the nite carries on and the Budweiser flows till about 1:30 and then it's time to shut it down as it's getting to be late and the tables are getting cleared and the lights are turned up while people stand around talking with one another and saying goodnites.

I've been in niteclubs where they just head out the door without looking around but after tonite's show they seem to have been brought together by a shared experience. And we are all real happy folks, somewhat drunk but all of us are still full of the torrent of driving rhythms and syncopated beat that has washed us all clean. We are among the last to leave and drive up to the Motel 6 base camp in Senatobia, still full of the music and my hands are numb from clapping. When sleep finally comes to me, I dream for what is left of the night and for many days and nights after, that I must find a way to move to Mississippi for good. It has been a good trip.