To Prepare for a New Album, Veteran Blues Man James Harman Played the Ponies, but Life's Gamble Enough for His Tastes.
In recent years, veteran Orange County blues musician James Harman could be found buying lottery tickets everywhere he went, betting on the ponies, even feeding the one-armed bandit in Nevada.
Had this hard-working singer, harmonica player and songwriter, who says he loathes blues stereotypes, been sucked in, after more than 35 years in the business, by the hedonism and impulsiveness that underlie the stereotypes?
Nah. He was just doing research. The trips to the track and the casino were strictly for soaking up the sights, the sounds and the experience of the gambling milieu, in hopes of gleaning images and bits of dialogue and terminology he could use in song lyrics for his new album, "Takin' Chances," which examines the theme of life's gambles and risks.
Harman kept buying lottery tickets - none more than a $40 or $50 winner, of course - because he wanted just the right model for the CD cover and booklet design he had in mind. "I never gambled before in my life, never played a game of chance," Harman, a voluble, inexhaustible talker, said in a recent phone interview squeezed into a hectic pre-Christmas crush of family obligations and over-the-phone business negotiations conducted from his longtime home in Huntington Beach.
"To research this project, I went to the racetrack twice with a friend in Kansas City and listened carefully to everything everybody said, and twice to the racetrack in Del Mar. I met all kinds of interesting characters. I could write three movies about racetracks."
Instead, Harman wrote one song, "Five'll Getcha Ten," a highlight on his best album since his two excellent late-'80s releases, the rock-oriented "Those Dangerous Gentlemens" and "Extra Napkins," the 1988 traditional blues session that this year received a W.C. Handy Award nomination for best blues reissue.
With characteristic wry humor, the song traces a gullible fellow's day at the races, down to the moment he visits the paddock - "I didn't know what a paddock was," Harman notes - and stares down the horses he's been told to bet on, hoping to find one with the look of a winner.
"I probably would never go [to a track] again," Harman said. "If I put down a dollar, I want back a dollar's worth of something I wanted. I came up the hard way; I'm a policeman's son. It's never been that easy, and gambling [money] away is unthinkable."
Harman, who grew up in Anniston, Ala., and Panama City, Fla., before moving to Orange County in 1970, spends the album puncturing the idea of foolish risk-taking. He also underscores the need to accept that everyday existence is nevertheless a gamble, a game of chance we must get on with, or else see our lives pass us by.
"You can buy a Maytag, baby, if you want guarantees / Love is all I'm offering, with no warranties," he sings in a particularly pithy and typically colorful couplet from "Crapshoot," a song embracing the vicissitudes of love.
The hourlong CD's loose thematic unity is a plus, but the performances and song arrangements make it special. Harman deploys a shifting cast of musicians, including luminaries from past James Harman Band lineups. The musicians lend their talents to a song list that offers a deliciously varied array of styles, moods and textures.
That process of mixing an observer's zest for life with a fondness for describing it in a lively way fuels Harman's songwriting. "It's just my little sociological study of life," Harman said. "Every day gives me something that's fodder to write with. I see people walking down a hotel hall talking, unaware of me, and I'm listening to what they say - and some of it ends up in a song...
"You become a special kind of short-story writer. A lot of guys are too derivative, too face-value," he said. "I enjoy any kind of wordplay and gamesmanship. I always try to look for the angles."
While he's through with the racetrack betting and the lottery flings he indulged in to help tell his current batch of stories, Harman is in the middle of a bigger, calculated gamble with his career. Last year, he switched from an established blues label, Black Top, to Cannonball Records, a fledgling company based in Minnesota.
It's still a hard-traveling, club-by-club grind for Harman, as he notes in "Lucky Dog," an ironically titled song from "Takin' Chances." The inspiration came when another blues musician ribbed Harman after seeing him play harmonica a few years ago on the "David Letterman" show, sitting in with ZZ Top, the arena-scale Texas blues-rock band led by Harman friend Billy Gibbons.
"He said, 'It's easy for you when you've got these heavy friends to pull you through.' I said, 'Shut up. You were playing with rubber soldiers in '62 when I started. If you were somebody Billy Gibbons knew and respected as a harmonica player, he might call you.' "
* James Harman plays Jan. 9 at the Blue Cafe, 210 Promenade, Long Beach (562) 983-7111.
TWO FAMOUS BLUES PLAYERS
Blind Lemon Jefferson. Born near Wortham, Texas, in 1893, Jefferson was indeed blind, unlike other Delta musicians who merely claimed the limitation. He moved to Dallas in his early 20's, supporting a family by playing on street corners for spare change. A brief but prolific recording career began in 1925, first with Paramount, then with OKeh, where he recorded Match Box Blues and That Black Snake Moan. Jefferson also recorded See That My Grave Is Kept Clean - an early blues spiritual - Jack O'Diamonds, Boll Weevil Blues, and Corrina Blues. He died penniless in Chicago in December 1929, possibly suffering a heart attack during a snowstorm.
Born in Shiloh, Louisiana, in 1888, Huddie Ledbetter - known in the blues world as Leadbelly - was among the first of the great American balladeers. Though he lived the life of a traditional Delta bluesman, Leadbelly was as well known as a folk singer, having originated such tunes as Goodnight Irene, Midnight Special, and Rock Island Line. Leadbelly was a large man, and given to fits of rage. In 1917, he was convicted in Texas for killing a man and in 1930 was convicted of attempted murder in Louisiana. Both sentences were commuted, however, based solely on his musicianship. His "discovery" came, in fact, at Louisiana's Angola Prison Farm when music historians John and Alan Lomax visited there in 1933. Leadbelly died in New York City in 1949.
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