And we're....Live!

Paul Rishell and Annie Raines’ first live album, A Night In Woodstock, releases today as the flagship recording on their Mojo Rodeo label, distributed worldwide by Burnside Distribution. The album features special guests John Sebastian (harmonica), Bruce Katz (keyboards), Reed Butler (bass), Chris Rival (guitar), and Billy MacGillivray (drums) joining the duo for an eclectic, high-energy set of acoustic and electric originals and classic blues songs.

The recording came about as part of a footage-gathering mission for the jug band music documentary Chasin’ Gus’ Ghost. Director Todd Kwait had heard Rishell and Raines play in John Sebastian’s J Band and wanted to film the duo playing behind Sebastian. As it happened, the Rishell/Raines band was scheduled to play in a roadhouse in Woodstock, New York that same month. The album’s liner notes tell the story of how this under-the-radar gig evolved into an all-star blues variety show. In early 2009, A Night in Woodstock will be released as a DVD with extra songs and features.

About the Artwork

Maggie Zander, a folk artist from upstate New York, created the dollhouse model and miniature props for the album’s cover. The steps, porch roof, shutters, lights, chimney and smoke are fashioned from new and vintage guitar and harmonica parts contributed by National Reso-phonic Guitars and Hohner Harmonica Co.

About Fritz Richmond

Fritz Richmond grew up in Annie’s hometown of Newton, Mass, and gained national cult status in the 1960’s as the washtub and jug player for the Kweskin Jug Band. He was also a recording engineer for Elektra records and one of the primary muses for the Lovin’ Spoonful and later a core member of John Sebastian’s J Band. He was interviewed extensively in Chasin’ Gus’ Ghost shortly before his death from lung cancer in 2005. The CD and DVD of A Night in Woodstock are dedicated to his memory and his legacy of preserving and championing African-American and old-time folk music.

About Mojo Rodeo

Paul Rishell & Annie Raines founded Mojo Rodeo Records in 2008 to launch A Night in Woodstock and lay the groundwork for future recordings. Raines came up with the name to describe a hybrid of blues and country music. Planned releases on the label include the DVD of A Night in Woodstock in 2009.

6 Weeks To New CD

We've been waiting for a long time to make this announcement: The official release date for the new, live "A Night in Woodstock" CD is 10/21/08. The disc is being manufactured now and will be distributed by Burnside Distribution Corporation, which means it will be available both through online music retail sites and traditional "brick and mortar" retail stores (all the straw and twig retail stores having been blown away by the big bad wolf some time ago - but it's not politic to speak of pigs this week).
We're still dotting i's, crossing t's, and crossing our fingers as well. 'Til then, keep in touch and watch this space for more announcements about A NIGHT IN WOODSTOCK.
-Annie and Paul

NEW! Paul's First Instructional Video for Truefire: Dirt Road Blues

Click the picture above to add to shopping cart, which will open in a new window, or Click Here to read a full description and view video samples of the product.

"Paul Rishell’s Dirt Road Blues is optimized for solid intermediate to advanced players, is presented across 2 interactive video CD-ROMs (Windows and Mac compatible), features 40 full-length interactive video lessons including performances of all the songs, text overviews, standard notation and interactive Power Tab so you can "see" and "hear" the tab and notation played out at any tempo. TrueFire's video lesson player features zoom, frame advance, looping and other handy controls."

"Get a solid grip on this Delta, Piedmont and Texas blues guitar repertoire and you’ll be able to handle anything (including your own compositions) with authenticity, stellar technique and maximum groove. Head out to the porch now with Dirt Road Blues."

Featuring Annie Raines on several performances. Bonus material also available on request.

SONGS:

“Down the Dirt Road Blues” by Charley Patton
“Shake ‘em On Down” by Tommy McClennan
“Low Down Rounder” by Peg Leg Howell
“Sweet Jivin' Mama” by Blind Blake
“One Dime Blues” by Blind Lemon Jefferson
“Black Horse Blues” by Blind Lemon Jefferson
“Rag Mama Rag” by Blind Boy Fuller
“Custard Pie” by Blind Boy Fuller
“Step it up & Go” by Blind Boy Fuller
“Trouble Blues” by Scrapper Blackwell
“Hunkie Tunkie” and "Keep it Clean” by Charley Jordan
and four Rishell originals; “Vanessa,” “Louise,” “I’m Gonna Jump & Shout” and “Blues on a Holiday.”

California Beamin'

Have you ever had a really vivid dream that was like a movie? Not a nightmare, but a story with such a happy ending that you still felt good even though you woke up and realized it never happened? That's how I feel right now, only it really did happen.
I have to start by going back 20 years: It's 1988, I'm 18 years old, in my first and only year at Antioch College, and about to start an internship at the Community for Creative Non-Violence in Washington, DC. Of course the first thing I do when I get to DC is look for a blues show in town. Jackpot. Lazy Lester and Loaded Dice are playing at the Twist 'n' Shout in Bethesda. I'm accompanied by my father and my uncle, who assure the doorman that they will vigilantly monitor my drink orders.
I don't care about drinking anyway. I'm too busy hero-worshipping. I buy a copy of Lazy Lester's new "comeback" LP, Lazy Lester Rides Again. His real name is Leslie Johnson and he comes from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He was one of the main session players on the Excello label, recording 15 singles under his own name and many more as a sideman for Lightnin' Slim, Whispering Smith, Slim Harpo, Tabby Thomas, and others in the 1950s and 1960s. The music coming out of J.D. Miller's studio for Excello became known as "Swamp Blues" both for its sound, a murky melting pot of blues, country, cajun, zydeco, and pop styles, and for the Louisiana artists who crafted it.
After Loaded Dice plays a great first set, I make my way through the crowd to talk to the band and Mr. Johnson. I boldly and recklessly ask him if I can sit in with him. Keep in mind I've been playing for all of 18 months. He balks a little, then says, "Why don't you audition for us after the show, and then you can sit in tomorrow night." I don't want to explain that my Dad and my uncle won't be available to drive me to the club the next night; that doesn't sound like something Little Walter or James Cotton would say. So I just tell him that I have to work the next night and would he please consider letting me sit in anyway? Relenting, he asks me point blank if I'm any good. Being 18, I'm confident in my abilities and assure him that I can play. Being 18, I'm not at all prepared for what's about to happen.
He brings me up on the third song and calls a harp shuffle in E. So far so good. He takes a few choruses, then turns it over to me. I start my solo and the band and audience are responding well. So far so good. I start wailing on the "3 hole" of my A harp, which I've just figured out how to manipulate to get some honking, wailing sounds. In fact, at this point in time it's the only place on the harmonica on which I can get honking, wailing sounds. And I've really got that one-note jam down. Which is why I become completely lost when both the reeds in that hole suddenly get stuck, resulting in more of a no-note jam. Panicking, I try to play other licks, but they all rely on that third hole. I have a solo to take. People are depending on me, or so I imagine. I throw the solo back to Lazy Lester while I try to fix my harmonica. This has never happened before. What do I do? I try tapping the harp against my hand and on the stage, hoping to dislodge whatever is stuck in the reeds. I'm really wimpy about it because I'm afraid I'll get thrown out for denting the stage floor. Finally I extend my harp out to Lazy Lester, and indicate through some kind of sign language that I want to trade harps with him.
To this day I can not describe the look of shock on his face. But bless him, he goes for it. I take his harp, finish my solo, acquitting myself reasonably well under the circumstances, and cringe as Lazy Lester takes my damaged harmonica and starts to play. But the man proceeds to wrest more music out of the first 2 holes of the harmonica than I could have gotten out of all 10. No 3 hole? No problem.
At that moment, I have one of the greatest epiphanies of my musical career: professionalism isn't always about how well you perform under the best circumstances, it's about how you perform under the worst ones. It's about how you cover up those inevitable disasters and keep the show going.
But it's too late for me to appy this knowledge on this night. The song is over, I'm back in the audience, clutching Lazy Lester's harp, my hands tingling, my mind racing. After the show, there are too many people around him and I never get a chance to thank him or give him back his harmonica and reclaim my own.
I was pretty happy to have his, actually. And a few years later it turned out to be the perfect harp for a recording session with Paul. The song was "Nothing But the Devil" by Lightnin' Slim, originally recorded in 1960 with Lazy Lester on harmonica. This led to another epiphany: "Old Blues Guys," as I characterized many of my heroes back then, often took the time and trouble to cherry-pick their harmonicas so they could play in tune. I had been nursing an invisible prejudice in assuming that playing "real blues" meant not caring about that stuff.
I saw Lazy Lester again years later when we were both playing at the Great British R&B Festival in England. He sat in our dressing room and surprised us by playing a Hank Williams song on Paul's National Steel. He didn't seem to remember much about our first encounter, or if he did he might have been trying to forget it. He was friendly but reserved. I wanted to make a musical connection with him, if only to make up for my own earlier embarrassment and awkwardness, but the timing never seemed to work out.
Flash forward 20 years to last weekend at the Doheny Blues Festival in Dana Point, California. It's a beautiful day, about 80 degrees with a breeze off the Pacific Ocean. We're getting ready to play a set on the "Back Porch" stage with our band, which consists of Billy MacGillivray on drums, Chris Rival on guitar, and Ed Friedland filling in on bass. We're happy to be there out on the road with such good players. I'm excited because Willie "Big Eyes" Smith and Bobby Rush are in the audience. Bobby Rush has just finished a powerful acoustic set and everyone is feeling fine. So I don't need anything more out of life, when suddenly who cruises by the stage but THE Lazy Lester. We wave at each other and he goes in search of a seat. Now I'm really hopped up. We start our set. The crowd is fantastic. The band is just cooking. About three quarters of the way through our set, I introduce "I'm a Lover Not a Fighter." I tell the audience, "This is a song by the great Lazy Lester, one of my very favorite harmonica players. I know he's here today so we're going to do it for him." I'm putting my heart into playing and singing it. I can't see him in the crowd but I hope at least that someone will tell him about it afterwards. In the middle of our next song, he shows up in front of the stage. He has a T-shirt over his shoulder and he hands it up to me. The T-shirt is the label of the Excello single of "I'm a Lover Not a Fighter" and it commemorates the 50th anniversary of the song. I try to keep playing through this but I just have to stop and lean over to give him a hug. I'm so thrilled I hardly know what I play to finish the song. The crowd is going nuts anyway. They call for an encore, and I get an idea. I step up to the mic and ask if Lazy Lester would join us on a tune. With a little help from Paul, the septegenarian makes his way over a rickety fence onto the stage. I ask him if we can do "Nothing But the Devil." He says he'll sing it but he doesn't have a harp. Don't you worry about a thing, I tell him, reaching over to my harmonica tray to hand him my backup A harp, a brand new Hohner Marine Band Deluxe. And now he's singing, and Paul is laying down some beautiful slide guitar, and now Lazy Lester and I are trading solos again, and I can't believe we've both survived long enough for this moment to happen. I watch him sing and am amazed by how animated he is and what a cool-looking cat he is. Tall and wiry, he seems younger than he did the first time I played with him 20 years ago. I guess 50 seemed older to me when I was 18 than 70 does now. And right now I feel more like a kid at 38 than I ever did when I was 18.
We finish the song together and I'm just beaming, grinning ear-to-ear. The band, the audience, all of us are one big ball of joy. Lazy Lester embraces me and then tries to give me my harmonica back. I hold my hand up. "Keep it," I tell him. "I owe you one."

photos by Robert Hyams

Springing the Blues, part 2: Reeeeal Fooooood

Success! After a few days of desolation and mall cuisine, we found not one but three great restaurants on our trek south. Sometimes we're forced to live on food from the Cracker Barrel or the Olive Garden for several days in a row. I realize how lucky we are to have this option when so many people are starving in the world. And for some people, especially young people, this restaurant regimen would be a dream come true. These chains have a nice shtick, serve decent food and are generally reliable. (And if they're close to the hotel, you have the added bonus of being able to dine in your underwear with the heat cranked up while watching HBO, and your mother won't come in and yell at you.) After three consecutive meals of this kind, though, when you're so doped up on sugar and salt you can hardly distinguish a "Tour d'Italia" (a rather cheesy offering) from a plate of corn muffins, it's time to hunt the big game: Real Food. We had some good leads in the form of a newspaper article about restaurants along the southern stretch of I-95 in South Carolina and Georgia. Unfortunately, after clipping the article and saving it from the trash for 3 months, I forgot to bring it along, and I couldn't remember the names of any of the restaurants it mentioned. No problem, that's why cell phones were invented. I called directory assistance, told the operator I was looking for a BBQ joint in Darien, name unknown, address unknown. She gave me three numbers and got off the line quickly before I could annoy her any further. None of the names sounded like the place I was looking for. No problem, that's why kids and the internet were invented. We called our daughter from the road and she was able to pull up the newspaper article online and give us directions to B&J's. I believe her college education is paying off already.

B & J's Steaks & Seafood
Hwy. 17, S, Darien, GA 31305
(912) 437-2122
We've eaten at four restaurants in Darien, a small fishing and marine research hub off of I-95 halfway between Jacksonville and Savannah. They're all pretty good and we wouldn't mind returning to any one of them. However, B&J's will be our first choice. It's just a neighborhood diner, easily bypassed by an outsider speeding to a better-advertised location. Its interior cinderblock walls are adorned with mermaid murals and a tasteful amount of nautical bricabrac. The two small dining rooms are filled with long folding tables and the tables are filled with people. The people are in turn filling up on the lunch buffet, which includes fried chicken, collard greens, cole slaw, baked beans, real mashed potatoes, stewed tomatoes, a full salad bar, and macaroni and cheese that was actually made by someone's Mom. Both the food and the atmosphere are genuine, and a bonafide bargain at $7 a head for some down-home cookin'.
Doggie Bags: 5!!

We arrived in Jacksonville that afternoon. I wanted to extend our streak, so I went online and did Google searches for "best restaurants jacksonville" and "restaurants jacksonville 'wine list'" and found a few prospects. We ate at two of them, Ocean 60 in Atlantic Beach and Giovanni's in Jax Beach. Both were expensive restaurants with excellent, freshly prepared food, and good wine and service. But as Paul put it, Ocean 60 is "a little too close to the beach." It features designer food and a crew of tall. handsome waiters. Its popularity as a nightspot for young singles became more apparent as we finished our meal and watched several groups of young women parade into and around the Martini Lounge where we were seated. I guess the word had gotten out about the waiters. I had plenty of good things to say about the place, but I forgot them by the next night because we ate at Giovanni's.

We've had some great meals in our time, but this was truly memorable from beginning to end. We started with some delicious California wine - it should be noted that Giovanni's has won the Wine Spectator Award of Excellence, which can't be a bad thing - and an appetizer of homemade sausage over gorgonzola. We shared a Caesar salad which was prepared at tableside - a little gimmicky, but it gave us a chance to get to know our waitress better. Her name was Jennifer and she reminded me of a grown-up version of Charlie Brown's mythic love, the Little Red-Haired Girl.
Paul was able to fulfill his weeklong quest for linguine and clams, with delicious results. I ordered one of the specials, a filet mignon which had been marinated, grilled, and glazed, and covered with fat, juicy porcini mushrooms. This all sat atop a homemade sweet pea ravioli and was surrounded by a cabernet reduction. It wasn't dinner, it was a religious experience. It was a little rich, though, so I put some aside for later in order to save room for dessert. I was glad I did. We had the "double-crust apple tart" which is really just a 5-inch pie, but call it what you want. Just don't call it a Table Talk. It was pure heaven. It had a buttery, flaky piecrust that had obviously been made that afternoon, apples cooked just shy of melting, and a scoop of homemade caramel balsamic ice cream.
Doggie Bags: My usual scale is 1 to 5, but I have to give this one a 10!
Giovanni's Restaurant
1161 Beach Blvd
Jacksonville Bch, FL 32250
(904) 249-7787

Springing the Blues, part 1: getting there

Glen Allen, Virginia, April 2, 2008
We're dying for a good meal. It's been almost 48 hours since our last bite of Real Food, a roast beef sandwich at the famous Rein's Deli in Conncecticut. I violated one of my cardinal rules of restaurants yesterday by driving 10 miles off our route onto a peninsula in southern Maryland for lunch at Captain John's Seafood. Captain John's is not to be confused with Cap'n Jack's or Captain D's, or its neighbor, Captain Billy's, whose weathered billboard on the highway suggests it has either seen better days or it hasn't, ever. I think I can safely add a "No 'Captains'" rule to our restaurant guide.
We made a more pleasant stop in Orange, Virginia, home of Billy Cooper's Music Store. This is the pedal steel guitar capital of the Eastern Seaboard. They have an amazing assortment of steel guitars for sale, and other instruments as well. My favorite item in the store is the pad of post-it notes with a little picture of a pedal steel on each note. The artwork takes up a lot of space on the tiny square, but it's cute and it provides entertainment for us "steel widows."

Questions about Harmonica and Women Players

Ana from Atlanta writes:
Hi Annie, I was at your seminar in Atlanta for the AHE [Atlanta Harmonica Enthusiasts] and I would like to say thank you for sharing your thoughts and experiences as well. We are all waiting anxiously for that instructional dvd that you mentioned as one of your projects for the future, and you are always more than welcome to come back and teach us at the AHE.
I am also writing to ask you as a woman and harmonica player and i have some questions that i wish you could share with me about your own experience:
1) Do you think it is possible to live as a musician only? what are your the projects you are involved with: playing with different bands, organizing projects involving harmonica, teaching, all that stuff?
2) have you experienced some sort of prejudice because you were a woman (like any other job)?
3) what are qualities that in your opinion define a good harmonica player?

Dear Ana,
Thank you for getting in touch. I'm glad you enjoyed the seminar.
1) I can tell you from my own experience that it is very difficult to make a living as a musician. First of all, there are only two kinds of financial transactions in the music business: Robbery and Charity. You generally need to have some "seed money" to get a career going and cover all sorts of promotional and travel costs. The pay can sometimes seem good for a 90-minute show or seminar, but it is very low for the total hours put in traveling and preparing for gigs, and if you don't want to live in the back of a van and eat at Burger King every day, it doesn't go very far. That being said, it's so important to follow your passion and your dreams. It takes a lot of hard work and no small amount of good luck as well. People have taken advantage of us from time to time. We have also had a lot of help over the years from family and friends, help that we needed badly even with income from gigs and selling CDs. We had to keep our family as the main focus while our daughter was in school, but now that focus is shifting back to us and our career. However, the club scene has been greatly diminished since we started out in the biz. We're shifting our focus now more to teaching, creating instructional products and a greater body of recorded work. We're trying to forget about fitting into some existing market and we're trying to focus more on enjoying what we're doing so we can make the music better. That's the plan anyway. It's a work in progress.

Thanks for the questions and keep 'em coming!

The Don'ts of Driving

Getting ready for a drive from Boston to Jacksonville, Florida in a few weeks. Time to check out the car, shake out the spring wardrobe, and remember some of the rules of the road:

When you're driving, DON'T...
- Drink wine
- eat with a knife and fork
- wipe hamburger grease off your hands
- examine your hands and clothes for bread crumbs or melted chocolate
- listen in on passengers' arguments
- fish around for your meds
- fish around for someone else's meds
- think about what would happen if you suddenly JERKED the steering wheel
- stare at limos
- play that song that makes you close your eyes
- play Monopoly
- or Sudoku
- assume that there are any good restaurants on a peninsula
- drive down said peninsula looking for said restaurant
- answer your email
- change your pants
- floss
- take off more than one layer of clothing at a time
- watch the movie playing in the car ahead of you

Those are all the printable ones I could think of. Feel free to add your own!

Mailbox Full; Mind Empty

When I was a kid, my mother brought home a book by David Macaulay called "Motel of the Mysteries." It was a takeoff on the excavation of Tut's tomb, but set in the future some years after our present culture was buried alive by the simultaneous collapse of airborne pollution and millions of pieces of junk mail in transit. Macaulay, for all his brilliance as an architectural illustrator, storyteller, and educator, was close but just off the mark in anticipating the worldwide catastrophe that threatens us even now: being buried under mounds and mounds of email. And we're not talking about the printed hard copies here or even the backup discs. Just the invisible, weightless bits and bytes that take over our once-productive lives. There has to be some measurable weight to my Yahoo! home page, though, which swells importantly as it delivers the statistic: "Inbox 12,911 messages." This is not even counting items that were deleted or dumped in my spam folder. Luckily for me, Yahoo stopped limiting message storage space a few years ago. I think it's one of the very few examples of a corporation actually acting out of pity for the consumer.

A couple of weeks ago, as my computer was recovering from a series of crashes, I started looking around for ways to free up memory and drive space. I had been able to keep the Outlook inbox under 2000 messages, but after last year's tours, it had ballooned up to almost 2500. Somehow my eyes locked onto the screen and I sat down and started reading, replying, filing, deleting. My eyes turned red as tabasco. Two little gray cones of my dead brain cells piled up on my shoulders, and a croupier mysteriously showed up to brush them off. I didn't take any notice, I just kept typing. Finally, after 6 hours, I looked up. Way up, as I had shrunk 3 inches when my neck went from vertical to horizontal. The inbox now held only 1605 messages. Wow! Amazing. May as well get it down to an even 1600, or just a few below to make room for the incoming batch. Another hour or two went by, and it was down to 1423. Gee, I should just get it down to 1400 and call it a day. Dinnertime came and went. At last I gave up the chase. But I had gotten the total down to just under 1200 messages. That was the first of several marathons. I've stayed up all night. I've used every color of flag provided by Microsoft Outlook. I've created several dozen folders and subfolders. I've answered emails that were 2 or even 3 years old. I've apologized profusely in at least 5 languages. And these are well-thought-out replies, too, not some all-upper case or all lower case Blackberry cuneiform, like "ok thx". I'm neurotic and picky and I actually think about how I sign an email. "'Sincerely' sounds nice, but on second thought doesn't that seem a little insincere? I'll type 'Best regards' instead. I can back that up. Or maybe 'warm regards.' No, too much. stick with 'Best.'" It's as if I think there's a Nobel Prize out there for email.

As of this writing, there are only 326 emails in my inbox. Oh crap, 330. 339. And almost all of these are awaiting a reply. Paul came upstairs and stood behind me watching the wisps of smoke rising from my ears. He suggested that I set up an automatic reply telling people to try back if they don't hear from us within 3 weeks. How could such a simple, ingenious idea come from someone who can only use our expensive laptop to get boxing news and spyware? Maybe his intelligence has been preserved by his computer illiteracy. I read in the paper that email lowers your I.Q. (okay, it was the comics page, but there's probably more truth there than in the national news section). Could that be true? What about the freedom we were supposed to gain with these labor-saving devices in our paperless officies? And where are those hovercrafts and streaming holograms we were promised in the disco age? They were supposed to have been perfected by now. The way things are going, we won't even have the social security income to buy them if they ever do come out.

I'm convinced that someday people will see us the way we see depictions of people in Victorian times: caught up in email and Google searches just as our forebears were caught up in dusting, washing and feeding chickens. The humans and nonhumans of the future will long for our open spaces, our sense of beauty and history, but they will enjoy conveniences we can only dream of. Of course it follows that their labor-saving devices will probably create inconveniences and demands on their time that we would even never want to imagine.
Feel free to add your comments! Don't be too surprised if I don't write back immediately.
ok thx
ar

Harmonica Q&A

Cliff Wilkie a.k.a. "The Kingfish" writes:

My wife and I heard both of you last weekend at The Outpost in Albuquerque. You rocked the joint !!! I had never heard the two of your before and had only heard Annie on a few cuts on random CD's. I could go on, but really I have a harmonica question.
Annie, during one of your last numbers you did a 3-4 draw trill forever. You just hung on it until I thought you would drop. Do you do some sort of circular breathing or have some kind of special trick to keep your breathe going that long? Would you mind explaining.

That 4-5 draw trill on Lookin' Good is just a long, steady, quiet inhale with my nose closed to keep from taking on excess air. It's not hard to sustain if you breathe in and out a couple of times beforehand to oxygenate your brain, and stay relaxed so the notes don't get pinched or leak air from your lips. I classify it with "party tricks."
There's a version on Youtube now called "Annie Raines blows you away" with our band that came out pretty well. Here's the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjQJetx593o