The first San Francisco Blues Festival took place in March, 1973. “The war in Vietnam was still going on and would until 1974,” explains Mazzolini. “And there were only a handful of blues festivals, maybe three or four in the country. There were no record labels beyond Delmark, Alligator, and Arhoolie,maybe one or two others. There was no support base. There weren’t any venues for blues music anywhere here in the Bay Area.
“What happened was the ’60s explosion in the Bay Area meant that most of the members of the Butterfield Band and the Cotton Band and others all moved here. A lot of those guys who were in Chicago moved to Mill Valley or San Francisco or wherever, and they started playing here on a regular basis with their own emerging groups.”
It took Mazzolini about five years to present all the artists on Geddins’ roster. By the 1980s, the festival was in an explosive mode. “I had people like Dr. Hepcat from Texas, Peewee Crayton, Joe Liggins & The Honeydrippers. Lloyd Glenn, Gatemouth Brown, Big Jay McNeely. I did a lot of Clifton Chenier, a lot of Albert King, Johnny Copeland, Percy Mayfield. I already had done the Thunderbirds and Stevie Ray Vaughan & The Cobras from Texas, Roy Brown. I had Jr.Wells, Buddy Guy, Koko Taylor, Carla Thomas, Little Ed & The Blues Imperials, Johnny Winter, Eddie Taylor, Little Milton, Willie Dixon, Johnny Littlejohn, Bobby Bland.
“When I made the connections to the indigenous blues scene in San Francisco, meaning the school of Lowell Fulson, the guys that were here in ’45, ’46, ’47, ’48, they were still around and playing. I put a festival together with the idea of including those guys with the new guys meaning Charlie Musselwhite, Elvin Bishop, Naflin, Mike Bloomfield. Even Hooker was a new guy.
JOHN LEE HOOKER BRINGS IN HIS DETROIT SOUND
“John Lee Hooker came out from Detroit, and in those early days Hooker had relatively no notability at all. He was just scratching to get by. He would only become a megastar in the late ’80s. An older black audience might have recognized his hits like “Boom Boom” and “Maudy” from the late ’40s and early ’50s, and those who knew about Hooker in Detroit did, but they were very few. Hooker started playing the festival in the ’70s, but he packed up his car and left Detroit.
“He’d gone through a divorce and went to San Francisco and moved out here, and that started the whole thing when Mike Kappas of Rosebud Agency took him in. What they did was they hired lawyers to go after Vee Jay and RPM and all those labels that Hooker had recorded for from Prestige Bluesville to Fantasy, etc. and they started getting the royalties. Hooker started making a lot of money, and they pretty much started to control his career.” Muddy Waters was the one that got away. “I would have liked to have had Muddy. I had Albert Collins a lot. I had Albert King a lot. Man, I really feel good about that. I had BB twice, but there’ll always be a couple that slipped through the cracks.”
Today, Mazzolini sees the festival business as much more competitive, and he thinks the West Coast is isolated from the blues scene. “I think west of the Mississippi there’s a disconnect, and it’s only because I think a lot of people can drive between point A and point B within a relative short span. I mean we’re 2000 miles from Chicago. That’s a long way. The reality is the country is big and because of Chess Records and the history, there was always that focus back there So, we were sort of like an island, and that remains today.”
HUEY LEWIS LOVES THE BLUES
This year’s headliner is Huey Lewis & The News, a rocker best known for ’80s hits like “I Want a New Drug” and “The Heart of Rock & Roll.” It’s not the first time Mazzolini has booked Bay Area artists who are not primarily known for blues. “Huey is a great harmonica player, and Huey plays blues harp, knows all about the blues guys, is a big devotee of Rice Miller and Little Walter. And Huey has been around since the ’60s. He’s really steeped into blues music and the blues. And that band that he has, I mean those guys do a lot of rhythm’n’blues. They have a big horn section. They kick butt.
“I mean I had Tower of Power on the show. I had a lot of acts on the Blues Festival that a lot of people looked at as suspect.Well,what I’m doing here is there are acts out there that came out of the San Francisco Bay Area. So, as far as I’m concerned, they belong here, and they belong on this stage. So, I made a determination to start including some of these people in the last five, six, seven, eight years. That’s a direction I want to keep in that arena.”
Mazzolini has no trouble finding artists today that meet his original criteria of showcasing Bay Area blues regulars. He ticks off names at this year’s festival like Kenny Blue Ray, Steve Freund, Angela Strehli, Lynnwood Slim, John Nemeth and Mark St. Mary. I attended the event for the first time last year, and Mazzolini was shocked when I told him the audience was the most rabid of any I’d encountered across the country.
RABID FANS CONTINUE THE TRADITION
“I will say one thing about our audience,” he concludes. “The hardcore really personally seem to have a stake in it. It’s a funny thing. I think that they have just come to accept the way that it’s done musically, and it just sort of fits their groove. It’s the same way I do the radio show. I just sort of go with the old school as much as the new stuff, and I don’t forget the history. I think that’s the important part.”
Perhaps its Mazzolini’s background of studying history combined with his total involvement in the scene. Whatever the cause, he has a highly developed perspective on the blues’ place in the Bay Area drawing on a personal involvement of more than four decades.
“Free form radio started here, and that meant you could play whatever you want and create whatever you want on radio. That had never been done before. Top-40 and all that were gone. I mean it still existed, but that was commercial AM. Here, FM started late at night and then it became full blown.
“When you have free concerts every weekend with the Grateful Dead and Quicksilver Messenger Service, Janis Joplin and Big Brother, and Jimi Hendrix, and everybody coming through playing for free, that does a lot to mold your feeling about the sense of commitment and the creation of events. And when you’re still in that position to see all with the remaining masters of the Delta and Texas blues, I mean promoters today and a lot of record buyers and audience-going blues fans didn’t see any of that. They have no idea, and that’s what generates my engine.”
