Cover photo © 2024 SweetMusicChica

Life can be full of surprises. For guitarist Louis X. Erlanger, the journey had started playing with a blues legend at a young age before getting recruited for a band that ended up on a major record label, and toured the world. Later, Erlanger decided to concentrate on his family, finding work that gave him an education in another aspect of the music business. He continued to play, record, and produce with a number of blues artists, finally cutting some records of his own, albeit under an assumed name The sum total of those experiences made him uniquely qualified when a friend asked for his help.

“Yeah, well, I’ve known Paul Oscher since I was a teenager, and I’m 71 now, so it’s a long time. I can’t remember how old I was when I first heard about him, but it was probably at 15 or 16 years old. A friend of mine was hanging out with this guy who played amazing guitar, amazing harp, attracted a lot of girls, and who also said he was going to play with Muddy Waters one day.

“I always was interested in Paul after I heard that. Then Muddy came to town and Paul had joined him already. I saw him play with Muddy a number of times in New York. Later he left Muddy and started playing around New York, having these incredible jam sessions where all kinds of people would come down to see them. Big Walter Horton showed up for one of them. The legendary songwriter Doc Pomus used to go to a lot when Paul had a Sunday night gig at a place called The Fugue on First Avenue in New York. David Maxwell, the Boston piano player, also sat in with him a lot.

“I would sit in because I wanted to learn. Paul had an amazing sense of time, just natural musical sense. So I would try to pick up whatever I could from him When Paul started seeing a girl that was a waitress across the street from my apartment, that’s when we really started to become friends, because he would hang out at my apartment waiting for her to get off work. He wasn’t an easy guy to get to know. He’s always sort of in his own world a lot of the time.

“He turned me on to a lot of the black clubs in New York City that a lot of white people didn’t know about. There was this whole rhythm and blues scene going on that most white people didn’t go to, but Paul went to all of them because he wanted to play with those people. Those two worlds were pretty separate for a while. Paul was sort of a liaison between them. He had all these different blues fans following him around at that time.

“I knew a lot about recording. Paul knew that I could translate it as a recording engineer, I could translate how to get the sounds that he wanted. So he started asking me to help him out with that, and I ended up co-producing a number of his recordings. Down In The Delta, and Bet On The Blues, his latest Cool Cat, and one with Pinetop Perkins and Willie “Big Eyes” Smith that we just re-released called Rough Stuff. I just have a real high opinion of Paul, and that’s how I ended up being in charge of his catalog.

“It was a surprise to me. I mean, I talked to him a lot and I was on the phone with him the whole time he was sick. But I didn’t know he was going to actually leave me his catalog. I found out right before he passed, when he said, “I want you to continue putting out my Blues Fidelity stuff, and I want you to manage all my digital and recording assets”. I am honored to do that. It’s a big job. I was working with his former manager Nancy Coplin to get his stuff up from Austin. She helped me with a lot organizing . We also had to get the whole estate settled. I think it was over a year it took to get it all straightened out.

“There’s unreleased stuff by Bob Gaddy, a great New York City blues piano player, and stuff by Steve Guyger, who was one of Paul’s favorite harp players. There’s something he did with Little Sammy Davis.  Paul is playing guitar and Sammy’s singing and playing harp. Sammy had a beautiful voice, almost like Little Walter. And it’s got a sound that you don’t hear too much anymore, absolutely beautiful stuff. That’s something we have planned to release in the future.

“The first release is something that Paul told me about, but he wasn’t sure about putting it out because of the way it was recorded. He didn’t feel it was the best sound but I was able to improve it. It’s Paul in the 1980s with the whole band at the Tombs prison in New York City. What’s beautiful about it is it really brings to life what Paul used to do around New York all the time, which is bring out these rhythm and blues revues that had all these great people in them, really low down blues, just really great stuff.

“So this recording, which is coming out probably the end of February, has David Maxwell playing piano, Candy McDonald is playing drums, Steve Gomes on bass. And singing besides Paul are Bob Gaddy and Rose Melody, who used to sing with him all the time. They do all kinds of beautiful stuff, gospel stuff, rhythm and blues, and the deep blues. It’s a real reflection of what Paul used to do, a little change from the solo stuff that he’s done, but I thought people should really hear how incredible a group he had. Paul’s playing really great guitar and harp on it. That release will be on his Blues Fidelity label. People will be able to see all the information about it if they go to:    pauloscher.com  “

Erlanger is also considering re-issuing another project Oscher record, Alone With The Blues, with Gaddy just sitting at a piano, playing and singing the blues.

“Gaddy used to play at this place called La Cave in Manhattan. Paul went up there one day and recorded him. He had put this out a long time ago, but only on cassette. So I’m cleaning it up and getting it ready to out on CD and also online. That was one of the things Paul asked for when he was sick. He really wanted to get that one out again.”

Added to the mix is a book Oscher was writing about his life in music that did not get finished before he passed. His ex-wife, Suzan-Lori Parks, has been helping move the book towards completion. It contains stories like the time Oscher was in the Muddy Waters Band, living in Muddy’s basement along with piano legend Otis Spann, and traveling around the country as the only white man in the band of black musicians

“There’s tons of interesting stuff. I’ve been finding all kinds of photos with various people, Bobby Blue Bland and Junior Wells, people like that from back in the old days. So we want to pull all that together, but I don’t think that’s going to come out for probably at least a year or so. Of course, we have to get a publisher too.

“Do you remember the guitarist Wild Jimmy Spruill?. Well, Paul Oscher was not somebody to give out compliments unless a person was really, really good. We went to see Jimmy Spruill at this club in New York. I’d never seen Paul so mesmerized. Spruill was playing the most amazing rhythm guitar you ever heard, just incredible stuff behind the group. But in the middle of the show, Spruill picked up this heavy chair in the front row by one leg like it was a feather, and started playing slide with the leg, with the whole chair. And it was good slide, you know, not stupid barroom slide, but really good slide. Paul’s eyes were wide open and the next day he was talking about it all day long.”

“Paul always had specific ideas about everything. It could make him a pain in the ass, but it also was what made him such a great musician. And, you know, he was a good artist too. A lot of people don’t know that, but if you look at some of his album covers, they are well-designed and very striking. He had a very good eye and a very good ear. So he had this whole idea about what kinds of illustrations he wanted to have in his book. I want to be able to follow that direction.”

Erlanger got his start as a guitarist in a band called the Stingrays. Always looking for new places to play, one day he walked into a new venue called CBGB’s. He managed to get the band hired, performing with other acts like Television and Patti Smith. Disco was in vogue, but CBGB was the rare place where a band could play their own music.

“We were having a lot of trouble keeping bass players because they were all going off to graduate school and stuff like that. It was driving me crazy. With a bass player you have to teach them everything, because they’re the key to the whole sound. It was a lot of work. I was getting a little frustrated with that. Then one day I walked into CBGB, and Mink DeVille had just come in.

“They were okay, playing blues, and rhythm & blues. A little bit ragged, but pretty good. But when Willie DeVille, the lead singer, sang a version of “These Arms Of Mine”, in the Otis Redding style, he had a sound in his voice that I just went, whoa, who is this guy? I went up and talked to him, and the band asked me if I wanted to come down to a rehearsal of theirs and just jam. We got along really well. At the same time, the Stingray’s lost another bass player. So I thought, well, God, I like these guys. I really like the singer, had always liked working with good singers. Two days later they had an outdoor show in Midtown Manhattan. They asked me if I wanted to do that show with them. I did, and that’s when they asked me to join the band.

“We started playing at CBGB’s, and this whole circle circuit around New York, but nobody ever thought that this would become something known throughout the world. The scene started to get bigger and bigger. We were still playing for peanuts, but it became a real music scene with a lot of bands playing their own material. That brought down all of these people from record companies, seeing that something was happening, thinking they should get involved. So bands started getting signed. We got signed to Capitol Records by Ben Edmonds, an A&R guy. We cut Cabretta, our first album, in like two weeks It was mostly live.

“Right away, we go from playing all these dives in New York to suddenly playing theaters in Europe. We did a tour of the UK, on the bill with this group Dr. Feelgood. They were great. I think we did like 32 cities in 34 days. We had a great time, then when we got back to the States, we played this show, I can’t remember where. We get on stage, looking at the audience, and there’s Mick Jagger, Jimmy Page, and Stephen Stills. Jagger and Stills are singing along with “Mixed Up Shook Up Girl”. And that’s how we knew like something was happening. I talked with Mick later. He really liked Willie’s singing a lot. He even said to me, “I’m an interpreter, but Willie’s a real singer”. Willie could sing anything. That was pretty heady stuff.

“We did a tour with Elvis Costello and Nick Lowe, and we played Chicago. I went out to Chicago and spent the week going around seeing Louis Myers, Eddie Taylor, and all these great people, getting inspired. I was asked to do a get-together with a bunch of Chicago rock Djs, so I took them all out to dinner on the record company’s tab, which eventually was probably charged out royalties. I thought afterwards we can go see Louis Myers, because I loved his playing. So we went to a club, and the DJs were bored, they were just bored to shit. I guess I was a failure as a promotion guy for rock people because I was too into the blues.

“Soon after came the drugs and the chaos that often happen. Willie was not always an easy guy to be around. Playing music with him was very easy because I could just sit and listen to his voice, be inspired. Eventually it led to me thinking, you know, how much longer can I do this? Do I want some kind of sanity in my life?

After leaving Mink Deville, the guitarist played with several groups including Bobby Radcliff for a while, and then a group out in Seattle called the Slamhound Hunters. He also found time to work with blues greats like Hubert Sumlin, Otis Rush, and R.L. Burnside. Then love came rolling around.

“ I met this woman, and we decided to get married, and I decided If we were going to have kids, I didn’t want to be on the road. So I got involved with music publishing. and I worked for this company. First I taught myself computer programming because I got really into computer graphics. Then I got a job working for EMI Music Publishing, which was the world’s largest music publisher, doing technology. When music started to go online, I went over to Bell Labs and saw one of the first portable things that was sort of the model for the I-Pod. So I was right in the thick of all of that, and learned early on a lot about the effect that online music was going to have on music publishing and songwriter income.”

In 2014, Erlanger released the first album by his alter ego, Sunny Lowdown, entitled The Blues Volume Low. Comprised of mostly covers, he handles the vocal and guitar with help from a rhythm section. His 2017 release, Down Loaded, received a 2018 Blues Blast Music Award nomination in the Acoustic Blues Album category. Right before the pandemic hit in 2020, his third album, Shady Deal, came out to good reviews, featuring a mix of covers and originals.

“Sunny Lowdown is still working, and I’m coming out with another recording called Down a Lonely Road. The idea is that, at my age, I’m heading down a lonely road because all my friends are starting to die. So it’s going to be heavy blues. And a lot of it is solo. I’d always been into it, but I decided to do it as sort of an experiment, and that’s why I didn’t do it under my own name. I didn’t know if it was going to work or not, but people obviously seemed to like it, so I’ve been happy about that.

“I stopped performing for a while because of COVID. My wife has some problems and I didn’t want her to catch the virus. But now I’ll be starting to play a lot, trying to push that record. I think it’s a really good record. There’s going to be a little bit of band stuff on it, but mostly it’s going to be solo. People can check it out at my website: www.sunnylowdown.com”

“One last thing I want to mention is that Paul wanted to get some younger blues players onto his label. Once I get settled, I want to look at that, because there are all these great people out there. I’m sure you know about Jontavious Willis, how good he is. There’s this guy I’ve been in touch with, Harrell Davenport, a young guy who’s totally into the blues. I’m always looking around for potential people that once we are ready, we might be able to put on the label and record. You’ve got to realize for me, it’s a labor of love. I’m not doing it for money, right? That’s number one. That’s the way I’ve done my whole life.”

“I think the music is going to give Paul’s legacy some notoriety. This generation has never seen a lot of the older blues artists live. And because of that, there’s something missing. When I was young, I played with John Lee Hooker when I was 16, so I was right up next to that music, and heard these subtleties that the original people had in terms of the way they told the story.

“With John Lee Hooker, you learn very quickly that you have to follow his voice, because he was telling a story, and he wasn’t going by 1-4-5, he was going by what’s going to make this story get across to the people that are listening. So you follow his voice, and you listen to where he accentuates it with his guitar, and that’s where you come in and out. That’s a whole segment of the blues that this generation has never heard, because today people don’t do that. You know, back in those days, the music was the story of black people. Now not only is the story not told, people don’t listen to the blues for the story as much anymore.”

Editors Note: “Heaven Stood Still”, a film about Willy Deville/Mink Deville is currently being shown across the US, Europe and Australia in association with the Doc ‘n’ Roll Films.