Cover photo © 2024 Jim Hartzell
Life has put Mark Hummel through some changes since his last conversation with Blues Blast Magazine in 2019 with Marty Gunther. He released several records including a limited edition collection of rarities and his latest album, True Believer, featuring a batch of notable covers and exciting originals, with help from a stellar line-up of musical friends. Last year, he celebrated the 30th Anniversary of his famous Harmonica Blowout shows.
“The Harmonica Blowout was something I did initially as a one off, not something I was going to do year after year. That just happened because of the success of the first one in 1991 in Berkeley, CA. We did it on a Sunday night, had about 150 people, which was pretty good for back then. Rick Estrin was the headliner. A guy named Doug Jay played on it along with my friend Dave Earl. The backup band was Jim Pugh on keyboards, Rusty Zinn on guitar, Jim Overton on drums, and Marc Carino was the bass player. At the end, the owner came up, said we ought to do this every year. I started expanding it, first to Santa Cruz, then Berkeley, Santa Cruz, and Sacramento. I created a traveling roadshow of harmonica players.
“I’ve always changed it up, rarely having the same players two years in a row. When I look back at my lineups, it’s been pretty much a who’s who of blues harmonica. I never got Junior Wells on a show, but we had everybody else – James Cotton, Charlie Musselwhite, Snooky Pryor, Billy Boy Arnold, Lazy Lester, Magic Dick, Lee Oskar, Kim Wilson, Rod Piazza, and Rick Estrin. Man, so many different people have been on these things.
“Next year’s tour is booked for February into early March, 14 shows along the northern West coast. Curtis Salgado is the headliner, featuring a female player from Spain, Sweet Marta, who is phenomenal, and the always exciting Dennis Gruenling as well. The band will consist of Nick Moss on guitar, his fine bass player Rodrigo Mantovani, Wes Starr on drums, and Bob Welsh on piano and guitar, and then myself, of course. We normally have four harmonic players, so most likely what I’m going to do is bring in a local harmonica player for almost every show. I’m still kind of batting all that around. But I thought the idea of having a local guy would be kind of cool.”
In 2020, Electro-Fi Records released Wayback Machine, which found Hummel going with acoustic instrumentation that paid tribute to the sounds that Bluebird Records was putting out in the 1930 -1940 decades.
“I had been working with this group called the Deep Basin Shakers. I started working with them in 2015 or 2016. I had Billy Flynn out for some shows , and I brought those guys into Kid Andersen’s Greaseland Studio to record some tracks. Kid played bass guitar on the sessions.
“I wanted to do something along the lines of what the Shakers were doing, which was Dave Eagle playing a rub board and this array of wild instruments he had, everything but the kitchen sink, and that might have been there, too! He was quite a character in terms of the sounds he’d come up with percussion-wise. The piano player, Aaron Hoffman, was somebody that could play all these really old blues styles of piano, plus he also played a bit of guitar. We did one original that bass player R.W. Grigsby came up with, and I did an original of mine. The rest was an array of Tampa Red, early Sonny Boy Williamson I, Jazz Gillum, who I’m a big fan of, and Robert Nighthawk.”
Two years later, once again with help from Andrew Galloway and Electro-Fi Records, Hummel put together a very personal collection that paid homage to artists that he had learned from back in the day. The title says it all – Mark Hummel Proudly Presents East Bay Blues Vaults 1976-1988.
“That project was really Bob Corritore’s idea. He had been bugging me for about five years, saying you know you ought to put that stuff out. Bob had been needling me to put it out, so I approached Andrew Galloway at Electro-FI, and he said, yeah, what we’ll do it as a limited edition, press a thousand copies. It’s a compilation of different stuff from that time period, mainly from 45 rpm records.
“There were different people that I either played with or just were on the scene, people like Ron Thompson, JJ Malone, Sonny Rhodes, and Mississippi Johnny Waters. There was also a cut with Brownie McGee that I had recorded a long time ago. I had a Franck Goldwasser cut when he was Paris Slim. I just found all these different things that were from that time period of people that I knew really well and played with, got their permission, then went ahead and put it out. I’m probably on about half of it. It’s really a portrait of the East Bay scene, which was really healthy at the time.”
When the pandemic hit, Hummel was thrown for a loop like most working musicians. He watched months of work get canceled without any recourse.
“One minute I’m working like crazy and the next minute I’m having to cancel everything. I had a tour in Europe and other things that were in the works that I had to just let go. To be honest with you, it was pretty depressing, all of a sudden going from feast to famine. I didn’t know if it was going to be the end of my live music career. I put my stock in things like teaching on Zoom and doing some live stream things, because Kid Andersen got those off the ground pretty early. And we made money from it! You could go in and make 1200 bucks on some live stream, which is pretty good. But you couldn’t do too many of them, that was the problem.
“I started working on my guitar playing at that point, trying to do almost a one man band thing with a racked harmonica. I figured if I can’t go back to playing with a band, maybe I can at least play coffee shops or something as a solo act. After a bit, I was really okay with the situation because I had been working so hard on the road, I was kind of exhausted to a certain degree. What got me back out is me and my wife ended up going to Cedar Rapids, Iowa because her cousin had passed. We rented a car in Minneapolis and drove down to Cedar Rapids. I started kind of missing being on the road, being behind the wheel. I think that trip stirred up some wanderlust in me.”
True Believer has Junior Watson and Billy Flynn sharing guitar duties throughout. Kedar Roy is on upright bass on seven tracks while Randy Bermudes is on electric bass on six cuts. Bob Welsh and Brett Brandstatt alternate on piano with Wes Starr on drums
“I’d have to say, by 2010, I started working with Wes Starr and I was already working with R. W. Grigsby. That was a real turning point for me because those two guys were teenage friends. They played in their first band together, a real team musically. Later, I started working with the late Little Charlie Baty, and then we got Anson Funderburgh into the picture too. That became the Golden State Lone Star Blues Revue.
“That band was a real step up for me in terms of what we were able to accomplish. We were doing a triple threat thing, and having that rhythm section made all the difference. I’ve been working with Wes now for 14 years, and I’ve been working with Anson for 12 years, so that’s been a real special time. Unfortunately R.W. had a stroke that put him off the road. He’s mainly working with his wife now, but he’s recovered fairly well, considering how incapacitated he was initially. We’ve done some writing together for songs on this new CD and we’re still real good friends. For the latest tours I had Bill Stuve on upright bass. He was a member of Rod Piazza’s band, the Mighty Flyers. We got this guy Clay Swafford playing piano who’s just amazing.
“Having a band like that has really brought out a lot of great stuff for me. Anson is a friggin masterful guitar player. He’s like working with Picasso, he is such a masterful soloist, the way he puts things together. Wes is this phenomenal drummer that is so musical and inspiring to play with. He just finds all the right parts to put in there. Both those guys are just super creative players.
“And then same goes for Stuve, another phenomenal player. Kedar Roy, who’s on the album, is another fabulous upright player. Randy Bermudes is on the record because he’s been playing with me a lot over the last few years. Bob Welsh on keys, who’s another guy I’ve been working with for ever and a day. It’s really a pleasure to be able to go in and record with these guys. Randy’s really good at going, hey, what if we try this? You know, let’s try this in here. You want guys that are going to contribute to the arrangements and the ideas of a song. It really made a difference to have guys that could put their two cents in and make it really sound good.
“The record’s doing really well. This is the first record I’ve put out on my own Rockinitis label in years, going back to 1989. I realize it’s a lot harder to put your own record out nowadays. The distribution thing is a pain in the ass. I have a distributor but still have to do the record keeping. In the old days, you could just grab a box of records, bring it over to the distributor who’s across the bay, and they would just take it, sell them, and send you a check.
“Nowadays, you have to have complete record keeping with a spreadsheet, all your receipts in order. It’s a total pain in the ass for me. Then you have to have somebody to promote the record, send it out to the DJs. I hired Michelle Castiglia to do the promotion behind it. This is my first time working with Michelle and she’s doing a great job. I’m totally knocked out. For the last 14, 15 years, I worked with Karen Leipziger, who is now kind of semi-retired. When Karen recommended Michelle, that really went far with me. Unfortunately what happens a lot of times is, if the record company is not doing promotion, your album will sink like a stone. No one will ever know it’s out. The reality is you have to have somebody doing the footwork.”
Hummel wrote a book about his many experiences on the road, released in 2012 as Big Road Blues – 12 Bars On I-80. Asked how touring is these days in comparison to his earlier experiences, Hummel had a quick response.
“Touring is way harder. There’s no comparison. If you look at 10 years, 20 years ago, it was a piece of cake compared to now. I’ve had booking agencies off and on forever, but frankly it’s always been a struggle. What happens with agencies is generally they don’t want to put a lot of effort into booking the weeknights. The reason that they concentrate on those weekend dates is because that’s where the big money is. They don’t want to really spend hours days at a time trying to find you stuff on a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. So as a result, even when I’ve worked with agencies, I ended up being the guy that has to book the middle of the week stuff to make the tours worth it.
“You have to be something of a pest, which I’m really good at. They don’t call me “The Bug” for nothing. One of my new songs on the record is “Ghosted”. That’s my life, man. I’m calling, emailing, and bugging the hell out of people just to get an answer from somebody, because in the modern day world, people don’t bother to say no. They just don’t say anything. That’s a different world from when I first started in this business, when you could actually get somebody on the phone and they could say not interested.
“When you’re out on the road like we are, we need to work every frigging night. I had six or seven nights off on my last tour and it was only a 16 day tour. A lot of times now they want you to pay for hotels on the nights you’re playing, which was covered years ago. It eats up a budget real quick when you are paying a bunch of hotel bills. The last few times I’ve had to do two vehicles for the trip, because we had five people, and you can’t get gear and five people in a minivan. Thank God we’re all kind of skinny old guys! You’ve got to have some cash if you want to sing the blues. Trust fund, tour bus, Grammy on the way. If you ain’t corporate sponsored, you’ve got to pay to play. I never thought it would come to the point where you have to be rich to play the blues.”
While Hummel understands that blues festivals need to book acts that will sell tickets, he wonders why he keeps seeing many of the same artists on the festival line-ups.
“It seems like the same 20-30 guitar players get booked. I understand what the festivals are thinking, they want to bring young people in. Well, how come I never see young people at these festivals then? I almost never see young people at festivals. And it’s sad because there’s a bunch of younger guitar players that can play straight traditional blues, but you don’t see them on the festivals like you do the artists that are in their 40s and up.
“There’s guys like Nathan James, a phenomenal guitar player. Another guy that’s great is our friend Zack Pomerleau, who plays drums and harmonica at the same time with Doug Deming. He’s a phenomenal talent, as is Jontavious Willis, who you don’t see out there like you should. There’s players like Andrew Alli, Sean “Mack” McDonald that I don’t see on a bunch of festivals. What’s the deal? I knock on festival doors all the time. Here’s another one – Billy Flynn. You see Billy backing everybody, but you rarely see Billy in a headlining position. Steve Guyger, he’s another one that should be all over the place. Joe Beard is one of the last of the older guard that can really sing and play the blues in a real way.”
True Believer has several songs that offer political commentary. Hummel is well aware of the risks of venturing into that realm in these emotionally charged times, but he felt he needed to get the record out before the November election.
“We cover the Elvin Bishop tune that I heard him do originally as, “What the Hell is Going On?,” before he changed it into kind of a Trump number. When he recorded with Charlie Musselwhite, he changed it to just “What the Hell?” It really became a different song. He sat in with us about a year and a half ago, and did that song. I really honed in on the lyrics a little better. Elvin actually ended up sending me a rough mix of him doing this extra verse that wasn’t recorded, which I added for my record. “The US stands for us.” That’s the verse he added.
“I realize I’m probably getting myself in trouble with people who don’t have the same political views as me, but that’s who I am. If it offends you, I’m sorry. But it’s important to me. People who just want to follow my musical endeavors can go to my website for information on Mark Hummel’s Blues Harmonica Blowouts, Mark Hummel and the Blue Survivors, and the Golden State Lone Star Revue.
“I also have the podcast series, Mark Hummel’s Harmonica Party, which was another outcome of the pandemic. My friend Jeff Vargen was the one that contracted me on Facebook and said, you do such interesting stuff, why don’t you do a blues podcast? I didn’t know anything about podcasts. Jeff said, I’m a documentary filmmaker, I’ll help you make them. The first one we did was on James Harman because he had just died.
“After about four or five of them, I realized I needed a concept to keep these things really interesting. I thought about all the blues people and figured I’ll just start interviewing everybody I know. We now have like a hundred videos, at least 50 to 60 are interviews with all these famous blues people, everyone from Elvin and Charlie Musselwhite, Barbara Dane, Angela Strehli, Anson, Billy Flynn, Kid Andersen. Rick Estrin, John Primer, and one of my latest ones with Dick Shurman. I’ve got one with Jim Liban that I just did, and other harmonica players like Kenny Neal, John Nemeth, and, Jason Ricci.
“There are episodes that feature that the fine saxophone players Greg Piccolo and Terry Hanck, the great guitarist Duke Robillard, and the powerful vocalist, Diunna Greenleaf. I did a lot of rock people too, like Country Joe McDonald, Barry Melton, Pete Sears, Nick Gravenites, and two of the guys from Big Brother & the Holding Company. I did them separately, bassist Peter Albin and drummer Dave Getz.. I’m will be interviewing Bobby Black, a cool lap steel player from the 1940s. People can get these snapshots of life in the music business, the travails of it, the highs of it, on 12 different platforms including Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, Facebook, and other podcast platforms.
“I’m not somebody that believes blues is everything. Country music is on the same level of the blues. It’s become this kind of watered down, unemotional type of almost factory-oriented music. It started as really heartfelt music, really hardcore, and now it’s become this watered down myriad of rock, reggae, and funk, the same way blues is today. I’m not trying to be a curmudgeon, but I really do feel like it does a disservice to people to call something blues when it’s so far apart from blues.
“I got to play with Lowell Fulson, Eddie Taylor, Brownie McGhee, and Jimmy Rogers. Those are the guys that we learned the craft from. And nowadays if you’re a young person, you can’t find anybody to work with except for people like Joe Beard or Willie Buck. It’s very hard to find guys in that older generation that are going to take you aside and go, hey, this is how it goes. If you don’t have any experience in being around that, I think it’s hard to get the vibe of what blues is supposed to be. You can’t learn it all from records.
“The other thing is that you’re young, you don’t have the life experiences to sing the blues. There’s songs I’ve been doing for 40 years and I didn’t even realize what the song really was until maybe 10, 20 years ago. If you don’t have the life experience, how are you going to sing about having had your heart broke, or not being able to get work, If you don’t have that, I don’t think you can put it out. I had the blues at 13 years old. I didn’t want to go to school. Fuck the teachers. I must have had the blues because I got into drugs and alcohol big time That was kind of my thing, getting your ass kicked like that is definitely a way to learn the blues.”
Visit Mark Hummel’s website to find out where he is playing next at http://www.markhummel.com.
Read Marty Gunther’s 2019 interview with Mark Hummel –https://www.bluesblastmagazine.com/featured-interview-mark-hummel-2/
Read Jim Crawfor’s 2014 interview including links to vintage YouTube videos of Mark playing live – https://www.bluesblastmagazine.com/featured-interview-mark-hummel/
