Cover photo © 2024 Marilyn Stringer
A noted songwriter, Blues educator, and guitar player, Tas Cru has made his mark in a variety of ways since he began a full-time music career almost 20 years ago. This is the third time he has been featured in Blues Blast Magazine, following Marty Gunther’s interview with him in 2021.
In 2022, Cru released his tenth album, which featured a batch of rocking original tunes that highlighted his guitar work supported by a full band.
“I called it Riffin’ The Blue because the songs on there all started with musical ideas, the kind of stuff that you hear as a musician when you’re just sitting in your living room noodling on your guitar, when you should be practicing. You noodle, then you go, oh, I like how that sounds. That’s when you hit the record button on your phone. I had a whole library of those things, saved over the last several years. I went back and listened to some of them again, thinking that riff speaks to this, this riff speaks to that. It all started with a riff, and that’s how I approached it.
“I was very happy with it. I had a couple of my usual compadres on the album with me, but I always like to go and get a little bit of help. I don’t believe in all-star albums with lots of special guests That’s not me. But once in a while, I’ll bring a cat in that I’d like to play with. For example, Bruce Katz came in to play keyboards on that album. I couldn’t really go wrong there. And then I was talking to Mike Zito about some ideas at one point. We didn’t quite get to do what we wanted to, but he did play on a couple tracks with me, and I was very happy with that. I enjoyed making the album. It’s upbeat, and lived up to my expectations.
“One song, “Brown Liquor Woman,” came from a guitar riff first and then it was mentioned to me that there’s a southern saying that girls will share with each other, good southern girls don’t drink brown liquor. When I heard that phrase, I thought, okay, let’s talk about someone that doesn’t do what Mama says she should. And there’s quite a few of them. I think we know some of the same ones. God bless them all.
“Stand Up” is one of our favorite go-to songs for live shows. We do a couple of really gospel infused kind of things, and that’s one of them. The other one is “Heal My Soul,” which is always a festival set closer. Again, that started with a riff. The lyrics in it are a little obtuse, a little obscure, and I’m sure that people can attach their own meaning to it. When I introduce the song, I tell people there are a lot of things in this world to stand up for. They might be the same as mine, but maybe not. That one always goes over. It’s a crowd-pleaser for sure.
“The closing track, “Memphis Gone,” means a lot to me. As a song, it’s part of what I call my Memphis song trilogy. The first one is called “Memphis Song”. That’s all about discovering Memphis for the first time, people that come there during the International Blues Challenge and all that. “Memphis Gone” was written after the COVID years. Perspectives changed , and I wish it was kind of back to the glory days, when everybody was excited about hitting Memphis for the first time, soaking up all the history. I have another song coming up that completes the trilogy but it won’t be on my album. I have somebody else that’s going to record it but I can’t talk about it too much yet. “Memphis Gone” is special. I think Zito does a nice job with the slide guitar on that, and Bruce Katz’s work is beautiful, and the vocal arrangements on it are something that I’m proud of.
“ I grew up a Sunday school Presbyterian kid, so there wasn’t music in that background, but I had this uncle, he was the crazy uncle in the family, had been in the Korean war, came home probably with PTSD, but they didn’t call it then. While he was in the army, he discovered music that I had never heard about. I started hanging out with him and listened to a lot of Ray Charles stuff, which he loved.
“On Friday nights, about six o’clock after supper, I’d go over and he’d be getting all set to go out for the evening, pressing his shirts, and he’d put these records on. I’d listen with him and hang out. I didn’t really listen to the records, I just enjoyed the experience hanging out. He’d break out like a little Jim Beam and some Lucky Strikes, and I’d go home and my mom would be yelling at my dad, don’t you let him go over there! So it didn’t really come from church. It came from my crazy uncle. Now, I’m the crazy uncle!
At one point, Cru traveled around the country. He spent time in Lafayette, Louisiana learning the differences between Cajun, Zydeco, and blues music
“At the Cajun jams, you sit in a circle, might be up to 20 people. Guitar players rarely get solos. They are sort of tolerated because of the rhythms they generated. Those that play the fiddle or concertinas get the solos. I saw and heard people playing the triangle down there, just unbelievable. You would have thought they were playing a grand piano. The different tones and textures and even notes they could get out of that was just amazing. I really enjoyed it down there.
“That’s one of the things I love about my early days before I really got going with touring was I would go and hang out in these different parts of the country where there was still this unique music happening. I’ve spent a lot of time in Oklahoma too, around the Tulsa area, hanging around with guys that idolized Elvin Bishop, Leon Russell and J. J. Cale. Some of them got to play with him a couple times. I remember getting to play with this piano player, Rocky Frisco, that played with J. J. Cale for a while. There are still pockets in this country of music that is very, very unique and distinctive.”
Earlier this year, the guitarist released a live in-the-studio album, billed as All Natural Cage Free and Fan-Fed, featuring songs from a number of his previous releases. The backing came from his current touring band featuring Mary Ann Casale on vocals, Tom Terry on bass, Phil Diiorio on drums, and Scott Ebner on piano and organ.
When it came to selecting the songs for the project, Cru took a unique approach.
“How we did that was I picked 16 songs, took them to the studio and we invited some people that came in from Connecticut and other areas not too far away. There was an audience of about 30 people. We played the same 16 songs four times, not all one day. We did two sets of the same 16 songs back to back on the Saturday night, and then we did it again on Sunday. It wasn’t exactly the same audience. Then we let the fans that were there in the audience pick the songs, using whatever criteria, if they just liked the song or if they thought it sounded really good.
“As musicians, we kind of felt that maybe the version of a song like “Take Me Back to Tulsa” on the third set was better than it was on the first set or the second but it wasn’t necessarily the same for the audience members. We had people do a survey, and they selected the songs. It came down to 11 songs that they picked that consistently made the cut. But one of them would just stuck out like a sore thumb. It would have been fun to put it on, but it just didn’t fit. It was a ballad while the rest of them were all pumping stuff. So we decided to go with the top 10 tunes the fans picked out. That’s our festival set now.”
The project was produced by the band leader, who wrote nine of the songs. The other he co-wrote with a long-time band member.
“Mary Ann pretty much wrote the song “Miss My Man”. She wrote the main part, got the riff, the idea and the concept. I just pretty much rocked it up, arranged it and added a couple of different pieces to it. She probably did 75 percent of the writing on that. I have written a lot of songs, that’s for sure. I just like doing it. There’s about 150 in my repertoire of written songs. And it seems like I got in a rut playing the same 20 songs for almost 10 years.
“That really started to drag me down. When I got the current band together, I’m not putting anybody else down, but this band has the vocal ability to open up a whole bunch of other stuff that I wanted to play, but I just didn’t feel we could pull it off and do it justice. So, I’m very happy with this band.
“I’ve always loved, even back when I was doing my cover band days, playing in a band where we had multi vocalists. Even if you do a new song before you’ve done the arrangement, everybody kind of knows where they’re going to sing. Everybody starts to fit their parts together. There’s nothing better than musicians or singers that grew up and played in the church. They sing a song and everybody just kind of knows where they’ve got to go. It’s just natural and it’s just amazing how some of that stuff can just quickly come together, sounding so rich. I definitely love to have songs that are interesting and melodic, with a lot of well constructed harmony.”
As Richard Bates, the musician followed a familiar path of attending college, eventually earning a PhD in Education. As the years went by, he began to search for something more.
“There’s a lot of things I love to do. I’ve been a full time musician off and on in my adult life. I worked as a side man for a band, there was one in particular out of Montreal that I worked with that started to do pretty well. I would. teach a little bit and then maybe go do something else and then come back to it. I just kind of fell into stuff as I went along. I never planned on getting a PhD or any of that, but I ended up working for this college that liked me and what I did.
“But then they told me that if I wanted to stick with them for any time, I had to get a PhD. And I said, okay. They concocted a way to keep me on the payroll and send me off for a couple years to finish up what I needed to do. It was just right place at the right time. But I always played music through all of that. But, full time music, I did it when I was really young. And then I did it again in my late twenties to like mid thirties. I was about 40 years old when I got into the teaching thing.
That band in Montreal at one point was courted by Sony Records Canada. Cru realized he was a sideman, and what the label really wanted was the band’s lead singer.
“It looked like they were interested in the band, but as soon as they could get the singer away, they shit canned the rest of us. I don’t know whatever happened to him, but for a while we were still playing around up in the Canadian Maritimes. One time there was an ice storm, where it rains, freezes, melts a bit, and refreezes. The storm can last a long time and then everything gets heavy, the trees get heavy, and the electricity gets knocked out. They couldn’t cook in the little town that we happened to be in anymore.
“There’s no electricity and they ran out of propane. That whole thing was miserable. I remember eating raw potatoes there, peeling them, actually washing them off in the snow, and eating them. My Montreal band mates were very cosmopolitan guys, like European guys. They loved having an American in the band because they thought it was going to help them in America. They also kind of looked down their nose at me as being kind of a roughneck.
“They called me the raw potato, because they thought it was disgusting that I was eating those things. It’s Quebecois French slang, and raw potato is what it means, uncooked taters. They don’t say potatoes in Quebecois French the same way that Parisian French would say it.”
“When I first started to hit some stages, I realized that there was some mix up over my real name because it was well known in the blues world at that time by another musician that had been around for a long while. It was before Facebook and all that and people would wonder if I was him, which was kind of weird. A friend of mine said, you got to change the name.
“He said, what do you got for nicknames? I thought about my high school nickname, but I said that ain’t going to work. It was kind of crude, Savage Dick by the way, and it has nothing to do with anything sexual, but relates to having your first name as Richard. So I thought about it, and finally settled on Tas Cru, raw potato. It’s a long story. I tell people about it sometimes when I do my acoustic shows. I have people in stitches about the whole Savage Dick thing, how that name came about.”
Cru has a long history of doing Blues in the Schools programs, with his career in Education giving him many insights into tailoring programs that will vividly connect with a wide age range of students. He has also authored a number of children’s books with a blues theme.
“An idea that I had stemmed from wanting to do something for the Blues Hall of Fame, sponsored by the Blues Foundation in Memphis, to raise a little money. What I decided to do is to remake some of my songs and have them be songs about dogs that get the blues. I reached out to my fan base asking, hey, you got a dog that gets the blues. Tell me why they get the blues.
“People started telling me stuff. It was usual stuff that I could imagine. Then I said, why don’t you send me a picture of your dog and why he gets the blues, what’s his name, where he’s from, and I’ll put it in an insert inside the CD, and you donate a little bit of money for that. We raised a decent contribution, But that turned into something totally unexpected, the three books that I’ve got about this dog who wants to form his own blues band. There’s a couple of the blue societies that really picked up on these books, especially up here around the Albany, New York area. They bought a bunch of them from me at cost and have been distributing them to libraries, about 90 copies of the whole trilogy.”
Happy about the current state of his career, Cru plans to continue making music as long as people want to hear what he has to say.
“I feel that I make good records. I love the studio. I think it’s a place to paint, like a painter would in their studio. They experiment with colors and textures. I love doing that. But I love playing live. That’s always been my goal, to make good records, write good songs, and get people to hear them. That’s what I’m trying to do. I just want to play. One question I get asked is, how long you been playing? And my answer to that is, without trying to sound glib, but it’s true, “Not long enough.”
View Marty Gunther’s 2021 interview with Tas Cru here:
https://www.bluesblastmagazine.com/featured-interview-tas-cru-2/
Or check out Don Wilcock’s 2018 interview here:
https://www.bluesblastmagazine.com/featured-interview-tas-cru/
Visit Tas’ website at https://tascru.com/
