Good Time

Click: Good Time

I posted this before in a different version. This is from Live At Bob’s and I love the whole vibe. My brother Mike holds the fort very nicely on bass, which allows Bill Dwyer to let loose with some great playing. He must be getting sick of me praising him to the sky, but he steps across so many borders in such a stylish way it’s uncanny. On this one he tiptoes between blues and jazz quite nicely. That’s harder than you think—add too much jazz, or the wrong kind, and you sound too uptown. It’s also possible to sound pretentious. Stray too far in the other direction and you might sound like every blues-rock bar band between here and Denver. The song has me playing the role of songwriter as poet. You know you have entered the realm of the poetic when you are buying the blues a drink. I also get to dust off something I never heard a lot of people use down in Nashville, and that’s scream. Nashville is not a screaming type of town— it’s very polite, at least on the surface. That may have made me the best screamer, if only by default.  Allen Toussaint has a beautiful song called From A Whisper To A Scream. Neither extreme means much without the other.

© 2011 John Sieger