Elvin Bishop Grows Up (Finally)

Elvin Bishop Grows Up

(Finally)

by Tom Dupree

"I'm the goose that laid the golden egg around here," says Elvin Bishop as he digs into his Macon, Georgia cafe meal. "I'm doin' real good." And although Top Forty Smash is an unusual role for Paul Butterfield's former Pigboy Crabshaw, it's here and you'd best deal with it.

Elvin has written a song, "Fooled Around and Fell In Love," which he recorded on his third album for Capricorn Records, Struttin' My Stuff. Like two of his previous single releases, this one picked up some initial interest from radio stations. But "Fooled Around" wouldn't quit. The forceful ballad, as sung by Elvin's new lead vocalist, Mickey Thomas, started gaining momentum and kept it up until it became only the second gold single in the history of Capricorn Records (The first: Jonathan Edwards' "Sunshine."). The significance is not lost on Elvin, who is an extremely intelligent man.

" 'Fooled Around' is already on two of those collections on TV. One's a sound-alike, and one is our version. But here's what will kill you, man. I will take all those .things, but I'm watching the Dodgers and the Giants baseball game come in, and while they're giving the warmups and last night's scores and the pitchers and all that, the jerk playing the organ starts in on 'Fooled Around.' I lost it then, man.

"I wrote that song four or five years ago, and I never was able to sing it well enough, and there was nobody singing in my group who could do it to my satisfaction until Mickey tried it. It was just a throw-in on the last album. We needed a little bit more time."

And now, Elvin's a hit, and he's ready with his fourth album for 'Corn, Hometown Boy Makes Good. Like the other records for his Georgia-based label, Hometown Boy emphasizes the eclecticism that Elvin's found ever since forsaking his Paul Butterfield Blues for the cowboy-hatted hellraising of his Tulsa, Oklahoma past. The Bishop sense of humor is there, with a reggae version of "Twist and Shout." And there's another hitbound ballad in "Spend Some Time," which may well be on your radio (This man has made a gold record! Elvin Bishop!) by the time you read this. But it's EB's boozed footstomping that's the name of the game, and that's what Hometown Boy delivers most of.

"I tell you, I don't like to stand up in front of an audie;nce and play stuff they don't want to hear," he says* "I have a wide range of interests in music, and I flatter myself that I can play a few different things pretty well. You gotta look at what the people are interested in and what you're basically interested in, and the point where they interact. That's where you gotta concentrate on for the time being. I don't see where that's moving backward or prostituting yourself. I can sit down and jam with musicians whenever I want to, or just sit in my kitchen, at home, and get my satisfaction that way."

Elvin's in Macon for the annual Capricorn summer barbecue, this year's marked with the much-heralded appearance of Phil Walden buddy Jimmy Carter, and also with the demise of the Allman brothers Band, long the label's main moneymaking proposition. Now, the rumors of the band's death are so up front that a splinter group, Sea Level, is playing for the assembled revelers (and well), though not yet signed to Capricorn. It is weirdness, and it's not just from the Secret Service men walking around with superserious expressions and tiny earphones stuck in their ears. It's plain weirdness. The label's big acts now, as far as dollars and cents are concerned, must be the Marshall Tucker Band—and Elvin Bishop. Imagine. A real star/

I hope this record sells... I'm definitely tired of slidin' through life on my good looks.

"The Brothers were Capricorn for a while," Elvin says. "People feel uncomfortable when they can't attach a symbol, a real heavy identity, to something." That's from a man who used to be known as a real good 12-bar bluesman, even by Capricorn prexy Walden, before Richard Betts bent his ear and laid a Bishop demo on him.

But Elvin, or Pigboy, had made quite a dent in the ears of many young music fans in his days with Butterfield. Time was when the Butterfield Blues Band and the Blues Project were the only electric groups that one listened to. "We got you away from Peter, Paul and Mary," Elvin says.

"I think Butterfield was a really heavy pioneer in music; a lot of people don't know where he is today. I don't think he's gotten the recognition he deserves. There's so much luck in the timing of the music business—how you get rewarded. Look at a group like Ten Years After, which came along not playing as well as the Butterfield Band did, sort of bastardized blues, and they made millions. That's what people wanted to hear then.

"It occurred to me after about five ye&rs in Chicago that I didn't grow up on no plantation in Mississippi and had never picked any cotton, so maybe it was a little silly to restrict myself to that kind of music. So when I wrote songs, instead of making them come out bluesy, I'd just let them come out how they wanted to. It sorta got me closer to my natural self."

So on to Fillmore Records and a couple of albums that didn't really turn out the way they had gone in. Then to a small, independent label best known for its "southern" diskings. This National Merit Scholar from Tulsa, Oklahoma fit right in. "Capricorn is a bit provincial, and a lot of times things may be done emotionally that don't really make good business sense. But the organization has been good for me. I figured I'd probably have a hit single one time or another. I just didn't think it would be this one. Matter of fact, I wouldn't even have picked it.

"I'm writing a lot of songs that need a real virtuoso singing voice, which God knows I don't have, so with Mickey I'm catching up on a lot of tunes I've had laying around that only he can do justice to. Just songs that I wrote that I can only hear sung by a hell of a singer."

It takes a change in attitude to pull all of this off, at least in the way you are perceived by the music-buying public. For Elvin, it's a looseness on stage, the idea that we're all only here for a party anyway. Songs that extoi the virtues of various alcoholic concoctions and attendant states of bliss. Ol' Bishop's band playin' that lowdown funk.

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"I don't see what connection 'taking yourself seriously' has to making better music. Sometimes it can be a real detriment. I think all the people I was involved with are better musicians now— they've had better experience in life, their technical skills are a lot more together.

"But as far as music in general is concerned, I don't know. That Butterfield thing happened during a weird kind of transition period. Right now, we're sort of floating along in some sort of mainstream, as I see it; it seems like the media's got a lot more comprehensive grasp on things than it did then. You don't see any giant steps happening in pop music now. Whenever the media sniffs out any kind of trend beginning to happen, they kind of filter it in until it blends in with the rest of the culture. Things like reggae, and socalled 'Southern rock.'"

At the latter, Bishop is a past master. In Macon this year, as he had the years before, Elvin participated in the annual jam at a local nitery, Uncle Sam's. This year's soiree featured Bonnie Bramlett, Dicky Betts, Chuck Leavell, and members of the band on the bill, delighted and newly signed to Capricorn, a bunch called Stillwater that was a Macon favorite but was now getting its taste of Marathon Jam and clearly loving it. This was the jam off of which Elvin kicked Martin Mull two years ago.

"I didn't know who he was. Toy Caldwell, a real good buddy of mine, was playing real loud that night. He let his amp get out of control, and I thought Mull was the one that was so loud. I kept telling him to turn it down. Finally he showed me his guitar; the volume was on zero. I told somebody, 'Get rid of this turkey. He can't play no fuckin' guitar.' I didn't know who he was. So last year, when we were in Nashville, he was playing. I was gonna apologize to him. I'd heard some of his records and I liked his stuff. When we got in to see his show, he saw us and went into this thing, 'Now, for those of you who missed the Elvin Bishop show tonight, here's how it went,' and he started doing these things with his slide . . . We loved it."

Boogying and partying and on the road. Jamming after hours and walking into clubs to see somebody else play. Is it getting old for a man who's been there longer than most of us have been listening?

"I been doing this for-fifteen years, and basically I'm getting a little tired of the road. I enjoy playing wherever I play, but it's the mechanics, the inbetween shit, the weird schedule and disruption of your rest, that gets you down. It's double for me right now because I've been doing it for so long, and also I have something to contrast it with. I have a nice home life, a real sweet old lady, a nice house with a little studio and a little garden outside, a lot of friends and fishing buddies, so it's an either-or thing right now. I look at that and say, 'Hell no, I don't want to go on the road if I don't have to.'

"I can go sit in a club any time I want to—at home or in another town—if I get the urge to play in a small place. But right now, the more spare time I have, the better I like it.

"I'm a late blossoming flower. I'm kind of slipping from childhood into feeling like an adult. That might seem like a little late, but the fact remains that where I just wanted to booze it up all the time, now I'm thinking about setting some things up for myself, which isn't like me, but I guess it's gotta happen."

And with "Fooled Around"—and hopefully, some stuff off the new record—it just might happen. Let's face it, Elvin's made it into the ball parks. He's got more confidence in this next record than in anything he's yet done. It's being produced, as was Struttin' My Stuff, at Criteria in Miami by Allen Blazek and Bill Szymczyk.

"I hope this record sells," Elvin says, "because I'm definitely tired of slidin' through life on my good looks."

The hometown boy has made good, and his fourth helping of music is without a doubt his most anxiously awaited LP yet. The usual Bishop subtlety shows itself on the cover, a photo of a wildly grinning young man in a cowboy hat, carrying heavy sacks of money into his local bank. "First decent cover I've had," he says. "That's worth something right there."

He's finished with his meal now, and he's congratulating the waitress on the vegetable soup. Thinks he might have another bowl for dessert. Somehow, it looks like everything's working out for the hometown boy down irr Macon. "I'm gonna have a really good cover next time too," he says. "I'm gonna wait until I catch a really big catfish and I'm gonna pose with it for the album cover."

The food's gone and the Braves game is on. "The blood's gone from the brain into the stomach. I'm mentally helpless right now. Let's get out of here." And we're gone.