Paul Jones’ Sixties Retrouvé

“When the band started we used to get the oldies out of the woodwork, what Dave Kelly referred to as the baby-sitter set. But when I look down nowadays I can hardly see anybody who was old enough to have bought ‘Diddy Wah Diddy,’ er, ‘Doo Wah Diddy’—oh, whatever the damn thing was called!”

Singer Paul Jones’ confusion is understandable. It’s been a long time since he threw himself wholeheartedly into the lifeblood of a band, almost 15 years in fact, and lately he’s as dedicated to the hard-core I> revivalism of the Blues Band as he was in

„ 1965 to Manfred Mann’s rhythmic hits. He’s also one of a few performers who has learned to enjoy his early work as much as the fans still dp, rather than brush it off as an amateur’s effort.

“Oh, I’ve been through that,” he admits sheepishly. “I went right through that whole , period of thinking "that everything I had done was shit. Well, my tastes have changed the same as everyone else’s. Judged by the standards of 1971, the stuff I was doing in 1965 was shit,' I suppose. But now, 1965 sounds a lot better than 1971 does.” His broad mouth breaks into a wide grin, with just a few crinkles at either end reminding theUistener that Jones isn’t too far from entering his third decade in the music business.

Whether lounging in the sun on the'roof of his London management/office, baking in makeup under the hot lights of a television studio as the Blues Band cuts a promotional film, or working out onstage at Trax and Hurrah when the group spends a week showcasing for the labels in New York, Paul Jones looks ridiculously good. One daily newspaper would denigrate him as resembling a gym teacher, its author obviously ill-at-ease observing someone who’s kept his body in line. The arm muscles ripple in contrast with his wiry frame. There’s no trace of the cascading . jowls which are becoming noticable on Mick Jagger, although the two are contemporaries, having toured together in the old days. And Jagger sat watching the Blues Band at Trax, perhaps remembering how much some of the students’ love for rhythm ’n’ blues permanently changed the face of rock.

It’s only been a year since the Blues Band evolved from a one-off experiment to a serious ensemble about to record its second album for British Arista, In an often documented legendary-type tale, Jones rang up former Manfred Mann bassist Tom McGuinness, who had since switched to guitar, and he phoned his old partner, Hughie Flint, to play drums. A few more calls followed until slide guitarist Dave Kelly and bassist Gary Fletcher (the only player not a 60’s veteran) completed the Blues Band lineup. They appeared on the pub circuit, pressed their own album, the Official Blues Band Bootleg Album, and were able to secure their British deal within a few months. Paul Jones, who had built a substantial acting career from his success as the star of the movie Privilege, was yearning to do more with his harmonica than practice riffs at home.

“It wasn’t that I got bored with acting.

You see, I only rang up Tom because I thought it would be nice to p|ay on Sundays, I really did. I didn’t even think we’d stay together. I thought we would just play a few gigs, enjoy ourselves, and that would be that. I was working six nights'a week in a Shakespeare play at the time and I was enjoying that tremendously. But I felt that I did miss getting up onstage and playing my harp, and it looked to me at that point, which was April ’79, as if it would be possible. It seems to me that the punks had prepared the way for us to start doing our kind of music in the clubs. They had demolished all that early 70’s pretentiousness which completely incapacitated me.

“I found myself in a very strange position. I’d actually, if I were a believer, thank God for the new wave thing, because I don’t think people would have accepted a band playing three-chord boogie bashes all night long if it hadn’t been for them. So I feel personally that I owe them a lot. And also, I love the music, I think records like ‘God Save the Queen’ are absolute classics. At the same time, I’m at variance to the extent that I still like a lot of music they would call bland. I even like some disco records, what’s wrong with me?” he mock-wails. Out of respect for Jones’ return to musical integrity, I conveniently forget about the horrific cover Versions he cut of “Pretty Vacant” and “Sheena Is a Punk Rocker,” done as honeyed ballads with lavish instrumentation. “Weird records,” .he says quietly, encapsulating most of his solo output.

Although Paul Jones may be a hero of the ancien regime to many new music fans, there’s certainly nothing overtly fashionable about the Blues Band, outside/ of their devout adherence to a musical form. I mean, Dave Kelly performs in overalls, and Jones points to his sport shirt as if he was a collegiate model. “We’re behind the fashion anyway,” he states, more concerned with how the group’s choice of name will strike Americans than with their appearance. He had mentioned in a British interview how arrogant it was for a quintet of Anglos to appropriate the name of a traditionally American music.

“I think we should change it to A Blues Band,” he ruminates. “Our going to New York is a bit like taking coals to Newcastle. I can hold my head up playing the harmonica in this country, but when I go to the land of Walter Horton and James Cotton, to say nothing of Paul Butterfield and Jerry Portnoy (Muddy Waters’ harpist), I’m in trouble!”

Being a harmonica fan since the days when Brian Jones and Keith Relf brought an exciting rock identity to the little instrument, I ask Jones his opinion of a current favorite, the Geils Band’s Magic Dick, who is probably capable of wall demolition with a particularly pungent solo.' “For me, there’s no better rock player in the world than Magic Dick, but he’s not really the best blues player, just because I don’t think that’s his bag. I never compare people technically. There’s no point because, in the end, what does it matter? Technique often impresses me, occasionally moves me,.and very seldom makes any difference whatever to my actual emotional state. ”

Immediately, I jump in deep water by asking Jones why he took up harp in the first place. After all, the reclusiveness of puffing on a harmonica seems in direct contrast with the outfront nature expected of a lead vocalist. He’s a bit awkward responding to it, and it appears that he hasn’t been asked about this integral part of his musical personality in a long while.

“Frankly, compared to the guitar as an image, it sucks. Well, the sucking is part of it—I’m not merely being silly. There’s an underlying psychological truth, which is that most artists are oral-oriented and performing artists seem to be more so than composers andauthors. And if you’re orally-oriented it’s an instrument you put in your mouth which satisfies you most, and of course the harmonica’s the only one where you suck as well as blow it.” Dr. Freud, get me out of here!

“But there is the fact, and in the end it’s more important, that it sounds to me so like the human voice, much more than a guitar

ever can. And I suppose the instrument that comes next for me would be the saxophone, alto and tenor, because they’re around the range of human voices. The harmonica in particular sounds like a person in some sort of emotional state and that’s wonderful, you can’t beat it.”

As for the harmonica players in the early Stones, Yardbirds, Pretty Things, Them, et al., according to Jones, “a lot of people tended to play just for an extra color, a sort of gimmick, another dimension to the group’s sound, rather than because it was their inevitable, that they had to do. I have to play. No doubt about it. You can stop me singing, but you couldn’t stop me playing.” Strong sentiments from a man whose vocals were praised by the Soho News as having “at least as much influence on Springsteen/Parker/Costello as Mitch Ryder or anyone else. ”

“A lot of harp players do die young. A lot

die of respiratory diseases. I believe it has some deleterious effect on the insides—you take one of your harps and open it, BOY, at the end of an evening and see all that green, all that corroded brass and think, you’ve been sucking that in all night, BOY.” As he speaks so intently about the instrument, Jones’ voice slided away from his usual refined speech pattern into a mock Southern crawl. Fifteen years away from American stages, with only a brief return in 1971 to co-star on Broadway with Jeremy Clyde in “Conduct Unbecoming” has his mouth watering at the prospect of presenting the band to some blueswailing New Yorkers.

Excepting the Inmates’ moderate success with “Dirty Water” and “The Walk,” the receptivity greeting new British rhythm ’ri’ blues bands at home is lacking in the U.S. Jones views certain less than enthusiastic label responses with professional patience. One A&R type sent manager Ray Kennedy a letter stating that he was confident the group could sell half a million, but that wasn’t enough to get them signed. Another much brighter soul earnestly thanked Kennedy for submitting his tape of “the Blues Brothers” before declining. And you wonder why the music business is flat on its ass... \

It doesn’t matter to the Blues Band that at Hurrah on a Tuesday night, for the group’s American debut only 50 people are jumping around instead of 500. They don’t care, in fact they thank the audience profusely when they’re called back for an encore. These 50 are the convinced, some who love r ’n’ b, others who revere Paul Jones. Dead Boy Stiv Bators falls into the second group, and he doesn’t know where to look, at Jones onstage or at another of his idols, Iggy Pop, who’s intently watching the Blues Band and leaping, dancing by himself, headbanging for God’s sake. Pressing to the front of spacious room, the audiences wobbles like a quivering insect, propelled this way and that as the Blues Band mixes oldies like Roy Head’s “Treat Her Right” with a few of their own tunes such as their first single, “Come On In.” It even makes sense, given Manfred Mann and McGuinness-Flint’s massive recycling of early Dylan, for the Blues Band to rip through “Maggie’s Farm,’,’ interpreting it as a metaphor for the current state of their nation.

Paul-Jones’s pop roots live in cheerful coexistence with his mui al purism. I threaten to call this story “From Doo Wah Diddy to Diddy Wah Diddy” but he’s not bothered. “In fact,” he half-jokes, “that was going to be the title of the first half of my autobiography. I’m now in the process of trying to get a critical memoir of the pop and fashion world of the mid-60’s together for on/2 of our newspapers, and if I succeed in doing it, it will eventually be a book. As I said to the guy from this posh Sunday paper when he first asked me: there’s two things you can do with rock ’n’ roll—play it or ignore it. Well, he gave me a reading ust and I was wrong—people can write about it.

“It’s not just enjoying the music that you play. It’s how you look and who you’re annoying.” Paul Jones smiles enigmatically, and I swear his perpetual youth has just been guaranteed for at least another decade.