Music and more with claudecat17 (aka Chris Davlin)!

I’ve been thinking for a while about what to write about for this, the very first post here on a blog that will hopefully last a while. If it never becomes more than a place for me to unleash opinions that’d be enough really, but I do hope to connect with people, find common ground, spark interest in some of the things about which I care deeply. Not sure exactly what this will become, if anything, but I’m open to all possibilities.

I imagine I’ll be writing mostly about things related to music. I’ve been a guitar player since age 14 or so, played professionally for a while in the 80s, and have some great road stories. But I’m also very much interested in other aspects of music including the histories of various genres, guitars themselves and the history of instruments in general, and many things unrelated to music, like vintage cartoons and roller coasters, old time radio comedies, comedy in general and its history, cats, unhealthy foods, various substances, etc.

My perspective probably isn’t all that unique for someone my age – 65 now – but I’ve always skewed older than my age in terms of cultural affinity. I was raised by Beatles records and hippie parents who moved the family east from the bay area to western NY when I was 6, which began quite an adventure that continues to this day.

It was an interesting era I grew up in musically. I was just on the cusp of that change in the early 70s that saw AM radio/top 40 pop music change drastically, and to my mind for the worse. The creeping onslaught of disco, punk and other corporate sludge was already underway. I kept listening to my favorites from the records we had in the house, mainly the Beatles still, some Jackson Browne, Van Morrison, Elton John while he was still bearable, and Stevie Wonder.

When I started buying my own records it was pretty embarrassing as I think back. Southern rock was a very big thing at the time and it wasn’t disco or punk, it had a bit of blues in it occasionally, and the guitar playing was generally at least interesting. I liked the first two Allman Brothers albums a lot, but that led me down a path that eventually had me buying Marshall Tucker Band albums, which were weird enough to be fun – they had a flute player! – and even the Outlaws, who I find it difficult to listen to at all now. Every few years I’ll play “Stick Around For Some Rock and Roll” and shudder at the vapidity of the lyrics, the glossy corporate stench of the overproduced group vocals.

But they had THREE guitar players! That was one better (I think?) than Lynyrd Skynyrd, who I never much cared for. I wonder if their amps went to 11? I can still name at least two of the Outlaws guitarists. And to this day when the big long series of guitar solos starts on “Stick Around…” I realize once more that it’s all still in my head. Even as I write this I can hear it! I loved it then, and it does have its moments. But can’t I get rid of that and insert some more Charlie Parker? So far the answer is no…

My main loves genre-wise have always been blues and jazz and ragtime, that whole continuum that stretches back as far as you want to take it, to before the transatlantic slave trade even began. I’m interested in the whole story, every detail. I want to understand how it all evolved, mostly because it’s given me so much joy. What started as a love for acoustic blues evolved to include everything else that people of African descent did musically once they were here in the new world. I firmly believe that this music as a whole, and it really is one big thing in many ways, is America’s greatest gift to the world, to history, to the ether of space/time/consciousness. If you can read you know it’s not “Democracy”, whatever that’s supposed to mean anymore. Not recently, and maybe not ever… It’s always been bad for far too many groups of people, and intentionally so.

Forgive me as I delve more deeply into my childhood years in an idyllic small town, but it’s part of the origin story. I can mark my early childhood by which Beatles album had just come out, including a strong positive reaction to “Tomorrow Never Knows” at age 5. I got it! Weird noises, backwards shit, the singer sounding like a voice from elsewhere, it all made perfect sense to me, and I already loved the band and had fully ingested their entire catalog including singles not on the albums. I remember driving the patrons of the local pizza parlor crazy by playing “The Inner Light” incessantly, a tune I still love. At the time I was a big George fan, maybe just to be contrarian. It’s weird now to remember things like the family debate over who sang “Lady Madonna”. The consensus was Ringo!

And very early on my dad, who was a media professor at the local college, SUNY Geneseo, and ran the radio station, would gently aim me towards better music. I was a big fan of the Monkees like every other kid at the time, and so I wanted their albums. Normally dad could bring home anything from the station but in this case he brought home a Lovin’ Spoonful album, the last good one, and after initial disappointment I became a huge fan of them too, to almost the same degree as the fabs, who were starting to get too weird even for me. To this day I’m not a fan of the “White Album”. The poster with the naked pictures and all that random shit (Yoko!) genuinely frightened me!

I began to survey the musical landscape a little more thoroughly, mainly through AM radio, top 40 hits, many of which were great! Motown, Stax, even the weird songs like “Timothy” by the Buoys, which involved cannibalism and was therefore a huge seller to 10 year old boys. There was also “D.O.A.” by Bloodrock, another very gory tune aimed at my demographic. It was a trend! I wasn’t too big on those but there was still plenty of great stuff on the top 40 stations. I remember really loving Gary Puckett and the Union Gap at maybe age 8, and there were always strange genre experiments hitting the charts too, like the Edwin Hawkins Singers or Melanie. It was a rich musical stew entering my head…

As I got older I became interested in guitar like any other music loving kid at the time. By 7th grade I was into Derek and the Dominos and the Allman Brothers, and I started asking for a guitar not long after that. First one was a cheap Harmony flattop from family friend Buzzo’s music store on Main street. Then a very nice Guild D-35, the best acoustic I ever owned and the guitar I learned to play on.

In my senior year of high school I took all my Regents exams while stoned, intentionally. I aced them all. My social studies essay was on ragtime and how I thought it was being classified incorrectly by the people at Billboard magazine, the chart keepers at the time. Ragtime had had a moment 4-5 years earlier when the movie The Sting was released and won awards. The soundtrack was listed on the classical music charts, mainly because it was on a classical label and played by classical people. I had the records and loved them, the solo piano stuff mainly – Joshua Rifkin especially. I was even trying to play some of it on guitar. Anyway, that essay got me a 100 on the exam, one of several 100s that day.

My point here is that once again I was 4-5 years behind musically and culturally, and I doubt many of my peers were reading “They All Played Ragtime” – one of the more definitive genre histories ever written, or Mezz Mezzrow’s insider story of early jazz and weed, “Really The Blues”. I was becoming more obsessed by the day! I began to get rid of the rock crap and replace it with more blues and ragtime, even some bluegrass and jazz. I was into David Grisman well before I knew much about jazz. Out with the Frampton and in with the Blind Blake!

One year, at maybe 15-16, I got Blake’s entire catalog on LPs – on Biograph records! – for Christmas. I must have gotten the info and given it to mom. It was the best Christmas ever! Even better than the year we three boys got Sesame Street puppets, which mom had carefully posed on the couch to be seen first when we all flew downstairs. I’d peeked already and was a little disappointed mom chose Bert for me. Ernie or Cookie Monster would have been better, but I rolled with it. To this day I have a bit of Bert in my personality, a bit cynical, lacking self confidence, obsessive about lots of things, etc. I’m pretty happy go lucky now but that’s only happened recently.

Anyway, I was always 4-5 years out of step with the times even as a teen. I was deep deep into what they called “country blues” at the time, which just meant blues played on acoustic guitars by a single human, rarely with any accompaniment but their own guitar and maybe a harmonica or kazoo. That encompassed a lot of diverse music, from the “ragtime” blues of Blind Blake to Robert Johnson and Charley Patton to Lonnie Johnson and all the rest of the pioneers that were put on shellac during the second wave of the 1920s blues recording boom.

My absolute favorite then and to a large extent even now was/is Arthur “Blind” Blake, a truly astonishing guitar player that could do things with his thumb that nobody has ever been able to decode fully. “West Coast Blues” is just a magnificent bit of guitar wizardry that bounces along with some pretty advanced (and extremely musical!) bass technique but also shows off some fancy chord changes more related to jazz than ragtime, plus some very cool chord substitutions.

Around that same time I discovered another tune, Bix Beiderbecke’s “At the Jazz Band Ball”, recorded in 1927-8, that became a staple of my everyday listening and stayed there. It was yet another LP that dad had laid on me or left with mom post-divorce. I found it on my own. I’ve come to realize that dad likely relied on his students’ knowledge for any music he’d hand me that wasn’t Steely Dan or the Who. We always had access to thousands of records because of him though, in literally any genre you could name. The only things he couldn’t bring home were what got played a lot, the popular stuff, which was of no interest to me.

Dad was pretty cool at the time, still pretending to be a hippie and still trying to convince mom to give it another try after the divorce that moved us from small town bliss to suburban nightmare in one very brief summer of very bad things. He literally picked me up from my last day of 6th grade in his yellow VW Beetle and drove us across country non-stop until we got to Salt Lake City, our last and only stop before we got to the bay area for the funeral of my grandmother, which I didn’t attend for some reason. He was probably addicted to speed but I was 12 and oblivious, though I was well aware of my folks’ other proclivities, the weed and acid and whatever those cans under the sink had been for. For a short while there were pot plants growing the breakfast nook, a decent sized room off the tiny kitchen of the 200+ year old house we lived in, now with a historical plaque affixed to the front, like every house on Second street.

Anyway, suburban life was absolute hell for skinny little long haired me, and I just withdrew into music. Soon I’d figured out that I wanted to learn guitar, but not just that. No, I needed to play fingerpicking style, immediately! I honestly can’t recall now what exactly inspired me to be that specific but it probably involved the Rolling Stone classified ads section and some dad-provided records. I got very much involved with this tiny label that specialized in fingerpicking acoustic guitar records that came with these tablature booklets that spelled out every note for you. I probably had a few dozen of those albums at the time, though the tablature was never used, just my ears and fingers. I’d order them direct from California, home of all things good and happy and NOT suburban Rochester, which I still hated a lot.

It took me a couple years before I began to find my people at school and make actual friends, but I did, and one was a great drummer already (another was the center on the basketball team). By the end of high school my drummer friend Mike was doing sessions and shit, appearing on records even – a real prodigy.

I eventually got pretty good at the fingerpicking and by the time I was out on my own I was playing electric a bit and inhaling brand new (to me) swaths of music thanks to new friends met at the open mic nights I was now frequenting regularly. I got into Little Feat, Ry Cooder, David Lindley and lots more blues, filling in the gaps to now include all the Chess stuff and much more.

Then I started listening to Friday night FM radio, the college station WRUR, which had extremely great shows that are still running to this day, spotlighting both blues and soul/R&B/funk/jazz. I was pumping music into my head constantly (I had no TV!), all stuff that was new to me and that I LOVED. I discovered “jump blues”, the horn based raucous stuff that would eventually get co-opted and sanitized for the white folks as “rock and roll”. To this day guys like Wynonie Harris and Tiny Bradshaw are regular listening. And Joe Turner! I’m pretty sure I “met” him once in a club near the end of his life, but it was one of those nights that was/is a blur for various reasons. It may have been a dream…

So I was really getting an education from those two radio shows, but it kicked into overdrive when I found out about the greatest record store ever to exist (it’s also still around!), the Bop Shop, conveniently located within walking distance of my second, slightly less shitty apartment. I quickly insinuated myself into the periphery of that place, spending my Sunday afternoons there and even “working” there for a time. Tom Kohn, the owner, along with the two radio guys, Scott Wallace and Doug Curry, were my biggest influences, in music at least. Together they helped me figure out what I liked and didn’t like, and man oh man did I like a LOT of what they were showing me. It was just a magical time! I even got to fill in for each of them, my only radio experience. I still have the tapes of my shows, which are embarrassingly naive, with too obvious choices and an earnestness that’s a little much…

I eventually got decent enough on electric to play in bands, even get paid for it at times. I bought a Fostex four track – the first of its kind I think, the X-15 – and wrote some bad songs, recorded them badly, and was just spending every waking hour absorbing music. I had my own little band that practiced weekly but was pretty terrible, just a couple friends who weren’t great at music but wanted to be. Poor Ken the drummer couldn’t play a shuffle to save his life… Bass player Greg had the basement and a very cool vintage Ampeg bass and amp though, so that was awesome. Thanks Greg! His family was absolutely stunning, and left us alone mostly out of self-preservation

Most importantly I was still friends with that drummer from high school, Mike Plouffe (pronounced Ploo-fay, hilariously – we called him Puff) who had now veered away from his beloved jazz fusion noodling records into my territory, playing with the same folks I was at least trying to play with. He introduced me to another guy I hung out and played with a lot, Steve Grills, a fine guitarist doing a lot of what I was trying to do but often better, though not always. The fact that I could fingerpick and never used picks at all was my gimmick, and he couldn’t do that quite as well. We were sort of friendly rivals, he the one with the confidence and pouting Elvis-like good looks, me the scrawny one with the bad teeth and hair, dressed ridiculously – I was into these collarless flannel button down shirts for one thing… I was enthusiastic and trying hard but I was never very sure of myself.

These were the times I look back on with the most fondness, the learning the ropes years. It wasn’t long before it started becoming not as fun. I’d end my years of playing for money in a Stevie Ray Vaughan tribute band led by Steve’s brother Tom, a whole lot different from Steve. Tom was great at playing in that hard rockin’ white boy blues way. We did Hendrix tunes and all the things your typical white boy blues band of that time would play. We even played George Thorogood tunes, which was about as far as I was willing to go in that direction – no offense to fans of the Delaware Destroyer, one of the weirdest nicknames ever. He destroyed my desire to play his crap ever again, that’s for sure! I was in it for the money now…

One of the few fun parts about that band was that there was a great drummer, John Cafer (pronounced Schaeffer but spelled close to what I typed), who turned me on to NRBQ, still one of my favorite bands ever. And because Tom was such a bad singer he’d give me a little set every gig where I’d get to do my tunes, which at the time included an NRBQ song, a Little Richard song, and maybe an Elvis if we had the bass player with the standup bass. As time goes on here I’ll share a hilarious yet harrowing tale about that guy.

I wasn’t a bad singer at times, and I could really get people going with “My Baby Left Me” with that bass player, Andy. I have a pretty low range but my singing idols were Lowell George mainly, and any soul singer you could name. I loved them all, the Stax guys especially, but also Motown and the more obscure stuff like James Carr and Clay Hammond. Soul was it for me for a few years, until I’d heard it all, or close to it.

I guess I should wrap this up. Obviously I didn’t have much of a plan when I sat down to write but I guess a meandering summary of my musical background will do. I have something much more specific in mind for next time, which could be very soon knowing me. I’m a long winded guy, for many reasons. Mainly it’s that I’ve lived for decades in near isolation from anyone that gives a shit about any of the above, another tale for another day.

I’m just bursting with music knowledge and enthusiasm that I know will improve the lives of millions, maybe even put an end to the mange for good. Did I mention I’m a comedy nerd too? They’ll get better – I hope! Remember, I had no TV during the height of the “Saved By the Bell” era so I’m working with a handicap here.

I’ll do one last paragraph in which I’ll share where my mind has been at its happiest lately, which is comedy related. I’ve finally discovered the Smartless podcast and have become addicted. If you’ve heard it you’ll know why. The guest names alone are insane. McCartney, Letterman, Spielberg, etc. And the best ones are often people I’ve barely heard of! It’s just plain fun when you can find something that’s both hilariously funny AND educational. I’ve laughed, I’ve cried, I’ve gotten goose bumps several times. Highly recommended, especially if you liked Arrested Development. If you didn’t? I hate to drive away traffic on the first day, but as the kids say, GTFO. Or letters to that effect.

Yours sincerely,
claudecat17

PS: my name as rendered above can be used to reach other parts of my empire, from the less than lucrative Ebay guitar “store” to the old and very baseball-heavy tumblr blog from the mid-teens. There’s a Youtube channel, with actual songs I actually recorded in like 1983-4 on that Fostex X-15. They’re extra embarrassing but have occasional somewhat-less-terrible bits. There’s a reason I’m not linking to anything here… I’m using this here thing as a fresh start.

But you can find the old crap if you try. If anyone’s wondering, Claude Cat was a Chuck Jones cartoon character, often seen clinging to the ceiling in terror, that got no respect. Not from mice, not from little yappy dogs, not even from Wikipedia. Last time I looked there STILL wasn’t a Wiki page for him, yet every other WB minor player has had one for years. Nasty Canasta, a one ‘toon villain character, gets a wiki page, but Claude gets bupkus. I keep track of this shit! The good Claude cartoons are out there now – they weren’t always. Terrier Stricken and No Barking are the ones you want, from the early 50s but still with that late 40s energy. Very tempted to link, but no…

That’s my favorite era, the post-war 40s. All the good stuff started happening then, not in the 60s. Nobody noticed for decades, but it all started right after WWII. Read up on the 1948 Cleveland baseball team that won it all with not one but TWO players of African descent, barely remembered today even by hard core baseball nerds. Everyone just knows Jackie Robinson, maybe Larry Doby, but what about Satchel Page, who pitched in World Series games in front of record crowds of 80,000+?

And 17 is just my favorite number, to complete the exposition. It’s green! I do have whatever they call that – synesthesia is it? All letters, numbers, words, sounds, have colors for me. My favorite color is yellow, deep yellow like the Simpsons – I had a guitar I refinished that color, recently sold on Ebay for less than it should have after an auction that attracted just one bidder – a very Ebay experience.

They’re like the Walmart of online shopping it seems. Huge audience, made up of lots of less than gifted potential buyers, many of whom can barely communicate, using an assortment of slang and unintelligible “words” that bring to mind the citizens of the future as depicted in Idiocracy, still one of my favorite movies along with Raising Arizona and pretty much any Coen brothers or Christopher Guest movie.

I’ll be listing things on Reverb once the remaining Ebay guitars sell… Would it kill you to buy a nice yet cheap guitar? I’d posit that it’s a non-fatal process in most cases, so take a look! There’s even a few non-guitar items – a few old monitors and a very nice winter jacket. Every dollar that goes to me is a dollar NOT controlled by a corporation or a billionaire. I’ve recently become a thousandaire after a lifetime of ramen and Chef Boy-Ar-Dee. He was a real person (Ettore Boiardi) btw, well worth a trip to Wikipedia. Without him we might have never learned about spaghetti and meatballs or Beefaroni! The first celebrity chef, and kind of a war hero too for sending so many cans to soldiers, who came home craving “Italian” food. At least it’s better than Spaghetti-os. Uh-oh indeed!

See y’all next time, and thanks for reading!