Music and more with claudecat17 (aka Chris Davlin)!

It’s another leftover! I mentioned this guy in the Tiny Moore post a few days ago so it makes sense to foist it now rather than later. I freakin’ love this stuff! Rivers really is a gifted player with some good ideas too, a nice combo. Cool that he used both necks on the doubleneck too. You don’t often hear soloing on a 12 string in this kind of music. On the other hand, this genre is wacky enough that it seems pretty natural.

I discovered this material when I “worked” at the Bop Shop in the early 80s, where I got much of my musical education. If you’re ever anywhere near Rochester, NY make a point of visiting, ideally with money to blow. Tell owner Tom Kohn that Chris, in MD for not much longer, sent you! When I was still there he had the Marsalis family as regular customers…

Here’s the piece. If you play the clip, enjoy! Play the clip!!!

Over the years plenty of guitar players, from Danny Gatton to Allan Holdsworth, have been dubbed “great” and “unknown”. The thing is, usually these guys are fairly successful, having at the very least released material made in actual recording studios, and generally aren’t really all that “unknown”. Today’s subject is a bit different. Though Jimmie Rivers (pretty good bio here, surprisingly) did do a few session dates as a guitarist in the late ‘50s, early ’60s, his “best known”, a term used loosely here, material was recorded on a reel to reel machine supposedly kept in a bathroom at times at the small 23 Club in Brisbane, CA from 1961-64. Now a legend among hard-core music obscurists, the music made by Rivers and his band, the Cherokees, was a decidedly more electrified and swinging than usual brand of “western swing”, with probably a higher proportion of jazz in the mix than typically makes up this odd musical hybrid genre. It’s not well recorded, and the audience reaction seems lukewarm or even completely absent at times, but this is incendiary stuff with amazingly great playing by both Rivers and his steel guitar sidekick Vance Terry, who do the bulk of the soloing on this largely instrumental material.

Western swing itself is an interesting beast as a genre, incorporating fiddles, horns, drums, electrified guitars, even accordions and other oddball instruments into the musical stew. It takes in elements of jazz, blues, country music, Mexican music, ragtime, rock and roll (once that became a thing), and just about anything else you can imagine as an American music form. It really is a wacky mixture, and has produced some great artists over its long history, including of course the legendary Bob Wills, Spade Cooley, and in more recent times, bands like Asleep at the Wheel. The aspect that I find most fascinating and musically exciting is its very early adoption of electrified instruments in the mid-30’s, first steel guitars, but soon thereafter regular electric axes, generally played in a hot-shot, amped-up jazzy style. It’s a fun genre to explore, though I’ll admit that I find a lot of it sorta boring, especially if it ain’t got the hot guitar solos and such like. But I digress…

Jimmie Rivers and the Cherokees, from what little information I can find, were a fixture at this 23 Club in Brisbane, and the aforementioned Vance Terry took it upon himself to record the guys from time to time. Boy am I glad he did. The product of Terry’s efforts didn’t see the light of day as buy-able material until decades later when Western records released the stuff on LP in the late ’80s (I think… that’s when I found it anyway). It’s since been released on CD and is one of those things that’s so great that it stays in print regardless of its insanely small potential audience. Rivers’ greatness as a guitarist is mainly responsible for this, though Terry’s pretty awesome too. Before I go into more detail on that, the rest of the band appears to be pretty standard drums and bass, maybe a rhythm guitar (hard to tell with the lo-fi quality), with horns added at times and occasional vocals. Again, it’s mostly instrumental, almost all guitars, and mostly fairly up-tempo. If it weren’t for the steel guitar and lack of horns this might be dubbed jazz, if we’re gonna split hairs. A personally interesting side-note here is that Brisbane is not far from where I was born, in ’61. These guys may have been on stage (if they even had one) tearin’ it up as I was entering the world mere miles away.

So, more on the music itself… One thing I find interesting is that Rivers apparently used a double-neck guitar (built for him by Gibson) for many of these recordings, and you can actually hear that at times. One neck is a 12-string, which itself is bizarre, as, aside from Lonnie Johnson, nobody uses a 12-string for hot guitar soloing. But Rivers does, and it sounds amazing, especially on “Jimmie’s Blues”, which contains maybe my favorite guitar solo of all time. It’s at least one of the best constructed; a thing of beauty as it builds, every note perfectly placed and not overtly flashy, to a logical and satisfying conclusion. It begins at around 1:45 in if you’re scoring at home, and who doesn’t love doing that? There’s a lot of Charlie Christian in Rivers’ playing, both in his wonderful tone and in the playing itself, which, if anything, is at once more effortless and adventurous sounding (at times) than Christian. He certainly isn’t breaking any new ground artistically, but man could he play fluently, and in a style that’s fun and easy to listen to. There’s maybe an added allure from the relatively poor recording quality. You sorta feel like you’re there amidst the Raleigh and Lucky Strike smoke and guys wearing big belt buckles and cowboy hats, with their wives or girlfriends in their beehives and uncomfortable shoes, possibly removed for dancing. It’s an aura thing.

I’m not gonna go nuts with the embedding “video” thing here, but I will include “Jimmie’s Blues”.

This stuff wasn’t on Youtube until recently, when yours truly decided to create a “channel” there for the sole purpose of making this music available to more people. The fact is, I exchange music emails with some people, wherein we foist Youtube links on each other, and it pissed me off that this stuff wasn’t there. I now have a whopping 3 subscribers to my “channel”, all without clue one as to why I need to have a channel at all just to post a few songs, but that’s neither here nor there. What you can do if you like this stuff is just do a search on Youtube using the band name and they’ll come up. Look for the familiar picture of Jimmie and his double-neck. In fact, here’s a link to my channel, which might be an easier way to get to this stuff.

That’s all folks. Really trying not to be quite as loquacious this time. I’ve meant to write bout this guy for a while now, so I’ve finally done so. Please, if you have any interest in guitar playing, western swing, jazz, or any sort of American roots music, give this stuff a try. The recording quality really isn’t that bad as a whole, though you can hear folks’ conversations at times. Consider it a fun exercise in time travel. Take the wayback machine to the San Francisco Bay Area, circa 1961, and hear some great music and maybe meet a baby named claudecat along the way. Thanks for reading! I bet this one gets almost no hits or comments, but do I care? I do not. Well, maybe a little.