BILLY BOY ARNOLD

The Blues Soul of Billy Boy Arnold

Produced by Duke Robillard

Stony Plain Records

by Terry Abrahamson 

The first time I saw Duke Robillard, it was like watching a Humphrey Bogart movie play the Blues.  It was 1974. Like a Bogie movie, Duke performed the whole show in black and white. Having to imagine the colors, I saw some that weren’t really there. But that’s the power of Duke Robillard. It must’ve been his hat: maybe not an actual Bogie-wore-it hat, but certainly the one I would’ve worn if I’d been in Casablanca.

L to R: Muddy Waters, Willie "Big Eyes" Smith, Duke Robillard at Paul's Mall, Boston, 1974. Photo: by Terry Abrahamson, reprinted from his book In The Belly of The Blues

I never thought I’d see those colors again. And then, a few nights ago, as my gurney was wheeled into the operating room at Henry’s Swing Club, the lights dimmed and the voice of Pervis Spann cooed “Ladies and Gennemen, it’s Star Time. But first....put your hands together for The Man with the Hollow-Bodied Soul, Duke Robillard.” And the spotlight hit him and lit him and Duke grabbed the mic from the cigarette girl’s tray and, his eyes met mine from beneath that Victor Lazlo brim, and he read my mind. “You don’t believe it’s me.” How could I? After all these years!  So, as the cocktail nurse ran the cord from his Gibson into my I-V port, Dr. Duke sang the name of every person in attendance at every show he’d ever performed, and every color they imagined - which I realized were the long-lost lyrics to “Strollin’ With Bones.”  And yeah, the colors they’d imagined were the colors I’d imagined. But I never could have imagined what happened next.

Swaggering out from behind the red velvet operating room curtain, Miss Anesthesia Jones rolled her good thing to my gurney and explained “Dr. Duke says you need a shiver in your liver. You need some Hayes and Porter in your aorta. We need to transform your spleen to a Duke ‘n Juke machine. But first, we gotta knock you out!” And on Duke’s signal, Miss Anesthesia Jones started her hot Blues drip...and a green glow filled the room: the kinda glow you’d expect to rise on That Great Gettin’ Up Morning when they raise the lid over Blind Willie McTell. A glow like this could only be one thing:  Billy Boy Arnold. In that green suit.  As Duke shouted “All aboard!,” the

door of the O.R. Coal Chute flew open, and Billy Boy’s flocked emerald form sailed onto my gurney in time to blow those first notes just as the ride began: notes exiting the harp as verdant vapors approximating the window of Smokey Joe’s on Halsted. And into the chute we rolled, with that harp riding Billy Boy’s lips like the coaster rode the Fireball rails at Riverview Park. And Smokey Joe’s mannequins did The Swim.

Billy Boy Arnold at Chicago Blues Fest 2014/ Photo: Dianne Bruce Dunklau

I recognized “Coal Man” before the green glow of the Jewtown Jamboree faded in the gurney’s rearview mirror. It was that number from the kid’s fairy tale, the one about the Blues song that waited ‘til its mama was asleep, then took the Cadillac keys, crawled out the window and drove all the way from Robbins, Illinois to Memphis, where East Side Minnie tricked that song into trading the Fleetwood for a jar of enchanted mumbo sauce. In the actual fairy tale, the song never makes it out of Memphis. But leave it to Duke to bring it back alive...that sauce dripping from every horn.

As the gurney took a hard right, the chute poured us out onto 63rd, and there’s Billy Boy’s baby easing her caboose out of One Arm Hill’s two-tone Belvedere.  “The Arm Man,” as the corner boys called him, had barely dragged his rag across the backseat slip cover when the harp hit the fan, with Duke’s Bogie Hat Guitar hot on its heels, and  “I’d Rather Drink Muddy Water” jumpstarted with a full head of all the steam under Billy Boy’s black Nylex collar, and never let up.

At 64th and Maryland, Duke signaled Miss Anesthesia to up the Robo in the cough syrup/moonshine drip and Billy Boy and Miss DNA Bank With The Blue Dress On took it into the alley with “You Give Me Nothing to Go On.” No, that cheatin’ caboose wouldn’t learn, and Billy Boy left her in the Englewood dust, with a proud, infectious “Baby, this sentence may end with a preposition, but the next one ends with a proposition” shuffle.

By the time we turned out of that alley, Billy Boy was in love again, and this one was a winner, descending the steps of the #4 Cottage Grove CTA bus like a Black Satin Slinky, her voice still gravelly from her valedictory address at the commencin’-to-commence ceremony of The Willie Dixon Academy of Weights and Measures.  And Billy Boy and Duke rolled out the Billy Dee Williams edition Shag Rug Twister, and Miss “99 LBs” did the Twizzler shimmy until the gurney blushed and Dr. Duke’s D’Addarios waved the white flag.

We hadn’t even turned onto 79th, but it was clear that Billy Boy’s new squeeze done chased them Blues away, and they weren’t comin’ back. Oh sure, there’s that misty-eyed moment at 71st when “A Mother’s Prayer” opened with a call to swing that gurney ‘round  to the family room entrance at Leak & Sons for the open casket viewing....but then Joe Tex hopped on and turned Mama’s veil into a sweat mop for the rockin’est laundry list of ghetto woes that ever sent rumbles through a dance floor.

At “St. James Infirmary,” as we stopped to check my vitals, Dr. Duke adjusted his Bogie Brim and told Miss Anesthesia to drain the color, and Billy Boy turned a deathbed lament into a Rita Hayworth strip-tease through a Dia de los Muertos diarama.  This was not your daddy’s Bobby Bland hang-yourself-from-the-inside-of-the-closet-door dirge.  In fact, croakin’ ain’t been this much fun since David Bromberg shot that Dixieland speedball into “Dyin’ Crapshooter’s Blues.”

Then it was Code Rhythm and Blue as Bruce Bears’ percolatin’ piano set the table for Mark Earley’s defibrillatin’ bari sax pulse to pump all the color back into the Duke/Billy Boy Soul Surgery Crawl with “Don’t Set Me Free:” an after-hours Ray Charles rave with the Raelettes riding the wave of the Raelungs...or whatever those horns were called.

Next, Duke put the gurney in park and kept the motor running as Billy Boy did a cool Blues walk to the Honey Drippin’ Drive-Thru window to grill Miss Mabel about “What’s on the Menu Mama?”  Yeah, Billy Boy mighta been talkin’ greens ‘n beans, but he’d soon be feasting on those menu specials he read about between the lines.  Sure enough, back in Mabel’s room, as their indigo shadows did an ebb and flow to the wall-melting “Worried Dream,” we knew there was gonna be a clean-up in the produce aisle followed by a hot buttered breakfast in bed.

By the time Billy Boy emerged into the sunrise, they were closing me up, and we slid back into that coal chute, careening from Oscar Brown, Jr. to Slim Harpo to Louie

Jordan before I regained consciousness to that luscious aftertaste from Mabel’s menu,

“Keep on Rubbing.”  I opened my eyes on Duke standing over me, his lip curled into the inevitable Rick Blaine this-is-all-the-smile-you-get, declaring “The operation was a success. How you feelin’?” I told him I was cured on “Coal Man,” but I was not about to tell Brad Hallen, Mark Teixeira, Rich Lataille, Doug Woolverton, Anita Suhanin, Jack Gauthier or the other, aforementioned musical healers to quit. Yeah, I’d been ailin’, but once they started wailin’, The Blues Soul of Billy Boy Arnold was never once failin’ to wrap me in colors no rainbow could ever imagine. It was indeed a miracle cure for any soul. And that’s the truth....in black and white.

Terry Abrahamson won a Grammy by writing songs for Muddy Waters. He helped launch George Thorogood’s career and created John Lee Hooker’s first radio commercial, which are just a few of his accomplishments. Terry also is a playwright and author of the photography book, In The Belly of The Blues – Chicago to Boston to L.A. 1969 to 1983 -- A Memoir.

Visit: www.inthebellyoftheblues.com