A few months ago I wrote a
blog about how much I love live music. I wrote about a bunch of
the great shows I’d been to, from Tom Petty to Motorhead, but I left out the
best one.
I’d like to
claim I didn’t include my anecdote about the great and underrated bluesman
Carvin Jones because I was planning on writing a full entry all along, but the
reality is I was drinking whiskey when I wrote that entry, so it’s a small miracle
I even remembered to spell check it.
I met Carvin Jones while deployed
to Tikrit, Iraq. Every year the Army and United Services Organization spend…
well I’m not sure how much… but a lot of cash on entertainment for the troops.
You’ll get a
few big names to come through every year. they get paid crazy amounts of cash to play a few
shows and sign autographs, but on the whole, we usually got journeyman entertainers who either never made
it big, or had their moment in the sun a long time ago.
Do you remember the Gin
Blossoms? That’s ok, neither does anybody else. They had that one song from that one
movie. Yeah, they came out and played a show.
I’m not trying
to badmouth any of the acts that came out to see us, most of them were very
nice to us. (With the exception of one very hypocritical country singer who
makes money by singing about how great the armed forces are, then acts
like a total diva when he visits them.)
I worked crazy hours during that deployment, so I usually didn’t get the opportunity to see these shows, but and I probably wouldn't have gone to most of them anyway.
The few shows I did
see, I attended as a journalist and photographer for my unit.
About 9 months
into my 12 month deployment, I was told I’d be covering a Shaka Kahn Concert
the next night.
I honestly didn’t know who
she was, but after 5 minutes of research recognized her as the singer from 70s
funk rockers Rufas, you remember them, they sang this one. I also learned
she was a pretty successful solo artist in the jazz and R&B realm.
What I found really interesting though, was the fact that in the 60s she was
affiliated with the Black Panther Party… and she was playing for troops
deployed to a war zone. (If you don’t know why this is funny you should either
retake high school history, or re-watch Forrest Gump.)
Anyway, knowing her history I went into her
show figuring I knew what to expect, only when I got there early, looking for an interview, a big black
guy with a Stevie Ray Vaughan hat was doing sound check.
The lady who
handled the celebrities when they visited our base told me he was Carvin Jones,
the opening act, and introduced me.
His energy was
infectious, and after a five-minute interview, where he barely gave me time to ask a question, but flitted from basketball to Buddy Guy to baby back ribs and back again in the matter of 45 seconds, I was
excited to see what the bluesman could do.
“I don’t know if you ever heard of us
before tonight,” Jones said, stepping onto the stage with a swagger. “But we are all going to
jam out!”
And Jam we did.
Carvin blew the roof of the
place, cutting
through Hendrix and Vaughan covers like butter, throwing in a few instrumental
tracks of his own for good measure.
He played one handed, behind his head and waded into the
audience like moses parting the red sea.
Half of his shenanigans I don’t even
know the name for, and he kept it up for an hour strait. When he finally had to
relinquish the stage to Khan you could tell he didn’t want to.
Shaka Khan was pretty good. She
isn’t really my bag, but I’ve got nothing but respect for her voice. A lot of
the older soldiers in the crowd really dug it, and she seemed to have a really
good time, but going on after Jones was kind of like going on after Nirvana. No
matter how good you are nobody is going to be talking about you after the show.
Especially considering Carvin wasn’t
done yet, after Khan left the stage, he came on for an encore, and by encore I
mean another 45 minutes of jamming to the coolest blues I’ve ever heard live.
I just realized that nobody in this last photo looks impressed... THEY HAVE NO SOULS!!!
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