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thought, ‘what the hell is that?’ Jazz is something I was familiar with when I was three, four, five, six. My brother was ten years older and had a 78s record collection. I was listening to Louis and Bessie and Sidney Bechet and all that stuff when I was really young and then you’d all of a sudden hear Lead Belly… what is that? Muggsy Spanier, the great cornet player came over to our house for dinner, and so jazz was something I understood as human beings of different colours did it, and they did it in New York, which was twenty minutes away.”
“But when I heard Vera Hall singing
Wild Ox Moan it was like, ‘are these people mythical?’ This is before I heard the Anthology, where you just didn’t even know there were civilizations like that. And then all of a sudden I’m ten, eleven, maybe twelve, and then the first R&B starts coming in… with Fats Domino, and we had the doo-wop thing going on which was beautiful. But, the first things that turned me on to the blues were these occasional things. My brother had a Josh White record – it meant nothing to me, it didn’t get to me, it was like ‘show business’. Big Bill Broonzy got to me, and then these other folks, the really deep thing. ‘Whoa, what is this?’… and then Lonnie Johnson.”
“I didn’t like the guitar much, it hurt my fingers… still does when I haven’t played in a while. Much easier time pick-
ing up a clarinet. But the guitar was just a way to get involved. And there’s so many people who are so good at it. After I came back to playing music in the late ’90s, I realised all these people play a lot more notes and it’s a lot easier for them but they don’t think like I think. They’re not going to come up with the same things. I was in the dressing room with Richard Thompson and I played one of my Tennessee Williams things. He turned to me and said, ‘I don’t know what the heck that is’ and I said, ‘that’s the idea, Richard!’ You know… he’d just played Honky Tonk Train on the guitar. I wanted to kill him… he’s so good. But he doesn’t have my mind. I struggle… but I find different things on the guitar. I take great pleasure in Muldaurising things but I’m not a technical wizard.”
Over the years, every gig of Geoff’s I’ve managed to catch, he’s played quite exquisite guitar, but I’ve never seen him play the piano – an instrument that he plays on several recordings.
“Well, I haven’t been doing that in while. I’d like to.”
I mention that blues pianist Walter Davis appears to be a big influence.
“I know. On Broke My Baby’s Heart with Ronnie Barron on the Better Days album, some of those chord structures, at least in the right-hand, I got off of Walter Davis. But then I put some me in there too. All of Better Days did arrangements. Paul Butterfield was great. Paul was a genius. He’s the only guy I ever played with who didn’t need me. He was too good. Better Days wasn’t the best thing he ever did. The first Better Days album is very good, but some of his live stuff, you know, he was cooking it back then… his big bands, he was a killer, man. I might have met Paul Butterfield at Cambridge, but I met him at Newport for sure. And he came up to Cam- bridge, might have had a girlfriend up there, so he was there a lot. He was from Chicago – I never could figure those guys out. He and Mike Bloomfield were the jivi- est two human beings I’ve ever encoun- tered. They would come up with stories, ‘Oh, really, it happened’… I mean? They were the bullshit artists of all time.”
“Butterfield and Bloomfield were the guys who talked Bill Graham into getting reasonable music to San Francisco. They said, ‘You mean you never heard of Otis
Photo: Dave Peabody
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