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Blues
From The Cascade Lounge
Located
on Cleveland's East Side, not far from the neighborhood where rap
superstars Bone Thugs-N-Harmony grew up, the Cascade Lounge is the type
of club that isn't often thought to exist anymore. The folding tables
and wood paneled walls are more basic and functional than high style.
The beer comes mostly in cans and you can't buy it with a credit card.
And if you want food, it's either a hot dog and a bag or chips from the
tiny store-like window counter in the back corner or a foil-wrapped hot
tamale from the self-employed roving vendor who occaisonally stops in
off the street.
Unlike those swanky, sterile nightclubs that simply attempt to
appropriate the look of an old juke joint, the Cascade Lounge is
special because it is the genuine article, a true juke joint in the best
sense of the description, where the real blues still lives and breathes
and thrives, barely touched by musical developments of the past several
decades. For roughly thirty years now (no one seems to remember exactly
how long it's been), the predominantly African-American clientele that
fills the Cascade each weekend has come out to relax, dance, and soak up the down home music played by the club's
star attraction, an outstanding 65 year-old bluesman that everyone at
the Cascade knows as "Guitar Slim."
Born
and raised in the depression-era South, Guitar Slim (his real name is
Nathaniel Savage) grew up in Snow Hill, a rural town thirty miles south
of Selma, Alabama. He worked from the time he was a child.
"We was poor when we was coming up," Slim recalls. "I
worked in the fields for 25 cents a day. I picked cotton. I plowed. I
cut logs. We did it all."
Slim received his first musical experience in church, where he sang as a
child. His grandmother wouldn't allow blues at home, but Slim says he
taught himself to emulate the bluesmen he heard on jukeboxes and
"those old wind up gramophones." Soon he was playing fish
fries around his hometown. "That's where I learned how to play the
lead and the bass on the guitar at the same time," he says.
He left home at the age of thirteen for Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where
he began working construction. At night, he played
the blues, forming a duo that performed under the name "Boogie
Woogie Santa Claus." "We played all over," Slim says.
"Liberty City, Coconut Grove, West Palm Beach." During his
time in Florida, he also met and performed with some of the traveling legends of the era,
including Little Walter, Muddy Waters, and Junior Parker. In 1956, Slim
got married and moved to Cleveland.
He says the name Guitar Slim came to him naturally. Friends had already been calling him "Guitar," and with his tall and
lanky frame, "Slim" fit right along with it. It couldn't have been a
coincidence though, that at that time the extroverted Louisiana
bluesman Eddie Jones, the original "Guitar Slim" (of "The
Things That I Used To Do" fame), was tearing it up from coast to coast.
Slim saw Eddie Jones perform several times in Cleveland before the star's death in 1959 at the age of 32.
"I met him right down there at that
place on 55th, Gleason's," Slim recalls. "He wore all them colored suits (laughs). Crazy
colors! Painted his hair too (laughs). A crazy guy, ahhh, but he could play. He came out of Gleason's and walked right on top of the
cars. Oh yeah, he was funny." It was also in Cleveland, at Gleason's,
that Slim met and was inspired by the legendary Elmore James. "I learned slide just from
watching him," explains Slim. "I only saw him a couple of
times, but I saw what he did and then I just kept working on it until I had figured it out."
Ever since the '50s, Slim has been
steadily performing as often as four nights a week while also working a
day gig as a brick layer, but now that he's semi-retired, he has more
time to concentrate on his music. A commanding vocalist, an overpowering
guitarist and a natural showman, it would seem that it's only a matter of time before Guitar Slim gets "discovered" by the
blues world at large and becomes a star on the national blues scene.
For now though, it's business as usual,
and that means every Friday and Saturday night you'll find Guitar Slim -
backed by his
always in-the-pocket band, the Blues Boys at the Cascade Lounge. The
Blues Boys, anchored by Slim's 31 year-old son, drummer "Little
James" (who has been laying down the beat for his father since the age of eight), are a talented group who have developed a near telepathic
ability to follow every musical curve their sometimes unpredictable leader throws at them. They also back up both the well
known and not so well known Cleveland blues musicians (including Texas Slim, Crazy Marvin, Earl The Pearl, and Wayne Bell) who
are likely to sit in with the band on any given night.
Watching Guitar Slim and the Blues Boys
perform at the Cascade is as much a visual as an aural experience. A
chain of Christmas lights loops around the frame of the Cascade
bandstand to provide the primary stage lighting, and only drummer
"Little James" is really on the stage anyway. The rest of the
band, including Guitar Slim, stand right on the dance floor. When the
blues gets rocking at the Cascade, the bandstand and the dance floor
become a commonly shared, happily crowded space. And Guitar Slim never
fails to draw a crowd.
Asked to explain why his loyal audience
sticks with him week after week, year after year, to hear him play the blues classics
-including "It Hurts Me Too," "Highway 49" and
"Since I Met You Baby" - that make up the bulk of his
repertoire, Guitar Slim explains, "It's just a feeling. Blues tells
a lot about yourself. Every time you play the blues you're telling your life history. I think
a lot of the people love the blues because they came up the same way I did. They came up the hard way too."
(Dan
Bindert)
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