Columnist Jerry Fink: Blues travelers land at Railhead

Friday, June 8, 2001 | 8:45 a.m.

Jerry Fink's lounge column appears on Fridays. Reach him at jerry@ lasvegassun.com or 259-4058.

Blues are the facts of life set to music, said the late Willie Dixon, a Chicago musician who was called the poet laureate of blues.

"That's so true," blues guitarist Tinsley Ellis said one recent Thursday night. "Blues is equally happy and sad."

Ellis was about to take the stage for the free, weekly Boulder Blues series at Boulder Station's Railhead nightclub.

The series began four years ago as a Monday night event for people to have something to do when football season ended. But the series took off and it was switched to Thursdays so it could continue year-round. Blues night was the brainchild of Judy Alberti, Station Casinos' vice president of entertainment.

"We have tried local jazz and country, but they have never worked for us," Alberti said. "We decided to book national touring musicians. The national touring acts for blues seemed to work. They can tag us onto a weekend date somewhere else. It works well on Thursday because they can easily get to their weekend engagements."

Many of the best blues artists in the country perform at the Railhead at least once a year.

"We try to keep it fresh," Alberti said. "No act performs here (on blues night) more than two times a year."

Blues fans know the names of most of the musicians, such as Clarence Gatemouth Brown and Rob Piazza, who have played at the Railhead where fans heard them for free.

And of course Tinsley Ellis, recognized as one of the elite of the Southern blues rock scene. The Atlanta resident is identified with Southern blues, but he says the regional blues lines are becoming blurred.

"The geographic blues sound (such as Southern, New Orleans, Chicago) is breaking down because of things like MTV and cable radio," Ellis, 44, said. "When I got started in the late '60s there definitely was a different (blues) sound around (regions of) the country."

Ellis knew he wanted to be a musician when he was 7 years old and watched the Beatles on "The Ed Sullivan Show."

"I saw that excitement, the guitar twanging and the girls screaming and the guys shaking their hair," he said. "I always liked that twanging guitar sound. (The show) just put it all in perspective for me."

He knew he wanted to be a blues musician at age 14 when he saw B.B. King perform at a south Florida nightclub that was turned over to teenagers (no alcohol served) in the afternoons.

Ellis sat next to the stage.

"I had never been in a nightclub before," he said. "The shiny bottles, the lights, the waitress and things made an impression. I was not just introduced to the blues, I was introduced to the lifestyle."

Ellis recalled King singing and playing the guitar and the instrument's 'E' string breaking.

"He kept singing, and as he sang he changed the guitar string and came right in on time," Ellis said. "That's hard to do."

King tossed Ellis the broken string and, like a fish, the teen was hooked.

Since climbing to the top of the blues scene, Ellis has opened for King many times.

"He's like a holy man," Ellis said.

Ellis, who recently signed a multirecord deal with Telarc in Cleveland, is so in awe of King and other blues musicians that he refuses to call himself one of them.

He says he's a rock 'n' roller who does the blues.

"Anybody who denies the roots of blues being very much of an African-American experience, they are really missing the point," Ellis said. "Who am I to compare myself to John Lee Hooker and B.B King?

"They have labored a lifetime doing the music. So I just go ahead and declare myself a blues rock artist. To me, really, when white people play blues it's blues-rock, almost always. There are a few exceptions. But for me, my music owes as much to Eric Clapton and Duane Allman as it does to Freddie King and Elmore James.

"I feel like an imposter if I try to come on as a 1961 ghetto African-American from Chicago. I mean, I'm a surfer from Florida for God's sake. I'm a keg-party jammer."

Lounging around