Brian Bisesi, an Italian-American guitar player from New Jersey who was part of the Muddy Waters Band from 1978 to 1980 in Out of the Blue shares a very vivid and often rough but real portrait of how life was when on tour with this blues master.
Bisesi, today still a musician and a music writer, recalls hundreds of situations, sets, journeys and incidents that all happened while touring together with many legendary other bluesmen. Like Pinetop Perkins, Guitar Junior, Bob Margolin, Jerry Portnoi, Fuzz Jones, Willie Smith, and lots of other famed musicians Bisesi met either while sharing the same bill or have them sit in a gig. Such as Johnny Winter, Eric Clapton, J.B. Hutto, Willie Dixon, B.B. King, Bobby Blue Bland, Koko Taylor and other blues stars.
For Bisesi, a wild dream became true, when spontaneously asked to sit in with the bad to replace an absent member one night in March 1978; naturally, he accepted, and right there his report on 180 pages begins. Even though his and Muddy Waters’ ways parted after two and a half years, during which the author also was to part-time road manager, driver, right-handy guy, and an intermediary between the band members and the leader, this experience changed his life forever.
Being around Waters and other blues greats, he soon realized that this was a unique experience, not just a job with any old band, but almost some sort of a calling. As “… all the old bluesmen that I was ever around, Muddy included, shared a concern about the future of the music. It was important to them that the blues stay alive. … They looked to the younger players – many of us white guys – to keep the blues alive.”
And almost everything happened on tours in Europe, Canada, Japan and all over the US, from wild parties, to money disputes to racist cops and border agents, dangerous locations, missed gigs and all sorts of problems while on the interstate. For blues historians and music aficionados, such a tour diary is priceless, as Muddy Water, the powerhouse of the Chicago blues scene, passed away in 1983 and the records here show how this inventor, master composer and performer lead his last legendary band, made contracts and reigned over his “family” on the road. And the band was traveling almost nonstop, around 50,000 miles a year. “This was a hard-travelin’ band. A local gig was considered anything under a thousand miles.”
The 43 chapters of the book principally cover the 2.5 years Bisesi was part of the Muddy Waters Blues Band, and basically each section covers one particular show, tour, festival or major event, sometimes on just a few pages, until the sad breakup of the band in 1980.
This is not a scholarly title on bluesmen or their way of life; instead, it is a simple, but highly entertaining travelogue with details of how life in a blues band in the late 1970s was, and it is loaded with anecdotes, surprises and lots of personal information on some of the greatest musicians of that period. The book comes with a foreword by famous blues guitar player Bob Margolin, also member of that legendary outfit. Bisesi gives the full story, as he was actually there, and not just gathered information and impressions from various interviews, concerts or film footage, as is mostly the case with books on exceptional musicians. Naturally, the title is packed with deepest gratitude and respect for the great Muddy Waters, even though he had his bad moods, too, as we learn here.
Review by Dr. A. Ebert © 2024
Brian Bisesi. Out of the Blue: Life on the Road with Muddy Waters. University Press of Mississippi (American Made Music Series), 2024, 204 p.