This week on Time Signatures with Jim Ervin, Erv welcomes another member of the Chicago music Family, Songwriter, Radio Host, and self-professed “Guy with a camera”, Terry Abrahamson. Terry brought stories of the early days in the Chicago Blues scene, how he became enamored with the camera, his passion for the Blues, and how he met and began writing for Muddy Waters all those years ago. And you should also look into getting your own copy of “In the Belly of the Blues: Chicago to Boston to LA 1969 to 1983”

website: https://www.inthebellyoftheblues.com/

Personal Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/terry.abrahamson

Facebook for In the Belly of the Blues Book: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100063848160989

Facebook for The Blues Parade Children’s Book: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100063673714173

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This is Time Signatures with Jim Ervin, a podcast presented by the Capital Area Blues Society in Lansing, Michigan. Now, most any modern musical style can trace its roots back to the blues. Time Signatures explores the blues and its musical connections with captivating interviews, lively discussions and news from the world of blues. And now, here he is, your host, Jim Ervin! Who you got today, Jim?

And so welcome. I'm your host, Jim Ervin and this is Time Signatures. Today's guest just happened to be born in the right place at the right time.

That's my take on the deal.

Born and raised on Chicago's west side, he has had his songs recorded by Muddy Waters, the Chaver Brothers, John Lee Hooker and and George Thorogood, just to name a few. He has produced stage work along the way as well.

And he is the only person in the history of the printed word to have written for Michael Jackson, Oprah Winfrey and Larry Flint. Perhaps his most notable work was done behind the lens of various cameras.

His photos are part of the permit collection at the Rock and Roll hall of Fame Library, the Smithsonian, Chicago's Museum of African American History. And if you ask him, he'll tell you he's not a photographer, he was just a guy with a camera. But those who know his work would argue that statement.

I'm honored to introduce you all to our guest, Grammy winning songwriter, author, air personality and guy with a camera, Terry Abramson. Terry, welcome to Time Signatures. How are you, sir?

I'm great. It's terrific to be here, Jim.

Terry, I can honestly say to you that I don't rightfully know where to begin. Because there's such depth to your story. There's a lot here to talk about. So I guess the best place to start is. Let's talk about your start in music.

Where did that journey begin for you?

It had a few different elements that all kind of came together. I grew up in the late 50s, early 60s and everything had a theme song.

The TV shows, mostly the westerns, which I watched, the movies, Old Yeller and you know, how the West Was Won. And even the cigarettes you smoked, the cars you drove had a theme song always comes to mind is Kellogg's Sugar Pops.

It was a Little animated gopher with a cowboy hat and bullet bandoleros crisscrossing his chest. And he had two six shooters in his hands.

And he would fire them at the bowl of sugar pops, and sugar would fly out of his six shooters with a lot of sparkle around them. And the song was, the pops are sweeter and the taste is new. They're shot with sugar through and through. And try getting that one by now. But every.

Everything I was ingesting had a theme song. And if I didn't hear a theme song, man, I made one up. So. Okay, got that. Then you've got. I'm in a changing neighborhood, okay?

And there was a record store across the street from my school on Madison and Central, across from Emmett School. And they had a transom over the door, and they had the speaker and the transom, and it would blast the music out into the streets.

And I might be hearing Muddy Waters singing I'm your hoochie coochie man.

Oh, wow.

Well, I'm eight years old, man. I'm not really kind of riveted to it, but I'm hearing it, and it's kind of sinking in and hibernating and percolating.

And I wasn't really sure what it meant, but I could tell from the words around it, around hoochie coochie man and the song that if I'd gone up to my first crush, Pamela Polopoulos, and said, hey, Pam, I want to be your hoochie coochie man, well, I might have had more success than, you want to go out. And guys would drive by in a big old car and you'd hear, howlin Wolf, we're going to pitch a wang dang doodle once again.

I don't know what that means, but it sounds from the rest of the words like it's a party. And I was pretty sure, you know, this guy was growling. It didn't even sound like singing.

I don't know what it sounded like to me at the time, but I could pretty much figure out this wine dang doodle was going to have cooler people, better taste in food and more fun music to dance to than my pin the tail on the Donkey 9th birthday party was gonna have. Then there. There was one other element. And I'm seven, eight years old. I'm learning to read, and I come across this doctor and this doctor Had a.

An incredible influence on me. And his name was Dr. Seuss, and he had these wild, incredible rhymes. And if he couldn't find a word that rhymed, he'd make one up and all sunk in.

And then I start listening years later to the Stones and Jethro Tull and the Yardbirds. And you're hearing the swagger, you're hearing this attitude, and. And I'm just a young white kid not knowing where my life is going.

But it sounds like I walk 47 miles of barbed wire. I got a cobra snake for a necktie. I got a brand new house on the roadside Made out of rattlesnake hide.

Well, seems to me like that'd be a cooler way to define myself than anything else that come along. So that's why this music caught on. And we learned years later, of course, the whole engine to the British invasion was the blues.

Isn't that crazy?

Because, you know, I mean, the best example I always give people, a lot of them aren't familiar with it, but if you've ever seen Peaky Blinders, it's a. It's a cable show. It's on one of those, you know, networks. You have to pay to watch the tv.

It's a bunch of young white English kids that have come, you know, in their 20s that have come back from World War I, and the whole country's bombed out, and they have no idea, identity, no future, nothing. Well, if you translate that to the end of World War II, you got the same thing. But suddenly they see Elvis.

And suddenly, you know, all this attitude and swagger Elvis has. Starts playing where it comes from, and they think, I want to be a Rolling Stone man. And it worked.

There you go. Now, I know that there's a few years between us. You're a little bit older than I am, so you had a bit of a head start on the blues.

Who were some of your favorites in those early years as you were starting to discover the genre?

Howlin Wolf was the first one I saw. He was paralyzing. I had no idea what to expect. He sounded like nothing I'd ever heard.

The band had so much texture and depth, and it was just different. To me, the closest I'd ever heard was Chuck Berry.

This is like if you're listening to Chuck Berry and you put your finger down and on the record and slow it down and. But he was. He was paralyzing Howlin Wolf. There's never been a performer like him, so definitely him. Muddy Waters, who I. I mean, the proximity.

I Had I. I was two feet away from these guys, and so I got to absorb them in a privileged way. And that is how the clubs were in Chicago.

We were at the end for everybody that wanted to leave those memories of slavery behind and hop on a train and get. Get as far as you could go. And that was the 12th street station at Roosevelt in Michigan, in Chicago. So here I am, baby.

And so all these guys, Muddy and Wolf and Otis Rush and Big Mama Thornton, I don't think Big Mama lived in Chicago at the time I was living there, but they came to Chicago and we could see them every weekend.

So when I start seeing these guys and I started hearing this music and we went to see Howlin Wolf, because my buddy calls me up, I'm home from college, freshman, between freshman and sophomore years, and he says, abramson, there's a. A band playing down in this bar by Wrigley Field. And they do the Stones Little Red Rooster. So we think, okay, cool, man.

You know, we went to the Stones, and you went to a dance. You wanted to hear the band, local bands do the songs by the bands you love. The Stones, the Beach Boys.

And so to go hear a band do Rolling Stone song, sound like a good deal. And we get there and we pay our money, and they put us off to the side because we weren't going to be drinking. We were underage.

And there's nobody sitting at the tables by the bar. We got there so early, I mean, by the stage, except for the swim table with seven old black guys. And some of these guys were really old.

I mean, Howlen Wolf was 60. We didn't know was him, but. And we said, what are these guys doing here? We know what Stones fans looked like. They looked like us.

They look like these guys. And.

But then Richard Harding, who owned the club, gets on the PA and as I say in the book, you've read this with all the enthusiasm of a guy giving you your carburetor estimate. He says, ladies and gentlemen, a Howlin Wolf band. And bam. My life was changed. My life was like, you know, here we are, right?

So I would say Wolf, Muddy. When I first saw Buddy Guy, it was a couple years later, but still in that same kind of getting to know the blues stage of my life.

And Jimmy Rogers would, you know, Muddy's Legendary guitar player. He and John. Little John, another Southside performer, they shared a house. Their house burnt down.

And there was a benefit at Alice's, the Little Coffee House. And everybody was there, man. Big Mama Thornton. I think Holland Wolf might have been there, probably. Like Johnny Young, John Little John for sure.

And Jimmy Rogers played. And Buddy Guy. I'd never seen Buddy Guy. I'd heard his stuff. He came out in some bright green outfit like the black Peter Pan, you know, and.

And he was so on fire, so alive. And he sang great. He had a beautiful wailing voice. You know, he really cared. Which was kind of not the voice you heard from a lot of these guys.

You heard something from Wolf and some from Muddy. And it wasn't like what. You heard the singing from Buddy Guy, but. But he. He was great. And I'll tell you something.

And he was just playing old, you know, deep, deep delta blues. He had a national steal, I think, and, wow. And I just loved him. I got goosebumps. And if you think.

If you hear him, he's one of these guys where, you know, that guy's white. If you hear the audio, you know, and haven't seen him. And to this day, I think he is an unappreciated treasure in the American blues Compendium.

He lives in Colorado now. Wow.

Okay.

Plays around. I think. I'm guessing that probably he. I mean, you know, he's old. He's probably older than me, but close.

But I bet a lot of it has to do with the fact that he can't afford to be, you know, driving around, doing gigs. It's just. He should be a big, big, big star. He was just fantastic and remains fantastic. John Long. Check him out.

And another guy who you know about from my book, who I found opening for Sonny and Brownie in sanitary and Brownie McGee in a bar in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Joe Place. And it was a classic, classic Chicago blues kind of place in Boston. Nonetheless, it had a big, heavy. It was in a storefront.

Had a big, heavy green wood front door. It probably had 50 coats of forest green paint on. You can see all the drip from the last. Not really a work of craftsmanship, paint job.

And it had a little window which is, you know, maybe like 3, 4 inches high. It's like the window you'd have in solitary confinement with a metal grade over it. And it had a.

A piece of torn box, cardboard, brown torn box cardboard nailed to the front door and handwritten on it was tonight sonny, Terry, Brownie McGee. So we go in and they're not up there. There's a white kid up there, and he's my age, he's like 22.

And he's playing a wood guitar with a pickup harmonica rack. And he's doing Hank Williams, he's doing old folk songs like John Hardy, he's doing Elmore James, he's doing Robert Johnson, he's doing Chuck Berry.

And he had little pieces of paper taped all over front of his guitar. We looked at him at the break and it was John Lee Hooker's autograph, Howlin Wolf's autograph, Bo Diddley's autograph.

And he filled that room with a wood guitar, man. And people were used to hearing Springsteen played in that room that summer. He wasn't as who he, you know, big deal yet, but.

So this is who played in that room. And he filled that room with more music and more rock and roll with a wood guitar than anybody had ever seen. We called the bar the next morning.

We said, we got some Hound Dog Taylor gigs booked. We want to have this kid open the show. You got a phone number? He said, well, he's gone, man. He lives in Delaware.

He hitchhiked up here to open for Sonny and Brownie. And he hitchhiked back to Delaware after the show. He's probably back there now. His name is Thorogood.

And I gotta tell you, you know, I. I've seen a lot of guys. I've never seen anybody like George. Thorold could. He was. He was as invested in every song as if he was given CPR to his kid. It was. It was.

I mean, that's my impression. Okay, yeah, yeah, but. But he sold. He sold me. And we wound up being his agents and loaned him money to buy his first electric guitar.

Oh, no kidding.

We hung out then. And he told same story about how we met that I always tell. But it was fun to hear him tell it from his perspective.

I called the bar, I got his mom's phone number through directory assistance, you know, thorough go to Wilmington, Delaware. So we call there the morning after I talked to the bouncer and from George telling. He told it backstage, there were five or six people in the room.

He said, let me tell you how I know this guy. He says, I just got back from Boston. I hitchhiked up there to Bowton for Sonny and Brownie.

And I hitchhiked back, and I'm in my mom's house, and I'm on the bed in my room, and I tell my buddies from high school, man, I can't make it in the blues. I can't make any money at this thing. I gotta go to trade school. And the phone rings and my mom yells out, george, it's for you.

It's some guy named Terry from Boston. He wants to put you on some Hound Dog Taylor shows. So George gets on the phone and we explained to him, you want to do it?

He said, yeah, man, I want to do it. It's 10 bucks a night. That's what they pay for an opening act. We'll take a dollar commission. Is he okay? Sounds great.

Okay, well, when can you be here? And he says, well, we might have a problem. Or what kind of problem? He's, well, I play baseball, and I might have a game that weekend.

Let me check my schedule. Comes back, okay, we're good. I don't have a game that weekend. I go, great. When can you be here? He said, we might have a problem. What was it now?

He says, well, I don't have any money to get up the Blossom, man. I don't feel like hitchhiking again, you know. Okay, so we agree we're in a Western Union. Him, money for a train ticket. Great.

Okay, see you in a couple days. What time you showing up? He said, well, we might have a problem. What is it now? He says, I got no place to stay. So he winds up staying on our couch.

And all worked out great. A couple, you know, like, the following summer, I wrote the Boston Celtics fight song. And it was like a rock and roll song. And so we had him record.

He was. He was keen to do it because he got to record with his buddies Jeff Simon and Paul Smith, who he had grown up with in Delaware.

And he wanted to have, like, a Hound Dog Taylor kind of band with him. So they came up and there was their first vinyl. And George says, you know, I'll do this, but I can't use my own name because I'm going to be famous.

And I said, well, I know where you got that from. We've been your agent for eight months. We've been telling everybody you're going to be famous. And so I'm glad you got it.

And we recorded under the Name the Boston Basketball Band. And the name of the song is Champs Again. And I've got a box full of 45 somewhere. But that was George Thurgood's first vinyl.

And he's the real deal, man. He's. He's the real deal. He was funny. He. He was totally impassioned by the music. And it lives in him like. I have never seen it live in anyone.

Well, Terry, I gotta turn the page here. I. I'm loving these stories that you're sharing, and I want to thank you for that so far. But I gotta talk about the camera.

You're just a guy with the camera. You're not a photographer. How did that process begin for you? What got you involved with your camera?

My grandpa took pictures. We go out, go to dinner, and he had a camera. He took pictures. He had a little 8 millimeter. I think it had no sound, but so he just did that.

He was an immigrant. He'd come over from Ukraine and chased out.

And so I thought, you know, it seemed like the most natural thing in the world to take pictures when you're with your friends, when you're with your fam. And so I just started bringing a camera. I wish I'd done it earlier. I wish I'd done it every time, but.

Yeah, especially now.

Yes. Yeah. But I mean, there are moments. I was there when Dylan came to play with Muddy, brought Victoria Spevy with him.

I would love to have had a camera then. But Bob Margolin got good pictures, and he got good pictures, and the Allman Brothers came and played with him. Didn't have a camera that night.

Bonnie Raitt. When I lived in Boston, the Jay Giles Band was out of Boston. And so, you know, I would sit at a table at Muddy and Reserve. There'd be eight of us.

There'd be a Al Perry, who ran WBC and radio, and Peter Wolf and Faye Dunaway, who was his wife at the whole time. I think it's scary. So I would like to get a shot at me and Faye.

And honestly, I mean, when I was working in the movies, I. I had some meetings with some people I wish I had the camera for. Most notably, probably Ken Osmond, who may not. You know, Ken Osmond is. I know the name Yasko. And I was trying to get a movie made on the cheap.

And so I thought I'd try to do some novelty casting. And I wanted.

Oh, wow.

I thought that Eddie Haskell would be a good guy to be in the movie. And he was. He was humorless, you Know, you have.

Met so many greats, the OGs of the Chicago blues. Terry, how did you end up meeting Muddy Waters and ultimately going to work writing for him?

After we'd seen Howlin Wolf, we were. And we discovered, you know, how the wolf. We see how the wolf. Because he did A Little Red Rooster and he did it. And it sounded kind of the same.

Kind of, kind of. Not really the same.

Right.

As the Stones. And then he does Sitting on. No, I mean, not sitting on top. Yeah, Sitting on Top of the World. He's doing Cream songs and he did Backdoor Man.

He's doing Doris songs. He did Killing Floor, he does Hendrix songs.

Well, we got home, we looked at some liner notes and writers credits and we made the amazing discovery that they were doing his songs and they were also doing songs by all these other guys. Isn't that crazy? Got off that train at Michigan and 12th. Wolf, actually, I think, came up in his own car.

I think Wolf had money when he left Mississippi or Memphis anyway, so we didn't like the fact that when you went to quiet night, where a lot of these guys played, or if you went to another bar, you got pushed off to the side. Because we were all old. We were not old enough to drink. But there was a place called Alice's. It was a coffee house. They didn't care how old you were.

And we show up and the room was maybe 20ft wide. I don't know how far deep it went. But there were chairs on either side and a wood floor. You could sit on the floor.

The stage was maybe a foot off the floor. So my buddy Abu took me to see Wolf. He and I and our girlfriends get there. Seven o', clock, sit on the floo, are at the stage.

And I gotta go to the bathroom, but I can't get out. So I think, all right, well, I'll climb up on the stage. It's not Carnegie Hall.

I'll weave through the wires and go around a drum kit, use a band's bathroom, which I do. And I pull a curtain aside and they're sitting holding that paper cup with that champagne in it. That picture you're getting. There's Muddy Waters.

And I'm thinking, I'm looking at Muddy Waters. Here's the man who is like Eric Clapton's idol.

You've been hearing this guy forever.

Well, I'd been hearing him forever, but not through him. I've been hearing channeled and regurgitated by Clapton and the Allman Brothers and Preem. And I said, wow, Hi. You just smiling eyes. Very nice.

He's quiet, I think. Can I use your bathroom, man? He was right there. So I went and used the bathroom, and I come out, man. It was great. Thank you. What a.

What a treat to meet you, man. And he smiled, nodded his head. He didn't have much to say. And I go back out, but every time he came back to Alice's, I went to the bathroom.

All right, Terry, where can we send folks to learn more about you? Because even though this was a good full interview, there is a ton that we never even got to uncover.

So in the meantime, where do we send them to learn more? Buy a copy of this really cool book. And also maybe even schedule you for a presentation on the blues.

I do them, man. I love to do them. I could be [email protected] that's my book site for the book we've been talking about.

Yes, sir.

And thebluesparade.com which is my illustrated kids history of the blues. And if you really need to reach me, I'm eriabramson T E R R Y A B R A H A m s o nmail.com and I'd love to hear from you.

And this is music that belongs to all of us. And it is meant to be shared.

And.

And it was given to us by.

The.

Bricks and the foundation of rock and roll. And we're lucky to have it. And I am as lucky as I could be to be able to talk about it in places like this today. And thank you, man. Thank you, Jim.

It was great.

Well, Terry Abramson, my deepest appreciation for your time today on Time Signatures.

Anytime you need a microphone to promote something, whether it be another book or an album, or you name it, get in touch with me and we will welcome you with open arms. How's that sound?

Sounds like a plan. Thank you.

And that wraps up this edition of Time Signatures. Once again, my thanks to our guest, Terry Abramson, but also to you. For without you, none of this would be possible.

Jim Ervin reminding you keeping the blues alive is everyone's responsibility, but preserving the history of the blues one story at a time. That's my mission. Until next time. So long, everybody.

You've been listening to Time Signatures with Jim Ervin presented by the Capital Area Blues Society in Lansing, Michigan. Now, for more information about CABS, visit capitalareablues.org. The Time Signature's theme song, “Michigan Roads”, is used by permission and was written by Root Doctor, featuring Freddie Cunningham Hand. You can find this episode and past episodes of time [email protected] or wherever you get your podcasts. Until next time, keep on keeping the blues alive. Ooh, Shucky Ducky!