Gazette, June 17, 2010
by Nathan Oravec
On Saturday, Kelly Bell and Company will provide the inaugural Brunswick Music Fest with a Phat Blues-fueled culminating act. It will be festival number two for the band that day, following Virginia’s own Winchester Blues Festival.
Surprisingly, such back to back performances are largely the rule, not the exception, according to the band’s frontman.
“It’s festival season,” said Bell matter-of-factly, noting that the band regularly performs 200 gigs a year.
The Baltimore-based bluesmen — including Kirk Myers on keyboards, Ira Mayfield, Jr. on guitar, Spencer Brown on drums and Freddie Louden on bass — have certainly made a name for themselves throughout the years thanks to their far-reaching travels.
“Our sound has continued to grow even funkier, I think,” said Bell. “We made a concerted effort to go back and get hold of our blues roots.”
It’s blues with a twist, of course. Followers of the band are familiar with its aforementioned “Phat” philosophy — best described as “Muddy Waters wearing a Bob Marley T-shirt, riding in Black Sabbath’s tour bus, on his way to a Parliament Funkadelic concert, listening to a Sammy Davis, Jr. 8-track tape, humming a Run-DMC song.” And even that, states the band, would only be close.
It’s via this hybrid of sounds and successes that Bell hopes to introduce newcomers to the music that shaped his life.
“It’s a perpetual goal,” he said. “What we aspire to do is bring blues to people who wouldn’t seek it out. Specifically the younger generation. They have been listening to blues for years, they just didn’t know it. You can’t turn on the TV without being exposed to the Blues in some way. But what we do, is we give them something they can sink their teeth into … We present blues in a fashion they can understand.”
Reaching out to young listeners is the primary reason Bell looks forward to “festival season” every year.
“There’s nothing like a hot, cold bar show, at 1 a.m. in the morning, and no one’s going home. That’s all fine and good,” he said. “But when you’ve been in the business for a while, you start to think ‘This is something that I could be doing with the kids.’ We call our festival appearances the PG-13 version of the show. We rock out. I love doing it. It makes so much sense for me.”
If hearing Bell speak about the blues is like hearing a holy man speak the gospel, it’s likely because he took a page out of the First Chapter of Muddy Waters — the forerunner, Bell said, who preached the word by “plugging in,” from the Mississippi Delta all the way to Chicago.
The iconic influence of Bo Diddley, a mentor whom the band often opened for, gave him, perhaps, his greatest advice: “Bo Diddley told me, ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll is merely the baby that the blues had,” said Bell.
But it was Bell’s father who introduced him to the sounds that would forever change his life, by way of Washington, D.C. radio station WPFW.
“I grew up in D.C. listening to Funk and Go-Go. My dad said, ‘This is where all that stuff you listen comes from,” said Bell. “Sometimes you need that other voice… And when I got to that question of ‘To Be or Not To Be,” as we all do at some point in our adolescence — it was the Blues that reminded me that none of us are alone in this world. I could always put on a Muddy Waters or a Howlin’ Wolf record and be reminded of that fact.”
At Saturday’s Brunswick Music Fest, Bell and the band may remind a few others in the audience as they help spread the word of the blues.
“Not that the blues needed the help,” said Bell. “I guess we’re giving back. And the way blues changed my life? I could give back forever, and we still wouldn’t be even.”
Bell urges fans old and new to visit the band’s website, www.phatblues.com, as well as following them on Twitter and Facebook.
“We’re on all of that,” Bell said. “People say, ‘Muddy Waters wouldn’t have been on Facebook.’ Sure he would. Muddy plugged in.”