San Francisco Chronicle
THE ARTS
Birdlegg is the boss of Oakland blues harmonica
Rona Marech, Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, August 22, 2003
Like any bluesman worth his salt, Birdlegg knows about women. Oh, does he know
about women. "Here's what women do," he said, sitting in a park on a recent
afternoon. The sun was growling hot but he was dressed in his trademark
three-piece suit, faded maroon tie, wingtips and a black derby hat. "I'll meet a woman
and she'll be enthralled with me because she'll see me play the harmonica. Then on
Monday, she'll want me to go to work."
"I've lost a lot of lovers because sometimes during the week I'm broke," he said. But
he always tells them the same thing: "Honey, what you see is what I do. I don't do
floors, I don't do windows, I don't do shoes. I play the Oakland blues."
And he doesn't just play it, he attacks it, he wallops it, he jumps inside and shakes it.
He is the blues, he likes to say.
"I'm crazy," he said. "I tell people I'm the dumbest musician you'll ever meet. But I am
music. I don't have to play with my mind. I play with everything."
To see the musical tornado known as Birdlegg (or Bird, but please, not Birdleggs and
certainly not Gene Pittman, his given name, unless you're the police) blues
aficionados need not go far. The East Bay's last professional African American blues
harmonica player performs with his Tight Fit Blues Band twice weekly -- at Pat's Bar in
downtown Oakland every Wednesday and at Everett & Jones Barbeque in Jack
London Square on Saturdays.
Like so many bluesmen, Bird, who's 56, has lost most of his teeth, but he looks like a
teenager sometimes, the way he hustles on stage. He shimmies, he jumps, he
hops, his hips sway, his hands shoot up, his knees pump, his elbows swing. "I'm not
this thin because I'm starving," he said.
All the while -- as he parades, as he sits on available laps, as he marches out to the
sidewalk to dance for the moon -- he's singing in his husky voice and his harmonica
is bellowing out his distinctive brand of delta country blues, sounding here like a train,
then like a sigh, then like a plaintive cry.
" It's nine below zero outside and I brought my woman's temperature up to 110
degrees," he sang on a recent night at Pat's. The crowd hooted.
"Go ahead!"
"Alright! It's alright!"
The gig had just started and the bar wouldn't be packed for another hour or two, but
already, his jacket was off and kernels of sweat were sliding down his face. His
sunken cheeks were flying in and out, like sails whipping in a storm.
"This is blues we're talking about. We ain't talking about no fake stuff, " he shouted,
singing out, "It's nine below zero outside and still my baby put me out for another
man."
"Now we playin' it," he said, before launching into the next song: "I'm going to send
you back to your family baby . . . And I sho' am going back. I'm going back to my mama
too . . . Little girl I just can't get along with you!"
"If you want to learn to sing the blues," he said, while the band thundered behind him.
"You have to come to Oakland."
He cut outside to smoke a cigarette and Laurie Raz-Astrakhan, a regular at Pat's,
leaned over. "I think he's the best blues performer I've ever seen," she said.
Birdlegg learned about music on his grandpop's back porch. His family had a little
farm in Pennsylvania and they'd work hard all day, Bird said, but in the evening they'd
sit outside with their guitars, fiddles and harmonicas, drinking his grandmother's
homemade wine and playing the blues. They could talk about a mule that wouldn't
move or a horse that needed to be re-shoed but their fingers would never stop gliding
across their instruments. "It's rare to see music played with such fluidity," Bird said.
"Most musicians look like they're having a hard time doing it. The thing that
impressed me with my grandfather and his friends was they were so at ease with it."
The blues grabbed hold of Bird then, and never let go. "All other forms of music, I had
to learn to love, but with the blues, there was no trying at all. I just love it," he said.
He bought his first harmonica in 1974 when he was a few months shy of his 27th
birthday. "I put it up to my lips and played it and it just did something to me," he said.
"It was almost like a déjà vu kind of thing. It seemed like I had done it before . . . It was
like meeting someone you love. You don't think about it, it just happens. I knew exactly
from day one what I wanted to do with it and now I'm doing it."
First, though, he had to leave home. He took care of that in 1975, when he was a
student at Shippensburg State College in Pennsylvania. He traveled to New York City
- "to buy some weed" -- and was sidetracked by a woman in Washington Square
Park. "I fell in love, she fell in lust," he said. She invited him back to California with her.
Birdlegg (who wasn't yet Birdlegg) dropped out of college and followed her to Oakland.
The affair ended in weeks, but not the affair with music. Bird stuck around, learning to
play by listening to the greats. He paid $4 to see John Lee Hooker play in a little
school in East Oakland. He heard Willie Dixon. He heard B.B. King play, sitting so
close that the only thing between them was a guitar.
He played his first gig with Massalah, then a blues icon in Berkeley. He played with
the much beloved Cool Poppa for 13 years. He formed the first Tight Fit Blues Band in
1980, but it was another decade before he felt he'd earned his rightful place next the
bluesmen elders.
"Everyone tests you," he said. "Do you have the stuff, the juice to be a bluesman?
When they accept you, they have a different way of saying it. 'We're not going to be
around much longer, so you're going to have to take this thing. ' "
Now the same age as those established bluesmen he looked up to, Bird tries to
pass along a message about the true blues to his audience and his students,
including his 3-year-old son (the last-born of five children), whom he claims already
has a way with the harmonica.
Lesson One: Blues songs are not all raw and sad. "In blues, you have subtlety,
innuendo . . . Blues wants to tickle you," he said. "White people --they think it's all sad
music. It makes us look like we're all pessimistic. I do up songs. I do jolly, jovial,
mischievous stuff."
Lesson Two: "You have to learn the art of not thinking. If you're thinking when you're
playing, then you don't know what you think you know," he said. "I see people on stage
and I can tell they're thinking. You can smell the wood burning."
Lesson Three: "You can only sing about what you've experienced." If you're Birdlegg,
that includes a fair share of hardship: "I've been homeless, I've lived with junkies, I've
lived in abandoned houses, I've hitchhiked around, I've lived under the stars," he said.
"It does no good for me to sing about being rich. I've never been rich. Just as it's
stupid for a rich person to talk about being poor.
" When you're really poor and singing about it, it's the real thing. That's what blues
is. You don't have to be polished. There's only one Birdlegg and the experiences I've
had, I've had for myself."
When he moved out West, Birdlegg said, he was happy to be known as a harmonica
player, but people insisted on calling him a black harmonica player. Though he
disliked their motivation, instead of resisting, he took up the mantle with pride.
"We invented it," he said. "When my grandfather played, he was not playing the latest
lick you hear on the radio. He was playing my concept of the blues, handed down
generation to generation. It's the real thing.
"Seventy million died to make the American Negro and the blues came out of that," he
said. "We owe them something." He claims he won't leave Oakland until he finds a
black harmonica player here who will keep the line going.
Despite all he's given to the Bay Area music scene, Birdlegg hasn't gotten the respect
he deserves, thanks to some combination of racism, jealousy and ignorance, said
Ronnie Stewart, the director of the nonprofit Bay Area Blues Society. "Fortune 500
record companies and music companies always try to push the white harmonica
players. Bird is just as good as them" and should be playing at major blues festivals
and the top blues clubs, he said. "It's a damn shame."
But Bird has a philosophy -- no matter how low he sinks and no matter how sticky his
personal life gets, he keeps playing. He shows up on time. He gives his all. He looks
you in the eye. He holds his head high. He doesn't pity himself.
"Everything I am is wrapped up in music," he said. "I'm so fortunate to have
something no one can take from you. They can take your money, your wife, your kids.
But they still can't take the music. It's yours."
THE ARTS
Birdlegg is the boss of Oakland blues harmonica
Rona Marech, Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, August 22, 2003
Like any bluesman worth his salt, Birdlegg knows about women. Oh, does he know
about women. "Here's what women do," he said, sitting in a park on a recent
afternoon. The sun was growling hot but he was dressed in his trademark
three-piece suit, faded maroon tie, wingtips and a black derby hat. "I'll meet a woman
and she'll be enthralled with me because she'll see me play the harmonica. Then on
Monday, she'll want me to go to work."
"I've lost a lot of lovers because sometimes during the week I'm broke," he said. But
he always tells them the same thing: "Honey, what you see is what I do. I don't do
floors, I don't do windows, I don't do shoes. I play the Oakland blues."
And he doesn't just play it, he attacks it, he wallops it, he jumps inside and shakes it.
He is the blues, he likes to say.
"I'm crazy," he said. "I tell people I'm the dumbest musician you'll ever meet. But I am
music. I don't have to play with my mind. I play with everything."
To see the musical tornado known as Birdlegg (or Bird, but please, not Birdleggs and
certainly not Gene Pittman, his given name, unless you're the police) blues
aficionados need not go far. The East Bay's last professional African American blues
harmonica player performs with his Tight Fit Blues Band twice weekly -- at Pat's Bar in
downtown Oakland every Wednesday and at Everett & Jones Barbeque in Jack
London Square on Saturdays.
Like so many bluesmen, Bird, who's 56, has lost most of his teeth, but he looks like a
teenager sometimes, the way he hustles on stage. He shimmies, he jumps, he
hops, his hips sway, his hands shoot up, his knees pump, his elbows swing. "I'm not
this thin because I'm starving," he said.
All the while -- as he parades, as he sits on available laps, as he marches out to the
sidewalk to dance for the moon -- he's singing in his husky voice and his harmonica
is bellowing out his distinctive brand of delta country blues, sounding here like a train,
then like a sigh, then like a plaintive cry.
" It's nine below zero outside and I brought my woman's temperature up to 110
degrees," he sang on a recent night at Pat's. The crowd hooted.
"Go ahead!"
"Alright! It's alright!"
The gig had just started and the bar wouldn't be packed for another hour or two, but
already, his jacket was off and kernels of sweat were sliding down his face. His
sunken cheeks were flying in and out, like sails whipping in a storm.
"This is blues we're talking about. We ain't talking about no fake stuff, " he shouted,
singing out, "It's nine below zero outside and still my baby put me out for another
man."
"Now we playin' it," he said, before launching into the next song: "I'm going to send
you back to your family baby . . . And I sho' am going back. I'm going back to my mama
too . . . Little girl I just can't get along with you!"
"If you want to learn to sing the blues," he said, while the band thundered behind him.
"You have to come to Oakland."
He cut outside to smoke a cigarette and Laurie Raz-Astrakhan, a regular at Pat's,
leaned over. "I think he's the best blues performer I've ever seen," she said.
Birdlegg learned about music on his grandpop's back porch. His family had a little
farm in Pennsylvania and they'd work hard all day, Bird said, but in the evening they'd
sit outside with their guitars, fiddles and harmonicas, drinking his grandmother's
homemade wine and playing the blues. They could talk about a mule that wouldn't
move or a horse that needed to be re-shoed but their fingers would never stop gliding
across their instruments. "It's rare to see music played with such fluidity," Bird said.
"Most musicians look like they're having a hard time doing it. The thing that
impressed me with my grandfather and his friends was they were so at ease with it."
The blues grabbed hold of Bird then, and never let go. "All other forms of music, I had
to learn to love, but with the blues, there was no trying at all. I just love it," he said.
He bought his first harmonica in 1974 when he was a few months shy of his 27th
birthday. "I put it up to my lips and played it and it just did something to me," he said.
"It was almost like a déjà vu kind of thing. It seemed like I had done it before . . . It was
like meeting someone you love. You don't think about it, it just happens. I knew exactly
from day one what I wanted to do with it and now I'm doing it."
First, though, he had to leave home. He took care of that in 1975, when he was a
student at Shippensburg State College in Pennsylvania. He traveled to New York City
- "to buy some weed" -- and was sidetracked by a woman in Washington Square
Park. "I fell in love, she fell in lust," he said. She invited him back to California with her.
Birdlegg (who wasn't yet Birdlegg) dropped out of college and followed her to Oakland.
The affair ended in weeks, but not the affair with music. Bird stuck around, learning to
play by listening to the greats. He paid $4 to see John Lee Hooker play in a little
school in East Oakland. He heard Willie Dixon. He heard B.B. King play, sitting so
close that the only thing between them was a guitar.
He played his first gig with Massalah, then a blues icon in Berkeley. He played with
the much beloved Cool Poppa for 13 years. He formed the first Tight Fit Blues Band in
1980, but it was another decade before he felt he'd earned his rightful place next the
bluesmen elders.
"Everyone tests you," he said. "Do you have the stuff, the juice to be a bluesman?
When they accept you, they have a different way of saying it. 'We're not going to be
around much longer, so you're going to have to take this thing. ' "
Now the same age as those established bluesmen he looked up to, Bird tries to
pass along a message about the true blues to his audience and his students,
including his 3-year-old son (the last-born of five children), whom he claims already
has a way with the harmonica.
Lesson One: Blues songs are not all raw and sad. "In blues, you have subtlety,
innuendo . . . Blues wants to tickle you," he said. "White people --they think it's all sad
music. It makes us look like we're all pessimistic. I do up songs. I do jolly, jovial,
mischievous stuff."
Lesson Two: "You have to learn the art of not thinking. If you're thinking when you're
playing, then you don't know what you think you know," he said. "I see people on stage
and I can tell they're thinking. You can smell the wood burning."
Lesson Three: "You can only sing about what you've experienced." If you're Birdlegg,
that includes a fair share of hardship: "I've been homeless, I've lived with junkies, I've
lived in abandoned houses, I've hitchhiked around, I've lived under the stars," he said.
"It does no good for me to sing about being rich. I've never been rich. Just as it's
stupid for a rich person to talk about being poor.
" When you're really poor and singing about it, it's the real thing. That's what blues
is. You don't have to be polished. There's only one Birdlegg and the experiences I've
had, I've had for myself."
When he moved out West, Birdlegg said, he was happy to be known as a harmonica
player, but people insisted on calling him a black harmonica player. Though he
disliked their motivation, instead of resisting, he took up the mantle with pride.
"We invented it," he said. "When my grandfather played, he was not playing the latest
lick you hear on the radio. He was playing my concept of the blues, handed down
generation to generation. It's the real thing.
"Seventy million died to make the American Negro and the blues came out of that," he
said. "We owe them something." He claims he won't leave Oakland until he finds a
black harmonica player here who will keep the line going.
Despite all he's given to the Bay Area music scene, Birdlegg hasn't gotten the respect
he deserves, thanks to some combination of racism, jealousy and ignorance, said
Ronnie Stewart, the director of the nonprofit Bay Area Blues Society. "Fortune 500
record companies and music companies always try to push the white harmonica
players. Bird is just as good as them" and should be playing at major blues festivals
and the top blues clubs, he said. "It's a damn shame."
But Bird has a philosophy -- no matter how low he sinks and no matter how sticky his
personal life gets, he keeps playing. He shows up on time. He gives his all. He looks
you in the eye. He holds his head high. He doesn't pity himself.
"Everything I am is wrapped up in music," he said. "I'm so fortunate to have
something no one can take from you. They can take your money, your wife, your kids.
But they still can't take the music. It's yours."
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