Inside track

Gary Bernath's new, cool blues

by Mark Edmonds

When I interviewed Pete Henderson in December about his new band, Fatwall Jack, the Hopkinton-based blues guitar vet mentioned he'd been working with harp player Gary Bernath. Bernath wanted to do a demo, Henderson explained, so last summer, they got together with five side players at Boston radio DJ Bill Smith's Sudbury studio to cut a few songs. After giving Smith the nod to let the tapes roll, they started playing and didn't stop for hours.

There's nothing unusual about a local blues band recording a demo. But what was unusual was the way the normally reserved Henderson raved about the session. He left me wondering just what the hell happened in that studio until Bernath's disc, Inside the Blues, arrived.

I've got to admit, when I first received it, nothing about song selection gave me any indication it was more than, well, a demo. There were a number of covers, among the 17 tracks, including Magic Sam's "Easy Baby," Albert King's "Call My Job," Otis Rush's "Double Trouble," Little Walter Jacobs's "Nobody But You," and Jimmy Rogers's "That's All Right" -- not a bad list, but I see a lot of covers of these songs on a lot of discs. Most of the time, they sound all right, but, still, they almost always lack the energy of their master versions. As a result, they oftentimes wind up on the shelf.

This past weekend, however, I listened to Inside as I tore out a kitchen wall. With my player stuck in repeat, Inside played all day. Each time it did, I found myself liking it more. This surprised me, especially since, after 10 years of playing these songs in radio, I have every string bend, chord progression, and plaintive wail committed to memory. Needless to say, it's hard to sit through covers, when I could play the masters with the flick of button. If they're not good, I won't, and I doubt anyone else will either. So what kept me from shutting Bernath off after, say, the third hour? Well, in retrospect, there is a handful of original tunes, many of which lean in the direction of T-Bone Walker. But what really saved the disc from future service as a coaster was the fact I was having just as much fun with Henderson and Bernath on the speakers in my living room as I might have had if they were in person with a full band in tow.

Recorded live, in a single session without overdubs, Inside was cut just like they did it in the old days. As a result, there's a spontaneity that's similar to what you'd find on any old Chess platter. It's something Bernath, who appears this Saturday at Ashland's John Stone's Inn, was going for when he set out to do the recording in the first place. "I'd been through this thing before with the philosophy of recording blues, and I believed, along with a number of the other guys who played on the session, that this music is really getting too technocratic," he says.

He should know. His experience with the blues business dates back to his college days at UMass in the late '60s. Inspired by a show the late Paul Butterfield did on campus one night, Bernath picked up his first harmonica. He's been carrying the torch for the blues ever since.

"I feel like this music really loses something when you get into a planned, studio environment," he notes. "So I really wanted to do something where I was in the same room as my band -- to capture that same feel they had in the old days at Chess where guys just came in and played. Pete knew about Bill's place, and steered me in his direction."

Twenty-one tracks later, it was time to cull. "We tried to get as many sounds -- one as a four piece, one with horns, and one with harmonica -- as we possibly could," Bernath explains of the weekend session, which was actually three sessions where players were added and subtracted. "And," he says as he points to the vibrating organ-powered takeoff of Bo Diddley's "Roller Coaster" he and the band deliver, "nobody out there's doing stuff like that. We tried to get as many obscure songs on there as possible. In fact, we felt we had to stick a couple tunes on there people knew, or they wouldn't be able to connect with us."

The Gary Bernath Blues Band play at 9 p.m. on February 28 at John Stone's Inn, in Ashland. Call 881-1778.