| Me and Big Joe by Michael Bloomfield -page 4 |
| because Joe didn�t need it. Sure enough, Joe got raspy and quarreled with lightning, and we were turned out of the place. When we got to the car, Charlie hustled into the back seat and pretended to fall asleep. I rode shotgun and feigned sleep, too. Roy was driving and Joe was between us, trying to direct Roy where to carry him. Joe was hard enough to understand sober, but drunk, you had no chance at all�it was just syllabic noise. What Joe had a penchant for doing when he was drunk was to look up distant relatives of his, sisters-in-law or whatever, and see if their husbands were working a nightshift so he could screw their women. So he had us driving through all the ghetto areas of Gary, Hammond, and East Chicago. ranting and roaring at Roy, who was unable to understand a word of what Joe was saying�it might as well have been Tagalog. And Roy would look over and say, �Michael! I know you�re not asleep� you�ve gotta tell me how to get home!� And when I wouldn�t respond he�d turn to Charlie and say, �Charlie, godammit, wake up! You gotta show us how to get out of here!� But Charlie�d just lie low, too. Joe�s eyes were tiny, squinchy red slits, and we weren�t about to go up against that grousing, cursing, Indecipherable angryness. If Joe wasn�t ready to return to Chicago, that was it�we weren�t going. Not that night, anyway. Finally, as dawn broke over the smokestacks and railyards and cracking- towers of northern Indiana, Joe grumblingly directed Roy home. In early July Joe took it into his head to visit some of his people down in St. Louis. The owner of the record store, Kaercher, thought it was a fine idea. �Yeah. Joe,� he said, �you go down there and be a talent scout. Take a tape recorder along and say you represent my company. Record some people, see what kind of deal we can make, and bring back some tapes.� Well, I�d begun to have doubts and trepidations about taking these field trips with Joe, because once outside Chicago my friends and I were pretty much at his mercy, and you could get into some strange situations with the guy. But St. Louis was new territory for me, and knew there was supposed to he some famous old bIuesmen living down there, so I said OK. I called up another pal of mine, George Mitchell and asked him to join us. George was a college student, originally from Atlanta and had once worked at he record store. He wore those Kinqston Tro-type button- down shirts and had a real neat Ivy League haircut. He really dug blues, and while in his teens had gotten to know many artists in the South. He got along well with older black people, and especially well with Joe, so I thought he�d be an ideal guy to have along. The drive to St. Louis was real nice. Wonderful, in fact. Joe talked to George and me about things from thirty years ago as though they�d happened that morning. He reminisced about ROBERT JOHNSON and WILLIE McTELL and BLIND BOY FULLER; he told how SUNNYLAND SLIM had helped MUDDY WATERS get a record contract; he explained how BIG BILL had gotten rich. Being with Joe was being with a history of the blues-you could see him as a man, and you could see him as a legend. He couldn�t read or write a word of English, but he had America memorized. Continued on p.5 |
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