Last night I discovered a jewel in – not exactly the mud, but a highly unexpected place. The Jack Russell in Marston is a very unremarkable pub. I would be unlikely, frankly, to set foot in it without specific reason, especially armed with the knowledge I now have that the nearest to real ale they are serving may be either Guinness or the dreaded Greene King IPA. Based on observing other Oxford pubs, I would in fact guess it won’t be all that long before it either gets taken over and turned into a popular but slightly overpriced hipster gastropub, or sadly shuts altogether.
However, I had a reason to be there, namely an ad for an ‘electric blues jam session – join in with the house band’ picked up in Daily Info (the goldmine of things you would never have tried to find out are going on in Oxford). Playing (mostly playing, and mostly on violin) the blues is my guilty pleasure that I love but never really get asked to do, although pub open mic audiences seem to be happy to let me do it these days (I must have got better in the last four years). So an open invitation to more or less a licence to do so was something I was only going to resist for so long.
It was electric in more sense than one. Heavily amped up – Marshall and Ashdown stacks for lead guitar and bass, everything else through nearly equally impressive speakers of various kinds – and with a strong emphasis on dirty guitar solos and electric bass grooves. But also with a cracking atmosphere and a real sense of enjoyment of everything going on, and some startlingly tight playing for a jam session, even if it did rely pretty heavily on 12 bars in the key of A.
So I was given two songs to sit in on, backing the massively built and massively voiced vocalist / organiser keeping the whole night running. The only other non-fret musicians to show were one blues harp, two drummers and the sax and keys from the house band. I think I was the youngest guy there by 15 years; the average age was about my dad’s and the volume was always at the edge of me putting earplugs in. I duly plugged acoustic violin, through clean-sound folk-oriented pickup, into someone’s easily 100W valve Marshall, and prepared to follow rhythm guitar and cover any chord issues with flurries of notes and waving the instrument around the stage.
It was a blast. After one verse of the first song Mr Big cued a solo from me, and it felt great from there on. Possibly peaking with a ‘battle (sic)’ between me and the house band’s lead guitarist. I was very deliberately brought back for a version ‘Just another Cup of Coffee’ at almost the end of the night, and seemed to have both the guys I played with and the rest of the crowd (mostly also players) lapping it up while I pulled out all the stops I could think of on the spot. My favourite critical appraisal of recent times came from an American passer-through:
I’ve been hanging round blues clubs in Chicago for thirty-five years, and I’ve never heard anyone do blues fiddle … You should get yourself a blues band.
Which raises a serious question: should I, and would it make any money? There is a paying market for rhythm and blues in the UK, though there’s a lot of people out there playing it for free. And maybe, just maybe, on last night’s showing I can appeal enough to fans of the genre to get over the sense of gimmick of using a ‘wrong’ instrument. Doing solo or fronting a small band could give me the standalone act that is usually what commercial booking agencies want more than a musician to add to or cover for someone in an existing group; though it would be massively choosing stand out over blend in (see previous post). Well, it’s a thought anyway.