By Dave Beardsley

Bob, I want to start by thanking you for taking some time to tell us your story. You were my savior in the days of the Soulard B3 (Blues, Brews and Bites) festival. As you know, we didn’t have a B3 the first year, and we heard about it….especially from musicians!! Then you came to the rescue, and it was turned it into a real B3 festival! It was a beautiful thing!!

Q: You go way back in the St Louis music scene. What is your path, when did you begin your musical journey?

A: My musical journey started when I was a kid living in Farmington. It was a small town and there were just a few cats that played jazz or blues. Most of the guys down there played country music.

There was one guy in town named Mike Shannon that started giving me jazz lessons. He got me hooked on Horace Silver. But the reason I love Music is because of my dad. He is a Hammond Organist and Drummer. He had the longest running jam session on Friday and Saturday nights at the Bungalow, in South City, for like 25 or 30 years. I mean almost as long as Art Dwyer’s Monday night jam at the Broadway Oyster Bar, at the time. So, I grew up playing Hammond organ, piano, trumpet, and drums. The whole family was full of musicians playing. All we did was play old jazz and blues tunes all day long.

Q: Who were some of the musical influences you guys listened to?

A: Different artists. My mom, when my dad was at work, would put on Louis Armstrong Records and Jimmy Smith Records and all the jazz guys. We just hung out as kids, dancing around the table listening to that kind of stuff and that was my life.

Q: When did you decide ‘I’m going to play music and I want to follow that path’?

A: I always did as a kid, it was the culture in our family. My parents never pushed us to learn. They just surrounded us with music and played it all the time

Q: It sounds like you had quite a home full of music.

A: We did! We didn’t really have a dining room like most people think of we had a music room! We had a Hammond organ, a piano, drum set, guitars, basses and horns all piled up in a jam area in the dining room! We were an unconventional family for sure!

Q: Oh yeah! I grew up on & remember shows like the Partridge family, where the whole family jumped in a bus and went on tour, right? Did you ever do anything like that with your folks?

A: I think our shows were not quite as glamorous as that, but we did, actually! My dad would book the state hospital that turned into the state prison. We would play for the people in the state hospital. On other gigs, we’d be the warm up band for the big bands in the county. We would start out our little Partridge family party and then the rock and rollers would come on! So as a 10-year-old playing, this stuff was great! There were also lot of fun little restaurants down there that we played and some private parties.

Q: Now when did you decide ‘I’m going to form my own band, I want to start gigging’?

A: I started gigging at 14. My dad would bring me up to St. Louis and I would play at Frederick’s Music Lounge on Chippewa for Freddy Friction’s dad, Fred Boettcher. He owned the piano bar. I would play the piano there while my dad would play at the Bungalow, the place I was telling you about a minute ago. That’s how I started gigging. As soon as I turned 18, I joined the Bob Kuban Brass. I’d put on my tux and play a wedding gig and then go to the Bungalow afterward to jam with my dad till he got done at one o’clock. Then we go to Courtesy Drive-In and eat Slingers! I mean that’s just the fun of it. It’s all about the culture, right?

Q: And that’s the culture you grew up in?

A: Yes, and back then with Bob Kuban, we were playing 7 or 8 jobs a week. There was music everywhere in St Louis and it was beautiful. I mean any style of music. You could go anywhere and hear anything you could dream of. There was a bar on every corner and music in every bar. But now, all that’s gone. It breaks my heart, and that is part of the reason I began putting organs everywhere.

I opened up a music store in the 1990s, Southwest Music. It was all used musical equipment. My dad helped me run it while I’d go buy stuff and we’d flip things left and right. We loved Hammonds. We packed the place with Hammond organs. We found that the Gospel churches in St Louis were in trouble because of the high cost of buying an organ. We would sell them an organ with a down payment that would be just what we had in it and let them make a monthly payment on the difference. We got a reputation for doing that in the churches and it was a win, win all the way around. That was something my dad and I built. I still do that to this day. He’s doing great at 88 y/o in Farmington, but I continue this concept as kind of a tribute to my dad.

My whole idea is that I want to play Hammonds, but also want to get them into churches, jazz clubs and etc. I rescue Hammonds that are to be thrown away or junked, and then invest in returning these instruments back into the community. I want to save that instrument because they are a big part of my life and it’s my way of giving back.

Q: I recently saw you down at the Tin Roof at Jason David Cooper’s show. You were on the B3 and it sounded amazing. It just adds another deep level to any band! It really does, and you’ve kind of made it your mission to put Hammond B3’s around town, beyond just churches. I know you hauled one upstairs at Jack’s Joint, I know BB’s Jazz Blues and Soups was also a recipient. It seems you’ve made it a mission to make St. Louis into a B3 town!!

A: Yes, I’m trying to. Yeah! Chicago has many clubs full of B3s. You go to the Green Mill and there are two B3s in the place and they have fantastic musicians playing. You go to Kansas City they have the Green Lady Lounge and there’s a Hammond and Leslie’s piled up in that place and people are playing them all the time. There are multiple venues in in both of those towns that have B threes. They’ll put that 400-pound thing in a club and leave it there so that the players can come and play it. If there’s not one there, they can’t play it and when these clubs strip them out and toss them, not only is there nothing to play but the instruments are being junked. The problem in a nutshell, my friend is this; In 200 years, I’ll be able to go into any music store on the planet and buy a drum set, a guitar, a saxophone, or whatever the heck I want, but I’m not going to be able to buy a Hammond organ because they’ll be gone. I’m talking about the ones that have tone wheels. These things are antiques. Eventually the last one on Earth will die just like the dinosaurs. My job is to try to forestall that as long as I can, to save the culture of organ jazz, the culture of organ in blues, the culture of black gospel, even country rock you name it! Even Keith Emerson for crying out loud, everybody used Hammond organs and in every style of music and when they’re gone what’s going to happen?

Q: I know, they’re amazing instruments, almost magical! One Hammond organ that comes to mind was owned by Wayne Sharpe of the Michael Burks band. He had an original 1972 Hammond organ he took on tour with him, and he kept it on a cart strapped to the cart. He said he never took those straps off, “that thing would probably explode if I did”. He treasured it!

A: I’ve had a few of those carts, I still do! And you’re right. There’s a guy that I know, Mitch Town, that lives up in North Central United States. He’s known all over the world. When he drives here, he brings his organ in a great big van and schleps it out of the clubs. There are a lot of guys doing that. I do that when I can. When I have a situation where I can’t, I have to use a clone or something. I say this to the musicians in town; “Playing gigs is a means to an end because I’m a professional and making a living. However, playing the Hammond “is” the end. It’s my heart, my soul. That’s what I want to do. So I’ll play Hammond gigs that some guys would say no to. Even if I’m already too busy, I’ll to go to the extra effort because that’s my heart.

Q: And you want to share that Hammond sound! That leads to my next question, who are you out there playing with today? You’re all over town!

A: Well, I’m gonna get my cheat sheet out. I started with Bob Kuban. I’ve played with the Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra, Suzanne Summers, Sha Na Na, and a band called Cornet Shop Suey. We traveled all over the country and out of the country for like 10 years before I stopped doing that to have kids. That was when I was with Big Bamboo and all these other bands but now, I’m playing a lot of jazz gigs with guys like Steve Davis, Jim Manley, Larry Johnson, Austin Cebulskii, Eric Slaughter, Jose Gobbo, and picking up Blues gigs with Marquis Knox, Jason Cooper, Renee Smith, Raul, Chris Shepard, Brian Casserly, John Mondin.

There are Churches that I play, like the mega church up in St Peters called Church on the Rock. We play jazz all the time there in between services, right out in the lobby. I use the Hammond organ and have had congregants from that church say; “I’ve seen it on the stage and the church but I’ve never seen one anywhere else. They’re looking at it out in the lobby and just flipping. I mean that is so cool! There are also these little pop groups, I play with, that do jazz or blues versions of pop tunes. There’s Josiah Joyce, who’s a fantastic guitar player, Joe Mancuso, Dawn Weber, Joe Park the guitar player, Vince Martin, and Jim Stevens, who’s forming this fantastic funk band around myself and a bunch of great cats. During the day I do retirement home gigs with my son, Jake, on the drums. I took a Hammond organ into a retirement on for the first time last week They couldn’t believe it! We were at the Gatesworth. It was with Joe Park, and Drew Davis.

Q; I did a show with Vince Martin at the Gatesworth called the Blues Highway where I talked blues history, musicians like Vince Martin or the Fab Foehners played blues, I talked blues, they played Blues. Basically a road trip journey through the timeline & travels of Highway 61, the ‘Blues Highway’. The crowd at Gatesworth loved it, said ‘it’s one of the best shows we’ve had here’.

A: They’re starved for great music there. Basically, the whole town is starved for great music and the musicians in this town are having such a hard time trying to figure out how to navigate working in a town that basically underpays. There aren’t enough clubs. The town’s beginning to have this certain level of apathy from the younger people because “people don’t know what they want, they want what they know.” As long as they only hear Juke Boxes and Karaoke, they’re not gonna know what live music is. We have to keep fighting the good fight.

Q: Absolutely! And along those lines, I want to invite you to put all your shows up in the STLBlues calendar so people can find you around town in these different bands!

A: Yeah. That’s a fantastic idea, let’s do it!

Q: I want to thank you for taking some time to share your story and we’ll see you out there playing music!

A: Hey thank you. Right on brother!