John McVey:
A Bluesman
INTERVIEW with John McVey - PART 1
orJohn, it’s great to sit down with you, talk about your musical history & how you ended up here in St Louis.
Q: You’ve been performing around town for a few years now so people know you well as a bluesman, and most people know you have a Texas background, but you had some time in St. Louis when you were a kid, is that right?
A: Yes. My dad was from Marthasville, so we’d come up to visit his parents and we’d hang out for a couple weeks during the summer and Dad would schedule these family vacations around the Cardinals schedule. So while my sisters were were shelling peas and stuff like that, he and I would take off and go watch the Cardinals play at Busch, so that was a lot of fun!
Q: Well here we are sitting in your living room years later, and you’re living right across from the old Anheuser-Busch brewery. Glad to be back in St. Louis?
A: Yes I am! When I was a kid whenever we’d come into town you’d always drive by the brewery and when I was a little kid it always reminded me of like a medieval castle on a hill as you come around that bend and you see it for the first time! And when my wife Mary Alice and I moved up here 10 years ago and found this place…..it was just perfect because it’s basically just across the street from the Anheuser-Busch brewery. I’m living reliving a childhood memory, and of course I tell people this house is so old that President Grant used to get drunk and pass out in our front yard when he was visiting his relatives. Of course that that may or may not be a complete fabrication of my imagination, but you know that’s just the way it is!
Q: Let’s go way back before life took you to Austin TX. Where did you grow up, and where there early music influences in your household?
A: Okay first I must make a disclaimer – the gummies have kicked in! So it was a long dark stormy night, suddenly a shot rang out, and I was born somewhere in North Carolina! I don’t know where I was adopted, I don’t know where I was adopted out of, I don’t really have a birth certificate so to speak. Yeah but I was adopted in 1956 and my dad was in the Marine Corps, a fighter pilot for the Marines and he was stationed at Cherry Point and so we lived in New Bern NC which time was super small you know and when he got out of the Marines and he retired – after 23 years I think – we relocated to my mom’s hometown of Pensacola FL. I was like 7 when that happened and that’s where I went through the Great Florida Public Education system, yeah (laughs) and started playing baseball and all that. And so that’s kind of where I was raised, and that’s also where I started discovering music. My mom had me take piano lessons from time I was 7 til I don’t know… 12 or 13! I didn’t learn it a lick. I can’t play a little piano and took her 67 years.
Q: Did that time teach you the basic chords?
A: No, nothing from the piano teacher. He used to work out in Hollywood and he was back in Pensacola taking care of his mom and so he had all this furniture throughout his house that was from movie sets. And so instead of teaching me anything on piano, he was telling me about the the furniture for movie sets all the time – for years – and those that furnishes made out of balsa wood, so these huge pieces of furniture and prop furniture that looked immovable, you can pick them right up (laughs). So that’s why I didn’t learn anything! That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
The piano teacher wanted to teach me you know – which is you know the proper way to learn – some theory and how to read, and all these exercises and getting into classical and stuff like that was all cool and all that, but the problem was I didn’t want to learn how to play Mozart or Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, I wanted to learn how to play Great Balls Of Fire by Jerry Lee Lewis! Well they weren’t teaching that, so I got bored, lost interest, kept playing baseball.
Q: You kept playing baseball all through high school into college, didn’t you?
A: I went to Ecambia High School in a time that had a troubled history of desegregation. It was around 1970 in Pensacola, I was going to Escambia High School, and the Rebels were the school team, the Confederate flag was the school’s flag, Dixie was the school fight song! So then all of a sudden, segregation was gone and it was desegregated and they bussed a bunch of kids in from Pensacola High School, and they didn’t really appreciate all them references to the Confederacy and stuff like that. So and you know, that was at the time of my great awakening, around 1970 when all of a sudden I realized yeah, I just discovered this thing called slavery in a history book, what was that about and that’s when I realized oh man there’s a lot of f****ed stuff in this country, and you know I called that my great awakening. I quit going to church, I quit believing in Dixie and the myth of the Grand Old South and all that sort of stuff you know. I woke up, not trying to be political.
A couple years after that, it was on a Saturday morning – it was 11:00 o’clock in the morning – I was driving my mom’s old station wagon, going to the local mall and malls were brand new back in those days. So there was a record store in this mall, in a corporate record store, I don’t know what it was, but anyway I was going to get a new Rolling Stones album or something like that. Well, I was listening to the radio station WBSR, and all of a sudden they started playing this song by BB King off this new album called ‘To know you is love you’. It’s a song written by Stevie Wonder, BB was covering it, and they played the whole song and it had this great guitar break in it where he breaks it down from the full band and orchestra, it breaks all the way down to where it’s just BB and the drummer, and then finally just BB singing that string man! I pulled my mom’s car over – on the left side was the Bank of West Florida and on the right side was a pool hall – Golden Crown Recreation Center – and it was 11:00 o’clock on Saturday morning and my mind had just been blown – that was the first time I’d heard BB King. I heard the name before because I was a Beatles fan, and read an interview in Rolling Stone with John Lennon where he said he just wished he could play like BB King, and then all of a sudden I hear my first BB King ! I didn’t go get the Rolling Stones cut out, I went and got that BB King album! I still have it in the backroom, it is still one of my favorite BB King albums, that is still one of my favorite BB King guitar solos. I was playing guitar at that time, I was doing Beatles and Rolling Stone stuff and all that. Blues records in Pensacola, FL were not readily available or easy to find ,and well that record changed the way I played from playing like Rolling Stones and Beatles songs and stuff that got me into ‘ohh man I want to check this out’, and so I started going to like Zaire’s and Kmart and their cut out record bins, and I found records like an album called Hideaway with Freddie King. Hideaway, and Dance Away with Freddie King which was half instrumentals and half vocals you know like Tore Down and things like and The Stumble. And I found Albert King’s cut out record release which was the Big Blues album that Albert King had released on the Bobbin label I think, I’m not too sure. Just some great Albert King stuff on it from his first album recording and release and it was really cool, you could tell Albert played differently than BB and Freddie, and so I really got into those guys! I like that stuff and I still like the Stones and you know Beatles and Jeff Beck and all that stuff but this Blues thing, that really got my interest!
Q: Were you gigging around town in those days?
A: No I wasn’t gigging around at all, I was just some kid trying to figure things out off of records, and I was playing baseball that was the main thing you know. So I ended up getting a scholarship to University of Arkansas at Little Rock and I played there for a season and a half before I injured myself and couldn’t play ball anymore, so then I became a cook. I still stayed in Little Rock I didn’t move back to Florida because there was just no future there for me at all to do anything, and when I was about 24 I picked up a guitar again. I hadn’t played guitar since I was like in 18-19 years old, 20 maybe, and so I picked it up again at 24 when I broke up with a girlfriend, she broke up with me actually and threw a guitar at my back saying ‘here, see if you make something of yourself’. Yeah okay, and turned out I kind of had a knack for it.
Anyway, before too long after going through playing in a band that recorded some demos for RCA, a whole album’s worth of original material that’s the first band I was in in Little Rock band called **** Dog, then I played in a couple more little groups around Little Rock. Little Rock always had to potential to have an explosive music scene, but just as soon as it threatened to break out, the establishment would always shut it down, shut down the bars. So Little Rock was nowhere for me. Anyway, I’d made friends with these people at this independent record store in Little Rock – Discount Records -and one of my friends there was this guy Carol D Bland, who was a harmonica player and Carol D when he was growing up in North Little Rock as a child, he lived down the street from a Blues club that would have people like T-bone Walker, Jimmy Reed, Little Walter, you know whoever was working the circuit at the time. He would go to see, and he’d sneak around the back and stand on some old beer crates and stuff and listen through the window! So he was hip to the blue scene and stuff and he turned me on Muddy Waters and Lightning Hopkins and people like that I’d never even heard of, you know. And so we were an interesting band, we used to play originals. It wasn’t country but it wasn’t quite country rock either, we played I guess now they’d called it Americana. We’d mix our songs up in our set lists like we do a couple of Don’s originals. Don Klaus, leader of the band he was the **** dog he’s a Vietnam vet and a lot of his songs had to do with his time in Vietnam and of course with lost loves of Arkansas mountain girls. So we’d do a couple of his songs, and we’d follow it up with somebody like Lightning Hopkins or Jimmy Reed or Muddy Waters, so people really didn’t know what to make of us. They just never heard of such a thing, and at that particular time and that particular location. Anyway eventually that band broke up and Carol D introduced me to Larry Davis.
Larry needed a guitar player for a couple of gigs for a weekend, so Carol D put me in touch with Larry who asked me to sing & play a couple times when Albert King came to town, because Albert and Larry were all childhood buddies, but I digress. I went over to Larry’s house – there’s an old shotgun style house in his him and his mother lived there and she was sick with diabetes really bad. I was waiting for Larry to come out and I was sitting on the couch with a little mouse running around underneath the bed in the bedroom right off the main thing and I was just going ‘well that’s interesting, that’s cool OK’ and then Larry came out with this guitar and sat down and showed me a chord and said ‘can you make this chord’ and I said sure! We talked a little bit and he said ‘play this rhythm’ so I played this rhythm. ;That’s OK, can you do this chord’ and I said ‘yeah I’m gonna do that chord’ and he goes ‘play this rhythm’. I play that rhythm, he says ‘OK you’ll do what’s your address’! I gave him my address, he says ‘someone be by pick you up at 10:00 o’clock tomorrow morning’. That was a Friday, and Saturday was when somebody came by, picked me up in a Bronco – the full size Bronco not the little ones – I and Coot, he was the bass plus keyboard player, he picked picked me up and then we went and picked up the rest of the band, and then we drove on to Memphis.
So here I am in my 20s, the only ofay in the vehicle, didn’t know any of these guys, they were all in their 40s and 50s, they were all a lot older than me, and we’re on the road to Memphis! I have no idea where we’re going, what we’re doing, and they start passing around the whiskey flask, get it to me and say ‘you want some?’, ‘yeah sure’ and then passed around the joint, ‘you want some?’, I say ‘sure, why not you know’, and so we’re having a grand old time! We get to Memphis , Coot pulls his Bronco into this alleyway, it’s pretty narrow and we go down it, and at the end of the alley Larry’s sitting on the trunk of his Cadillac talking to some girls! We get out, unload all our equipment. and take it through a narrower walkway to a backstage area and we set up our stuff on this stage, and then I have time to walk around a little bit. Well, on the stage next to us is John Lee Hooker and Charlie Musselwhite, after those guys Memphis Slim is playing so it turns out to be this big festival in a park right off of Bill Street somewhere. I mean I don’t know to this day! I still don’t have any idea where this festival was or anything, but we played between John Lee Hooker and Charlie Musselwhite and Memphis Slim I believe and we did a 45-60 minute set, something like that and Larry introduced everybody in the band, ‘and this young fella here on guitar, I don’t know his name yet, I just met him yesterday but ladies, he is a ladies man, you want to talk to this guy’! But you know I turned this as red as I can be! So anyway after our shows over I’ve got all these girls talking to me, and they’re all sweet and deep smiles and they’re nice you know to this redheaded kid, and I’m just quite cool and Larry goes ‘man where you going, no time for that, I’m going to head back to Little Rock, we got a show there tonight!
I said ‘what’? Larry said ‘yeah we got to go’. I waved goodbye to the girls, and got back in the truck and drove back to Little Rock and played a show for four hours to 15 people, 6 of them were in the band and 6 of them were working there. At the end of the night Larry said ‘so this is the Blues’. I go ‘yep, this is what it is’ it’s the first show, we got paid 75 bucks apiece, the second show we got paid 20 bucks apiece. Larry goes ‘do you think you can hang?’ I was hooked! I was hooked hook, line and sinker, man! That was a ‘hell yeah, I can hang’! I called up my job the next morning to quit and two months later I was homeless on and off for two years. I had a blast.
Q: So you were gigging around Little Rock for quite a while, but then you ended up in Austin. How did that happen?
A: I was back in Pensacola one day visiting my folks on a break from Larry, and he called me up and said ‘John you need to go down to this place called Night Town in Fort Walton Beach. There’s a kid from Austin TX playing there who just recorded one of my songs, and I’ve known this kid for a little while, he’s pretty good so I think you’ll like him’. So me and a buddy we go to Night Town in Fort Walton Beach, and of course the act is Stevie Ray Vaughn with the original Double Trouble! His album had not even been released yet, he had just quit the David Bowie tour and no one had ever seen him work, not there anyway and so we went there and the first song Stevie was up with Rude Mood.
1500 guitar players get up and go have a drink at the bar! Second song he did, ‘Voodoo Child’ 14, 999 guitar players try to start selling their guitars immediately and switching to the bass. I just looked up at the stage, and I said ‘well crap if Larry moves to LA, I’m moving to Austin’ because anytime they could produce a guitar player like that, it had to have something going for it, and this is before Austin exploded you know. Actually the big Texas oil and energy bust happened, and Texas was in the middle of a huge recession. So by the time I got there in ’86’, you know when you’re looking for a place to live landlords would be showing you places you know just a couple years ago I could get for $500 a month, now it’s for a parking pad you know people would put up a tent and live on it. I’ve just gone ‘well that’s just nuts’. Well anyway, the bust happened so that wasn’t going on anymore so Larry moved out, and there was there was nothing for me left in Little Rock once Larry moved to LA. When I was with Larry, that was like I said, I had a blast! I got the meet and play with Fenton Robinson, Albert Collins and Albert King and got to hang out with Albert King quite a bit, yeah just incredible stuff you know. I mean Son Seals was riding high at the time, him and Albert Collins were duking it out as to who was going to be the new king of the Blues guitar and they were both just incredible. And at the same at you had Albert King go ‘shoot **** y’all don’t stand a chance’. Freddie King was long gone by then and BB was kind of doing a a very commercialized version of BB. And rock – it was just you know, big hair and heavy metal stuff, and that’s all good you know, that’s rock and roll, and the other end was the new wave and the punk movement. And then there’s a third movement at the time, it was a blues movement, and that was for the cats that didn’t want to play hair metal, maybe just couldn’t grow the hair (laughs) didn’t want to play punk and new wave, even though we kind of sympathized with some of the ethos at the time. So we got into playing Blues and this is like in Austin mainly this scene popped up and it was just I went down there and it was just incredible! Our first night in town, my wife and I drove down 6th Street, we didn’t know what the heck was going on! It’s just crazy man, there’s bars lined up on each side of the street for I don’t know 5-6 blocks, and every bar has a live band in it and every live band has a f****n guitar player that’s just killing it!
And then you’re there, you go in one bar and you’d hear this guy playing guitar and you just go ‘Jesus’ and you’d walk out of that bar and walk into the bar next door, well this guy’s better, you go down to the next bar, well this guy’s even better! And it was like, what the heck! It was a town that, at that time, by the mid 80’s, really promoted and supported guitar players. It was a guitar town, no doubt about it, at that time it was a straight ahead guitar town. If you wanted to gig, you had to be able to play, because there were just too many great guitar players in that town, and it wasn’t all Blues. There was a lot of country, there was a lot of rockabilly, there’s a lot of rock, but everybody had great guitar players everybody could play! It was just wild, and it was such a healthy atmosphere of competition and striving to make yourself better and stuff, it was a wonderful time to be in Austin TX! I considered myself very fortunate, I was there from 1986-2006, right around that time.
Q: And you played at some legendary Austin clubs, is that right?
A: I played Antone’s, I played the Continental Club, I played the Hole in the Wall bar, played the Black Cat Lounge, played the Austin Outhouse, toured all over the the country and all over Europe in bands out of Austin, it was a great experience.
Q: Did you meet John Logan and Hudson Harkins there in Austin?
A: Yeah, I did! Hudson had a band called the Hoo Doo Cats and his guitar player was a friend of mine, Scott Reiner out of Las Vegas. Great guitar player, great singer, also worked at Ray Henning’s heart of Texas music, that’s where I’m at. And so I met Hudson because we were in different bands you know, he had his band and I was playing in different bands, a couple of them, they were just playing the same circuit at that time. A lot of times, because when you weren’t on tour, you came back down to 6th Street and got a gig. So you know, that’s the secret to surviving as a musician, especially as a guitar player in those days, you worked as much as you could, took every opportunity. You’d work sometimes 3 gigs a night 7 nights a week! You know you just played, you played, you played, and you toured and you come back and you hustle gigs. And then lot of bars didn’t pay very well, so you had to learn how to hustle tips and we got pretty good at being able to hustle tips out of a crowd. Of course they got their money’s worth, they got one heck of a show and excellent music!
All the musicians at that time, we all got really good at hustling the tips and we all learned when a crowd was done, how to turn the house. You know, we’d play two 2 1/2 hour sets till the crowd stopped tipping you know, and then we’d take a break and turn the house and then do it all over again! And so at several of those places, you could make a lot of money once you learned how to do that. Of course you had to be good, that’s the thing, you had to be good, you had to be able to play! And then there were the other clubs, the historic clubs, the famous ones like Antone’s and the Continental Club, you had to be really good to play in those places, and the pay is okay. You’d make more money down on 6th street, but the thing was, it was a lot of fun especially at Antone’s or Guadalupe, or Guadalupe anyway, cuz that was where all the great shows happened, well you know the Blues parties, the anniversaries, and stuff like that!
All those guys from Chicago were down there playing all the time, and it was just this magical place in time! My wife bartended there for 11 years, bartended at Continental Club for eight or nine years, it was just a wonderful place to go hang out after you finished your gig down on 6th street or some other part of town you know just down the street at the hole in the wall or something like that you haul ass up to Antone’s, try to catch the remnants of the last set and see if they were going to shut the doors and you know, play overtime! There was a lot of times there was an extra set after closing time and it was just incredible! You’d see Otis Rush on stage you know, standing 10 feet away and only you know, 30-40 people in the joint and so it was, you know, it was after 2 am, and it was just incredible! And then the Antone”s house band with Derek O’Brien and Denny Freeman playing guitars! Mel Brown was an artist in residence for a while when I was there, it was just great guitar playing everywhere and I was fortunate enough that I got to play Antone’s quite a bit and be a part-timer. I got involved in the organization a little bit and got promoted by Susan Antone and Cliff, and they made my career, you know helped me have a career!
Q: Antone’s is on the ‘Texas Flood’ wall at the National Blues Museum, along with a reference to the ‘Antones Women’ album. One of those women was Marcia Ball, did you ever run across her in your Antone’s years?
A: I ran across Marcia when I was playing with a band called ‘Hook and the Hitchhikers’, with Hook Herrera on harmonica & vocals, Alex Napier on bass, and Mike Buckham on drums. We were playing a gig at the Continental Club, and at the end of the gig Marcia and her husband were there, cuz I was the new kid on the block and made a splash as part of a grand entrance, so people were there to check me out. David Murray had just left her band, he was her guitar player for several years, and she came up to the bandstand and said “I need a guitar player for my band, I’m in the middle of holding auditions, but I’ll hire you on the spot!” I just looked at her and said, “can I get back to you on that”, because I had no idea who she was! I didn’t know, and so I told the band about it – whose names I will not mention again – anyway, they spent all night talking me out of it, saying “well she’s a pianist and she’s the star, and does nothing but her stuff. You’re a blues player, do you want to play just straight ahead blues and stuff like that? You know she won’t even give you a solo but maybe once a set” and stuff like that which was all fiction, I found out later (laughs)!
So anyway, I became infamous as the guitar player that turned down Marcia Ball’s offer to join the band – without even an audition! That’s good!!!
Q: We were sitting down at Hammerstone’s for one of your gigs recently, and you were doing a Freddie King song at the time that had a surf influence! What led you to combine the two genres?
A: Well, I grew up on the Gulf Coast in Pensacola, I was at the beach a lot because that’s what you get did as a kid, a teenager! Especially, you know, you went to the beach, and so the sound of the ocean crashing and stuff like that, well that’s where the original idea for guitar reverb came from with Dick Dale. It’s the sound of the waves crashing, and the reverberation caused by that. You know Blues is about being yourself, and my love of reverb and sometimes tremolo, that’s me being true to myself because I grew up in that environment. My cousin surfed all the time, I had a lot of friends that were surfers. I had a lot of friends that were motorcycle riders too. In fact when I was 16, it was right around Christmas, when I walked into a room where my mom and dad were, my mom looked up at me and goes “what do you want, I can tell by the look on your face you want something”, and then my dad goes “oh crap he wants a motorcycle like all his friends” and I said “no I don’t, I want a guitar”. My mom looked at me and said, “what do you want a guitar for, you don’t know how to play it?”
Well, I’ve never forgotten those words, and that’s probably the reason why I still play guitar today. So you know, BB used reverb a lot, and a lot of people use reverb for the production values and stuff, so I just kind of got into that sound. I wasn’t consciously trying to blend surf music with Blues, it’s just that I liked reverb, so it just kind of worked out that way!
You’ve been in St. Louis a few years now. Back when I was at the National Blues museum, I was able to bring you and your band to the Legends stage, it’s one of my favorite memories.
Q: What did you think of the Saint Louis scene when you landed here in town, and what do you think of it now?
A: Well when I landed here, the (Blues) triangle was really strong you know with Beale, BB’s, and the Broadway Oyster Bar, and so that was a fun thing to check out, and then Soulard! Mary Alice and I actually made our decision to move to St Louis sitting in on the patio of Hammerstone’s on a Sunday afternoon. Raul was in the Voodoo Blues band, and was running the Sunday Blues Jam. We just fell in love with the vibe of Soulard and Benton Park, and the architecture, you know I mean! We’re big fans of St. Louis, it’s a great town, has a great music scene music! The scenes undergoing some changes right now as is a lot of things, we don’t know exactly what’s going to happen but and at the same time I still think the St. Louis scene is extremely strong. You have people like Marquise Knox and Jeremiah Johnson, you know just big time national & international Blues artists. They’re both friends of mine and they’ve both been really nice to me and very generous when they talk about me, these guys represent some of the finest of St Louis of music and that’s what they’re both about is the music! They’re the big stars and there’s other stars coming up, it’s all great!
Q: You were involved with helping Dylan Triplett grow his career, weren’t you?
A: Yeah, I helped get Dylan signed. I put him in touch with Larry Fulture who is the bass player from Taj Mahal and Ruthie Foster and a great independent record producer in his own right. And so I got him and Dylan together and they got the record deal worked out and kind of got Dylan discovered and doing what he’s doing now, you know. It’s like you got to help people when you can, and I’ve always done that, I’ve always helped.
In Austin, I was always helping people learn how to play, how to perform on stage – paying them while I was teaching them, by the way – and I continued do that whenever I see it and have the opportunity to do so, cause people helped me when I was coming up!
I didn’t have it easy. I didn’t you know, no one handed me $1,000,000 and said here, you know. They handed me a busted guitar and said ‘here’! was homeless off and on for a couple of years, and I worked my ass off. I toured for decades, I played and played and worked and partied – and I partied hard – and it was all fun, it was a blast!
And now I’m here in St Louis! When I first came up, I worked a lot cause I was very fortunate, Art Dwyer hired me right off the bat! I played with the Soulard Blues band for five years or so till COVID hit, and Hammerstone’s hired me right off the bat with a Wednesday night residence that I’ve kept going for 10 years and hopefully another 10 if I live that long!
I don’t play with the Soulard Blues band anymore, I don’t travel anymore, and I have no interest in recording. I love Hammerstone’s, I play there usually twice a week. I have a great band with the Morgan family, with Tecora Morgan, Riley Morgan Jr. and Ziggy Morgan!
Q: Riley Jr. plays drums of keyboards at the same time it’s just incredible. You were quoted as saying that in Texas down in Texas you have to ‘play pedal to the metal and kick ass’. Did you find that here in St. Louis?
A: There were some great musicians here, they had a different thing, a different approach to playing than what we did in Texas, and I had to assimilate that and that that’s cool man cause everything you learn I tell you learn that’s one of the things I’ve liked about living in different places you you get to experience more of life from different regions of different cultures. That’s the whole thing, you’re you’re trying to experience this life cause we ain’t here forever! There’s great players here! There’s Big Rich McDonough, and Matt ‘The Rattlesnake’ Lesch has gotten so good in the past 10 years! I mean I love it when he comes in if he wants to sit in, I love having him. Marquise Knox comes down to Hammerstone’s and sits in with me from time to time, Jeremiah Johnson, all these guys!
You were quoted in the RFT as saying “Down in Texas, it’s a ‘pedal to the metal’ thing. I prefer having cats that can kick ass and keep up.”
Q: When you started playing in St. Louis, did you find that kick ass talent?
A: I’m very fortunate that these folks are so nice to me and so cool to me and they’re great players. I went through a lot of different rhythm sections, everybody could play their ass off! I don’t mess with people that can’t play, but the people I’ve chosen or that have chosen me to play with, they’re all world class musicians!
Q: There was a buzz around town when you moved here, almost a reverence. Did you know about that?
A: I appreciate the sentiment, but I’ve never been in this for that, it makes me uncomfortable, it always has. They tried to make me a star a couple times when I was younger and it was just like, NO, cause I worked for people that were stars and I saw what they had to go through and I just thought “that’s not for me, I just want to play”.
So when I got here, the audience welcomed me, the musicians welcomed me and then they all got to know me. Eventually I found my way to the Morgan’s, and with my rhythm section being brother and sister, there’s that sibling connection there – they’ve been playing together their whole lives – so there’s a connection there rhythmically. It’s just incredible!
Q: They are incredible! What amazes me no end is Riley playing the keyboard as he’s playing the drums, and keeping it all separate in his head! How does he do it?
A: The really amazing thing is he can only do that when he’s playing at Hammerstone’s because it’s that big mirror right behind him, and you see that’s the trick…..he’s got to use mirrors, and so what no one notices is while he’s playing drums, his image in the mirror reaches out and plays the keyboard parts. That’s what’s going on but that’s a secret, don’t tell nobody (laughs).
No, he’s extremely talented, their whole family is! Yhey all play all the instruments they all sing they all dance, they’re smart and funny people and they keep me laughing! They’ve accepted me as one of their own and they are some the best people I’ve ever met in my life. I really enjoy playing here and I’m planning on spending what’s left of my days performing music right here at Hammerstone’s every Wednesday, every 1st and 3rd Sunday, and every 4th Saturday from here to Infinity and beyond.
Q: John, that’s a good way to close this, thanks for your time today. More below, in interview Part 2!
videos from the John McVey interview - PART 1
INTERVIEW with John McVey - PART 2
AUSTIN TO HOUSTON
Well, I left Austin one step ahead of the police and two steps ahead of a couple of exes, I left in a hurry! My profile had gotten really high as far as the Austin Police Department was concerned and I didn’t want to be arrested so I skedaddled out of Austin Texas. I had a friend living in Houston, because I had a regular gig in Houston at this place called Shakespeare’s pub. I would go down there once a month you know with The Stumble and we played every New Year’s, and went down and played – the food bank had a big benefit there every Thanksgiving – and I was always the headliner for that, and this place would be packed! It only held 95 people, and when I played there at the Food Bank on New Year’s and stuff, there was easily two to 300 people crammed in this joint, and we were rocking. And so I get down there and stayed at Jim Pierce’s house – he was one of the vice presidents of the record label – Doc Louz and I had become friends and so I moved. He let me move in his place, and I stayed there for about 6 weeks until I got my own apartment, just two blocks away. The day I got there I went over to Shakespeare’s and told him “I just moved there could I get a regular gig” and the owner said, “we just sold the bar yesterday”, and I said what!! “Yeah, we sold it to this guy we call him Mr Ali, he’s Palestinian”. I said “Oh Ok” and they go “don’t worry John, we told him you come with the lease”. And I said “what”? He goes “you are part of it, your gigs are here whether he has anybody else play or not you’re part of the lease, the agreement”. And so Mr. Ali and I got along great, everybody else hated him but I got along with him great! He loved my playing and I worked there. That club went through several ownership changes after the original owners had sold it, and it was like I was part of the lease, no matter who got the club.
So I had that, and then from that place I stretched out and played all throughout the SE Texas region, you know. Down in Galveston I had a couple places I played there regular. A friend of mine, Paul Orta – who I’d played with for about three years in Austin, toured Europe twice with and made a record that was one of the best selling records on New Rose Records out of Paris and was written up about in Spin Magazine and Rolling Stone and all that shit, that was a good band. We had Freddie Pharaoh on drums, Keith Ferguson on bass, Eddie Stout on bass and he was also the band manager and label owner that Paul recorded for, and that was a killer band, but anyway I digress….so I played Shakespeare’s for the first time, met the original owners, with Paul Orta. So I’m down there in Houston, there’s lots of places to play, but there weren’t any real Blues clubs so to speak you know, but I kind of fit in in a lot of different kind of clubs because they like the way I played guitar. They didn’t particularly care that I was playing Blues or not, but the fact that I was a hotshot guitar slinger kind of thing you know, they knew I could draw. I could draw, I always had a good following in all these different places, and I recorded the live album there in Houston, and my last studio album was recorded when I was still in Houston. Andrew Reed had this record label out of Asheville NC, and he saw me play in Austin a couple years before I moved to Houston and then he lost track of me because I moved to Houston. It wasn’t until 2012 that he found me in Houston and set up my last record. I had James Floyd and Barry ‘Frosty’ Smith, the legendary drummer who played with everybody in the world from Sly and Parliament Funkadelic to me (laughs), one of the most incredible drummers who ever lived! And we did a live show at a theater in Fayetteville, no, in Asheville NC that was filmed and released all over, and Andrew Reed was actually on NBC news being interviewed after they had the fires out there in Asheville, right after the hurricane and we’re going, “wow, Andrew’s still alive, he’s giving an interview on NBC about how tough things are there right now just because he lost it all….lost his studio, his cabin, they all burned down and flooded, all that shit”. And you know, previously he’d lost one of his kids in a car accident, and Andrew’s had a tough time but he does never gives up and he always says, “you’re the man that taught me how to play guitar!” OK, you know you could already play, but okay! So that’s where I recorded my last two albums was when I was based in Houston.
The thing about Houston, and in Austin too, at that time of my life I had gotten into extraneous partying, you know, activities, and so I was doing a lot of blow and a lot of speed, and all that sort of shit, and drinking a lot, just having a grand old time, and you know, not giving a shit about anything. Or that, you know, I was in debt up to my eyeballs, didn’t give a flying fuck because Texas had usury laws – credit cards could threaten you and but they couldn’t….if you live in Texas and you owe somebody money, there ain’t nothing they can do about it, they can’t sue you, they can’t throw you in jail, they can’t do jack shit. So I was pretty much living just on the edges of the law you know, just on the outside edges of it, which I’d lived most of my adult life like that anyway, you know. As Bob Dylan once said, “to be honest you have to live outside the law” and I am an honest person! And so I’ve always lived just, you know, right there, like that, outside the law. And so I was partying pretty good, and I looked like hell. My skin was grey, you know people all over in Austin and Houston……there was a bookmaker making bets as how long I was going to survive and shit, you know, in Austin. Yeah, I fooled him, he lost his money! And all the MF’ers who bet against me, lost their fucking money.
I’d played – just finished headlining – one of these big food bank benefits at Shakespeare’s, right, and so I come out, and the way I would end my show, I’d be doing my ‘Freddie King goes surfing’, which you’ve heard, it’s hot shit, a really fast surf tune that throws in several Freddie King references, and the way I’d end my show is I’d stuff my guitar, shove it through the ceiling and leave it hanging from the ceiling, feeding back, just howling, and I’d introduce the band before I played the song, then play the song, shove the guitar into the ceiling, left it hanging from the ceiling, go “and I’m John McVey”! The door to the outside was right next to the stage, and I’d walk off stage and walk outside, and I did that for 14 years there! The place…..we always figured it was going to catch fire after one of those show stoppers! One guy said “Man, you have the best show finale of anybody I’ve seen outside of James Brown!”
MILLER LITE COMMERCIAL
Ok, now this was in Austin, it was, I don’t know, ’93’, something like that, and I had my own band. I wasn’t touring with anybody else, I was touring with my band doing some regional work up in Colorado and all that sort of stuff. And I’d whittled it down to a crack little trio, and we were playing a Monday night residency at this place called Maggie Mays on 6th Street and so anyway, it’s this big place and it’s Monday night and it’s dead as shit, and there’s a group of people shooting pool in the back, right? So anyway, we’re playing and we get through the first set – and you’ve seen me play to empty rooms – you know I still I put everything I’ve got into it! I hit the stage, guitar in my hand, and there ain’t no goofing off! I’m serious as shit about my music you know, and I played my ass off. And so we were playing our asses off. Johnny Benoit was the drummer, and all I can remember right now is this nickname ‘P-2’, this guy from Paris is one of my best friends at the time I taught him how to play blues bass…and I’m having a senior moment….well God, he’s going to kill me (Pierre Pelgrine). And so we finished our first set, and couple of people come out from that group that was shooting pool. and they say “hey, we’re in town shooting the Miller Lite commercial, and our director wants to talk to you about you know, y’all shooting the Miller Lite commercial with us over the next couple days. It’ll pay pretty good, $1500/man you know”. And we just went ‘shit, you get the fuck away from us’, we weren’t in the mood, you know. You know, people say all sorts of stupid shit to you when you’re performing, and we just go ‘get the hell out of here’, you know, ‘don’t make me come off this day to beat your ass’, you know, and well then, a whole group of them come up…..the director and the assistant director come up, and they go “no, we’re serious! Wade wants you, and they wrote down the address of this hotel and said “be here at this room at 9:00 in the morning”. We’re just going “yeah, okay, I’ll tell you what, we’ll be there”. And so we played our gig and stuff you know, they partied all night and then we all left, his friends and stuff, but we didn’t believe any of that crap.
Well, just on a lark we showed up at the hotel a little early, about 8:30 and stuff like that, and as we’re walking in, another band – a very popular Austin band – was walking out, and they were cussing them and stuff like that, and they’re going “somebody got this gig! This is nuts, we were told by our manager we’re going to get this gig!” And so we walk in – we didn’t bring instruments or anything – and they go, “well, act like you’re playing a song on stage in front of a real lively crowd”. So we just mimic guitar, drums and bass and we jumped around like we were the Monkees or some shit! They go “okay, you got the gig, show up at this place down on 6th Street tomorrow morning at 6:30 in the morning”. So we show up and they’d converted one of the bars into a TV studio – and they were really after our drummer Johnny Benoit, he had movie star looks, but they had take all three of us, I mean we could play! So we acted like we were customers at the bar, and there’s one scene in the commercial where I walk up to the bar you know, get two beers, and wander off. And then the next day, they had us meet them at a small Texas town, Fischer TX, at the Fischer Dance Hall, which was an old dance hall from the early 1900s. It’s just amazing!
We got there late because we were too busy smoking pot in the van, and we got a late start for some reason. Anyway, we pulled up on the set and they’re all freaking out because the band’s not there yet, you know, well they come running to the van, we open up the doors, all this smoke comes billowing out like a Cheech and Chong movie, and we all stumble out. They grabbed Benoit, they put him in this old Ford pickup truck with this beautiful model that they had as part of the show, and had them driving up and down a country road outside Fischer while the rest of us set up everything on the stage, you know, after they freaked out. And then they go, “OK, what we want you to do now, is for this next scene, is just pretend like you’re rehearsing”. And at that time I’ve never been in a rehearsal. This is before I joined Labelle, and I’ve had rehearsals for her band just because I was auditioning people whipping people into shape and getting a show down, but except for that, I’ve never had a rehearsal. I didn’t know how to run a rehearsal, and so we just laughed, we’re just going “we don’t rehearse, we just play whatever song John calls, you know, however he feels” and I go “and I call whichever song I remember the words to”, you know, and I’ve never had a set list, I don’t do that stuff. I called the next song, the one that I can remember most of the words to, and so they said “well just play then, and entertain everybody,” so while we played, everyone was on lunch break inside the hall eating tacos and stuff, we played a 30 minute set, and they filmed it.
I saw it once, after a friend of mine got a videotape copy of it. I never saw it when it was playing. It starts off with a camera zooming down the neck of my guitar, past my hand while I was playing, and focusing on the drummer you know, cause he was the star of the commercial, right, and it was just wild! Two days work, we made 10,000 bucks apiece. Right after the commercial, I left and did my first tour of Italy and Switzerland under my name, and when I came back, you know, that’s when Lavelle’s management got hold of me. During my tour, my band had gone on to play with a some fairly big names in the independent rock category at that time, my bass player was a drummer, and we’re playing with Paul Simeon from the Clash and other people like that, they were a great rhythm section. And so I came back and didn’t have any gigs lined up, and was just making you know mailbox money from this commercial and my wife had fallen down and broke her leg in two places, compound fractures, and so she was in half a body cast and she wasn’t working, and I wasn’t working. Lavelle’s manager called me up just at the right time, and so I put a band together for Lavelle cause she’d been banned from Chicago because her band was not up to snuff at all, and her first album had just come out on the Antone’s Records – Miss Lavelle – and so I put a band together that would play the record note for note, and we put up a show and hit the festival circuit, and we did that for five years. We played all over the world, all over this country, and I’d already toured all over the country with Larry and with Paul Orta and the Kingpins and Hook and the Hitchhikers and stuff like that. I’d always worked and always toured. Like I used to say, “well I lived in Austin for about 22 years of stuff, and I was on the road for 25 of them”.
And so yeah, that’s what happened, I put that band together, and then when that band version of the band broke up, then I put another version of the band together that was even better, and that band really took leaps, every place we went we just stomped. You know I had Freddie Pharaoh on drums, he was not with Sue Foley anymore, and so he was playing drums for us and we had Arturo ‘Sauce’ Gonzalez on Hammond B3. Like I said, he was in a band that in the early 60s called Sonny and the Sunliners, and they had a nationwide hit, ‘Cry For Me’ I think, I don’t remember the tune but they had a nationwide hit, and they were on Dick Clark’s American bandstand. and then like I said they pretty much all got drafted to Vietnam, that kind of broke that version of that band up, and so anyway and then Sauce would play with Doug Somme all the time and the West Side horns and with a bunch of Cajun bands and Tex Mex bands that were really famous in the Hispanic communities all over this country, and he toured with them as the B3 player. Him and I were roommates, and I loved Sauce, he was a wonderful, wonderful person, and a good mentor towards me, helped me out a lot with different things. And a lot of times he got me when we weren’t on tour, or even after we both quit Lavelle, he got me gigs playing with the West Side horns, an all Mexican R&B band, really highly regarded, and we played you know these Mexican joints and stuff like that. And places where to this day I’ll never forget playing…at Club 71 and I’m still friends with the former owner – that club’s been closed down – a guy named John Garza who’s known as Juan Aio, and these were all outlaws, man, it was a bikers club and it was an adventure, I’ll just put it that way. I won’t go into the specifics so to speak, but it was it was a wild time.
MEETING LAVELLE WHITE
It was at a club in Little Rock AR called the Blue Note, and I was playing there with Larry (Davis), and as I walked in, there was this lady sitting at a table right next to the stage and they introduced her, “this is Miss Lavelle White“, and Miss Lavelle asked me to get her a Courvoisier – with a water back – from the bar, and that’s how I met Lavelle White! And then she started flirting with me and messing with me, because that’s what she likes to do with all the young white boys, just to see if she could scare me. I just looked at her and laughed, and that’s how I met Lavelle. It was right before we did a European tour – Larry’s first European tour with Lavelle, Zora Young was on that tour and Miss Jean Carroll was on that tour, she was more of a kind of a folk blues singer kind of thing, and that was a 6 week tour in 1983. Mario Satterwhite was the bass player, he’s passed away now, and Jim Schutte was the drummer, he has also passed away. Lavelle and I are probably the only two still alive.
The manager of a club in Paris – where we were doing a 3 week residency – did get in an argument with me once, cause I was the band leader and stuff like that, and she goes “you know you are not the best, and you have an ego about yourself, and you are not the best” she goes, “you’re just a little bit better than everybody else, but you were not the best”. I didn’t know what to say about that, and I was just a little bit better than everybody else that had been in their club, but I was not the best. So what do you do with that, you know, and at that time my ego is flying pretty good, but I always remembered the old Muddy Waters axiom of ‘there is no best, you can only be a gooden’, and that’s all I ever wanted to be, was a ‘gooden’, but let me tell you I can play this shit, you know, and I play it better than a lot of people.
THE MOUNTAIN STAGE SHOW
Well it was in Charleston WV, and it was an offshoot from Prairie Home Companion, the same guy (Garrison Keillor), he started the Mountain Stage show too as an offshoot, which was strictly music, yeah no comedy, none of that stuff. It was strictly live performances, and we got booked on that show and there was a bunch of people. Some of them are superstars, and became superstars in the country genre. The one guy who I remember meeting on that show is Chris Whitley and he’s passed, but him and I hung out on the back loading dock and smoked a joint, and talked about you know, the music business, and they were putting him through a hell at that time cause he was becoming a rising star you know, he’d even had stuff on MTV and all that and he couldn’t handle it. He was such a sweet kid, he was a sweetheart of a man, and they just drove him crazy – the music business!
THE MUSIC BUSINESS
I advise anyone, ‘don’t be stupid enough to get involved in the music business’. Music is great, the music business sucks, it’s rigged against a musician, they want you to jump through hoops and they don’t give a shit if they’re mentally impairing you or if they’re jeopardizing your health or anything they don’t care. They want that bottom line dollar, and if you’ve got to be wheeled out on stage in a full body cast, shit like that, well by God you better jump around, you know. So I’ve got my issues with that. But Chris Whitley, I remember meeting him and he was an amazing musician. I liked him quite a bit, he was a good guy. And then, the house band were all these studio veterans. World class musicians, I mean you could have dropped the sheet music of a Bach concerto in front of them, they could have played it, you know. So we did our set you know, we were one of the headliners, and an undiscovered talent – the Velvet – was starting to ride high pretty good, and then at the end of the show they do a jam between the house band and all the front people, the stars of all the musical guests they have, and they were going to do ‘Every day I have the Blues’, something like that, to accommodate Lavelle. And then the leader of the band – who was a guitar player – comes up to me and goes ‘we want you to play with the band’ and then they got Sauce Gonzales – a B3 master who played with Sunny and the Sunliners on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand in 63 or 64, right before him and the whole band got drafted and sent to Vietnam. They asked him to play B3, and we were the only band members out of all the backing groups and stuff like that we were the only two asked, and they gave me a spotlight solo in the middle of this, and called out my name repeatedly! 23 million people live baby, you know it’s a lot of fun I probably whiffed the solo, I don’t really remember (laughs), I was pretty excited!
THE EUROPEAN TOUR
In ’83’ I was with Larry Davis, and we did this European tour with Larry, Lavelle White, Zora Young, Jean Carroll, Mario Satterfield was the bass player – his dad played bass for BB King – and I got the drummer by name of Jim Schutte who was at that time Luther Allison’s drummer – he lived in Paris – so we did this 6 week tour of Europe, and it was like…we didn’t have any nights off. Really I don’t think we had any nights off except for the first night when we first got there.
We traveled by train, we all had EuroRail passes which was really cool, but all three of these women had a ton of suitcases – two or three big BIG suitcases – and this before they put wheels on these things, right, they had handles! Yeah that stuff didn’t exist. Well, we were always late for the trains! I’m not going to say who was always making us late for the trains, but it was always one of the 3 women and so we get to the train station and we had to run for the trains! Well, because in my 20’s, I was the young white boy on the tour – I was 27 I think – I had to carry all the girls luggage, so I’d be making several trips from where they put the luggage, and be carrying two bags at once running toward the train, throwing the luggage on, go back get the other two bags, run into the train, throw the luggage on, run back get the other 2 bags throw that luggage on, run back, get Larry’s luggage, get all my clothes that were rolled up in a little backpack, grab that and run to the train & jump on the train just as it’s pulling out! That was generally the MO of the day back then. Man, they worked my ass off! We had three days off in Austria, in Lance Austria, and I had got sick. Oh God, I didn’t leave my room! and the gig we played right before we head to three days off I was getting sick then and the owner of the club we were playing at gave me a bottle of Johnny Walker Red and said “here put this on your amp and you’re feeling bad, just take a swig, it’ll get you through the gig”. And he was right! Man, it was the first time I’d ever had scotch, and that was pretty cool. I don’t remember anything about the gig, I remember we had a good time.
We traveled all over, we played a gig in Germany in this old church in this little village, and it was one of the first benefits for the Green Party. They had just gotten started and that the real tall – she was thin, the lady that started the Green Party – and her partner were both there, gave speeches and stuff. and Lavelle the girls and Larry they were all nervous about playing in an old church, because you know they’re doing the ‘devil’s music’, “eyeroll”, but it was a great gig! I mean we got called out for three encores, and just rocked the house! I can still see it in my mind, being on that stage which was where…I guess the stage was the converted pulpit area you know, but it was a performance area at that time and people were just screaming and raising hell and dancing and just having a blast. That was a wonderful show, and I still remember bits and pieces of it, so it had to be really good, right? And that was the first time where I’ve been in a band that was being treated like we were the Rolling Stones or some shit, you know, like Rock Stars…it was a rush and it was a lot of fun. And then later on in the tour, we’re somewhere in France headed to the south of France to Nice and places like that, ‘sunny places for shady people’, I believe the guy that wrote the ‘The Great Gatsby’ described it as. And we were staying at this old, old villa from the 1600’s, 1500’s, something like that, maybe even older. And there’s 3 stories, and so they had us all up on the top story, each in our own bedroom. Well, the girls had kept talking about they just knew the place was haunted, especially Lavelle. Lavelle is really into magic and superstition and stuff, especially back then – now she’s still there, she hadn’t changed – but so they were all talking about ghosts and all that stuff….what they’re going to do if a ghost showed up and all that. Well anyway, the little place is nice and quiet, and about one o’clock in the morning, Mario and myself, we start running up and down the hallway bouncing into the walls and stuff and making noises and shit, and I think Mario managed to climb out a little bit on the roof and stomp around up there, and the next morning all three of the girls had spent the night together in one room with butcher knives, because the ghosts were coming after them, going up and down the hallway! I never ever told Lavelle that it was me and Mario, never, to this day she still doesn’t know that! Man, she’ll still tell people about the haunted place they stayed at in France, you know, with ghosts on the roof, in the hallways.
“I think he’s got it! He’s finally got it!! – Albert King
MEETING ALBERT KING
Slim? That was his childhood nickname, Slim, I learned that from Larry Davis who was his childhood friend, you know, they knew each other in Pine Bluff Arkansas when they were both kids, teenagers and stuff. The first time I saw Albert King live was at a little club called The Afterthought, in Little Rock AR, and he introduced a special guest…..”ladies and gentlemen we have a star in the audience, and it’s Larry Davis”, you know, and introducing to the people, you know, which was the kind of the polite thing that they did at the Chittlin’ circuit. When another musician was in there and they knew him, they would introduce him and stuff. And then Albert played! And I was sitting in the front row, a friend of mine – Carol D. Bland – had gotten me a ticket, and I got there two and a half hours before the band even showed up so I had a front row seat! Albert was there for two nights, and on the first night I’m just sitting there not 4 feet away from him, and it’s a small club, and the stage wasn’t very tall, and he had a killer band. I didn’t know where he picked those guys up from that, had a left handed guitar player and he played a black Les Paul, and he was just smoking – or maybe he’s right handed I don’t know – anyway he played a black Les Paul, he sang some songs and played guitar, and he’s a young guy and then Albert came out & he did the Albert King show, and that was the first time I’d ever seen him! And I was just blown away, because I had a bunch of his records you know! Then the next night he’s playing the same club, a big thunderstorm rolls through, knocks out all the electricity. Albert’s bus is parked right out the front door, so Albert hooks up his generator to power the instruments, and stage and lights, and the show goes on! So I was going ‘okay, a cool cool Albert King experience, right?
Well then after that, Carol D. introduces me to Larry – which we talked about in the last interview and I joined Larry and stuff – and then all of a sudden, we had a show! Albert King’s Thanksgiving breakfast dance at Kansas City, I don’t remember the year, and it was a place called Foster’s Hall. Now Foster was the local gangster that promoted acts, and he had the Blue Room also and it’s called Foster’s Blue Room – this is what Larry told me, these I don’t know the exact names, the proper names of these places – but Foster’s Hall I think turned out that eventually be the Grand Emporium, I have no idea, I don’t remember. But we were doing the breakfast dance, and then after breakfast dance, we were going to play a real lot…..I didn’t realize it, for two days and nights straight with no breaks at Foster’s Blue Room. I have no idea how we ended up doing that, but so we play our opening set for Albert, and as we’re heading backstage, Albert puts his hand on my shoulders, says “put your guitar back here”. So I come back on stage and go backstage, and he says “come here”, and he has me stand right behind his big old acoustic amplifier that he played. He goes “I’m going to show you how this is done”, and the band kicks off and do his theme song opening theme song all the time which was “Them Changes”. They do an instrumental, the whole stage is dark, the whole hall is dark, when a single spotlight…..after the band goes around one time, a single spotlight hits the stage and hits Albert King right as he hits this massive bend, right hand, and I’m standing right behind his amp, and that’s right then when he hits that note and I’m going “I’m watching God play guitar!” And that was my first experience with Albert King.
Well, turns out my next experience was later on after the show when we’re at Fosters. It’s snowing and it’s cold and icy, and hell, you know it’s the first time I’ve been up what I call North, being a Southern boy, and so I’m staying outside the club on a break, and Albert’s bus comes rolling up through the slush and stuff like that, and I have to jump out of the way because I wasn’t paying any attention, cause half of Kansas City was on fire at that time because the mayor or the city government had just turned off a bunch of people’s electricity for non-payment! So people were starting fires, got to stay warm, right? So Kansas City, in that area….this is in the Paseo and that’s all a tourist area now….back then it wasn’t, and it was pretty rough. So I was just checking this shit out, I’m the only offay within miles, you know. Seriously…the band was worried about me being outside. Me, I never been scared of anything, I’m an idiot. And Albert’s bus come slushing up, pulls up just barely misses hitting me, and Albert opens up that door – and Gus. “Oh I recognize you, you’re Larry’s cracker! I had you stand right behind my amp, you learn anything?” Yes Mr. King, yes Sir yes, Mr. King! Then I scurried back because he scared the shit out of me, called me Larry’s cracker! I didn’t know what that meant, I found out you know, I was the token white boy guitar player in the All Black Blues band, you know. So I was Larry’s cracker, I was the guy that set up his guitar and his amp on stage and all that sort of shit you know, part of paying dues! I was a young kid the newcomer on the band, I had to pay my dues…..and they put me through some dues! And so that was all well and good, we made it through there, and then played a couple more shows with Albert, like up in Omaha and stuff like that. And we went back to Little Rock, and Albert and Larry, we would do shows with Albert at this place called Tony’s Dog House on Roosevelt Road all the time, whenever Albert was in town. He had a girlfriend in Little Rock, the same girlfriend Little Milton Campbell had. I ain’t saying in her name, she was a sweetheart, a nice lady, and she was our bass player’s girlfriend too! So we did a bunch of shows at Tony’s Dog House, and then sometimes Albert would just show up out of nowhere, visit his girls and all that stuff. One time we were playing a Saturday night show at Tony’s, with Larry, and Albert walks in and everything just kind of pauses, and Larry goes “Hey Slim, why don’t you come on up here and play some guitar and sing something for these people”, and Albert – that voice of his goes very loud – goes “heck man, I don’t have to play no guitar, your cracker plays just like me. The only problem is, I’m Albert King!” And Larry and the whole club, 300 people and the whole band, turn and start laughing at me. I turned bright red, man, because Larry’s going “see I’ve been telling you, you need to get your own style! See, you never know when the real deal’s going to walk in. I’m so embarrassed…..I was trying to hand Albert over my guitar, “Oh man, you keep playing” and so yeah, that was a learning moment for sure, I was going OK…I know what I got to do now. And then it was a few months later, probably about 6 months or so later, I was playing at the Little Rock Blues Society Blues Jam on a Wednesday night at the PSOB club, which is shrimp, oysters and beer, it’s a restaurant club and I’m playing .I don’t remember what song I’m doing, it’s a slow blues, and all of a sudden Larry and Albert are standing next to me on the stage, and Albert’s telling everybody “he’s got it, he’s finally got it, he’s learned how to play this shit the right way!” That was one of the biggest compliments of my life, and you know, that story is told in one of those newspaper articles! And so from then on, Albert was always nice to me. I didn’t work for him, and I knew Albert was a tough band leader, but he was always nice and polite to me, because like I said, I didn’t work for him and he knew where I was coming from. He knew I was paying my dues playing with Larry Davis….if you playing with Larry…you paying some dues. At that time it was it was rugged, and every now and then Larry called me up, said “come on over”. I come over around lunchtime and stuff, and all of a sudden Slim would drive up in this big old Bronco that had horns on it, and then also had diesel truck horns on it and stuff. And he’d take us and he’d buy me a barbecue sandwich. Albert King used to buy me barbecue!! I never had no money, I work for Larry and I’m telling him “I ain’t got no money, Mr. King you know who I work for”, and I didn’t! You know when I started playing with Larry I didn’t work no jobs anymore, I was done that bullshit, you know. And so I was homeless, you know, living in people’s couches and in their front yards, and sleeping in my car and all that shit. It was an experience, but I kept playing, and so I have fond memories of Albert King.
Touring with Larry, definitely, you were paying your dues, and here’s a couple examples of that (laughs). Oh man, we’d travel in the winter, and Larry’s had this old Dodge van, it didn’t have any heat, and so the way we kept the van warm while traveling and up and down the interstates of America was, we’d have a Coleman kerosene heater going in the back of the van with all of us huddled around it, praying every second that Larry did not lose control of the van on that ice and snow because it had been crispy critters for sure, that’s I mean. Think about it, liquid kerosene heating the back of the van….that was the heat of the van, and oh it could have gone horribly bad, but fortunately it didn’t. And then other things about touring that Chitlin circuit at that particular level, at that particular time in history. Like the bass player and I, on a couple of Midwest tours and up into Canada and stuff, we drove the equipment truck. The equipment truck was an old station wagon, and all the equipment was piled into the very back of the station wagon, right, and me and James Floyd would sit, you know we were driving, and so we were in the two front seats. It barely had a heater, but the heater was kind of superfluous because the whole floorboard in the back seat was missing, so we’re high as shit off of carbon monoxide fumes, driving down the highway in the middle of the day and at night, trying to get to the next gig. And of course, then there was the recreational vehicle that Larry had, that in the bathroom, there was no floor, so if you hit the pee you would just pee out the floor. You’d open the bathroom door and stand there and try not to fall through the floor. Hit any bump, and you’re peeing all over yourself! 0h man!! So anyway, that that’s just a little bit of stuff. There were some pretty hairy and scary moments that happened. I remember traveling with Larry through the Arkansas….through the Ozark Mountains, we were going up to Kansas City, it was just him and me. We were in Larry’s Cadillac, and this happened in the van too, cops would pull us over in the middle of the night and come around to where I was sitting, and ask if I was okay. These are white cops, I’m a white boy, traveling in a car, or a van, full of black men, all obviously older than me. I said “yeah, I’m fine, why are you asking me?”, you know, and I got it. And I saw this shit happen in real time, and I just went “Oh, I understand now”, you know. The times in this country, this country has a very dark history that most people in my situation from where I’m from and how I grew up and stuff, we’re not privy to the inner workings of what was going on. Traveling with Larry, this was one of the greatest educational experiences in my life cause I learned how a lot of this country really felt about other people in this country, and it was a worrisome moment. And that has always stayed with me, and you know it really made quite an impression….being pulled over in the Ozarks in the middle of the fucking night by some highway patrol guy with a gun you know, his hand on the gun the whole time. It’s just, you know, for a bunch of overcaffeinated jolly musicians just trying to make it to the next gig, dude!
So what Larry would do – Albert taught him this – is he’d get a special honorary sheriff or deputy sheriff’s badge and license from some small town in Arkansas, and stuff like that, and so he’d whip that out, and when he’d show that to whatever cop was harassing us, they’d ease up and let us go. You know it’s just, it was nuts, made no sense. And so, yadda yadda, one day, we’re off the road, we have a gig coming up that weekend at this place, this old east side club in Little Rock called the Owls Club, and back in the day, in the 50s and 60s, it was a mainstay stop on the Chitlin Circuit. My friend Carol D. bland grew up just down the street from that place, and he saw T-Bone Walker, Jimmy Reed, yeah, it was a legendary Chitlin Circuit club. BB King had played there, you know, everybody had, Albert King. So anyway I go over to Larry’s house that Friday afternoon, sitting at a table is this guy I don’t recognize. Larry goes “John, I want you to meet Fenton Robinson“, and Fenton’s got his guitar and he’s just playing some T-Bone Walker stuff. Fenton didn’t talk much, he was quiet. This was after he’d gotten out of jail for the traffic accident, stuff like that, you know, and he’d become a very gentle and quiet man at this time. I didn’t know him before, so I can’t speak about that, his younger days. So we go to this club and we’re playing, and you know we didn’t start playing our first set until midnight, we didn’t finish till 5 or 6:00 o’clock in the morning. And I remember standing next to Fenton, and he had this beautiful high tenor voice, and to this day – and I could remember doing this with Larry and Lavelle too – I remember standing right next to him and hearing him sing and his voice was like a ghost, it floated above the band, above the sound of the instruments, above the noise of the club. It just floated, this beautiful high tenor voice literally floated and filled the whole room, and I’ll never forget just looking at him…his eyes are closed, his guitar – he’s playing rhythm guitar – and he’s singing in this beautiful voice, and I was just awestruck! That feeling that came from that man, and that hit me, it was almost akin to a religious awakening or something, you know, and Lord have mercy, the man was so gentle and so nice to me and had such talent, and that was incredible! Then the next time I saw him was, we were playing at Blues up on North Halsted in Chicago with Larry, the place is packed, we’re up there playing, and Fenton’s in the audience. Larry says “come on up and sit in with us for a second”….they’d already talked, right, they knew what they’re going to do. So he gets Fenton up there to play, Fenton’s leading the band and I’m playing the second guitar you know, Larry’s sitting down talking to some girl, all these musicians are in the audience, and Jimmy Johnson is standing in front of me, staring at me…intently staring at me with what I perceived at the time was just pure hatred in his eyes, like ‘who’s this white kid trying to play our music in one of our clubs’, and stuff. I’ve never forgotten that stare. I never talked to the man, he wouldn’t talk to me, and I understand why he felt…why I thought he felt that way. I don’t know if he did or not, he obviously had an intense stare about him all the time, but that scared me to death. And Fenton would start a new song that I didn’t know, and he turn around patiently while the band was playing, have them hold the one and just vamp on that one chord, and he’d show me the riff in real time that he wanted me to play and I’d sit there and watch him play it a couple times for me, and then I’d play it back until he’d smile and goes “okay, you got it” and then he turned around and continued his song. And Jimmy Johnson’s just staring at me, and I know he’s thinking ‘shit man, I knew that riff’, you know, ‘I know how to play that stuff! Damn, how come I ain’t got the gig?’ ‘Well Jimmy, you wouldn’t work for $20 a night’….I would, you know (laughs).
And that gig, we stayed upstairs at Bigtime Sarah’s apartment because she was running the club, managing the club or something and stayed in the apartment above. There was no place to sleep, me and couple of the guys in the band slept on the floor. I got put in the closet, a big walk in closet, right, and about 2:00 in the morning this rat runs over me! Fuck that shit….like I said I paid some dues. So fuck that shit. I get Larry’s keys and go sleep in the van on Halsted at 2:00 in the morning, 3:00 in the morning, motorcycles going up and down, people raising hell, bumping the van and shit. I didn’t care, I felt right asleep, it’s nice and cool outside too, it was hot in that apartment, and that way I kept an eye on the van and the equipment, I did that for 2 nights. But anyway, the next morning went up to Bigtime Sarah’s apartment with the band, we had a little breakfast and stuff, and Bigtime Sarah put a record on the record player, she just got it, it just come out – it was Magic Sam Live, on Delmark Records at the Ann Arbor Blues Festival – it had just come out. Magic Sam had been dead for quite some time, you know, over 10 years at that time, about 12 years, and I’ve never heard Magic Sam before. So I got turned on to Magic Sam in the apartment above Blues on Halstead by Bigtime Sarah and I was hooked on Magic Sam. Shit, I still play a lot of stuff like him and Luther ‘Guitar Jr.’ Johnson and stuff like that, who was another Magic Sam acolyte way before I ever heard of either of them, and he was playing with Muddy Waters you know, and that’s a favorite, favorite memory of that time period.
And I have one more, happened around ’85’ or so, back at the Owls Club. I’d just got married that day, that morning, up in the Ozark Mountains. The little girl that was from Harrison AR – which is one of the last at that time – last remaining sundown towns – we all know what that’s about. And James Cloyd, who’s my best friend and his bass player – and he played bass, recorded on my last album that I did – he’s passed away now, which was tragic, and you know, he just got sick and died way too soon and he was one of the gentlest, funniest, most intellectual people I ever had met. And James was my best man at the wedding, so we’re up there in the middle of the Ozarks, black best man, Hillbilly girl that I’m marrying and we got married by a Cherokee Indian chief that had his marriage certificate from the back of Rolling Stone! So then we have to beat it all the way, and the property that we got married on was a cliff overlooking the Ozarks, it was gorgeous right, and the house was owned by that Georgia O’Keeffe lady and stuff, and the lady that was watching the house for her had never seen a black person in her life before, and so that was rather interesting. But she didn’t have any problems with it, she just never met a black person before, and so that was all cool. it was a great time! It was fun, and then we bust back to Little Rock cause I have a gig with Larry that night! Well, on my wedding night, at 1:00 in the morning, my hillbilly wife from Harrison AR is sitting at the end of the stage at a card table in between two elderly black gentlemen that were doing the DJ spots in between band sets, and they were passing weed and whiskey back and forth and she was getting fucked up, and she’d never been in a black club! It was in a very unique experience, you know, and that was how we spent our wedding night. She ran out of patience with me many, many decades ago.
MARY ALICE IS ON THE SCENE
And so there’s one time I went out, and I was talking to some friends of mine, this little blonde girl with these piercing blue eyes comes up next to me, and just interrupts you know. She goes “Oh I used to live in Austin. Yeah, I used to know Cliff Antone, and all those people”, and stuff like that. “And I go “who are you”? “My name is Mary Alice”. She goes, “you want to be kidnapped”? I said “sure, but I got to be back in 30 minutes because I’m playing with the Sunday night jam session band, and we start in 30 minutes”. She goes “okay!” So we get in her car and she drives over to her house, and we feed her dogs, then she drives me back to the club, and we’re having a conversation the whole time. And I’m just going “this lady’s pretty smart and pretty sharp and stuff”. One thing she asked me on the drive back to Shakespeare’s was, “well, what do you think of our mayor”? We had to first openly gay female mayor in the country at the time, and I said “hey man, I think she’s doing a good job man, she’s a good mayor”. And I didn’t know that was a test, you know, and so we get back to Shakespeare’s and she’s dropping me off…..I’m getting out because I got to go play go back to work, make some money, and I go, “well, Miss Mary Alice, can I give you my phone number so you can give me a call if you feel like it”?
She smiles at me sweetly and goes, “No, I’m not going to call you”. I said “maybe I’ll see you here at Shakespeare’s again”! She goes ‘No, I never come out here, this is west Houston. I’m in central Houston, downtown”. I said “okay, well it’s nice meeting you, I hope you have a good life”. About two weeks after that, I’m playing with Bobby Mac at the Big Easy, and I’m standing stage left, right by the front door. We’re right in the middle of a song and this girl walks in, I’d lean over and I said “well hi Mary Alice, good to see you”. She was trying to sneak past me, cuz she didn’t hear me play at Shakespeare’s, she wanted to see if I could actually play! Because she grew, she hung out when she was young with Lou Ann Barton and Jimmy Vaughn – she waited tables at the original Antones! She was one of the people that started all the waitresses dressing up like the 40’s and 50’s and all that stuff you know, and from that point on she started showing up at my gigs.
And I just gotten out of a really hairy drug-fueled relationship, and I wasn’t looking for anything else….that girl was crazy! And Mary Alice kept showing up at Shakespeare’s and stuff, and she talked to me and I wouldn’t have much to say, cause I was scared of her and shy and bashful cause I’m shy and I have very awkward social skills as in none! People always think I’m stuck up and it’s like, “no, I’m scared talk to you because I don’t know how to talk to people. I ain’t stuck up or anything, I’m nervous, that’s it!” And so she put an end to my not being friendly by grabbing hold of me one time, and going “you are the unfriendliest man I have ever met!” And I was going “no no no I’m not, I’m not, I really want to know you, I just don’t know what to say, I’m scared”. And we started dating and then moved in together, and we’ve been together 15 years! And after we’ve been together a year, she goes, “you know, the only thing that’s going to break us up is that nasty habit of coke and speed that you do”, and she goes “sleep on that”. And I woke up the next morning and I said “I’m done”, and I cold turkeyed everything, BOOM, just like that! Never touched the stuff since! We’ve been together 15 years, and she saved my life.
And so when we came up here, Preston (Hubbard) played a gig down at down in Houston at Shakespeare’s, he was with that slide guitar player that from Austin that comes up from time to time, I can’t remember his name, plays some Elmore and stuff like that and he’s decent, and he used to tour up here all the time and would bring people like Buck and that piano player – used to play with the Blasters and with the Thunderbirds – who’s also a good friend of mine. So Preston and I went back a long ways, he was in my band for a good year. Jean Taylor was the piano player, and him and Jean played in The Stumble, Jean played for six months, Preston was with me for a year and stuff and that was a lot of fun but that was definitely a drug fueled band. It was crazy. I mean just absolutely crazy.
But anyway this is past that! I’d already recorded this album that was released out of Asheville and Universal Music and stuff, and Preston comes up to me at the gig and says “hey man, you need to come check out St Louis, there’s a lot of work up there. We need to put the band together!” So we stayed in touch, and about a year later I said “OK Preston, I’m coming up, I’m going to come check it out”. So me and Mary Alice come up to St Louis, right, and we get a hotel. We didn’t know our way around, didn’t know anybody except for you know, I didn’t remember that John Logan lived up here, I didn’t remember that Hudson (Harkins) lived up here. It’s just Preston, and Preston and I were going to put a band together. Well, Mary Alice and I, it was a Sunday afternoon when we were checking out all the clubs that said they had blues. We got to Hammerstones – we’d already been the Beale on Broadway and BB’s – we get to Hammerstones on Sunday afternoon, a blues jam is happening being run by Raul. And we’re sitting on the back patio, right by the steps that go upstairs to the deck, and we’re having toasted ravs and a couple of drinks and it’s March….yeah it’s in March, late March, and it was a beautiful day, like an early spring day here for St Louis. It was a beautiful day, and Mary Alice said “I just love this architecture”, stuff like that. I said “yeah, this place is cool, you know I used to run around here a little bit with my dad. You know I’d see the Cardinals play and see the brewery and all that stuff”. Well, we decided right then on that patio that we’re moving to St. Louis! and so we go back to Houston, and within two months the house is sold! She shut down her business, I’d given up all my gigs, we pack up, we move up here not knowing anybody but Preston. Didn’t didn’t know the Preston was sick and was soon to die, you know. We get up here the week we are up here as the day it comes out – the cover story in the Riverfront times about him & his controversial relationship with the Siri girl, you know – which I’m just going “well, people could be shocked, but none of that surprised me at all, that was just Preston – who was a sweetheart, by the way’.
But that’s how we ended up moving here! And Mary Alice had enough money for selling her house so we were able to buy pay cash for this house, and she got a job downtown at a salon, and I got hired by Hammerstones after sitting in. They had the Mighty Orq, he’d came up from Houston and he was playing a Saturday night. He was out on the patio, and they were still letting bands play on the patio at night I guess, I don’t know why he was on patio, but I came in and sat in. I came off stage, (Denny) Hammerstone gave me a gig, right then and there. They’d never seen anybody get up and pass an empty guitar case around to all the audience members. I said “cause there weren’t a tip chart up there”. And I’m passing it around after I finished my little mini set with Mighty Orq people, yeah and I’m looming over them, you know my cowboy hat, boots, and all that shit, and had a full beard at the time.
So I got that gig with Hammerstones! And then went and sat in at the Broadway Oyster Bar on a Monday night, it was the Soulard Blues Jam. That night, I walked away with a gig to play the Oktoberfest with the Soulard Blues band as one of their 3 guests, along with Miss Renee Smith and two other women singers. I had the opening slot and I just tore it up….and a month after that I got offered to gig with Soulard Blues band, and played with them until the pandemic. And so between that – playing at Hammerstones and playing some other gigs on my own around and stuff, and realizing, you know the only place I really want play is Hammerstones! Well then, Social Security kicked in after COVID – you know, COVID kicked in and killed everything – well I’d met the Morgan’s, we put together a band, and we played throughout the entire COVID thing at Hammerstones. Once or twice a week, we would barricade off the front of the stage with 2 to 3 rows of chairs, and we would not stay in the club on breaks – we went outside anytime we were off stage – like everybody, we were masked up and none of us got COVID. And that was how I met the Morgan’s, we’ve been together for five years. Still together, they’re going to be the last band that I’m ever going to work with. Riley hasn’t been playing, he’s had some health issues he’s had to deal with, so he’s been out this month, but he’s starting up again in June, 1st week of June. And we’re getting to record some soundtrack material for a Papa Ray TV show, and I’m playing on Papa Ray Day over in Collinsville IL on the 24th, and I’m using Chris Miller on drums and as you heard him, incredible drum great drummer and stuff like that. Riley may be up to playing some keys, I don’t know and Papa Ray supposed to join us for a few songs on harmonica and sing a few so we’re going to have a good time.
But that’s how I got to St. Louis! Mary Alice saved my life in Houston, to where I’m still alive. And came up here, we fell in love with St. Louis, fell in love with the people! I don’t know how many of the people fell in love with me or not, because I’m kind of cantankerous. And people learned real quick once they got to meet me that I don’t stand bullshit, and when it comes to my job I’m super professional about it, and I’ll raise hell with anybody that’s not.
WHERE TO FIND THE JOHN MCVEY BAND
Hammerstones, that’s it man!, Social Security kicked in! Wednesday nights, every Wednesday night from 7:00 o’clock to 11:00 o’clock the best Blues in town guaranteed, you ain’t going to find a better Blues guitarist or better Blues band a better show in town on Wednesday night than at Hammerstones from 7 to 11, every Wednesday. You ain’t gonna find a better Blues band anywhere in town on Sundays – the 1st and the 3rd Sundays from 3 to 7 – than the John McVey band featuring the Morgan’s! I mean that band just smokes, and it smokes with Chris Millar! And there’s been other people – Benet Schaeffer, Marty Spikener – both him and Benet have been and Chris have really helped out while Riley’s been ill. And I love the fact that musicians in this town help each other, you know, even if they don’t like you they’ll help you if it’s needed, it’s just a wonderful place. Yes, I’m there every Wednesday, the first and third Sundays, and the 4th Saturday of every month.
Hey John, thanks for taking the time for this interview!
Thank you! I know this is going to be ‘interview, Part Two’, but after you go through all this information I just gave you, I figure there’s going to be a Part 3, so I already thank you!!
We’ll look forward to it!
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