ALABAMA MIKE
''TAILOR MADE BLUES''
2010
48:41
1 Tailor Made (Mike Benjamin) 04:31
2 Ghetto Life (Mike Benjamin, Scott Brenton, Scott Silveira) 03:21
3 Eddie Lee (Mike Benjamin) 05:29
4 Go Ahead (John Lawton) 04:57
5 I'm Gone (Scott Brenton) 03:39
6 Enough To Keep Me Holdin On (Frederic Knight, Jon Tiven, Sally Tiven) 4:11
7 Moon Dog Howl (Mike Benjamin) 04:52
8 Stop Putting Me On (Jon Lawton) 03:47
9 Look Here Baby (Tom Holland) 03:33
10 Hoo Doo Man (Junior Wells) 05:39
11 Easiest Thing I'll Ever Do (Tom Holland) 04:38
ABOUT
BY OFFICIAL WEBSITE
Alabama Mike has plenty to sing the blues about these days.
Until March of last year, he had a full-time job as a truck driver, hauling produce in an 18-wheeler back and forth between Richmond and Sanger in Fresno County five, sometimes six days a week. His side job as a blues singer was beginning to take off, and he’d just been nominated by the Blues Foundation in Memphis as “traditional male blues artist of the year.” (He lost to Charlie Musselwhite.)
Then he developed a persistent, painful cough. He wouldn’t go to a doctor at first, thinking it was just a cold, but his girlfriend insisted. He was initially diagnosed as having double pneumonia, but it was eventually discovered that he had valley fever, so named because of its prevalence in California’s Central Valley. Mike had the worst type – disseminated valley fever – and he was bedridden in his San Leandro apartment with an IV port in his arm for a year – until six weeks ago.
Strong medicine
“I had a nurse coming over three times a day to give me medicine they call Abelcet,” he says while sitting behind the wheel of his 1996 Buick Roadmaster. “The medicine is so strong that they had to give me a cocktail of Demerol, Tylenol and Benadryl to ease the side effects ’cause it gives you the shakes and fever and chills.”
To make matters worse, he was fired from his truck driving job in July, his state disability insurance ran out recently, and he lost his combination manager, record producer and drummer, who had moved out of the Bay Area.
The singer, who was born Michael Benjamin 48 years ago in Talladega, Ala., is wearing a shiny champagne-colored suit, yellow shirt and hat, yellow and green tie and tan suede shoes, having just finished a four-song set at a Sunday afternoon blues festival in the parking lot behind the Capri Lounge in East Oakland.
Comeback gigs
That is his comeback gig, and he does another one that evening in West Oakland at Bikers’ Paradise, a private establishment in a warehouse operated by the Public Enemy Motorcycle Club.
At the biker party, Mike has exchanged the yellow shirt and tie for a red shirt and matching breast-pocket handkerchief. Backed by a five-piece band that includes such Oakland blues veterans as guitarist Big Bob Deance, bassist Country Pete McGill and onetime Queen Ida saxophonist Bernard Anderson, he wails “Little Red Rooster,” the Willie Dixon tune that was popularized in the ’60s by both Howlin’ Wolf and Sam Cooke.
As he sings, a woman wearing a see-through, ankle-length cape that reveals her bare shoulders and arms struts between the pool tables and the musicians. She flaps her arms like a chicken, then bends down, picks a red balloon off the floor and holds it atop her head to simulate a rooster’s comb. Mike eggs her on by crowing between the song’s phrases. Anderson joins the hilarity by making squawking sounds with his tenor.
Mike now sees an upside to his misfortunes. With no day job to report to and having largely recovered from his illness, he plans to focus all his energies on his career as a blues singer.
“This is my opportunity to really go ahead on and approach doing the blues for my lifestyle,” he says. “I’m singing the blues for my bread and butter now.”
Six days later, in a tiny recording studio in the basement of producer and harmonica blower Scot Brenton’s house on San Francisco’s Bernal Hill, Mike begins work on his third CD. Even though there’s no audience, other than Brenton, guitarist Anthony Paule and a reporter, the singer is still looking sharp, this time wearing an outfit that includes a green V-neck sweater, orange bowtie and spit-shined orange-tan leather shoes.
Mike’s previous CDs – 2009′s “Day to Day” and the following year’s “Tailor Made Blues,” both on his own Jukehouse label – drew rave reviews from blues magazines in the United States and United Kingdom – “[H]e has a superb soulful voice that brings Elmore James, Buddy Guy, Little Johnny Taylor and a young B.B. King to mind,” England’s Blues & Rhythm observed – and helped him land slots on blues festivals in Northern California and Nevada and at Pennsylvania’s prestigious Pocono Blues Festival, where he opened for headliners Mavis Staples and the Fabulous Thunderbirds in 2010.
Unlike those discs, which featured full electric bands, the one he’s currently recording is a stripped-down acoustic affair with just voice, guitar and harmonica. With Paule picking a syncopated pattern that draws on the styles of both Robert Johnson and his stepson Robert Jr. Lockwood, and Brenton blowing lonesome Sonny Terry-like mouth harp, Mike kicks the session off with an original 12-bar blues titled “I Ain’t Never Seen Times Like This Before.”
“My money done got funny/My change done got strange/My credit won’t get it/Not a doggone thing,” he cries out in anguished tenor tones. The trio’s old-school performance sounds as if it might have come from the Great Depression of the 1930s, rather than from the current recession.
Mike will make his public debut with Paule and Brenton on Tuesday at Yoshi’s in Oakland at a benefit for the East Oakland Boxing Association, a financially strapped nonprofit organization that for the past 25 years has helped keep young people between the ages of 5 and 20 off the streets by providing boxing lessons and other free activities. Also on the bill are Nick Gravenites, Barbara Dane, David K. Mathews, Rick Estrin and the Nightcats, Steve Lucky, Carmen Getit, Mark Hummel, Steve Freund, John Lee Hooker Jr. and Ron Thompson.
A boxing fan
Mike is a boxing fan himself, and during his four years in the U.S. Navy in the mid-’80s, he briefly took up the sport while at Alameda Naval Air Station.
“I was sparring with this dude who must have been 20 pounds heavier than me,” Mike recalls. “He was a professional, and he hammered me so hard on my forehead, I said, ‘This might not be for me.’ I can’t take no licks like that.” {sbox}
Lee Hildebrand is a freelance writer. sadolphson@sfchronicle.com
BIOGRAPHY
BY OFFICIAL WEBSITE
Alabama Mike is a hard-driving Chicago-style blues singer with the ability to make you feel as if you’ve revisited the early CHESS RECORDS days.
Alabama Mike is a force on the microphone with that first rate, church house tenor’, that he was blessed with he has a sound that will remind you of a young BB King or Buddy Guy, Elmore James and Little Johnny Taylor.
Michael A. Benjamin, aka Alabama Mike was born January 31, 1964 in Talladega, Alabama. He was influenced by the gospel singing of his father who encouraged him and his five siblings to begin singing in the church at a very early age. He came to California in 1983 via a military hitch in the U.S. Navy which landed him in the San Francisco Bay area. Several years down the road, as he soaked up what he could learn from blues records he collected and local blues act and associates along the way, he started performing the blues professionally in 1999. He was fortunate enough to put a record label (Jukehouse Records) together in 2009 along with co-founder Scott Silveira and released his first record entitled Day To Day which officially broke him into the blues music scene. Domestically and internationally known for his first rate tenor’ vocals and his witty and ingenious song writing skills, he then followed with his sophomore offering in 2011 which he entitled Tailor Made Blues that has been causing some fuss around here, garnering five star reviews in all the major blues magazines and heavy airplay worldwide. His band includes Anthony Paule ~ guitar, Scot Brenton ~ guitar/harmonica, Kedar Roy ~ bass, Paul Revelli ~ drums. He recently formed a acoustic blues-trio calling the The Hound Kings, which includes himself, A. Paule and W.S. Brenton. The Hound Kings have released their debut CD May 2013 titled UNLEASHED. The Hound Kings new release UNLEASHED CD was nominated by The Blues Foundation for a 2014 Blues Music Award in the Acoustic Album category. Alabama Mike performed at the 2014 Blues Music Awards with The Hound Kings and was rated one of the Top Ten Highlights of the show by the Blues Foundation. Alabama Mike has shared the stage with such blues greats as The Fabulous Thunderbirds, John Primer, Lurrie Bell, Steve Freund, Bobby Rush, Johnny Rawls, Fillmore Slim, R. J. Mischo, DeWayne Wiggins, Willie (Big Eyes) Smith and so many others. He has also played several national festivals and concerts including the Poconos Blues Festival, Reno Blues Festival, among others and is preparing to tour internationally this Summer 2015. He has previously been awarded 2010 Blues New Artist Of The Year ~ Bay Area Blues Society, 2010 Nominee Blues Blast Magazine Beat New Artist Debut Recording, 2011 Nominee Blues Foundation ~ Category:Blues Music Award Traditional Blues ~Male Artist Of The Year. He is currently preparing a 2015 release of blues/soul original compositions that is sure to have blues lovers and listeners anticipating Alabama Mike’s third solo project which will be produced by Kid Anderson (Greaseland Music Services) in the San Francisco Bay Area. This work will feature the likes of Jim Pugh who was with Robert Cray for 25 years and before then he was in Etta James’ and Otis Rush’s bands. On organ and piano and Jerry Jemmott who played bass in King Curtis’ band in the 60′s, and they played on most of the Aretha Franklin, BB King, Freddie King and Otis Rush records of that time the 60′s. There will also be a host of local bay area blues artist featured such as Lil Jonny Lawton, Aki Kumar, Sid Morris, Kedar Roy and many others will be accompanying him.
WEBSITE
TO THE TOP
''TAILOR MADE BLUES''
2010
48:41
1 Tailor Made (Mike Benjamin) 04:31
2 Ghetto Life (Mike Benjamin, Scott Brenton, Scott Silveira) 03:21
3 Eddie Lee (Mike Benjamin) 05:29
4 Go Ahead (John Lawton) 04:57
5 I'm Gone (Scott Brenton) 03:39
6 Enough To Keep Me Holdin On (Frederic Knight, Jon Tiven, Sally Tiven) 4:11
7 Moon Dog Howl (Mike Benjamin) 04:52
8 Stop Putting Me On (Jon Lawton) 03:47
9 Look Here Baby (Tom Holland) 03:33
10 Hoo Doo Man (Junior Wells) 05:39
11 Easiest Thing I'll Ever Do (Tom Holland) 04:38
ABOUT
BY OFFICIAL WEBSITE
Alabama Mike has plenty to sing the blues about these days.
Until March of last year, he had a full-time job as a truck driver, hauling produce in an 18-wheeler back and forth between Richmond and Sanger in Fresno County five, sometimes six days a week. His side job as a blues singer was beginning to take off, and he’d just been nominated by the Blues Foundation in Memphis as “traditional male blues artist of the year.” (He lost to Charlie Musselwhite.)
Then he developed a persistent, painful cough. He wouldn’t go to a doctor at first, thinking it was just a cold, but his girlfriend insisted. He was initially diagnosed as having double pneumonia, but it was eventually discovered that he had valley fever, so named because of its prevalence in California’s Central Valley. Mike had the worst type – disseminated valley fever – and he was bedridden in his San Leandro apartment with an IV port in his arm for a year – until six weeks ago.
Strong medicine
“I had a nurse coming over three times a day to give me medicine they call Abelcet,” he says while sitting behind the wheel of his 1996 Buick Roadmaster. “The medicine is so strong that they had to give me a cocktail of Demerol, Tylenol and Benadryl to ease the side effects ’cause it gives you the shakes and fever and chills.”
To make matters worse, he was fired from his truck driving job in July, his state disability insurance ran out recently, and he lost his combination manager, record producer and drummer, who had moved out of the Bay Area.
The singer, who was born Michael Benjamin 48 years ago in Talladega, Ala., is wearing a shiny champagne-colored suit, yellow shirt and hat, yellow and green tie and tan suede shoes, having just finished a four-song set at a Sunday afternoon blues festival in the parking lot behind the Capri Lounge in East Oakland.
Comeback gigs
That is his comeback gig, and he does another one that evening in West Oakland at Bikers’ Paradise, a private establishment in a warehouse operated by the Public Enemy Motorcycle Club.
At the biker party, Mike has exchanged the yellow shirt and tie for a red shirt and matching breast-pocket handkerchief. Backed by a five-piece band that includes such Oakland blues veterans as guitarist Big Bob Deance, bassist Country Pete McGill and onetime Queen Ida saxophonist Bernard Anderson, he wails “Little Red Rooster,” the Willie Dixon tune that was popularized in the ’60s by both Howlin’ Wolf and Sam Cooke.
As he sings, a woman wearing a see-through, ankle-length cape that reveals her bare shoulders and arms struts between the pool tables and the musicians. She flaps her arms like a chicken, then bends down, picks a red balloon off the floor and holds it atop her head to simulate a rooster’s comb. Mike eggs her on by crowing between the song’s phrases. Anderson joins the hilarity by making squawking sounds with his tenor.
Mike now sees an upside to his misfortunes. With no day job to report to and having largely recovered from his illness, he plans to focus all his energies on his career as a blues singer.
“This is my opportunity to really go ahead on and approach doing the blues for my lifestyle,” he says. “I’m singing the blues for my bread and butter now.”
Six days later, in a tiny recording studio in the basement of producer and harmonica blower Scot Brenton’s house on San Francisco’s Bernal Hill, Mike begins work on his third CD. Even though there’s no audience, other than Brenton, guitarist Anthony Paule and a reporter, the singer is still looking sharp, this time wearing an outfit that includes a green V-neck sweater, orange bowtie and spit-shined orange-tan leather shoes.
Mike’s previous CDs – 2009′s “Day to Day” and the following year’s “Tailor Made Blues,” both on his own Jukehouse label – drew rave reviews from blues magazines in the United States and United Kingdom – “[H]e has a superb soulful voice that brings Elmore James, Buddy Guy, Little Johnny Taylor and a young B.B. King to mind,” England’s Blues & Rhythm observed – and helped him land slots on blues festivals in Northern California and Nevada and at Pennsylvania’s prestigious Pocono Blues Festival, where he opened for headliners Mavis Staples and the Fabulous Thunderbirds in 2010.
Unlike those discs, which featured full electric bands, the one he’s currently recording is a stripped-down acoustic affair with just voice, guitar and harmonica. With Paule picking a syncopated pattern that draws on the styles of both Robert Johnson and his stepson Robert Jr. Lockwood, and Brenton blowing lonesome Sonny Terry-like mouth harp, Mike kicks the session off with an original 12-bar blues titled “I Ain’t Never Seen Times Like This Before.”
“My money done got funny/My change done got strange/My credit won’t get it/Not a doggone thing,” he cries out in anguished tenor tones. The trio’s old-school performance sounds as if it might have come from the Great Depression of the 1930s, rather than from the current recession.
Mike will make his public debut with Paule and Brenton on Tuesday at Yoshi’s in Oakland at a benefit for the East Oakland Boxing Association, a financially strapped nonprofit organization that for the past 25 years has helped keep young people between the ages of 5 and 20 off the streets by providing boxing lessons and other free activities. Also on the bill are Nick Gravenites, Barbara Dane, David K. Mathews, Rick Estrin and the Nightcats, Steve Lucky, Carmen Getit, Mark Hummel, Steve Freund, John Lee Hooker Jr. and Ron Thompson.
A boxing fan
Mike is a boxing fan himself, and during his four years in the U.S. Navy in the mid-’80s, he briefly took up the sport while at Alameda Naval Air Station.
“I was sparring with this dude who must have been 20 pounds heavier than me,” Mike recalls. “He was a professional, and he hammered me so hard on my forehead, I said, ‘This might not be for me.’ I can’t take no licks like that.” {sbox}
Lee Hildebrand is a freelance writer. sadolphson@sfchronicle.com
BIOGRAPHY
BY OFFICIAL WEBSITE
Alabama Mike is a hard-driving Chicago-style blues singer with the ability to make you feel as if you’ve revisited the early CHESS RECORDS days.
Alabama Mike is a force on the microphone with that first rate, church house tenor’, that he was blessed with he has a sound that will remind you of a young BB King or Buddy Guy, Elmore James and Little Johnny Taylor.
Michael A. Benjamin, aka Alabama Mike was born January 31, 1964 in Talladega, Alabama. He was influenced by the gospel singing of his father who encouraged him and his five siblings to begin singing in the church at a very early age. He came to California in 1983 via a military hitch in the U.S. Navy which landed him in the San Francisco Bay area. Several years down the road, as he soaked up what he could learn from blues records he collected and local blues act and associates along the way, he started performing the blues professionally in 1999. He was fortunate enough to put a record label (Jukehouse Records) together in 2009 along with co-founder Scott Silveira and released his first record entitled Day To Day which officially broke him into the blues music scene. Domestically and internationally known for his first rate tenor’ vocals and his witty and ingenious song writing skills, he then followed with his sophomore offering in 2011 which he entitled Tailor Made Blues that has been causing some fuss around here, garnering five star reviews in all the major blues magazines and heavy airplay worldwide. His band includes Anthony Paule ~ guitar, Scot Brenton ~ guitar/harmonica, Kedar Roy ~ bass, Paul Revelli ~ drums. He recently formed a acoustic blues-trio calling the The Hound Kings, which includes himself, A. Paule and W.S. Brenton. The Hound Kings have released their debut CD May 2013 titled UNLEASHED. The Hound Kings new release UNLEASHED CD was nominated by The Blues Foundation for a 2014 Blues Music Award in the Acoustic Album category. Alabama Mike performed at the 2014 Blues Music Awards with The Hound Kings and was rated one of the Top Ten Highlights of the show by the Blues Foundation. Alabama Mike has shared the stage with such blues greats as The Fabulous Thunderbirds, John Primer, Lurrie Bell, Steve Freund, Bobby Rush, Johnny Rawls, Fillmore Slim, R. J. Mischo, DeWayne Wiggins, Willie (Big Eyes) Smith and so many others. He has also played several national festivals and concerts including the Poconos Blues Festival, Reno Blues Festival, among others and is preparing to tour internationally this Summer 2015. He has previously been awarded 2010 Blues New Artist Of The Year ~ Bay Area Blues Society, 2010 Nominee Blues Blast Magazine Beat New Artist Debut Recording, 2011 Nominee Blues Foundation ~ Category:Blues Music Award Traditional Blues ~Male Artist Of The Year. He is currently preparing a 2015 release of blues/soul original compositions that is sure to have blues lovers and listeners anticipating Alabama Mike’s third solo project which will be produced by Kid Anderson (Greaseland Music Services) in the San Francisco Bay Area. This work will feature the likes of Jim Pugh who was with Robert Cray for 25 years and before then he was in Etta James’ and Otis Rush’s bands. On organ and piano and Jerry Jemmott who played bass in King Curtis’ band in the 60′s, and they played on most of the Aretha Franklin, BB King, Freddie King and Otis Rush records of that time the 60′s. There will also be a host of local bay area blues artist featured such as Lil Jonny Lawton, Aki Kumar, Sid Morris, Kedar Roy and many others will be accompanying him.
WEBSITE
TO THE TOP