Happy Hour Harmonica Podcast

Paul deLay retrospective with Grant Dermody, Ross Garren and Pete Dammann

• Neil Warren • Season 1 • Episode 120

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Grant Dermody, Ross Garren and Pete Dammann join me on episode 120 for a retrospective on Paul DeLay.
Paul is a harmonica player who may go under the radar for some but his unique approach to both the diatonic and chromatic harmonica, as well as his powerful vocals and his insightful and humorous songwriting have placed him firmly in the hearts of harmonica and music fans in the know.
Paul was from Portland, Oregon in the north west United States where his first outfit was the Brown Sugar Blues band. He formed The Paul deLay Blues band in the early 1980s releasing four albums before a period of incarceration in the early 1990s saw him breakout with his highly original blues based material, all laced with harmonica playing quite unlike any other. His passing in 2007 has left a Paul deLay shaped hole which has never been filled.

Links:
Paul deLay website:
http://www.pauldelay.com/

Grant Dermody interview:
https://www.harmonicahappyhour.com/grant-dermody-interview/

Pete Dammann LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/peter-dammann-4777b916/

Videos:

Brown Sugar Blues Band - I Know My Baby Been Cheating:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IdB1HuB9so

Burnin’ album:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGa0DQNJ2ao

Fourteen Dollars In The Bank:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzqF1jNhO-Y

deLay Does Chicago album:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NaI0T2rhQQM

Ocean of Tears album:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IE1u-RBPfmI



Podcast website:
https://www.harmonicahappyhour.com

Donations:
If you want to make a voluntary donation to help support the running costs of the podcast then please use this link (or visit the podcast website link above):
https://paypal.me/harmonicahappyhour?locale.x=en_GB

Spotify Playlist:
Also check out the Spotify Playlist, which contains most of the songs discussed in the podcast:
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5QC6RF2VTfs4iPuasJBqwT?si=M-j3IkiISeefhR7ybm9qIQ

Podcast sponsors:
This podcast is sponsored by SEYDEL harmonicas - visit the oldest harmonica factory in the world at www.seydel1847.com  or on Facebook or Instagram at SEYDEL HARMONICAS
--------------------------------
Blue Moon Harmonicas: https://bluemoonharmonicas.com


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SPEAKER_03:

Grant Dermody, Ross Garron and Pete DeMann join me on episode 120 for a retrospective on Paul DeLay. Paul is a harmonica player who may go under the radar for some, but his unique approach to both the diatonic and chromatic harmonica, as well as his powerful vocals and his insightful and humorous songwriting, have placed him firmly in the hearts of harmonica and blues fans in the know. Paul was from Portland, Oregon in the northwest United States, where his first outfit was the Brown Sugar Blues Band. He formed the Paul DeLay Blues Band in the early 1980s, releasing four albums before a period of incarceration in the early 1990s, saw him break out with his highly original blues-based material, all laced with harmonica playing quite unlike any other. His passing in 2007 has left a Paul DeLay-shaped hole which has never been filled. This podcast is sponsored by Seidel Harmonicas. Visit the oldest harmonica factory in the world at www.seidel1847.com or on Facebook or Instagram at Seidel Harmonicas. Hello and welcome to the poll delay retrospective episode and today I've got three guests to talk us through Paul's career. I've got Grant Dermody who's been on the podcast before in 2020. And we also have Ross Garron, first time you're on. So Ross, you're a harmonica player and composer, done loads of session work. and you're a Pole Delay super fan I

SPEAKER_01:

sure am yeah thanks for having me man I've really enjoyed your podcast and it's so cool all the people you've been interviewing and I'm very appreciative for the opportunity to be a part of it

SPEAKER_03:

and then you also got I'm very pleased to say we got Pete DeMamm so Pete you were the band manager and guitarist in the Pole Delay band for 25 years yep

SPEAKER_02:

That's right. I was with him a long time.

SPEAKER_03:

Yes, superb. So you worked with Paul day to day, toured with him, so I'm sure you'll be able to give us a great lowdown of what he was like and playing with him all those years. He was a one of a kind. He was a one of a kind. Maybe start by just sort of a bit of description about how you knew Paul or you knew his music. Obviously, Pete, let's start with you carrying on with, you know, how you got... together with his band and that type of thing?

SPEAKER_02:

I was a journalist in Portland. I had grown up in Chicago playing in blues bands. I'd come out to Portland to work for a researching a piece on the northwest blues scene right about at the time that robert cray was about to win his first grammy and the gist of the article was how did a blues scene happen in the northwest uh so far from you know the roots of the music and i was going around interviewing different bands and i was interviewing the paul delay band they were having auditions at this gig for a guitar play So I did the interview on the break. After the interview, I said, I grew up in Chicago playing this kind of stuff. I'm going to go home and get my guitar and audition for the gig. And they were like, they were horrified to hear that the journalist was going to be auditioning for the gig. But anyway, I auditioned for the gig. I got the gig. And that was kind of really the beginning of the end of my journalism career. That wasn't my intent, but I went on the road with the band and eventually ended up the full-time guitar player what year was this it was like an 88 probably 1988 80 maybe 87 still kind of long time ago so

SPEAKER_03:

you mentioned

SPEAKER_02:

robert cray there yeah when i first came out to portland to do this newspaper job my first thought was oh i'm never going to see another blues band i'm moving to the northwest they're not doing this kind of music there the first week i was in portland i went out to a club to hear the robert cray band that it still had curtis salgado in it at that point and the next day I went out to hear Paul DeLay and his band and I was like so blown away because I had grown up you know I saw Muddy Waters a bunch of times and Howlin' Wolf a bunch of times and Otis Rush and Coco Taylor played our high school dances so I thought I knew this music pretty well and I just didn't expect to hear anything like it out here in the northwest and I was shocked and surprised and elated actually to hear that there was such amazing artists out here in the Northwest.

SPEAKER_03:

So, yeah, so let's bring Grant in now. So how did you know Paul?

SPEAKER_04:

So, yeah, I grew up in Seattle and I went up to Alaska in 1976 and I picked up the harmonica, started learning how to play. And when I came back to Seattle in 82, I started looking around for, you know, the best players around that I could learn from. So I studied with Kim Field for a long time. And then I heard Paul a lot. And, you know, with Pete on guitar, I think every time I heard Paul, I heard you as well, Pete. And I was just knocked out by Paul's singing. When I first heard him, I wasn't experienced enough to really appreciate what it was that I was actually hearing. But as I got stronger on the instrument, I was able to just really appreciate his phrasing, the fact that he was just a completely unique harmonica player, both on the chromatic and the diatonic, and vocalist and songwriter. You could tell in his playing that he'd really listened to the older players that we all love. completely went his own way. And so I hit him up for a lesson and I think he gave me like two lessons and said, man, he always called me Bubba. He just said, Bubba, you don't need lessons. You just need to play more. And we started and we became friends. We played a lot of pool. Later when he ran into legal trouble and was trying to clean up, I'd been in recovery for a long time so I was able to lend my experience with that. I wrote him a letter to try to help him get a lighter sentence and And we wrote letters when he was in prison and when he came back out. I always heard him every time, whenever I could. And we hung out when he would come to Seattle. And we always enjoyed seeing each other, even though it wasn't that often.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, great. Sounds like you were good friends and supportive to him. So Ross, we'll bring you in now. So you are based in the West Coast yourself, aren't you? So we described you as a super fan. So did you ever see Paul play or has it all been from recordings?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I saw Paul play a handful of times. I grew up in Maryland until I was the age of 11. But then my folks moved to Monterey, California. So in my middle school years, kind of high school, middle school, late 90s, early 2000s, that's when I encountered Paul and I was, you know, early teenager, that kind of era. Yeah, Paul would come down either with the band, or as part of of Mark Hummel's blowouts just by himself. He would come down to the general area that I was in and I did get to see him a handful of times playing Sly McFlies or I think it was the Catalyst, I forget, in Santa Cruz. I probably saw him about three or four times. I remember one time he was scheduled to play a park performance and it was the day after September 11th or the weekend after September 11th. So I think the last time I could have seen him was a a rare canceled event you know when sort of everything got got canceled and that was going to be uh yeah in Monterey so yeah that that's I did get to see him he was really nice got to talk to him a few times I even gave him you know a little amateurish recording I made at that time and maybe wow it was it really blew me away something like four or five six months later I get a call on the phone from him I'm probably a freshman or sophomore in high school and and he uh lets me know what he thinks, and that I always found really touching, you know, that he took the time out to give me a call.

SPEAKER_03:

I think Paul DeLay, you know, lots of people have heard of him, but he's probably a little bit under the radar to some extent, you know, in the real harmonica greats, but I think a lot of people who know him really love his stuff, and like you said, Grant, he's got a really unique way of playing. I think lots of things are read about him. He tried to avoid clichés like the plague.

UNKNOWN:

... Thank you.

SPEAKER_03:

So, you know, that's a big part of his playing. Do you know how he developed? You know, you mentioned, Grant, that he definitely listened to all the greats, but how did he push himself away from, you know, sort of playing the usual blues sort of licks and things?

SPEAKER_04:

You know, we never really talked about that. He was such a great songwriter, and he was such a great singer, and I'm far and away, I think, the best singer I've ever heard.

SPEAKER_07:

Hair, silky skin But all of that beauty is mighty thin Now I've opened my eyes I think it's perfectly Be clear, you're gonna look like hell in another ten years While I'm a-walkin'

SPEAKER_04:

right out The only one else that would really come close would be Salgado, I think. But in terms of being able to really put your heart and soul out through your voice and your harmonica, he was the best at that. I'm guessing that his songwriting dictated how his phrasing evolved. I don't know. What do you think about that, Pete?

SPEAKER_02:

Well, he didn't really start writing, at least not writing complete songs until after he got busted and cleaned up. He had this folder full of scripts But we really didn't work on original material with him until after the big bust. And that was a revelation to all of us. It's like, oh my God, what has this guy been sitting on all this time? It's like the lights in the house came on when he cleaned up. It was really, really amazing. His aesthetic, I mean, he was a really interesting intellectual sort of guy. I mean, his grandfather, I think, was like the editor at the Oregonian. His dad was the staff photographer for the local newspaper for years and had taken photos of the Beatles and Princess Grace. and you know you know his family listened to a lot of opera music and he was just always uh listening to weird stuff going to see odd movies all of that's fed into his aesthetic when i joined the band you know i i had grown up in chicago heard otis rush up close when i was a kid That's what I was aspiring to do, is kind of replicate some of that. And he was obviously really attracted to that in my playing when I joined the band. But right off the bat, I remember I played some kind of, you know, B.B. King-like riffs that I thought were really cool. And he just kind of, he got this, he was, don't play B.B. King riffs. don't do just don't do that i don't want to hear that i'd rather hear you screw something up and figure out what to do with that then hear a really nice bb king riff with a lot of conviction behind it always prefer the weird unexpected turn than the kind of nice concise statement so that's just the way he was and then when we finally did start writing material i mean very little of the stuff we put out on evidence would fall into a straight ahead blues uh format a lot of the purists really kind of like were shocked and kind of disowned him for a while because um you know oh that's not blues which was ridiculous seemed just seemed ridiculous to me but he really um was always pushing uh harmonically and lyrically away from the cliches he really Because that just wasn't what he was about. He was not a cliche himself. He was a really eccentric, interesting dude. And that played out in his songwriting and his singing and his phrasing.

SPEAKER_03:

Like you said, though, he's quite a jazz influence. There's lots of swing in a lot of the songs. Did that come later when you were in the band? So, you know, his first band was in the Brown Sugar Blues band. bit more of a straight ahead blues and he started to move away from that and again was that with you or earlier he started to get away from just being blues? He always kind of went back to

SPEAKER_02:

that traditional stuff. I mean, he loved that material and kind of the original, the pioneers of that genre. But I think he was always kind of pushing in these other directions. Even in the Brown Sugar era, he was really young when some of that was recorded. I mean, they're just little snippets that you can find here and there. But, you know, when I hear that stuff... I'm amazed at how fully realized he was right out of the gates. I mean, his phrasing even back then was eccentric and innovative. And as he grew and as he, you know, as he got a band around him who was interested in pushing out in those directions, you know, like when we added Louis Payne on organ, Louis had moved up from the San Francisco area and played with a lot of jazz organ gigs for a long time and had played in R&B and funk bands so that he brought harmonically and rhythmically that whole bag into the mix.

SPEAKER_03:

So, Ross, what about his unorthodox approach to playing harmonica? I mean, is that something you picked up and tried to, you know, influence your own playing? You know, what drew you to that and what did you take from it?

SPEAKER_01:

My thought is that, you know, music is such a subjective field, right? And art and some people hear something, it really moves them. The next person thinks it's terrible or, you know. And when I heard Paul, that was just kind of it for me. I can autopsy after the fact, like, what are the elements that really appealed to me, but it was definitely just an immediate reaction to when I heard him. I was like, ah, this is my guy. Here is a guy who is about my parents' age, who lives on the West Coast, somebody I can kind of identify with in some ways, versus being a person I was reading about and didn't get to see. They were from a different generation, totally different world. He was from my time, like I said, pretty much about my parents' age. So I identified with him as like a person that I could know, unlike, say, Sonny Terry or these other greats, you know, Little Walter, I couldn't really identify in that way. So I certainly had like that kind of connection with him. I wouldn't say that's a personal connection, but why I think he resonated for me in one way. And I think in the other way, like that, I encountered Paul in a point in my harmonica development where if it was a record that had a harmonica player on it and was available at my local Borders bookstore, which was kind of the big bookstore where you at that time you could listen to the CDs before you bought them, I pretty much would get every record that I could find of anybody that played harmonica. I wanted to know kind of all of it, you know, and Paul obviously was a contemporary player who was pushing a lot of the boundaries and when I think when I heard him there's a combination of things one it's the complete package you know and I don't I hate to compare him to other players that were around at that time but there were guys who were great harmonica players whose singing or songwriting wasn't really that interesting so he really appealed to me on that level and then there were a number of guys who were really tremendous technicians really to probably speak the vocabulary of certain styles or certain eras of harmonica that I like perhaps even better than the architects of that era themselves you know like had really you know crystallized what that style was and there were a few guys like that and I enjoyed them and listened to them but listening to Paul he sounded like a total master one of the guys that struck me as good an improviser as I had really heard in any genre who every song probably offered something unique and unexpected who would push the harmonica in a lot of interesting technical ways whether it's through the unusual tongue splits that i hadn't heard other players use through the effects through playing chromatic in different positions i think i've heard recordings of him on unusual harmonicas like i don't know if it's a cot harmonica or auto valve harmonicas or some different recordings I've heard over the years where he was clearly messing around with some of those things packaged with the songwriting, the singing, the stellar band of really unique characters. It's really cool to me the different voices of how each member of that band played these stellar arrangements. And it was just a great context to hear music that I could listen to and be into for more than the harmonica. And then when I focused on the harmonica, he really just struck me as like a guy who in the era that i was learning harmonica who seemed the most like the real guys to me like he wasn't an imitator which i think most of the real guys there are recordings obviously of like early little walter and things where he sounds more kind of derivative than he does later but pretty quickly All of the guys that I love the most, I'd say most of them really just had this unique style. Whether they put emphasis on that, whether they developed that, whether it came natural or not, that's certainly a hallmark of my favorite players. really more than anyone else in that era for me, felt like the real thing, an iconoclastic, original voice on the instrument, who simultaneously, there are other guys that I thought were quite original, but his way of doing it to me was not cheesy, and it wasn't overly contrived or forced in terms of being original. Yeah, so he just, just one of those things, when I heard it, I was like, this is the guy. This is the mastery, the unique it's clear within 20 seconds of every song I've heard.

SPEAKER_03:

So I think what you've all touched on a little bit is his sort of complete package. I don't think you can take away the fact that he was a great songwriter, a great singer, and a great harmonica player. They all came together, didn't they? So let's touch on his songwriting a little bit and some great lyrics he wrote, very funny lyrics as well. There's plenty of songs I really love of his. So there's a song called Could We Just Shoot Your Husband, which, you know, with a title like that, it's got to be a great song.

SPEAKER_07:

Could we just shoot your husband, baby? So we can go on and live our lives. It's wrong to keep on cheating. Baby, we can make everything

SPEAKER_03:

alright. Excellent. And one of my real favourites is Ain't That Right, which, you know, really catchy tune and great lyrics.

SPEAKER_07:

Imagine seeing that acute while we're walking down. You

SPEAKER_03:

mentioned, Pete, earlier on that he started writing after he came out from his incarceration. I think he was writing in prison, wasn't he? And then he came out with lots of songs.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, he was busted, let out on bail, And then the trial kept getting put off and it was put off cumulatively for like almost two years before finally one day we got the word that like, okay, it's happening tomorrow. And he did some sort of a plea deal. So he ended up, you know, rather than going away for like 15 years, which was like what he was looking at at one point, because he was busted. There was a lot of cocaine involved in transaction that he was a mule for. So anyway, he did a plea deal. But in that two years after his bust is when he really kind of sobered up and suddenly all of these loose ends started to come together. Most of us didn't really understand that there were all these loose ends kind of floating around in his head and in his file folder all those years. But when he sobered up, it all started to come together. And also he had this sense of urgency it's like he knew he was that he was had gotten busted and was going away for some period of time he had this band who was that was willing to work with him and stand by him and so he really had the sense of urgency to kind of get what he could together in that time frame and we put out two recordings that were later picked up by evidence while he was awaiting trial. So his writing really started before he went away but after he got busted.

SPEAKER_03:

Were those two albums the other one and Paul Zilla?

SPEAKER_02:

Yes, yes, exactly. Two really excellent albums. Yeah, they were mind-boggling to us. I mean, you know, I'd been playing with them for a few years at that point, and I was like, wow, where did this come from? This is amazing.

SPEAKER_03:

And so all the songs on both these albums were originals.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_07:

¶¶¶¶

SPEAKER_03:

So the first album you played on with Paul, and was that, what did you say, 88? Was it Burning?

SPEAKER_02:

It was Burning. Yeah, Burning was a live recording at the Owl. And it was early, very early in my tenure with the band. And we were, yeah, we were playing all covers. I'm pretty sure. I don't think there were any original tunes on that album.

SPEAKER_07:

Peter, damn it. Hang on to your hat.

SPEAKER_03:

What about the arrangements of the music? Was that down to the band or was he instrumental in that as well?

SPEAKER_02:

Well, he would come to the band with some hooks, a kind of a loose idea for the song. You know, his writing style was very from the top down in the sense that he would start with the embellishments of the building and then work down to the foundation. And he wouldn't even really think about the foundation. about the hook that would happen on the bridge, and we would sort of push him into figuring out the structure and how to connect the bridge to the main part of the song. It was very much a collaborative process. I mean, it was Paul's ideas and kind of ultimately his call on the aesthetic questions, but it was very much the saxophone player coming up with the harmony part for the riff or something that would connect the main part of the song to the bridge or whatever it was very collaborative except for the lyrics I mean the lyrics were really all his doing

SPEAKER_03:

But the lyrics go, I think, so great with the songs, you know, the arrangements. They all work so well together. I think that's a really strong part of why it all works so well together, yeah. Yeah. He was born in 1952, so we're talking he was with the Brown Sugar Band from 74, so he was 22, I think, when he was probably playing before then. He had a little time where he toured with Sunderland Slim and Herbert Slim and then joined this Paul DeLay band in 1982 when he was 30. Played through to 1990 until he was sent away for 41 months, as you say. So what about... chromatic playing. Do you know about that, Grant? When did he start picking up the chromatic? Because he's very strong on chromatic. There's lots of chromatic on his recordings. you know when he started um playing that

SPEAKER_04:

he was playing it right when i heard him for the first time which would have been somewhere in the mid 80s i believe mid to later 80s uh I couldn't give you a year when he picked it up. But when I heard him play, he already had his own voice with the instrument. And like Ross was saying, he was playing in lots of different keys. The people that I had heard play chromatic up until that time were mostly playing D modal on a C chromatic harmonica. That's not what Paul was doing. He was doing all kinds of stuff. And then there's plenty of great chromatic playing on the other one and on Paul Zillow.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah,

SPEAKER_04:

yeah. as well.

SPEAKER_02:

He was playing chromatic when I first joined the band. I forget who he was referring to, but he said early on when he picked up the harp, somebody advised him, and I can't remember whether it was another blues harmonica player or whether it was some other sort of musician, but he said, you know, you really should pick up chromatic because you've got all 12 notes in the scale. There's a whole other world out there that you can't get to with the you know he took that to heart and there weren't any real examples in the blues world for him to follow to take cues from he really had to kind of invent that himself i mean they're most of the chromatic harp you hear being played in the blues world is pretty like uh grant was saying is i guess it's the door you know sort of dorian minor key stuff

SPEAKER_03:

yeah

SPEAKER_02:

and he what he wasn't doing that he had already figured out how to do it another way

SPEAKER_03:

yeah no absolutely and and Quite a distinct style, as you say, on the chromatic. He's definitely not playing the sort of usual third position stuff. So, I mean, I think from my listening, I picked out he did play a song on chromatic on the 1982 album Teasing. So I think as early as that, he was playing chromatic with the first Paul DeLay. That's

SPEAKER_06:

right.

UNKNOWN:

That's right.

SPEAKER_03:

Okay, so we've talked on these albums, Paul Ziller and the other one, which is in the early 90s. And then he released Ocean of Tears in 1996. Again, there's some great harp on there. And then Nice and Strong. So on there is a song well-known for him, which is$14 in the Bank, which was nominated for a WC Handy Award for Best Song.

SPEAKER_07:

$14 in the bank$1500 worth of honey I told my

SPEAKER_02:

That was kind of interesting. We were working on a new record. We had put together some material that Paul really thought was going to get us some crossover radio play. You know, they were not straight ahead. They were sort of a little bit more sort of Robert Cray-like blues tunes and structures with a little bit more complicated bridges and chord changes. But he came into the studio one morning and said, you know, we really need like one kind of straight ahead blues tune on this album. Let's give this a shot. So we kind of ran it down We ran through it and recorded it. That was kind of how that particular song happened. It was just like a one-shot thing. And it was Paul sort of saying to everybody, we need something that's a little bit more straight ahead, guys. Let's try this. And it still was quirky. I mean, if you listen to it, the four chord is a minor chord. It has some minor to major kind of chord changes in it that are not predictable at all. and I was like, Paul, why are you doing this? Let's just play it straight ahead. No, no, no, no, Bubba. We gotta do it like this. He insisted and I didn't get it for a long time and then the more as time has gone on, it's like those little weird quirks are the defining element of that tune. We used to call them the nuances in his material but we quickly decided that they were actually more like nuisances. So we started to refer to all of his little quirky lines and transitions as nuisances.

SPEAKER_03:

So, I mean, talking about his recordings as well, so, Pete, another thing you do is you help look after the poldelay.com website, which has got lots of great information and lists all the albums that he's released on there. So, I mean, looking through and doing my usual research and listening to the album, I couldn't find all his albums, so there's some good compilation albums which have come out, which are, you know, a nice representation, but... I mean, where are the albums available from? Do you think you can get them via the website? Yeah,

SPEAKER_02:

and a lot of the stuff is out of print. I mean, evidence is not in business any longer, and we can't even get product anymore from them. So a lot of that evidence stuff is out of print and unavailable. Frankly, we have not done much updating of that website since he passed. I'm not an IT guy. I really, I didn't have that much to do with the website except sort of throw content at the people who are putting it together. I think at this point we're, we kind of talk about it. We just, nobody has quite had the bandwidth to do it is to figure out how to get all of this stuff up on a streaming site. So at least the world can hear it, you know?

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, no, that'd be great. I mean, obviously there'll be some clips on here. Some people can hear it, but yeah, I think if people want to find out more and really dig into, into some, I mean, looking at video, various forums I've read lots of great things and people saying I sold a CD on eBay I bought an eBay you know a CD on eBay it seems like a lot of that has gone around and that's maybe some of the reason that he's not maybe quite as well known as some of the other players so yeah it'd be great to get his stuff out there more yeah so but as I said there are some really good compilation albums so there's an album called The Last of the Best live recordings by the Paul DeLay and I think that was put out to sort of commemorate him just after he died wasn't it?

SPEAKER_02:

Right yeah we'd recorded I think it was live at the Triple Door maybe in Seattle and have this recording and right after he passed we put that one out that has David Vest who now lives in Canada piano player from originally from Alabama real great boogie woogie guy that's a pretty straight ahead blues album there's not a lot of tricky songwriting on that music Toward the end of his run, He made a hard return to the kind of traditional blues repertoire and expression. And part of it had to do with the makeup of the band at that time. Because Louis Payne had moved on and Dan Fincher had moved on. The guys who sort of helped him structure all the material he put out on Evidence. Ocean of Tears, Nice and Strong. They had moved on and they were an essential piece of putting that material together. and making it happen.

SPEAKER_03:

And there's another live album called Live at Notterden. I think it's recorded in Norway. Yeah, and that was put out in, recorded in 1997 and put out in 2017. And then you played on that show, didn't you?

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, and that was the core band that put together all of the evidence material, essentially.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, so you think that's a good representation of his not straight ahead sort of blues stuff?

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, I think so. I mean, it was a really good set.

UNKNOWN:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

It was kind of interesting. The Notodden Festival had put out a sort of best of album. that had cuts from their first 15 years or whatever it was they were celebrating. And there was a Paul DeLay cut on that album. And at some point after he, fairly recently, like, I don't know, four or five years ago, it dawned on me that if they had a multi-track recording of that song, they probably somewhere, somebody had the full set that we had played that day at Notodden. And so I wrote some the festival director, and he said, yeah, I think it might, yeah, Norwegian Public Radio, I think, may have that somewhere. So, you know, a month later, I got this link to a Dropbox that had the whole set on a multi-track recording. We took that to somebody to master it and sort of retweak it a little bit, and then we put it out.

SPEAKER_03:

And that's available on streaming. So, you know, again, people can easily access that. And it'll be on the Spotify playlist that I put together as part of the podcast.

SPEAKER_01:

You know what? Here's a question for Grant. So you knew Paul a really long time. There are a few oddities in his catalog, either early stuff that was hard for me to track down or kind of oddball live recordings. It sounded like Paul would play a harmonica that was not a chromatic, not a diatonic, you know, whether I think one sounded perhaps octave tuned, like an auto vowel. I'm kind of doing this from memory because those tracks, I can't exactly remember where they are at this point, but, um, one sounded kind of like a, maybe like a cotch harmonica or something where you could even bend in it. And it sounded like a blues harp, but you also had a button on it, you know? Uh, can you speak a little bit about that? Cause I'm curious, it's such an oddity and I'm not really aware of many, maybe really any of the other blues players playing stuff like that. And they say, Sound really cool on these recordings, but there's only like one or two in his catalog that I encountered, none of it on those evidence albums and stuff. So was that something that he was kind of doing? What were those instruments?

SPEAKER_04:

I don't know. When I heard him play live, I didn't hear that. I heard him play diatonics and then different kinds of chromatics. It seemed like he had like two or three different chromatics with different availability of notes, right? So what would that be, like a 16-hole one and then a 12-hole one and then maybe a smaller one? Right. But that's, yeah, that's all I can tell you in terms of the harmonicas that he used. I understand what you mean, though, because he'd get like sounds and you're trying to figure out how's he getting that sound what's he using so um but i don't have an answer for you sorry man

SPEAKER_01:

yeah no i was i was just curious because it did strike me as either a trick on my ear or more like an oddity you know where he just kind of you know like little walter plays the cotch on a song or two and it's really cool you know

SPEAKER_04:

you know i'm i'm listening to paul and i'm a i'm a i'm a learning you know well i'm still a learning harmonica player a We're all works in progress. But I was early in my development. And up until that point, I heard a lot of people going so far as to recreate little Walter solos on stage and pass them off as their own, which is just not cool. You don't do that. But there were people that were doing that. And when I heard Paul, I didn't know how to articulate it at the time, and I didn't really know what I was hearing at the time. But in retrospect, Paul was a guy that really knew how to serve the song. He understood that the job of the musician is to serve the song. And how he chose to do that, the different tones that he used from song to song, the different ways that he did or didn't use his hands, whether it was a chromatic tune or a diatonic tune, or like Ross was saying, another harmonica that he picked up that he was just messing around with and learned how to play, and his use of space. As we know, there's tons of harmonica players that use no space. But Paul was not like that. Paul's use of space was really stunning. And he had his own voice. And that really attracted me. That was kind of like, oh, okay, that's a whole other way that you can go. And whether he knows it or not, he influenced me quite a bit by just me listening to him and realizing that that's what he was doing.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, and I think similarly myself, and again, I've certainly listened to him in the past, and I've got some of his songs in my collection. But recently, you know, I find myself playing, trying to, you know, do something which isn't so unusual. He does these sort of unusual jumps from low to high, for example, you know, and then just different phrases. You know, even just that, just trying to sort of do a little bit of that in your playing sort of rubs off on you, doesn't it?

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah, absolutely.

UNKNOWN:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03:

So picking out any favorite songs of his, have you got any in mind that you'd like to call out starting with you, Ross?

SPEAKER_01:

So when I encountered Paul, my first record was Take It From The Turnaround. And I picked up every record I could as they came out from there on out. And so his early material is kind of stuff that I have found probably since that period. Like I had all those high production value evidence criminal records. I think those were the record labels. Yeah. Yeah, okay. So the earlier stuff wasn't stuff I encountered until much later. I just couldn't get my hands on it. But for me, I kind of... You asked me a favorite song. I kind of consider... And I would like to ask Pete about this. I consider... Pretty much everything on all of those records to be just absolute gems. Band arrangement-wise, harmonica playing-wise, you know, it almost sounds like he never repeats himself. There's just, you know, such a wide variety of masterful playing. Also ensemble work, you know, harmonica in an ensemble, not just as a lead voice. There's just so much of it that's so great. Not so great. It's my favorite stuff. But if you ask me to pick a song, I would say when I first heard the Delay Does Chicago album as an aspiring player, like I said, I missed his whole era that Pete has mentioned about playing more straight-ahead material prior to these songs. evidence criminal releases. So I had not had the pleasure of hearing just Paul play a set of more standard stuff. And Delay Does Chicago certainly gets into a lot of stuff that is not Totally standard. But when I heard that album, that one really just floored me because it put his playing in a context that I was much more familiar with and also maybe would be playing myself on gigs or with friends, you know? More kind of, yeah, standard public domain fare, if you will, in terms of the chord progressions. And listening to his idiosyncratic... Just that out of hell mastery of the whole thing in this context where you could listen to all of my favorite players play pretty much, you know, was just a revelation. And so I could say like, you know, all those tracks are great touchstones for me. If I was to pick one, you know, listening to his... solo on the back half of the song wait is like maybe the most nasty chromatic playing i can think of it's just got like all of the stuff that i love about his playing kind of in there and some stuff that i've pretty much only heard on some live records like paul didn't really play octaves on the chromatic which is part and parcel to most west coast blues players chromatic style kind of coming out of that George Smith thing now I have heard like little moments here and there where it's happened but not on those records not on those high production value records but like he pops into that for a second he it's just got everything in there this sort of I think one of the things that really blows me away about his improvisations is his He pretty much doesn't really ever sound like he's playing licks to me. He sounds like he is composing in a stream-of-conscious kind of way with really wonderful, motivic music. development and relationships between phrases. And there's just this kind of masterful architecture of how the melodic lines kind of evolve, both in terms of creating a shape to a solo and how they sort of relate on a more, you know, on a more microscopic phrase to phrase level. But that solo, it's got the angular weird phrasing that he pops into it's got the odd double stops it's got this nasty tone it's got this killer way of just building a solo that would probably be one I could point to I can't say it's my favorite but whenever I listen to that one I'm just like my god this is everything

SPEAKER_03:

So let's bring you, Grant, a song or an album that you would like to pick out.

SPEAKER_04:

My favorite albums are the other one and Paul Zilla. And, you know, I think like Pete was saying, you know, there's a depth and a sense of urgency to both of those albums that's, you know, you can just hear it. My favorite tunes on the other one are Why Can't You Love Me? Why Can't You Love Me? and oat brand and then on the um on the paulzilla album uh i really love i missed you bad and pete you take a gorgeous guitar solo on that one and then i also love don't feel nothing

SPEAKER_03:

Great stuff. So, Pete, even though you're not a harmonica player, we'll maybe let you pick one of Paul's favorite songs of yours out.

SPEAKER_02:

I think the one that just really knocked me out, because it was one of the first ones we tackled after he got busted, was the other one. You know, it's got some just really cool chord changes that are different. And he plays really... It's just haunting to me. Yeah, I just always really dug that. But yeah, there was so much in that repertoire we did with that band that really was just so exceptional. That whole period before he went to prison was... Under a deadline. I mean, in the literal sense of a deadline, it's like, you know, you are dying. You're going to die at dawn. What are you going to do with the next 24 hours? And that was kind of the feeling we had for like two years. It's like the whole band was in this, was just focused and really engaged in like everything that we were trying to do and that he was trying to do. Yeah,

SPEAKER_03:

it is amazing how that focuses the mind, doesn't it, as you say, having that.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, totally. And it really was an ensemble, you know, the way we would, you know, I really felt like I was an instrument in an orchestra rather than a guitar shredder in a blues band. I mean, I would do that when the time came to do that. I'd try to do that. But the rest of the time, I was trying to figure out how the guitar parts were going to work with this very reedy sound we had of harmonica, saxophone, and Hammond organ. I mean, that's a lot of reed-ish sounds. And to kind of pull all that together and weave it together in a way that really worked, we spent a lot of time and put a lot of creative energy into trying to figure out how that could work. Because we didn't really have any models to work from. There weren't blues bands with this instrumentation that we knew of that we could sort of look to for guidance. We had to kind of really figure it out. And I think that's why we came up with an original solution, because we had to, you know.

SPEAKER_00:

Hey everybody, you're listening to Neil Warren's Harmonica Happy Hour Podcast, proudly sponsored by Tom Halcheck and Blue Moon Harmonicas. This is Jason Ritchie here telling you I love Blue Moon Harmonicas. I love the combs, the covers, the custom harps, the refurbished pre-war marine bands, and nobody's easier to work with than Tom Halcheck. Check them out, www.bluemoonharmonicas.com.

SPEAKER_03:

You know, suddenly... Paul died in 2007. He's 55 years old. So I think, Pete, you played the show with him just before this happened, yeah? So if you could maybe tell us about that time.

SPEAKER_02:

So he was, you know, he put on some weight. He was having a lot of health-related kind of issues. His joints were starting to give him a lot of trouble. He was kind of borderline diabetic, I think, probably at that point. So we were kind of aware that he was sort of struggling a lot of the time. We had played about two weeks before that final gig. We had been down in Mexico playing in Playa del Carmen. A friend of ours has this place. thing down there that she does, and we'd gone down there to play, and he really kind of seemed like he was, I thought it was a sort of jet lag, but anyway, he really was kind of having trouble getting around. It was hard to tell how much of that might have just been weight related, you know, because he was carrying a, you know, so he explained one day when he hopped in the van to drive off to a gig, he said, Bubba, Just imagine what it would be like walking through life with, like, 25 bowling balls attached to your back. And I went, oh, yeah, okay. Okay, I get it. So, anyway, the gig in Klamath Falls is in this beautiful Art Deco theater in southern Oregon. Really great crowd. He had what seemed like it was a bad cold coming on, or a flu or something, because his voice was really raspy. He did not do a lot of singing on that gig, but he played great harmonica. And he told lots of really funny jokes. This is like on a Saturday evening. he seemed like he was struggling but he was still there for the gig and he was playing brilliant harmonica playing funny jokes hopped in the van the next day drove him home and he said well I'll just try to sleep this off the next day he called me up we were supposed to play on a Tuesday we had a Tuesday gig He called me up and said, Bob, I think you better get a sub for Tuesday because I just think I'm coming down with the flu or something like that. I said, okay. So Tuesday, I got the call that he had gone to the doctors, already had been moved to the hospital. And by the time I kind of like got focused on what was going on, he was like already hooked up to a morphine drip. And they said he has late stage leukemia. As far as I know, nobody knew he had leukemia. But he had emerged from Klamath Falls with late-stage, full-blown leukemia. And he basically got checked into the hospital and just crashed and burned almost immediately. Like 12 hours later, he was gone. So the whole thing was just sort of shocking. I have a live board recording of that gig, and it was a pretty cool gig. But it was shocking. In some ways, I remember feeling relieved that it wasn't a weight-related issue that the bad should have like been more aggressive about intervening about you know because we had conversations about that all the time should we do something you know he had cleaned up from drugs and alcohol but he really had put on an enormous amount of weight and it was really it was serious enough that every time we had to fly off to a gig i was concerned that you know he might not ever make it off the plane alive you know i just thought oh he's gonna have a blood clot or something so i was in some ways i was relieved that it had nothing to do with any of that it was leukemia it just like came out of the blue took him you know it spared him a lot of years of suffering if he had continued to have to struggle with his weight and his weight related issues

SPEAKER_03:

and mercifully quick as you say so

SPEAKER_02:

it was mercifully quick and he went out he went out kind of in a blaze of glory I mean he You know, like I said, we were down in the Caribbean two weeks before that, you know, and these amazing, beautiful beaches and Mayan ruins and stuff. And then like two weeks later, he was gone from leukemia.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah. So we talked about, obviously, you got the last of the... the best album out after that, and then this other live album out sort of 10 years later. So anything else happen, you know, following his death?

SPEAKER_02:

Well, we put together some, like, memorial concerts out here that were really, really special. I mean, we did one up in Seattle, we did a couple of them in Portland, and basically all of the Northwest blues guys like Lloyd, Jones, and Linda Hornbuckle and Curtis, but also people like James Harmon came in. And we did these as fundraisers for this youth music project here called Ethos. And we raised a fair amount of money and mostly just sort of pulled the community together and kind of celebrated. I mean, his departure left a whole void in the scene that has not really ever been He had big shoes to fill, man. That's all I can say. He took up a lot of space, and there's a big empty space there now. There still is. I still think about it a lot. I think about him a lot.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, well, hopefully we can inspire somebody to pick up on some of his uniqueness by listening to this.

SPEAKER_07:

You want to have the time

SPEAKER_03:

So let's now get on to talking about the gear he used so it might not be that easy for us to pick that out and again Pete as a non-harmonica player you might not be quite so clued into what gear he was using but I was reading some great stuff on the forums and there was a great entry from Drury Hammer so if you're listening Drury thanks for your contribution but he basically said he was looking at in Paul's case in 2003 and this is what he was playing so he said he played hone and big river harps which is from what I understand he sort of played all of his careers certainly the last part of his career does anyone know about uh his use of honing big river harps

SPEAKER_02:

he talked about big river harps i mean they're they're the kind of the you know the run-of-the-mill blues harp and um he kind of liked them because they were they made a lot of one of the things he says they made a lot of them in a lot of different keys so they were in tune i think he said that other models of harmonica some of the off keys they made so few of them that they'd quality control or something like that wasn't quite as predictable. So anyway, he liked those, but the chromatics were a whole different story. I mean, that's

SPEAKER_03:

The chromatics have got, he was playing a hona chromonicus, which are generally 12 holes. So, I mean, Ross, you talked about him playing different sort of harps. Do we know what he was playing on the chromatics wise?

SPEAKER_01:

I mean, from the recordings, you can tell he's often playing a 16 hole. Yeah, I personally don't really know much other than looking at pictures, probably, you know, at that time I got to look into his case and I have gotten to be a guest at his wife's house a a couple of times and when I've been up in the area and she would show me his, you know, sort of leftover harmonica. So it was really cool that she showed me that. And it was just the kind of stuff you're talking about. I can't really speak to whether those are the harps he was gigging with or they were just kind of, you know, left leftover, you know, instruments. But yeah, 64 on or 64 and big river harps seem to have been a big part of his kit, at least towards the end of his career. And I, you know i can't really i don't know if he did that just because big rivers were cheap and affordable and you could take the reed plates off without needing nails and hammers and stuff or whether those were his favorite instruments but that certainly you know seems to be what he had and

SPEAKER_03:

A very interesting thing I read in this forum again from Drury Hammer is that he used this space case, which was kind of like a briefcase plus an amp, where he had this sort of direct box plugged into a Zoom multi-effect amp simulator. So I don't know, Peter, were you aware he had this sort of space case that he used? Yeah,

SPEAKER_02:

yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that was his get-rich-quick hope, is that he was going to mass market the space case and retire. Or something like that. It was a source of a lot of jokes from the rest of the band, because he was always tweaking it and putting things in and taking things out, and the connections were kind of duct-taped together. The space case, well, the insight I got into his aesthetic... early on we were driving to a gig he had a cooler full of stuff to eat he had traveled with this whole cooler of provisions and in that cooler he had three different kinds of mustard you know he just was a real gourmand for everything including sound so the space case was like the three they had the three different kinds of mustard and then some you know personally i sort of found it distracting because i thought his phrasing was so especially in the chromatic was so so stunning why would you want to put flanges and echoes and stuff like that that would distract and make it hard to really focus on what he was doing so So I was that sympathetic about his kind of struggles with trying to get the space case to work.

SPEAKER_03:

So he was swapping out different effects pedals. Was he always sort of changing it and trying to get different sounds? Yeah,

SPEAKER_02:

yeah, he was experimenting with it. It was in a constant state of development, and it was always the beta, you know. He was always testing the beta

SPEAKER_03:

version. So he plugged this into what, a solid-state amp, did he? So was he carrying an amp around? Did he plug that into a PA?

SPEAKER_02:

He mostly went into the PA. When I first joined the band, he had like a Tweed Tremolux, Fender Tremolux from the 50s that was just barely hanging together. But early on, he just started going direct into either a solid state amp or into the PA through Space Case when he was playing with Space Case. I don't think he was using the Space Case anymore. in the last of the best era.

SPEAKER_03:

Great, yeah. So, well, he's innovative in his use of pedals and other things as much as in his playing, let's say. And microphone-wise, again, he was playing in a static JT30, so do we know if that was his only mic or did he have several as most of us do?

SPEAKER_02:

I'm not positive. I don't remember him talking a whole lot about his different mics. And a lot of times he played... straight into the vocal mic, you know, into the PA, into the standard mic. He used the old mics when, whatever it is, when we were playing traditional Chicago blues stuff and when he wanted that sound. But otherwise, he didn't tend to use that as what I recall.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, he was using this space case. It probably would work with a sort of standard vocal mic rather than a bluesy mic, wouldn't it? So that would make sense.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. Can I ask Pete just, like, one or two questions? Yeah. Yeah, I wanted to ask you, man, like, so... Those recordings you guys made are just so great. Comparing the live recordings to the studio recordings, one thing that knocks me out having no insight into how music was being recorded in that era in Portland or how you guys thought of things, the production value and the nuance and detail to those recordings is masterful. It does not sound just like a band doing a take, you know? Um, there's delay throws on a harmonica solo as he goes to the final break. And there's, you know, there's nuance on that level. Paul's playing, you know, um, especially on some of the less traditional materials, some of the, I get the impression he had insanely good ears.

UNKNOWN:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

yeah you know we worked out the um arrangements very meticulous because that was partly lewis payne's input but you know if you have one the keyboard playing a suspended chord on the on the five chord and everybody else is just playing a regular dominant seventh chord on that chord you immediately have all these conflicts and or if somebody's playing a different passing chord than you are anyway with our instrumentation we really had to work all that stuff out or just got cacophon you know got chaotic the solos were um you know paul was paul was pretty interesting in the early days this was before i was in in the band but like teasing tonight early recording i had heard a story that there's a caught on teasing that paul took like 125 takes of a solo like he was just obsessed obsessive compulsive and he just drove everyone crazy and he took seriously like 125 over a course of a week like 125 different versions of that solo and ended up using i think one of the first or second takes you know so he i guess he learned a lesson there but I think that was partly drugs and alcohol in those days. Because when we went into the studio, he was a lot more focused and he would get what he wanted pretty quickly. Sometimes he overdubbed a section or took another pass at something. But the solos from everyone in the band were... You know, the intent was to try to get him on the first pass, because I think at that point we all kind of understood that after the first or second take, you've lost some essential mystery of what you're trying to do. I kind of wanted to say something about the Paul DeLay Does Chicago recording. We had just come to Chicago from Notodden. We had just flown in from... norway and we were uh... well i think we've come in from norway we also played syracuse in polka knows that summer so we may be coming from there but anyway we had landed in chicago we're playing at buddy guys club i think maybe like on a tuesday or wednesday we were there early paul went down to the club for the jam session and johnny bergens band was the house band so he played with those guys and I think he was really just sort of really revved up by the immediacy and the rawness and the lack of organization of it, you know, compared to what we had been doing for the prior two years since he'd been out of prison and the two years before he went to prison where we were really crafting this pretty nuanced and organized and arranged material. He just really liked getting down and just playing straight ahead, Chicago Blues, just watch for the cues, do it on the fly. That's what that recording came out of that meeting. He kind of got to work right away setting up that recording session.¶¶ That was kind of a release from all of the maybe hyper-focused stuff that we'd been doing on Evidence before that.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, so that was released in 1999. Was it recorded then? So that was, I think, the second-to-last album we put out, wasn't it? Heavy Rotation was the last one in 2001, was it?

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, I think that's right.

SPEAKER_07:

Remember what I told you, you don't mean a thing Because I love you, babe One other

SPEAKER_01:

thing to say about that that I'd be curious if Pete has some insights on, is Kim Field played me maybe one or two recordings that he was able to find of Paul as a sideman on maybe some singer-songwriter records, some session dates that he did. But almost all the recordings I've found, maybe there's the David Vest era recordings, Where Paul is not the singer in the band on some cuts, you know, but for the most part, it's Paul is front man. And with Delay Does Chicago, one thing like so, I think, you know, everybody acknowledges how masterful little Walter is and everything he did. But one of the things that like, is just total genius to me. It's his accompaniment of Muddy. He's able to play so much stuff, and somehow it's all perfect. And when I listen to that, I'm like, okay, this is genius at work, that you can accompany in this kind of ostentatious but totally musically satisfying way, the way that Walter does on a lot of that stuff. And when I listen to... Delay Does Chicago there are a few cuts where he as far as I know on his studio albums maybe the only ones I'm really aware of or at least from that era of him as an accompanist and the way he is accompanying is just the same genius to me it's in the moment interaction music And it blows me away thinking that he probably was not doing a lot of accompanying, but maybe he was. And I'm curious if there are records of him just... being a sideman on a blues band date, or if you have any insights or thought in that, because he's so in the moment playing no-stock stuff while accompanying in a tasteful way, kind of moving everything around on a few cuts on Delay Does Chicago, and that was another aspect of that recording that knocked my socks off.

SPEAKER_02:

That's really interesting. I hadn't really thought about that, but... He didn't do a lot of accompanying. I mean, he would go in and sit in with other people when they were playing around town. He did that a lot, just to go out and play. But he didn't do a lot of recording as the side guy harmonica player. I think maybe because... What he did was so eccentric that it kind of scared people away, you know. Oh, I just want a kind of a normal harmonica solo here, not a Paul DeLay solo. I don't know what they're thinking. But anyway, he didn't do a lot of that accompanying work. So I think really it was just he had an amazing, he had amazing ears. You know, he just could hear all of it. all of the dissonance and harmony and everything else and kind of, he was just there in the moment. He absolutely was there in the moment.

SPEAKER_06:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

He just, I mean, early on when I was playing with the band, when he was still really under the influence and he would show up at gigs where he hadn't slept in two days, you know, and he'd go, oh man, how is this going to work? You know, the guys passed out in the seat next to me. We'd get to the gig. He'd get on stage. And he would just transcend it totally. He was like a superhero when he hit the stage. And then he'd get back in the van and just pass out. He was totally in the moment. He lived for that moment on stage. There's no question about it. That's where the real drama and beauty of his life really played out to me was on stage.

UNKNOWN:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03:

So... great thanks all for your contribution so I just want to to finish off now by maybe talking about Paul's legacy or any final words you've got to say about him so a grant starting with you

SPEAKER_04:

yeah I mean you know as far as what I he he never he didn't give me a ton of feedback on you know I think like I said you know I hit him up for lessons and he gave me like two lessons and kicked me out of the nest and said just no man you don't need lessons from me just play you know that was a high integrity thing to do I mean I was I would have been happy to pay him from more lessons, but he just, you know, that wasn't who he was. But I do remember him saying to me once, he heard me play at a gig one time, and he gave me some feedback afterwards, and he just said, Bubba, beware the gratuitous vibrato. And he said it in a really kind way. It was just like, ah, yeah, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You don't have to put something on every note that you hold, and you don't even have to hold all the notes. And so just those kinds of things. I completely agree with what Pete just said about, I mean, he had an enormous setting years and there's so many different ways to be musical and he was just like super musical in all kinds of ways but he and i were talking about theory one time and he didn't know that the kia f had one flat you know in it or something and and and i'm like um And, you know, I mean, that doesn't have any, not taking anything away from his musicianship because he didn't know that. But I asked him, I said, how do you tell the guys in the band how you want your songs to go if, you know, if that's one way that you don't communicate in? And he just said, I do a lot of nodding my head and shaking my head. Yeah. He didn't say it that way. He demonstrated it. But I thought that was really interesting. I mean, he was so deeply musical and had such huge ears. And from a classical perspective, point of view he didn't speak the language really you know so I was yeah I thought that was really fascinating you know he was a huge influence on me in just a lot of ways like I said before just his the way he served the song the way he used space the way he had his own own way of phrasing and the way he just kind of had his own voice vocally and through the harmonica in everything and it changed from song to song each song He knew exactly how to serve each song. And I still do the best I can to carry that on in my own way.

SPEAKER_03:

Great. Thanks, Grant. So I'll bring you in now, Ross. So what do you think is his legacy or his lasting impression on you?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I mean, on me, I think it's multifaceted. I think, one, the harmonica, we've been blessed with a number of great players, but we have not been blessed with the... Right. So, to me, Paul is that, and he, you know, represents... an extra special place for me because on the harmonica, there just haven't been very many guys like that, at least playing the kinds of music that I pay attention to. I can't speak to other styles. So I think for me, one of the things is a constant reminder that a guy like Paul or Thelonious Monk, I consider them somewhat similar in that they are playing out of a style that other players are kind of in and around. Maybe not exactly the same thing but you know Monk is playing with these great bebop players he is writing his own music and setting up his own context but it is in the ballpark of some of those other styles and Paul same with kind of playing blues but both of these guys I think show that with creativity originality and vision you can basically turn a known idiom on its head in a way that still works. Like for me, one of the things I listened to Paul and he does a lot of stuff where I'm like, okay, that kind of shouldn't really work or it wouldn't work for other players or it's kind of, it doesn't belong in this style based on what other people have done. But the way he follows through with it, it makes it work. And it is like, a sight to behold that this is a possibility and it's good to be constantly reminded that we're mostly limited by our own kind of you know our own imagination limitations and that he you know could create a similar level of uniqueness to me as as as monk so And then, you know, on a more, you know, micro level, the way that he, I think, expresses a very wide variety of emotions in his playing, I think is an important takeaway for me. Like a lot of the blues players I love are just like nasty and intense. And that's generally a feeling I get from them. They just sound like badasses. But Paul will do that. He will also... play something like really humorous like almost like like a Looney Tunes joke like that break on nice and strong like that's just like a musical humor soundbite you know and he does just that there can be this wider variety of emotions besides you know just one thing you can play beautiful you can play really funny and weird and you can play intense and I think that's a takeaway I think the way he goes from math tones to tiny tones like there's this idea of what a good tone is on harmonica and I think Paul is a good reminder that you can use a lot of terrible tones and amazing massive tones you can use them all alongside for me too much better effect than just a single great tone that you kind of keep in that same zone He has so many takeaways, but I would really just say the fact that he could create such an iconoclastic style that's so offbeat and have it sound like badass blues harmonica to me is the main source of inspiration and takeaway for me.

SPEAKER_03:

great stuff so the felonious monk of the harmonica is certainly a great credit so Pete you probably knew him best having played with him for 25 years you've already said that he's left a big hole from his passing so any final words from you?

SPEAKER_02:

He was really a surprise I mean one of the first gigs I drove I was driving the van out to some like Spokane or Boise somewhere across the western wheat fields and He was passed out in the passenger seat. And like the sun was going down and the fields had been just recently plowed. And so there's this amazing light and green and browns and thunderclouds and sunlight. And I was just going, wow, this is an amazing little drive. Paul wakes up, looks at it for a second and goes, Bubba. I think these farmers out here were influenced by the Cubists and the French Expressionists. Then he went back to sleep and I went, what the hell? Where did that come from? You know, just visually, he was kind of in a different world. I went to pick him up at a gig. Well, this happened many times. I'd go pick him up at a gig. He would be listening to Lawrence Welk's show. And I go, Bubba, why are you listening to Lawrence Welk? I said, I'm doing research. And he would use a lot... If you listen carefully, there are lots of inside jokes in his material about Lawrence Welk. Little sound effects and goofy little stuff that he put in. What's my takeaway about him? I don't know. I think it takes... takes an enormous artistic talent to be able to color outside of the lines of any kind of in any genre but i think in blues it's really hard because you know the audience is expecting it to sound like what they're familiar with yeah and um he was able to color outside of the lines a lot and make it work in a way that still just baffles me and blows me away. I mean, sometimes I'd hear him on the chromatic harp. He wouldn't be playing scales. He would just be like grabbing mouthfuls of sound and just blowing until the thing was distorting, until the harmonica was almost kind of rattling. He would pull something like that into something that would somehow make perfect sense on a blues tune, you know, a standard blues tune, or on one of his more kind of nuanced songs. I mean, the guy really had an amazing artistic aesthetic. I don't know how you would teach that. It's just, it's who he was. I mean, he was, like I said, he was a one-of-a-kind musician. Yeah, he was a one-of-a-kind.

SPEAKER_03:

So thanks so much. You're all joining us today to talk about Paul DeLay and his life and how you knew him and influenced you. So thanks so much to Grant Dermody, Ross Garron, and Pete DeMann.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, thank you. It was great hearing all you guys talk about Paul. It was really great for me. Thank you.

SPEAKER_04:

Me too. Me too. Thanks, guys. Yeah, what a wonderful experience.

SPEAKER_03:

Once again, thanks to Zydle for sponsoring the podcast. Be sure to check out their great range of harmonicas and products at www.zydle1847.com or on Facebook or Instagram at Zydle Harmonicas. Thanks so much to Grant, Ross and Pete for joining me today. Wonderful to hear their first-hand accounts of meeting Paul, seeing him perform and sharing their stories and how he touched their lives. And also thanks to Kim Field for helping me out with this episode. Thank you for watching. I'll sign out now with Paul playing an instrumental, one of Grant's favourites. This is Old Bram from the Other One album.