This edition of ON the Beat was originally emailed to subscribers on January 19, 2023. To receive Josef Woodard’s music newsletter in your inbox each Thursday, sign up at independent.com/newsletters.
Added to the index of real time pleasures enjoyed with live music’s rebirth: the sound, and palpable sensation of top blues musicians inciting a sonic riot of happiness, shivering rafters, and a literal rumble underfoot at the Carrillo Rec Center. We’re talking, of course, about the venerable Santa Barbara Blues Society’s special slate of dance concerts in the historic Center, with its spring-loaded dance floor.
You have to be there. Accept no streaming, in-house entertainment center substitute.
Friday night, January 20, finds the Society returning to the Rec Center with a stellar name in the current blues firmament, Tommy Castro and his outfit The Painkillers, who last played locally in 2019, in the pre-virality Before Times. The San Jose-born and bred Castro, a go-to bluesman for roughly three decades, dropped his latest album in his long-running pact with Alligator Records, A Bluesman Came to Town in 2021, in the heart of the pandemic and the music lockdown. Among the highlighted tracks is “Blues Prisoner.” This week, the blues prisoner comes back to our town, donning the imprimatur of having won the 2022 BB King Entertainer of the Year award.
On his latest album, the 67-year-old Castro demonstrates his potent mix of Chicago blues, Memphis soul, and Southern Rocking grit, as both soulful singer and stinging guitarist. In other words, Castro is not your deep-dish blues purist.
As he told me, “It’s tricky being a modern blues guy, because you learned from a bunch of really great original artists. These guys were all giants, the people that we learned from. It’s an art form and you don’t want to stray from that too much, but you do owe it to yourself and everybody else listening to you to bring something of your own to the party. It’s tricky, balancing that. I’ve been navigating that all these years. I’m happy with what we’ve done, but there are people out there in the world with their own ideas about what blues is and whether or not what we’re doing is blues. I really don’t care about that (laughs). I know where I am and where I come from."
“I write songs and don’t have any limits, saying 'I can’t do that, because it’s not blues.' I’m looking to write a good song. We put them across the way it makes the most sense, whatever the song calls for. Everything we do is pretty firmly rooted in blues and roots music, and then we just try to create our own songs that give me some sort of my own sound or identity, but without straying too far. It’s tricky.”
He makes the trick work wonders, with or without the spring-loaded killing floor.