At last! The long awaited -ahem- Blind Lemons album, Southside Gumbo is ready. Released by indie label Gaztelupeko Hotsak, there are 14 tracks of our personal blend of Chicago and New Orleans sounds. You can listen to it here or at the Blind Lemons site. If you like it so much that you just have to have it, orders by email are more than welcome, either to me at
[email protected] or to the band at
[email protected]. Price is €10 plus shipping, which you can confortably pay via PayPal. The CD will hopefully soon be available at CDBaby or some other online store, for the convenience of everyone overseas. So here it is:
Now, the usual personal info and yet some more music for y'all.I come from a cool middle-sized sea-shore town in the north of Spain, Gijon, but I've been living in Madrid for quite a few years now. It's been also quite a few years since I first took up the harp, back in the good-ole teen days in my hometown. Blues harp to be exact. I like old-school dirty blues, and my main fields and interests are pre-war and Chicago blues. I've been playing regularly all around the Spanish blues scene as a sideman with several bands and some of the big names in the country. I've always played in my own band as well, together with my close friends and blues partners in Madrid. With "Alias Blues Gang" we played some of the main fests in Spain, and we put out a self-produced record. In 2005 most of us who played there put together a new band, The Blind Lemons (check us out here at MySpace!), in which I play the role of singer/frontman besides the harp. We play Chicago influenced blues with a good dose of New Orleans piano funk, and we've just released our new CD. I also keep a duo project with my old partner from Alias Blues Gang, Vladi Olmos , in which we play old delta and country blues, covering Rob. Johnson, Charlie Patton, Tampa Red, Jazz Gillum, Muddy Waters, Big Bill Broonzy or John Lee Williamson, among others. I also play as a sideman in Vladi's own band, Same Old Blues, as well as with other Spanish blues guys like Tonky de la Peña, Malcolm Scarpa, Fede Aguado , Flaco Barral , Smiling Jack Smith or Fred P.G. For the fellow harp freaks, I'll say that I play preferably Hohner Marine Band harps, but I also like and use the Hering Vintage 1930 and the new Seydel 1847, all tweaked and repaired by myself. My preferred mics are an old Shure brown bullet with a black CR element and an old crystal JT-30. My amps are a '62 brownface Fender Princeton, a '75 silverface Fender Princeton Reverb with a 12" Weber 12A150 AlNiCo speaker, a '59 Fender Bassman RI, a Dutch made Marble Max, a Sonny Jr. 410 and a Masco MA-17N.
Down here you can listen to the CD my pal Vladi and I recorded back in 2003, called "A Pelo", which in Spanish can either mean "unplugged" or "doing certain things without certain protections" ;)). For a while it was up on the net for free download, artwork included, but eventually we had to cancel the hosting. So now you can listen to it again here...We hope you like it...:) By the way, the Fox Chase number wasn't originally on the CD, but I've included it here now, as we usually do a couple of solo pieces in our gigs. This is from the Rock'n'River Festival in '05.
From The Blind Lemons CD release party, here's an old classic:
