Written interview with guitarist & vocalist Rev Raven – Reverend Raven & Westside Andy and the Chain Smokin’ Altar Boys – Way Back Home.
Jazz Blues European Union: – Thank you for taking the time to have this interview with Jazz Blues EU. Tell us about your music. Tell us about your music. When did you start performing?
Rev Raven: – For all intents and purposes, we are a Chicago house-rocking blues band. We play a lot of original songs over traditional African American blues grooves. Our music is presented as an ensemble instead of just backing me up. My favorite Chicago blues bands were ensembles, especially Jimmy Rogers.
We’ve had a fine string of harmonica players and pianists through the last 30 years: Madison Slim, Cadillac Pete Rahn, Benny Rickun, and now Westside Andy Linderman. I feel honored to play with these guys because between them they are veterans of the Charlie Musselwhite, Delbert McClinton, Tino Gonzales, Paul Black, Pinetop Perkins, Jim Liban, and many more.
I started playing guitar when I was 14 years old. My older cousin, David, and his friends took me to see Cream, with the Mothers of Invention opening, in 1968 at the Amphitheater in Chicago. I was mesmerized by Clapton’s playing and Frank Zappa.
A little side story, though. My cousin Dave was the copy boy for the music critic at the Chicago Tribune at the time, and so he’d always get backstage passes for these shows. So we went backstage to meet Cream and talk to them, and Ginger Baker took one look at me with my greaser hair and my Nehru jacket and said, “No bloody kids.” So I had to go stand over by the Meister Brau sign, and my cousin would come over and collect me when they were done hanging out with them, getting their autographs and stuff, I guess.
In the meantime, this long-haired guy with a watch cap comes up and goes, “Hey kid, what’s going on?” And I told him what was going on. He introduced himself. He goes, “I’m Jimmy.” I said, “Oh, you’re the drummer from the Mothers?” He says, “Yeah.” It was Jimmy Carl Black. It was pretty cool. He hung out with me, and when I told him what they did, he started badmouthing Baker.
I have a picture of it, and I sent it to him like 25 years ago. He didn’t remember it, but we became Facebook friends.
But yeah, I started playing guitar after that Cream concert, and that summer I drove my mother crazy playing the opening riff to “Sunshine of Your Love.” That’s all I knew. So she told my older cousin to get me some guitar lessons from his guitar player in his band, which he did, and then he showed me how to learn songs off records.
I ended up ruining a lot of my brother’s records trying to learn how to play solos by putting quarters on top of the needle. To this day, I owe him those records too.
I was hooked. I would come home from school and practice, and most of my friends at the time were budding musicians. There were only two of us in high school who were into blues, and that was me and a friend of mine named Al Cardozo, who now goes by the name Al Stone, but that’s another story.
Then I saw Freddie King in 1971 with Leon Russell’s band backing him up at the Kinetic Playground in Chicago. It might have been ’70. I’m not sure. Freddie was out in the middle of the floor, 2,000 hippies. He’s got a 200-foot cord, a bunch of cords taped together, and he’s standing right in the middle of the audience, and he’s just ripping.
And that was it. I stopped playing rock and roll that day. And to this day, when I go to jam sessions or play with people, and they say, “You know this song?” I say, “Not if it was written after ’71. I don’t know it.”
I got hooked on blues as a teenager. Why listen to rock bands singing about teenage love when I could listen to songs about Hoochie Coochie Men, evil women, going to jail, etc.? So I’ve been playing it off and on my whole life, with a 15-year break when I was in the Navy.
What do you consider to be your hometown and how does that affect your music?
I was born and raised in the West Englewood neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago, with a few stints in the suburb of Posen, Illinois, which was just over the border. We were lower-middle-class, working poor for the most part.
But it was an incredibly exciting time to grow up in Chicago as a kid. The ’60s were happening, and there was all this incredible music going on around me. I sometimes think of myself as that kid in The Wonder Years—11, 12, 13 years old, watching all of this incredible stuff happen around me.
And because of my older cousin Dave, I got to see a lot of the really cool bands that were coming through town.
Chicago itself is a tough, working-class town, and when I was growing up, especially on the South Side, that was very much a part of the culture. As soon as I was old enough, I was going to the Checkerboard Lounge, Buddy Guy’s place, the Queen Bee Lounge, Teresa’s—anywhere we could get into.
And they got a real kick out of seeing all these long-haired hippies coming into the blues clubs, but we were there because we loved the music. We’d have a ball.
So my music is influenced almost entirely by Chicago artists. There are exceptions—Albert Collins from Texas, maybe a little bit of the West Coast guys—but mainly it’s the Chicago shuffle, all kinds of great grooves, and songs about life itself.
I try not to write or sing anything that isn’t personal to me. I want to keep it real. In my case, most of it comes from broken hearts, lust, growing up poor, and losing people in my life.
What performers have been your inspiration?
I think, like most of the kids in my circle of budding musicians, it was Eric Clapton. He was probably the biggest influence on me at the time, before Hendrix came along. I was listening to Clapton play with John Mayall, looking at the backs of the Yardbirds and Rolling Stones records, and then all of a sudden my cousin and his friends started saying, “Wait a minute. You know, Chester Burnett, Morgan McKinley, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf—they live and play like three miles from our house!”
So all of a sudden, we started going to the clubs. We went to the Checkerboard, and I got to see Otis Rush, Lefty Dizz, Johnny Dollar, James Wheeler, Louis Myers, Dave Myers, and all these incredible Chicago musicians.
Dave Myers actually gave me some great advice one night at Buddy Guy’s. He told me, “Never play the same thing the bass player is playing.” I took that to heart, and I still think about it.
And, of course, there were the Kings. I saw Freddie King, and that changed my life. For about two years, I was obsessed with Freddie’s instrumentals. I wished I could sing like that, because for me, the blues is all about the vocal.
In fact, some of my favorite blues bands have been fronted by women. That’s just a personal preference of mine. There’s something about a great female blues singer that really gets me.
And, of course, Junior Wells and all the great harmonica players—Little Walter, Big Walter Horton, James Cotton.
In the late ’70s and early ’80s, when I was old enough to get into the whole nightclub scene, we followed James Cotton everywhere. He was the band to see if you wanted to party, have a good time, meet girls, and dance.
To this day, one of my favorite blues albums ever is Live at Antone’s. James Cotton had Luther Tucker and Magic Guitar Murphy on guitar, and that record still gets played a lot around my house.
So I guess my influences are pretty broad, but they all come back to the same thing: great blues musicians who could make you feel something. That’s what I’ve always wanted to do with my own music.
What do you find most challenging about being an independent artist in today’s music industry?
I think one of the biggest challenges is simply having the stamina to do it. Driving long distances, unloading heavy equipment—although we now have a gift from heaven: a roadie, LOL—putting on a good show, packing everything back up, finding your hotel, trying to get some sleep, and then hitting the road again the next day.
After a few weeks of that, it can really take a toll on you.
Then there’s the cost of putting a band on the road. Gas, hotels, equipment, food—everything has gotten more expensive. And you’re trying to make enough money to pay the musicians and make the whole thing worthwhile.
There’s also the human side of it. You’ve got a family back home, and you want to keep them positive and reassured when you’re gone for weeks at a time.
Cancellations can really hurt, too. We’ve dealt with cancellations for all kinds of reasons, including COVID and venues going bankrupt. When you’re an independent band, you don’t have a big organization behind you absorbing those losses. You feel every one of them.
And I think it’s getting harder on venue owners who promote blues, too. A lot of the traditional blues audience is made up of baby boomers, and the culture around going out to hear music has changed. We’re not necessarily drinking and raising hell like we did 30 or 40 years ago.
So the challenge is keeping this music alive in a changing world, while still making it possible for independent musicians and the people who present the music to make a living.
But we keep doing it because we love it. At some point, you realize that if you’re still willing to load the gear into the van, drive 500 miles, play for two hours, and then load it all back up again—you must really love what you’re doing.
What do you base your success on?
I’d like to give Little Richard’s answer to Johnny Carson and say, “Because I’m pretty.”
But seriously, I’d say it’s probably persistence, being willing to travel, and being very lucky with the musicians who have ended up playing with me throughout the years.
I also think being accessible is really important. We call it schmoozing, but it’s really just hanging out with the crowd. You go out, you talk to people, and you actually make friends with them. You look forward to seeing people when you’re on the road. The people who come to our shows have lives, families, stories—and you learn about their lives, and they learn a little bit about you.
Then they come back.
I think our songs are good, too, and I think our show is really good. We’re a tight, tight show band, and that comes from playing together for about 15 years. We have six or seven sets of material to choose from now, so we never get bored playing, and we can keep things fresh for the audience.
If I remember what I did the last time we played a particular venue, I don’t want to give them the same show again. I want every performance to have something different about it.
And we respect our audience. We dress nicely on stage. We try to be kind and attentive to people.
For me, success is when people come back. When they know the songs, when they know the band, when they come up and say hello, and when you genuinely look forward to seeing them again.
If you can do that for 15 or 20 years, I think you’re doing something right.
Can you talk about your experiences collaborating with other artists or musicians? How does it influence your creative process?
I learned how to play behind a harmonica player by playing with Madison Slim, who was a member of the Jimmy Rogers Band back in the ’80s and early ’90s. From then on, I had a string of really talented harmonica players: Cadillac Pete, Benny Rickun, and good shows with R.J. Mischo, Steve Vanderhaar, Pat Hayes, and Big Al Grothe on saxophone.
And then there’s Westside Andy, who’s been in the band for 14 years now. Andy and I have a synergy, I believe, where we play off each other very, very well.
Our drummer, Craig Panisch, used to play with Bernard Allison and Brian Lee, and he’s right there in the mix with us. And PT, our bass player, is like an encyclopedia of blues grooves. He’s played with Charlie Musselwhite, Luther Tucker, Big Walter Horton, and Jim Liban here in Milwaukee.
So I get ideas from all of them. I get their input, and we try to create something that sounds a little bit different from the usual blues band.
Even though I’m from Chicago, I don’t play strictly traditional blues. There are a lot of bands that do that a lot better. So I just play what I feel—and what we feel—and hope something happens on stage. That little bit of magic that happens between the band and the audience.
And I think even though we’re still old, we still live for those moments.
What was your latest musical release?
We just put out a brand-new CD called Way Back Home. It features the current band, who have been playing together for almost 14 years.
A lot of the songs are tunes we’ve been playing night after night for years. People would come up after shows and say, “Is that song on your CD?” And we’d say, “No, we’ve never recorded it.” So we finally decided to fix that.
There’s a little Chicago blues, some swing, a couple of originals, and a lot of great harmonica from Westside Andy. We also have Dennis Wage on piano and organ, who used to play with Delbert McClinton.
The title track is Wilton Felder’s “Way Back Home,” which Andy has been playing almost every night for years. And it’s never quite the same twice. That song has become a real part of our live show, and it ended up being the most requested song on the CD.
We basically went into the studio, cut the songs we wanted to record, cleaned them up a little bit, and put the record out. There wasn’t some grand master plan. We just wanted to finally record some of these songs that people had been asking for.
Now we’re looking forward to getting out on the road and supporting the record—and, hopefully, letting people hear it the way we really play it, which is live.
Do you have any news to share? Could you share the story behind your latest new CD: Reverend Raven & Westside Andy and the Chain Smokin’ Altar Boys – Way Back Home?
As I was saying, people would request “Way Back Home” almost every night after Andy played it. The people selling our merchandise would tell us, “You know, everybody keeps asking for that song.”
We took a long time to record this whole CD together, and the songs are all things we’ve been playing for years. So we finally decided, okay, let’s make a band CD.
This isn’t my CD, per se, like some of my other records where I paid the musicians and put the record out myself. This is the four of us putting out a record as a band. We share the expenses, and hopefully we share some of the benefits, too, so we can make a living doing this.
We had a lot of fun making it, and we’re looking forward to doing more in the studio. We’re currently writing more songs for our next CD, which I’m hoping will be all originals. It’s really just a matter of finding the time to get into the studio.
Actually, I’d also like to record another live CD. Live albums are some of my favorite records anyway. There’s something about capturing what happens between a band and an audience in that moment that you just can’t completely recreate in a studio.
How does your latest album fit into your creative path? Is this a goal you wanted to achieve?
Well, now that we have those songs out on CD, we can start focusing on writing new songs and hopefully collaborating with some other writers. There are a few people we’ve been talking to about collaborating on songs.
As I get older and play a little less, I find myself really enjoying writing songs and playing around in the studio.
Our engineer is Steve Hamilton from the Sausage Factory, and he does wonderful work. He’s recorded so many great bands, and he really knows how to record blues bands. He likes putting us all in the same room and having us play together, rather than putting everybody in separate booths with headphones. To me, it sounds much more natural that way.
I learned a lot about entertaining people by going to blues clubs as soon as I was old enough to get in—the South Side, Buddy Guy’s Checkerboard Lounge, the Queen Bee Lounge, Teresa’s—and watching the bands. I watched how they entertained the audience, what people danced to, and how everybody in the room would just get happy.
And I think that, for me, that’s what it’s all about when you play for people. You give them quality entertainment while still being true to yourself. Because maybe they’ve had a hard week. Maybe they had an argument with their spouse. Maybe life just isn’t going the way it should for them right now.
But if, by the end of the evening, they feel good and they’ve got a little spring in their step, then I’ve done a good job. We’ve done a good job.
We like traveling together. We’re a band of brothers. There are no hidden agendas and no ego trips. We just have fun.
I spent a lot of years in the Navy, and it reminds me of having a good division of shipmates, where you could actually go to work and enjoy yourself. That’s what it’s like for me every night when I play with these guys. I enjoy myself.
So that’s pretty much my creative path: just doing it for as long as I can, and having fun doing it.
If you can make a living, pay your bills, and play the music you like, then you’re blessed.
How do you approach the process of songwriting, and are there any specific themes or emotions you tend to explore in your music?
Most of the songs I write seem to be directed at people in my life that I couldn’t have this conversation with. But I can sing it in a song every night and get it out of my system.
People I loved, people I miss, people who are no longer with us. Sometimes something humorous will be said somewhere, and it just has a ring to it. I’ll write it down somewhere, or, with this new record thing on my phone, I’ll record it.
I do what Steve Allen used to do. Steve Allen, the songwriter and entertainer from the ’50s and ’60s, used to carry two little tape recorders with him. He’d keep one in his left pocket and one in his right pocket. The one in the left pocket was for ideas for songs, and the one in the right pocket was for ideas for books.
I always thought that was great, so that’s what I do now. I have a lot of partial songs that I haven’t finished.
So if I ever get over being a procrastinator, maybe I’ll finish them up.
But most of them are about loving someone or being hurt, and telling them how I feel about things. I think that’s probably where most of my songwriting comes from. If I can’t say it to somebody, I can put it in a song and sing it.
As an indie musician, how do you navigate the balance between creative freedom and commercial appeal?
Actually, I’ve never written a song with commercial appeal in my head. I write them because that’s how I feel about something. I usually have a groove in mind for it. Sometimes I’ll try them over a bunch of different grooves just to see if it works.
Then we start playing them live. You play them a lot for a couple of months, get them tight, and then eventually we move on to something else.
We’ve been lucky enough to be commercially appealing enough to tour regionally. We’re a regional act. We’re not a national act. We play throughout the Upper Midwest and pretty much all over the Midwest. We do one Florida tour every year. We used to go to the Virgin Islands, we’ve toured Canada, and we’ve done a couple of tours of the East Coast. We’ve never really done the West Coast.
But we’re too old to tour like that anymore—and we don’t want to. We like staying in our little pocket here and playing for places and people that we enjoy playing for, people who come see us all the time, and hopefully bringing some new people into the audience.
And you try to have one of those evenings where everything comes together. You have the right place, the right crowd, the vibe is good, the people at the venue are on the ball and hospitable, and you have this wonderful experience. The crowd responds, and something just happens.
But it’s momentary. The next day you wake up, and that’s all it is—a memory.
And then you try to go out and do it again.
That happens for us more than occasionally. It’s happened pretty frequently over the last couple of years, and it’s very addictive.
I think that’s why I keep doing it. I don’t see myself stopping. I just see myself slowing down. And that’s okay.
What role does technology and social media play in promoting your music and connecting with your audience?
It’s enough to make it a lot easier to get the word out about where we’re playing. I only use a few platforms because I don’t know how to use the other ones. I use Facebook, Bandsintown, my website, and my email list. That’s about it.
I know I should probably be on the other platforms. I think we’re on Spotify and Pandora, and I know we get some play from them because I get a statement from BMI every quarter, and they actually pay you for that. If you list your performances each quarter, they pay you. So it’s another good reason for me to educate myself.
Once again, though, there’s that procrastination thing, and finding the time.
So I have a publicist. Her name is Christine Johnson in Madison, Wisconsin, and she does a wonderful job. She takes care of a lot of my social media stuff, and she does a really good job because, honestly, I would forget to do it.
Then I’d wonder, “Why aren’t there more people at the club?” Well, it’s because I forgot to put the word out.
So having somebody handle that part of the business for you is a godsend to me.
In addition to our roadie, James.
Could you describe a memorable live performance experience or tour that has had a lasting impact on you and your music?
Well, I don’t even have to think about that. It was opening for B.B. King twice at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa, in front of a crowd of almost 3,000 people.
It was surreal for me, you know—this palooka from the South Side of Chicago, opening for one of my heroes.
And then, being the kind gentleman he was, B.B. invited us onto the bus to hang out with him. So we spent about half an hour on the bus talking about music, talking about life, living on the road, and just hanging out. It was great.
The other one would be playing at Buddy Guy’s. You know, Buddy Guy’s is nirvana in Chicago. So getting to play there and open for people like Koko Taylor, Gatemouth Brown, and Eddie Clearwater was a huge honor.
Then we eventually got our own shots, where we were the only band or the headliner. That was an honor, too.
But I always had more fun opening for those folks—the bands I would go see on my own—and getting to be that close to them, hanging out with them in the dressing room and talking to them.
That’s pretty much it for me. I did my career in the Navy, and then I got out and I was able to experience all these things.
I don’t need anything else. I’m content.
In an era of streaming platforms, how do you feel about the changing landscape of music consumption and its impact on independent musicians?
I would think it would be a great time to be in a band, especially if you’re young, because you can have success without the help of a record label. You can do it on your own. There are bands that get in vans and drive all across the country, and we bump into them on the road at gas stations and rest areas. They’re young rock bands, and it’s a lot of fun to see.
I think the same is true, at least for what we do. People aren’t buying CDs like they used to. Everything is streaming now, and I try to go with the flow.
From what I hear and read, modern technology and streaming platforms can be beneficial to independent musicians because you have more control over your music, what you earn from it, and how you book and promote yourself without a record company in the middle of everything.
Everything changes. That’s life. People, places, and things don’t remain the same, so you have to live in the present. When you’re trying to make a living doing this, you just have to accept that and keep moving forward.
And I do it with the help of the people who work with us—Christine and Larry K, our promoter, Jen Taylor, our graphic artist, and my agents, Rico Anderson, Lance Schulman, and Doug Tackett from Road Dog. There’s a whole little team behind us.
And it all works out. It frees us up to basically just go, show up, set up, and play—and hopefully be well-rested enough to play well.
That’s really what I want to do.
Musicians often have a close relationship with their fanbase. How do you engage with your fans and build a dedicated community around your music?
I engage a lot on my Facebook page, mostly, and through emails and the news and upcoming events on our website. But a lot of it is getting out in the audience and talking to people, and thanking them for coming to the show.
I guess it all ties in with schmoozing, but I like to do it. I like people. I don’t like sitting back in the green room or the dressing room and just hanging out.
People appreciate it when you remember their names. I try to use what I learned in the Navy—walking the spaces, as we called it—to learn the names of the sailors and their families, so that the next time you saw them, you could ask about them. You just use their name a lot while you’re talking to them. It usually works.
Once in a while, though, I’ll get somebody completely out of context. I’ll be playing in Milwaukee, and there’ll be people in the crowd that I know from Minnesota. I don’t recognize them at first because they’re out of context, and they’ll say, “What are you doing here? We drove all the way down to see you.”
And I’ll say, “Well, that’s an honor.”
That’s the personal side of it that makes this whole thing very enjoyable.
By Olivia Peevas
