INTERVIEW WITH BLACK RIVER BLUESMAN
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14 January 2012
Black River Bluesman: If Black Sabbath Were
Blues Artists
Whether solo, with a band or with his current duo partner Bad Mood Hudson,
Finland’s alt.blues hero Black River Bluesman has literally played all over the
world: from Brazil to Nepal, from Thailand to Russia. He’s travelled the
American South and jammed with the late great Mr. Tater The Music Maker,
he’s started the Floating Cockroach alt.blues festivals in Finland, he’s had a
Top 3 hit in Estonia with ”Watcha Do”, a track we recorded together last
year... There’s even a documentary being made about the man and his way of
life. So who is this Black River Bluesman?
Well, his real name is Jukka Juhola, he was born in 1958 and he has been playing
music all his life. His mother taught him to play the piano when he was nuthin’
but a child, and he went on to pick up the bass, the guitar, and the baritone.
Over the years, he has lived in many countries but has settled in the Finnish
countryside, in a place called Mustio in Finnish and Svartå in Swedish: The Black
River.
”The Black River Bluesman project really started in earnest in 2002 when I felt I
had collected enough original material to make a record,” Juhola says. ”Now I’ve
made four, and I can honestly say that my original idea for the sort of blues I
want to play hasn’t changed one bit. It just takes time for things to develop, you
can’t change everything at once – little by little, things become what they need to
be. At the moment, the new album and the current line-up seem to be the best –
it’s just like with single malt, really: the stuff immediately in front of you is always
the finest!”
The Most Talked About Song In Minneapolis
Indeed, a youth spent in Scotland has left Black River Bluesman a lifelong
member of the Mustio whisky club, whereas the months in Cuba have made him
partial to riding a bicycle to gigs. With Finnish winters, though, that’s something
you talk about rather than do – you know what they say: there’s no summer in
that part of the world, it’s just poor skiing weather.
”Jukka tells a little about were he come from in ”There is No Relief”. He sings ”16
hours of sunlight in 37 days”. Could this be were Jukka draws his inspiration from
for his music?” writes Rev.Nix in his Cigarboxguitar.com review of Black River
Bluesman’s latest album. ”[It’s] the song I kept hearing about from The Deep
Blues Festival III... The most talked about song performed [in Minneapolis] that
weekend.”
Still, Jukka Juhola has kept on travelling and drawing inspiration from lands
stranger than Finland. For example, the title track of his 2005 album “Ants In My
Kitchen” may relate to downhome household issues, but the sleevenotes are
signed “Sen Monorom, Cambodia” and lead off with: “Behind the jungle,
somewhere in Indochina, I sit on a rice bag and drown in a blind old man’s
performance. On his knees, he’s holding a dobro-like instrument that he plays
with a bottleneck…”
Deep Blues and Garage
Among his influences, Black River Bluesman cites Mississippi Fred McDowell, RL
Burnside, John Lee Hooker, Hound Dog Taylor and Tom Waits. The things he
values most in music are credibility, honesty and unpretentiousness; what he
hopes for first and foremost is that his own music would sound like him.
“I’ve been a blues fanatic since the 1970’s and from the start, I’ve been listening
to Mississippi Delta and Hill Country Blues – but there are also rock influences like
punk and garage,” Juhola admits. “The final encouragement for me came with the
world wide alt.blues movement, known in the States as Deep Blues: suddenly in
the late 1990’s/early 2000’s, there were many uncompromising blues-based acts
like Ten Foot Polecats, Deltahead, Dirty Trainload, Purgatory Hill, Gravelroad,
Honkeyfinger, Left Lane Cruiser, Johnny Lowebow…”
Right – after many years of playing expensive-looking hollow-body Gibsons, it’s
the Lowebow cigar-box guitars that Black River Bluesman is mainly associated
with these days. From a standard-issue Lowebow acquired on a whim a couple of
years ago he soon graduated to a double-neck baritone model, still the only one
of its kind.
Double Headed Trouble
“There’s only one like his – the second one has the necks reversed. It's both
Johnny Lowebow models in one, the Bass/Baritone and the Personal Lyre with
Underslide,” says the American luthier and musician Johnny Lowebow. “I drove
Jukka down the Mississippi from St. Paul to Memphis. We stopped at Sturgeon
Bay to stay at The Holiday Motel with Pat MacDonald and recorded at Makin’
Sausage Music [studios]. I think we're lost brothers. Must be related through
Viking raiders on Scottish shores!”
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Black River Bluesman & Bad Mood Hudson... and a certain double-headed thing
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Be that as it may, Black River Bluesman’s new weapon of choice can be heard on
his latest and greatest album “Double Headed Trouble”, recorded as a duo with
multi-instrumentalist Andy “Bad Mood” Hudson on drums and backing vocals and
released on December 17th, 2010 on Jukka’s own Gecko Yell label. Incidentally,
Mr. Bad Mood hails from a place just slightly down the road from Jukka’s called
Pohja – The Bottom.
“I’d done three albums with a traditional quartet line-up and had come to the
end of that road. I got my first Lowebow at exactly the right moment and started
using it for solo gigs, but when [former Black River Bluesman & The Croaking
Lizard drummer] Andy rejoined me, a duo seemed like the perfect solution,”
Juhola muses. “Then Johnny Lowebow, the Mad Scientist of Memphis, built a
double-neck stereo baritone to my specifications – on that, I can play guitar and
bass simultaneously and run it through two different amps. And as usual, we
recorded the new album in a single day with none of that post-production
fiddling.”
Bangkok To Haapsalu
For the album sleeve, the duo decided to use their stageplot which the
International Conspiracy of Sound Engineers is in the habit of losing. Of the nine
tracks, two had appeared previously on Jukka’s earlier CD’s and only ended up
being re-arranged and re-recorded at the very last moment, when two of the
tracks originally meant for “Double Headed Trouble” were dumped in the studio.
One of these recycled “oldies”, “Out In The Woods”, had never been attempted
by the duo, but once Black River Bluesman managed to come up with yet another
weird tuning, it was nailed in a single take.
“If Black Sabbath were blues artists, this is probably what they would sound like,
especially if you throw a little Jim Morrison and Tom Waits into the mixture and
stir occasionally with a little bit of Punk,” opines John Vermilyea of the Canadian
Blues Underground Network webzine. “With "Double Headed Trouble", Juhola
and Hudson have managed to take the blues right to the edge and in doing so
they have managed to also bring us a lot closer to it's raw origin. They managed
to do this by taking the old style Mississippi Delta Blues and basically tearing it a
new one, giving us something fresh and new, with the essence and respect for
the old and pure.”
The album was launched with a string of gigs in Bangkok in early 2011 and the
band’s August tour of Estonia included appearances at the country’s two blues
festivals, Pärnu Bluusipäevad in Pärnu and Augustibluus in Haapsalu. At the
latter, the duo spent hours signing autographs after the show, having just
broken all sales records in the 18-year history of the festival advertised as “the
biggest bluesfest in the Baltics.”
Nicest Mean Man I Know
On November 14th, the Italian online label Lepers ProduTcions celebrated their
50th release with “50 Lepers” – a free 50-track compilation that saw Black River
Bluesman & Bad Mood Hudson covering Superfreak’s “Careless Love”. A trip to
Italy has already been confirmed for August 2012, and in March, the duo will
embark on a two-week tour of the American South, including an appearance at
the Lowebow Festival in Florida. September will find the duo at the Boxstock
festival in Manchester, England. Says Juhola: “I think we have played more
abroad than we have in Finland, and we mean to keep it that way.”
Before “Double Headed Trouble” (2010), Black River Bluesman has released three
albums, all available on Gecko Yell: “Rat Bone” (2008) with The Croaking Lizard
and “Ants In My Kitchen” (2005) and “Not A Dog-Gone Thing” (2003) with The
Cockroach Combo. I’d also recommend tracking down the super-rare 2006 EP
“Cardboard and Plastic” that features an earlier line-up of The Croaking Lizard
with the celebrated singer-songwriter and fellow Black River resident Sami Kukka
on drums.
What else? Among other things, Jukka Juhola runs a successful business growing
plants of the non-smokable variety. His wife Katja Juhola is an acclaimed artist,
who has also done a series of paintings of the blues stars of yore. Jukka’s
English-born brother-in-law L.R.Phoenix is another fixture on the Finnish blues
scene, playing his hypnotic North Karelian Lake Country Blues with a pen knife for
a slide on a four-string electric. Over to Johnny Lowebow: ”That Black River
Bluesman is the nicest mean man I know! He will not go to strangers’ dinner
parties or share hotel rooms. Mean man. Really, he's not mean at all, just plays
mean blues!”
Amen to that.
ANDRES ROOTS
Link: Black River Bluesman website
Andres Roots is a musician/writer from Estonia. This interview has been published in English
on ReviewTheBlues.com, in Swedish in the Jefferson Blues Magazine and in Finnish on
Jazzrytmit.com.
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