Deejay Who Can Talk a Blues Streak Will Play at Newport Beach Club

Bluesman Bernie Pearl can joke about the kind of show that he’ll put on at Newport Beach’s Lido Cafe tonight--suggesting it will be “drunken animals on stage savaging the music”--with little worry that he’ll be taken seriously. Known chiefly as the host of KLON radio’s Saturday morning “Nothing but the Blues” show, Pearl has a rock-solid reputation for treating the blues with respect and fluency.

Along with proselytizing “the real thing” over the airwaves for the past nine years, Pearl sired the successful Long Beach Blues Festival (entering its 10th year this weekend), has taught blues history and blues guitar at USC and Long Beach State, has worked actively to book local blues acts and has himself performed the music since the early ‘60s.

Although his radio show has become a rallying point for the Southern California blues scene (averaging 25,000 to 30,000 listeners, according to the Arbitrons), Pearl said he feels most fulfilled when he is out playing the blues himself.

The 49-year-old guitarist/singer is joined in his Bernie Pearl Blues Band by fellow guitarist/singer Terry DeRouen, sax man Hollis Gilmore, bassist Mike Barry and drummer Albert Trepagnier. Guesting with the band tonight will be local legend and sizable showman Harmonica Fats. Among the musicians’ credentials: DeRouen’s long stint as bandleader for the late Big Joe Turner, Gilmore’s backing of the equally departed Percy Mayfield, and Harmonica Fats’ role as a recording studio staple, working sessions with everyone from Bill Cosby to Lou Rawls to Ringo Starr.

Pearl said his band delves into a variety of blues styles from ‘30s country finger-picking and slide to more contemporary electric standards. It is in presenting this depth and variety that Pearl’s own, unique background comes in handy. As the younger brother of Ed Pearl, founder of the Ash Grove, a club that was Los Angeles’ Mecca of blues and folk music through the ‘50s and ‘60s, Pearl learned to play firsthand from such masters as Lightnin’ Hopkins, Mance Lipscomb, Fred McDowell, Bukka White and Brownie McGee.

By the mid-1960s, Pearl was a person on whom blues musicians would rely to assemble backing bands when they were in town. That led to touring work with Big Mama Thornton, Freddie King and others. He recalls one such gig with King at the Anaheim Convention Center, where they shared the opening slots for Leon Russell with a young Elton John.

Pearl said that along with their instrumental techniques, his blues mentors imparted to him the notion that “the music is not anything detached: It’s not a technical thing but is all woven in with life style and history, what you do with your life, what you think and how you conduct yourself. The thing that they all tried to stress was that the blues had to be reality, something you or somebody else experienced, something you can feel. It’s not about just coming out and playing a bunch of notes.”

While not exactly savaging the music, Pearl said, he tries not to make a museum piece of it either. “Sometimes I try to convey a sense of the history, to show people the rich variety in blues, and sometimes I just want to dive into the instrument, bring out as much as I possibly can and cause them to have a good time.”

Given that the music is drawn from the hard history of African-Americans, Pearl, who is white, maintains that there is some validity to the question of whether white men can play the blues.

“When I listen to Blind Lemon Jefferson, Texas Alexander and Leroy Carr, the blues goes not only back in black history but is from the black experience. Whites can be excellent, they can get good at playing it and learn from it and do it well--otherwise I would stop playing--but as far as I’m concerned, the blues has not only to do with the black experience of the past but also with that ongoing experience.

“I think instrumentally you could do a blindfold test and in some cases really not be able to tell the difference, but as far as creating or maintaining the blues as a black experience, by definition, whites are not part of that.”

He said he was heartened to see more young blacks competing in the recent talent search shows which precede the Long Beach Blues Festival.

“There is a self-perpetuating myth that young blacks don’t like the blues. So black radio doesn’t play that music, and people never get the chance to like it. If they aren’t exposed to the blues on the radio, particularly to the younger bluesmen like Donald Kinsey or Joe Louis Walker, they aren’t going to know that young blacks they can identify with are doing it.

“The music reflects a black reality, and some of the younger black kids will be able to listen to John Lee Hooker and learn quicker than a white kid who has to completely re-acculturate himself for it, to have to say, ‘My god, how do I suddenly put the skin of a man from Tupelo, Miss., on me?’

“It’s been over 20 years since blues has been popular with the general black population. But I’m hoping it may go the way of this black rock ‘n’ roll revival, where black kids are looking at rock and saying, ‘This is music that we were in on creating, and we’re not in on reaping it,’ and are getting more involved in reclaiming it.”

As in previous years, Pearl will be the host of this weekend’s KLON-presented Long Beach festival, though he is not entirely happy at not being allowed more creative input in the event he launched a decade ago (initially, he had booked the festival talent, as he did again in 1987). He does think the event, which has drawn up to 16,000 fans in past years, is indicative of the vitality of the blues scene.

“I think it’s pretty healthy and growing in popularity. There are lots of good blues records coming out, still a lot of vitality in some of the established blues artists and in a lot of the new artists coming up. There’s practically a renaissance of black blues happening in Chicago now, and there’s a generation of white guys locally, such as James Harman, who may be the salvation of the blues in this area. It’s becoming part of the accepted music scene. . . . And you see B.B. King eating McDonald’s on TV now.”

While blues music still may be given short shrift on most radio outlets and on video networks largely dominated by mainstream rockers, the music endures, Pearl said, because “all that liberated, joyous, hip-shaking moving around by whites, all came from the blues. It all came from the freedom and joy and celebration of the flesh, the celebration of real life that blues is.

“Since the time when whites were listening to Rudy Valee while at the same time Lemon Jefferson was singing ‘Come Get That Black Snake,’ there has been a huge conversion. People like Elvis Presley were at the crossroads and absorbed certain elements of black culture that they brought to the whites.

“Everybody has feelings, emotions, sex, infidelity, drinking, all that, but blacks talked about it openly, humorously and meaningfully in their music. Whites were prohibited musically from doing that until all of a sudden Elvis and the others adopted it.

“The blues has a universal message, and even further than that, it is a window to African music for America. There’s a whole different, life-celebrating culture there, and I think that’s what the blues has allowed everybody all over the world to do.”

The Bernie Pearl Blues Band and Harmonica Fats play tonight at 8:30 at Cafe Lido, 501 30th St., Newport Beach. Admission: $3. Information: (714) 675-2968.

The 10th Anniversary Long Beach Blues Festival will be Saturday and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. at Cal State Long Beach’s North Athletic Field. Saturday’s performers include Johnny Shines, Grady Gaines, John Hammond, Buddy Guy, Little Milton and the Fabulous Thunderbirds; Sunday’s include Ronnie Earl, Terrance Simien, Charles Brown, Koko Taylor, Solomon Burke and John Lee Hooker. Tickets: $17.50 advance, $20 at the gate, $32.50 advance for both days. Children 12 and under free. Information: (213) 498-8052.