When Johnny Mastro met Mama, things could have gone any which way.
It was 1993. He was a young harp player recently arrived in Los Angeles from upstate New York. She was the reigning matron of the L.A. blues scene.
“Mama” Laura Mae Gross was a hardscrabble woman born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, in 1920. She’d opened up a blues club called Babe’s and Ricky’s in L.A. in 1964, a decade after her husband had been murdered while cashing his paycheck.
Mama took her blues seriously. Her club featured the blues luminaries of the era, including George “Harmonica” Smith and his protégé, William Clarke. But she also gave young musicians the opportunity to prove themselves.
Mastro wanted in, and it wasn’t easy. But he wasn’t about to go away.
“She was incredibly intuitive, complex, completely dominant and could size up a musician in a matter of notes,” Mastro wrote in a reminiscence after Mama died in 2009. “Many players wouldn’t hang out there because the scene could be pretty brutal. For the first 5 or 6 years, I was thrown off the stage many times or given the ‘white boy slot’ after a lot of black customers would leave.”
Somewhere along the way, Mama took a liking to Mastro. She began giving him almost spiritual lessons in the blues. Even though she wasn’t herself a musician, she taught him the importance of listening closely, playing with soul, and – most importantly — doing your own thing.
Mama put Mastro and his boys to work as one of her club’s house bands. And she gave Mastro the ultimate compliment: she named his band.
“She just started calling us Mama’s Boys,” Mastro recalled in an interview this week. “She was a very powerful force with that club. She was the owner, and it was her kingdom. So it was a bit of a compliment to be called that….We kept the name – we thought about changing it a few times, but we’ve kind of held on to it for 16 or 17 years.”
“I feel lucky, man,” Mastro said. “It was really neat to meet this lady, and she took me under her wing…I’d probably be in an office somewhere if it wasn’t for her.”
Mama had intentions. For her, the blues was not some kind of a museum, a dustbin of tried-and-true tradition. It was a living, breathing thing, something need to be infused with new soul constantly in order to remain vital. She made her contribution by fostering new talent.
Mastro and the Mama’s Boys are one of the bands who push at the very edge of what can only loosely be called the blues genre. They have a rough-edged, almost feral sound. Their last record, Beautiful Chaos, is a new kind of blues. You can hear some of the sources from which it emerges – Chess-era Chicago blues with a Butterfield Blues Band kind of rock tilt – but it’s wilder and heavier than most anything calling itself blues has been before. In fact, Mastro sought out Jim Diamond – who played with the famously dirty soul band, the Dirtbombs, and worked on three White Stripes records – and travelled to Detroit to work with him as a producer.
Purists may object. And Mastro is fine with that.
“I’ve been on the outside a little bit,” Mastro said. “I got no intention….I want to play music, man. It’s 2011, you know? Some people won’t get this, but in a way, I got that from Mama. See, she never looked at blues as being outdated. She didn’t look at this stuff as a museum piece, like a lot of Caucasian people might. It was a living, breathing thing for her and I saw that. She always encouraged you to study all the guys and absorb it. But to really play, you’ve got to express yourself and whatever things are inside you. I think that is really important, and I try to do that, as far as the overall sound.”
“My guys are kind of misfits,” Mastro added. “Our drummer is way heavy to play in a typical blues band on the West Coast, our bass player is heavy, and our guitar player is – in a way, his solos can be kind of crude, yet really moving, and Mama loved him, so I knew he has soul I was looking for. I got guys that can really get outside the box, with me…I hope we work towards getting a nice cohesive sound which is little bit different from what you would normally hear. I think we are on the right track with all that shit. Mama was proud of us, you know?”
Johnny Mastro and Mama’s Boys play Dive Saturday as part of the Rip Cat Records CD release party also featuring White Boy James and the Blues Express, the Mighty Mojo Prophets, and more. See www.johnnymastro.com for info and www.brixtonsouthbay.com for tickets.
