Kirk Fletcher honed his chops at the Boogaloo. The nationally recognized blues guitarist returns to where it all started.
Kirk “Eli” Fletcher grew up Gospel.
His father was the pastor and his mother the first lady of the Macedonia Church of Christ Holiness in Compton. But as much as he loved and admired his parents and their role as leaders at the church, it was something his older brother did during mass one day when Fletcher was eight years old that really caught his attention. His brother played guitar.
Something about the sound of the instrument just riveted the young boy.
“I was like, man, I want to do that,” Fletcher recalled in an interview this week.
So he started playing, and soon was good enough to play in church himself. Then, when he was 12, he went to the Long Beach Blues Festival and heard the guitar played in a way he’d never even imagined. Legends such as Albert Collins and Bobby “Blue” Bland showed the fire, soul, and passion of the blues, while the Staples Singers – led by 80 year old Pops Staples and his elegant Telecaster guitar – showed him the bridge between the gospel and the blues.
As a teenager, he discovered a ramshackle but famed guitar shop called Music Works. Owner Jim Foote took a liking to the kid, and soon Fletcher was hanging out at the shop every minute he could, meeting professional guitar players and becoming intricately knowledgeable about the workings of the guitar itself.
He met his first blues elder around this time, as well. A bluesman named Al Blake heard Fletcher playing in an R&B band and liked the young man’s sound. Blake, like so many blues players, was steeped in the history of the music, particularly the really early, pre-WWII blues artists such as Son House, Robert Johnson, and Tommie Johnson. He took it upon himself to bring Fletcher into the blues family fold.
“He basically saw something in my playing…and we kind of hit it off, so then he invited me to his house every Sunday afternoon,” Fletcher said. “Man, he’d just play records for three or four hours, then have dinner. He’d tell me about all these old musicians, these really obscure blues musicians. We did that for a few years every week, and he’d make me tapes, so I was able to really dig right into the cool stuff – not the filler, but right into the gold mine.”
“If the kind of blues I’m so passionate about playing was a 4-legged mammal, it would be on the top of the endangered species list,” Blake has said in previous interviews. “It’s that rare.”
It was after high school, however, that Fletcher entered the university of the blues. Café Boogaloo in Hermosa Beach opened in 1995 – the year after he graduated – and quickly became a Mecca on the national blues circuit. Then-owner Steve Roberts took a liking to Fletcher, and soon more blues elders started giving him a helping hand. At Boogaloo, Fletcher started playing with the likes of Lynwood Slim, Janeva Magness, and Junior Watson.
“Junior Watson is famous in the blues community, and he took me under his wing,” Fletcher said. “Lynwood Slim let me play a lot at Café Boogaloo, and Janeva Magness. I mean, they gave me a stage to play on – it’s really cool to listen to blues records, but it’s another thing to get up on stage and actually play the music.”
Watson, who was also a friend of Blake’s, would invite Fletcher to his home, where they’d drink tequila, smoke cigars, and trade licks.
“Oh yeah, me and Watson had a good time,” Fletcher said. “Aw, it was fun learning, and it was like my birthday every time I went over to his house…He’d sit down and play guitar and show me all kinds of cool things, and this is a guy who’d been doing it for over 40 years.”
The kid was turning into a monster guitar player, and his sound soon caught the attention of Kim Wilson, the famed lead singer and harp player from the Fabulous Thunderbirds. He took Fletcher out on tour with his Blues Revue and educated him on the Texas side of the things, blues as well as old style R&B. Soon thereafter, one of the true elder statesmen of the blues, Charlie Musselwhite, brought Fletcher into his band.
He toured with Musselwhite for more than two years. This was when Fletcher got his doctorate in the blues.
“That was amazing, because Charlie Musselwhite is a musical legend, and I really got to come into my own and get influenced by other things and find my own sound with him,” Fletcher said. “He would just egg me up to just keep on going. He pushed me, like, ‘Come on, man, play, play, okay!’ and it was always that continuous thing. Charlie didn’t have all the borders, he was a little more free. He’s been around longer than all the rest of the guys and it was just different. He’s into all these different kinds music doing Cuban stuff, rock stuff, and more traditional stuff. It was being just more open to find out what I am all about. It was fun, man.”
Fletcher had arrived. He subsequently toured with the Fabulous Thunderbirds and made a national name for himself as one of the young guns of the blues. He also formed his own band, and after parting ways with the Thunderbirds a couple of years ago, he cut a record called My Turn. It was actually his third record, but in a sense, it marked his arrival. Produced by the respected guitarist Michael Landau, Fletcher steps out of the shadows of his many influences and creates his own distinct sound.
From the opening licks on “El Medio Stomp”, Fletchers displays that gift that only the great players have – his sound, by turns fiery and playful, always inventive – is recognizable in a few notes. And on the second track, a gritty swampy take on Jimmy Reed’s classic “Found Love”, he quite literally finds his voice: the song is his first recorded vocal ever, and it’s downright beautiful.
“I’m no great vocalist, but I’m just trying to figure it out,” Fletcher said.
The record also includes a searing instrumental called “Blues for Antone” and another unexpected and wonderful vocal, Fletcher singing Sly Stone’s “Let Me Have It All.”
And that’s exactly what Fletcher is up to: he’s having it all. There’s rock, there’s soul, there’s even some spoken word on My Turn (hell, there’s even some mandolin). Blues purists may object. But these are Fletcher’s blues.
Kirk Fletcher plays Café Boogaloo Saturday night. See www.kirkfletcher.com for more info or www.boogaloo.com for show info.
