"Being there with my dad, Eddy Clearwater, Jimmy Johnson and Willie Kent, all of whom I admire so much, that was a dream come true. We all played our butts off that day and had a blast."
Brooks has earned his spot on the front lines. He spent a dozen years backing his father, watching how the master entertainer drew enthusiastic responses night after night. For years, the younger Brooks put his lessons on stage every night, opening his father's show to great response. With his father's blessing, he left the band to strike out on his own shortly after releasing his own debut album, Golddigger in 1998.
Like his father before him, Brooks became a Chicago blues mainstay, playing regularly in Chicago area clubs. After the release of his second album, 2001's Take Me Witcha, he hit the road for what turned out to be a seemingly non-stop three-year tour, picking up devoted new fans all along the way. And while he hadn't planned to take five years between recordings, he did want to do it right. He made up for lost time by packing as many tunes as possible on THE TORCH.
"The good thing is I had time to test almost all of these songs on an audience and to work them out with the band", Brooks says. "We knew what songs people loved, and we got them just the way we want them. It gave us a lot of confidence in the studio knowing that people already loved these songs."
Indeed, the album celebrates all that Ronnie Baker Brooks is -- a man with both a legacy and a vision, a man uniquely suited to carry THE TORCH.
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This is a great release:
ReplyDeleteBman's Blues Report: Chicage Blues: A Living History (The Revolution Continues) New Release Review
Here's some Eddie Clearwater:
ReplyDeleteBman's Blues Report: A Good Leavin' Alone - Eddie "The Chief" Clearwater