Fired up

It's Spontaneous Combustion with Son Seals

by Mark Edmonds

Meet Frank "Son" Seals, Chicago bluesman -- and up-and-coming real-estate magnate. "In this business, you've got to have something to fall back on if things don't go exactly right," the 55-year-old guitarist explains when asked why he dropped off the blues tour circuit about seven years ago. "Years back," he says, "I started making investments into income properties. And to protect my interests, I had to spend a lot of time overseeing the operation. That meant staying in Chicago and off the road."

Like many bluesplayers of his generation, secondary sidelines augment performance income. So it's property management for him. The job has kept Seals local for years, allowing only for quick road trips like the one that brings him to Northampton's Pearl Street on August 15.

Until his son took over the business, Seals kept his playing to clubs in Chicago's north and west sides. So what better place for Alligator, Seals's label since 1973 when he released his first record, to capture him working? The recent Live-Spontaneous Combustion has the Alabama-born guitarist performing for a wild crowd at Buddy Guy's Legends with his band du jour -- featuring former Albert Collins bassist Johnny B. Gayden and Chicago keyboard vet Sidney James Wingfield.

The eighth disc of his career, Combustion, is also a long overdue follow-up to 1978's Live and Burning, a project that featured a then much younger and hungrier Seals sweating his way through a recording that remains standard-issue in the collections of many true blues fans for its early-Albert King-derived guitar pyrotechnics and for Seals's completely different take on what by then had become the basic, shuffling sound of Chicago blues.

Throughout the years, he worked on his sound in the studio, injecting some funk here and a little more rock there on projects such as Chicago Fire (1980) and 1994's Nothing But the Truth. By Truth, he'd perfected his studio alchemy, making him instantly recognizable when played on public-radio blues shows.

But because of his limited touring folks like me wondered what had become of his live show. Had he forsaken invention and fallen victim to Chicago's booming blues tourist trade (where most bands stick to tired covers such as "Sweet Home Chicago")? Or worse yet had he become a tired shadow of the man I saw burn down a Boston club some 13 years ago?

Thankfully Spontaneous proves otherwise. Although covers play a large role in his show (on the disc, Junior Parker's "Crying for My Baby" shows up in hyper-shuffle mode, while Lowell Fulson's "Trouble, Trouble" and Jimmy Reed's "The Sun Is Shining" both come through as scorching slow numbers), Seals still emphasizes his own material, much of which ("No, No Baby" and the oddly titled "You're Love Is Like a Cancer") is rock and funk-based.

Seals is heard ripping through each song with the bent-string technique he learned from Albert King and Earl Hooker (Seals played drums in King's band in the '60s). Imitative of his mentor's styles, his short, dagger-like phrases cut through the sound like summer lightning pierces the evening sky, contrasting his half-spoken, half-growled vocals.

Seals admits he didn't think about his style. But adds, "I always wanted to be myself and create my own sound from the beginning. And I always wanted people to think that when they heard me, I didn't sound like B.B. King or whoever. I've gotta be myself. Can't play no other way."

He grew up in rural Osceola, a juke-joint-owner's son. While a teen, he toured first with Hooker then King. Landing in Chicago in '71, he found the city's Southside blues scene interesting. "It was a heck of place," he recalls. "There were places to play all over the north and south sides. Many of them are gone now."

Seals was "discovered" by Bruce Iglauer Alligator's owner and, at the time, its only employee. "Someone held a phone to the door so he could hear what I was doing, and the next day, he asked me if I wanted to make a record. I looked at him and said, `What?' Nobody had ever asked me to make a record before."

Today, Alligator -- and Seals -- are known worldwide. But still, he says, he's holding on to his real estate. "You never know when things are gonna turn," he warns. "If they do, I'm gonna be ready."

The Son Seals Blues Band play Pearl Street, in Northampton, at 9 p.m. on Friday, August 15. Tickets are available at Strawberries or by calling (800) 843-8425.