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Rollie Tussing - Worried Man's BluesArticle and photos by Greg Johnson, CBA BluesNotes September 2006 |
Our meeting for the interview had been set in advance, but who knew that temperatures in this part of July would be hovering around the low 100s. A rarity for Portland to have a string of days this hot consecutively. As I pulled into the parking lot at the Cascade Blues Association office, Rollie Tussing was already waiting for me sitting on the stairs. Quickly I suggested we move the meeting to someplace a bit cooler. Someplace that had air conditioning. So we made the short trek down the street to Duff’s Garage.
Knowing that Rollie was a whiz with stringed instruments, I had brought along the three-stringed Strumstick I have owned for a number of years. Personally I am so inept with instruments that all I can do with the thing is make little plinking noises. But Rollie picked it up, quickly gave it a tuning and set off making wonderful music that I never thought possible from this item that had been gathering dust in my home office all these years.
July was an exciting month for Rollie Tussing. Not only did he perform in the Cascade Blues Association’s Journey to Memphis finals on the 4th of July at the Waterfront Blues Festival. He also won the competition and will be traveling to Memphis to represent the organization and region at the International Blues Challenge next February. His performance was flawless save for a malfunctioning kazoo. Being a one-man band he adjusted to this unexpected situation and did not allow it to alter his delivery. And the judges took note of his ability to adapt, handing out consistently some of the highest scores ever seen in the history of the Journey to Memphis.
The ease that Rollie was able to flow with during this mishap makes it all the more amazing when remembering that he had approached me prior to the beginning of the event and told me that he was extremely nervous and did not know how he would come across. I had simply told him, “Just be yourself. Treat it as just another gig. You will do fine.” It was easy for me to tell him this as I was not the one performing. But Rollie had approached me with the same information before his set at the semi-finals at Beale Street NW back in May. I saw him overcome that worry then and knew he would do so once he started again.
This sense of loose nerves is a new thing for Rollie Tussing. He claims that the older he gets the more the feeling takes hold of him. It started up about two summers back while he was riding his bicycle down a rather steep hill and all of a sudden imagined an old man panicking and falling down. So now whenever he feels faced with a challenge, he develops a sense that he is that old man. He stresses and has a little indigestion, but Rollie seems to fall into the flow and carries himself quite comfortably onstage.
It wasn’t always that way, though. As a younger musician he could perform at an event like the Baltimore Blues Festival and whether the crowd was a thousand people or whatever, he’d just get up and play. Rollie came up in the musical communities of Michigan cities Ann Arbor and Detroit. A little cocky as a youngster, he did not hold older musicians in awe at the time. People like The Butler Twins, Uncle Jesse White, Johnnie Bassett or Eddie Burns he considered as his peers. Even to the point of brazenly telling them that they should hire him to play guitar in their bands. He now knows that he should have paid more attention to these older artists who had migrated from the South to Detroit, had worked the music scene for numerous years and deserved his respect. He liked what they were playing, but feels he missed a great opportunity to learn from some of the best.
Growing up in Ann Arbor, music was not readily available within the Tussing household. His parents had a strong dislike for music in general. Even to the point that it was possible for his father to have a physical reaction. Watching a movie where he felt the music was too much, it was not uncommon for him to walk out of the theater.
At the age of thirteen, Rollie purchased a Walkman. Stopping by the local Radio Shack on the way home he made another purchase, a cassette with the greatest hits of Chuck Berry on side one and Little Richard on side two. It took him hard, especially Chuck Berry’s guitar work. It was 1984, but he felt like a teenager in the 1950s hearing these same songs for the first time. So he grabbed onto it. Being at an age where he was looking for his own way to rebel against his parents, and with their dislike for music, Chuck Berry was his ticket. He just didn’t know how unhip it would be with other kids his age.
Chuck Berry eventually led to the classical Rock bands of the 1970s like Led Zeppelin. The story is quite common, Rollie began reading liner notes and looking at song credits, finding names like McKinley Morganfield and Chester Burnette. It made him begin exploring other artists associated with these newfound heroes. So the trek from Led Zeppelin led to Muddy Waters, who in turn turned him onto Buddy Guy, and from there to Jimmy Dawkins. He had found and fallen in love with the Chicago Blues sound.
Around his first year of college, Rollie began to tire of classical Rock. What he had liked about the sound was it’s bluesy feeling within the guitarist’s part. He really wanted to be somebody like Jimmy Page at the time and it was the type of music, along with a bit of Jazz thrown in, that he performed with the bands he played with at the time.
It was then that his vision of guitar changed forever. While scouring the music video bins at a local retail store, Rollie came across a copy of “The Blues According To Lightnin’ Hopkins.” Taking the video home, he couldn’t stop watching it. For nearly eighteen hours non-stop he absorbed how Lightnin’ played with his thumb and fingers attaining both lead and rhythm sounds all by himself. “It was some of the hippest rhythms,” remarks Rollie. “The punch you in the gut type of stuff.”
A short time after discovering the Lightnin’ Hopkins film, Rollie was approached by a woman he knew from high school. She told him that she was a great singer and had a really cool record collection that included Victoria Spivey and other like material that they could draw from. Deciding to become a duo, Rollie booked their first gig at an art house in Detroit. Seconds before leaving for the gig, she called Rollie and told him she was too afraid to go to Detroit. He went anyway and performed solo. “It was really, really bad,” he says. “But I have grown better.”
This led to his encounters with the Blues legends of Detroit and his attitude of being on the same level of musicianship. “I look back and think, ‘Aw I was an idiot.’ I could’ve been absorbing all this wealth.” And somewhere in the mix, Rollie put together a demo cassette of himself playing guitar and singing.
Working at a party store in Ann Arbor, one of his co-workers heard the demo tape and told him that his father was a music manager and big-time producer down in Tennessee. They sent him the demo and he called back to say that he had some gigs booked for him. “You might as cut your ties and get on down here,” he told Rollie. They picked him up at the airport in Nashville, taking him to a club called Turf’s. A cover band was playing; one of the most incredible acts he had ever seen, cover band or not, with a great slide player. During their break his friend’s father, the manager, told him to take the stage. Armed with a dobro guitar and a harmonica in a rack he began to play. Badly. A drunk at the bar yelled at him, “Hey you’re not that bad!” But two women in the room actually booed and hissed at him. When he finished the manager would not even speak to him, but his girlfriend was trying to be nice to Rollie. “Don’t worry about him,” she told him. “He just spent a lot of money and he’s nervous about how everything is going to go. We’ll pick you up at the hotel tomorrow and go to the next gig.” The next day came and they never showed up or called. The day after that was the same. So Rollie decided he’d had enough and since he’d saved up some money he would leave Nashville and travel until he ran out of cash.
His travels landed him in Clarksdale, Mississippi. He visited the Delta Blues Museum, then headed over to the offices of Rooster Blues. While talking with the staff, he took note of the music playing in the background. It was what he described as a cross of Charley Patton and Mance Lipscomb, without all of the scratchy 78 sounds. He asked who it was and he was told, Eugene Powell. Though it seemed very cliché to him, they informed Rollie that Powell lived nearby and if you took a pint out to his house for him, he would play for you. Having nothing to do the next day, Rollie bought a pint of Kessler’s and knocked on Powell’s door. The elder Bluesman was a bit leery of Rollie and didn’t really seem too interested in the whiskey. But after Rollie spoke to him about guitar for a little bit, he warmed up and showed Rollie a couple of things and they sat down and played some songs together. It was another one of those situations where Rollie really didn’t know how fortunate he was to be in until it was too late. Later finding out more about Eugene Powell’s reputation he wishes he had spent more time with the guitarist.
Rollie returned to Ann Arbor following his travels. With his tail between his legs. He decided that he would continue playing guitar, but not in any more bands. He felt that he was only an intermediate guitarist, had no stage presence and that as a Blues performer he was just horrible. Coincidentally, though, at this same time a Folk scene was beginning to develop in Michigan. A friend tried coaxing him to play at an open mic in Ypsilanti and after pleading him to come out three or four times, Rollie finally consented. Once he did, though, he started going every week. It was here that Rollie truly cut his teeth learning to become a performer. A whole group of Folk artists made this show every week and began creating quite a scene. Rollie remembers it as, “The worst sound and the worst audience. The perfect place to hone your skills.”
Gigs began to develop from these shows. And some of his friends decided to start their own record label, which eventually merged with a larger label out of Chicago. Through this label, Rollie cut his first CD, “Blow Whistle Blow,” and started to tour a lot. Released in 1997, the album was available internationally for about four months, but he was under a lot of pressure from the label to tour without any support. It became too much to handle, so Rollie parted ways with them.
During this same time, Rollie hooked up with a librarian named Ira Lax, who had seen a need to bring music back to the schools in Michigan. Not specifically a Blues in the Schools program, as there was not enough Blues artists to fill this need, Rollie and Ira would approach teachers in the school systems who were interested. Whatever was being taught in the class at the time, be it the World War One era, or the Industrial Revolution, or anything else, Rollie would go into the class and play songs associated with the era. It was a means of learning about the commonality of the people not covered by history books.
For one such eighth grade class who was studying the book “Roll Of Thunder Hear Me Cry,” it would be a three-day course. Rollie would teach them about the characters and their times the first day. The next he would introduce the kids to a few songs, showing them the basic formula for writing a Blues song. He described it as American Haiku. Writing on the board a stanza, he instructed them to fill in the blanks. They would learn rhyming sequences and about call and response. The third day would be spent reviewing what had been learned, having the students write songs and performing them.
It was also through these music in the schools performances that Rollie first began to make his own instruments. On the eve of his first school presentation he had no idea of what he was going to talk about. He was really into Jug Band music at the time, so he thought there’s always the washtub bass. He went out to his yard and began to collect items. Picking up a stake and a cookie tin, he applied a tuner and strings to these pieces and viola, his first cigar-box guitar had been created. The makeshift guitar, washtub bass and a banjo were huge successes with the schoolkids and the students would use these instruments as part of their songwriting exercises.
Cigar-box guitars also became a passion for Rollie. He co
mmunicates regularly with many other musicians who play such homemade devices around the country and every now and then they gather for a very unique day of playing with one another. The cigar-box guitar also plays a big part in his current performances as a one-man band. Alternating between slide and cigar-box guitars, Rollie completes his act with a kick drum, kazoos and harmonica.
Another passion of Rollie’s that makes up a good part of the sound behind his current repertoire is collecting older 78 records. He is especially fond of recordings of classical Chicago Blues, Jazz and post-war Country music. There is also some weird stuff in there he notes. He describes the sound from these discs as Teutonic and it is something he just loves to listen to.
In 1999, Rollie was scanning the Internet when he came across a piece about the National Slide Guitar Competition. Reading the article he told himself that this was something he had to get into. Unfortunately he had already missed that year’s event. Then the next year came and went before he realized he planned to attend. But in 2001, Rollie entered the competition and traveled to Brevan, North Carolina, driving straight through from Michigan for twelve hours. Brevan seems like it is in the middle of nowhere, possibly a hundred miles from anything else. The event was held in a cornfield and there were seventeen contestants that year. And next to no audience at all. In the end it came down to Rollie and a fourteen-year-old player from Southern Cailfornia named Kyle Hanes, who had studied guitar with Bob Brozman. “The kid was phenomenal,” remembers Rollie. “If I am going to lose to anybody, it might as well be to a fourteen-year-old.” But in the end, Rollie was declared the winner.
Soon after the competition, Rollie began to think that he needed to move away from Michigan and set his sights on Portland. One reason was that he had just had enough of the inclement winter weather in the Midwest. Another aspect was the sensational music climate he noticed in Portland. It was open to all forms of music, including a solo Blues performer like himself. In Michigan there just did not seem to be a lot of work available for a solo artist, other than playing Folk music, which he was not really intoned to. Most work for Blues acts in Ann Arbor and Detroit are more aimed for full-sized electrical bands.
He also had a good friend from his childhood that now lived in Portland, who told him about the opportunities in the city. His friend, Ezra Holbrook, has a band called Doctor Theopolis, is a talented singer/songwriter and has produced numerous albums for a variety of acts in Portland. Rollie considers him to be the closest individual to a genius he has ever met. When Rollie first came to town, Ezra helped show him around and introduced him to people in the local music scene. He was enamored with the quality of musicians and the venues in Portland. Within his first week in town, Rollie obtained steady gigs at both Imbibe and the Mock Crest Tavern. He considers both of these venues as his home and intends to keep the gigs as long as they wish him to continue playing at their establishments.
About a year back, Rollie began to have the urge to record new material. His album “Blow Whistle Blow” had been available at his shows and on CDBaby.com since moving to Portland, but had suddenly sold out. He booked studio time and brought in a band. Everything seemed to be going right, but the feel just wasn’t there for Rollie and he became depressed with how it was sounding. So he decided to take it back to the old ways, with the band recording into a single microphone. He plugged that mic directly into his computer in his basement and over a period of two nights, Rollie and a handful of friends created the tracks that made up the album, “Secret Society Of The Diminished Seven.”
Lately, Rollie has returned to the studio cutting new tracks with Ezra Holbrook producing. Originally he intended the CD to be another quick and dirty production, but with Ezra behind the helm you just have to listen to his ideas. Not just a recording of the one-man act, nor is it a traditional Blues record, Rollie says it is “really, super cool. The type of sound that you might expect if Tom Waits was producing Mance Lipscomb.”
Rollie’s Journey to Memphis win in July has him quite excited about traveling to Memphis. When originally applying for the competition he was concerned after reading the rules about the term “Blues content.” His panic thoughts had returned and he thought “What does Blues content mean? Were the judges looking for standard 12-bar Blues, shuffles or swing?” He stressed about how his performance would come across, and told his wife before leaving for the first night, “Honey, I’m going to lose.”
But now that he has preservered through the Journey to Memphis and is actually going to the International Blues Challenge, his thoughts are a little more relaxed. “I want to see the type of competition that is out there. Who has a record deal or a website and who doesn’t. When I was with the record label I was worried about pimping myself and felt stressed. But I’m going to go back there and I’m going to have fun. I will play a couple gigs and we’ll see what happens.”
Worries or not, Rollie Tussing’s career in Portland seems to be successfully rising. Perhaps it’d be nice if Rollie did experience a little stress while back in Memphis. It seems to move him forward quite favorably.