“It’s a labor of love. No expectations or delusions of grandeur. Just people playing music they love. And hopefully people get blessed by it. I don’t think past that to be honest with you.”
Kid Ramos on his upcoming Nola Blue Records album Strange Things Happening (out March 21) does gospel the way Metallica does rock: intense, hard-driving and with a dedication that is nothing less than obsessive.
“We recorded it live. Everything was recorded live. The only thing that was overdubbed was piano because Dave Limina played B3 in the room. We recorded in a small room. The singers were singing in the same room at the same time. There were no headphones, and there was just a little speaker for the vocals to come out so that they could hear. And we just did it just like that. (It took) about two days of recording and a couple of days mixing.”
There were quite a few first takes. The album covers several Soul Stirrers songs and pushes the envelope on a gospel/hard blues hybrid.
“Music is spontaneous and the more you play it, it loses something, I think,” says Kid, whose 40-year history includes stints with James Harman Band, The Fabulous Thunderbirds, The Mannish Boys, Los Fabulocos, and The Proven Ones. In 2014 he took home The Orange County Music Awards Lifetime Achievement Award and has had 14 Blues Music Award nominations.
“I think when it’s spontaneous like that, even if it has mistakes that aren’t very noticeable, it’s more about the feeling than it is everything being perfect. I’ve never made a record that was gonna be perfect. I just wanted to capture the feeling of what we’re trying to do, you know? As long as there aren’t any horrible mistakes then let it go. Leave it the way it is. My experience of doing it the more it starts to lose something, you know.”
The album was produced by Chris Lizotte who’s listed as singer/songwriter and worship leader. Dave Limina on Hammond organ played with Ronnie Earl and the Broadcasters for 15 years and is Dean of Keyboards at Berkeley School of Music. “The first time I met him, Brian (Templeton, vocalist) told me about him. ‘This is the guy we have to have on this record. If we’re gonna make a gospel record, this is the guy we’re gonna have to have.’ Ok, Brian, if you say so, I trust you.”
Kid sees himself as the last of a second generation of blues guitarists. “There’s a lot of history there. You know, this is amazing because everybody’s gone. They’ve been gone. I came in at the fringe of a lot of stuff. They were like the second generation – Freddie King and all those guys, I got to see them. I was a kid from Orange County going to see blues, and nobody was into it in my age group. I was an outcast of sorts. I had a few friends I convinced to go with me and ended up liking it of course, but most of these guys were dying off by then. That’s so great that you got to see that and had the opportunity to be there.
“I’ve been a Christian, a believer for 30 years, and I’m just drawn to the music that’s from the heart, you know? I like everything. My parents were opera singers, and I grew up hearing opera music, which I didn’t appreciate until later in life. It’s really intense, and a lot of it’s very dramatic.
“Gospel has a lot of soul to it, so it doesn’t matter what type of music it is – if it has honesty and the people that are telling the story are telling it from the heart – I gravitated to it. It’s the sound to me. There’s something about it, and when I first got on the James Harmon Band (1980) in my very early 20s, he had an unbelievable record collection. We would play anything. We would play gospel records, country blues, Peetie Wheatstraw, Robert Johnson, every kind of blues there is. He’d play music. I heard the Soul Stirrers back then, stuff with Sam Cooke singing a cappella, amazing stuff. So, I always had it in me to spread that.”
“My parents were singing opera in my house at 1 o’clock in the morning. We had a baby grand piano in our living room and there’d be a pianist playing, and there would be people singing and you heard them project like you cannot believe. I’d be trying to sleep, and there would be people in there singing, and my mom would cook. My mom’s Italian; everybody would eat and drink wine and start singing, and I’d just want to go to sleep. I didn’t really understand it until late in my life when I heard Vaughn Monroe. It was beautiful.”
Kid’s son Johnny is a featured vocalist. “You gotta live a few years to know anything. My youngest son knows a lot for his age because he’s been around me and been exposed to a lot of stuff, but young people don’t know a lot about any of this stuff, you know? He’s such a great kid. He’s just a good soul, and we have a lot of fun together. He’s only 25. So, I told him it’s gonna take him a long time to where he isn’t a kid. And keep doing it. Do it for the love of it, not to have an expectation. He’ll be let down if he does.
“To me music is music. If it’s good it’s good. Even whatever style it is. I mean Hank Williams – original, what a storyteller. The songs he wrote were simple songs, three or four chords, but what a story he’s telling. So, it just transcends everything. Music transcends it all: language, borders, culture, everything. And when you hear somebody really doing something it’ll cut through everything.”
