Woodstock’s Golden Notebook has hosted many author events, but the launch for John Milward’s Crossroads: How the Blues Shaped Rock’n’Roll (and Rock Saved the Blues) may be the first to provoke a call to the cops.
The launch party at the Colony Café was a multigenre affair. Milward read excerpts and sang pertinent songs, his gritty vocals accompanied by solo guitar on roots tunes and by his long-running band Comfy Chair on electric blues and rock numbers. The stage was flanked by his wife Margie Greve’s illustrations for the book—striking black-and-white portraits of such blues and rock icons as Robert Johnson, Howlin’ Wolf, Eric Clapton, and Stevie Ray Vaughan.
As Comfy Chair wailed on “Black Magic Woman” (a Santana hit via Fleetwood Mac’s Peter Green via Otis Rush), an intoxicated audience member “doing the Woodstock hippie dance” lost her balance, knocking over an easel with portraits of Muddy Waters and—wait for it—Peter Green. “She was okay, the paintings were okay,” Milward says, laughing. “And you know that little room off the balcony at the Colony? During the rock set, there was a couple up there ‘engaging in lewd behavior.’ The club owner went up and said, ‘You’re going to have to leave.’ And the guy says, ‘Can’t we have a few more minutes?'” That’s when she brandished her phone to dial the Woodstock Police.
The cops never came—the club owner’s threat did the trick—but Milward gleefully echoes a friend’s response: “Wow, man, this is a great literary reading if they’re doing it in the balcony!”
Milward and Greve share a classic white cottage in Bearsville with two mellow cats, Tipitina and Big Red. The walls display Greve’s woodcuts and prints and hundreds of neatly shelved CDs and records. “Leftover swag from my rock critic days,” explains Milward, an affable man with a soul patch; he’s a little abashed by the framed gold Ted Nugent album in a back hallway, explaining that he profiled the singer for the Chicago Reader in the mid-’70s, “before he became such an absolute asshole.”
Sitting near his cherished 1930 National Triolian resonator guitar, Milward notes that he’s usually the one with the interview pad. Crossroads grew out of a feature he wrote for influential roots-music magazine No Depression on “The Sons of Gary Davis.” The legendary blind preacher and guitar virtuoso gave lessons in his Bronx apartment to many younger players, including David Bromberg, Ry Cooder, Stefan Grossman, and Woody Mann. “I have no children,” Davis once remarked, “but I’ve got many sons.”
Milward met Mann at West Virginia blues camp. “Woody had these old tapes of his lessons with Davis,” he recalls. “He was playing this little ragtimey thing—he was a very accomplished player for 15—and in the background you can hear Gary Davis clanging on his guitar. That’s folklore at its base. It’s like an oral history.”
Milward also played guitar as a teen growing up in the Westchester suburbs; his first was a Daphne blue ’65 Fender Mustang. “I wasn’t in high school bands,” he says. “I brought the guitar to college, where it sat in the closet. Basically, I ignored it for 20 years.”
He started playing again in midlife, while working as a freelance rock journalist. “I’d been a music freak all the way through,” he explains. After studying journalism and hosting a radio show at Northwestern, he veered between a “crazy job working for an encyclopedia” and freelancing for Chicago papers.
The Chicago Daily News soon put him on staff. “The first week, you’re supposed to get acquainted, learn where everything is? My second day there, Elvis Presley died. It was a baptism by fire,” Milward recalls. “I didn’t leave the building for 24 hours. Every newsroom in the country was doing the exact same thing, all trying to avoid the lede ‘The King Is Dead.'”
After the Daily News folded, Milward wrote for Rolling Stone, the New York Times, USA Today, and the Philadelphia Inquirer, moving to New York in the late ’70s. Shortly after meeting Greve, he “threw things asunder” by renting a summer place from composer George Tsontakis. By summer’s end, he’d relocated to Bearsville. “We’ve been a commuting couple ever since,” he reports. He’s based mostly upstate, while an art director job keeps her in Manhattan during the week.
Along with the musician portraits for Crossroads, Greve contributed an “author photo” illustration, which, Milward quips, “added some hair and subtracted some years.” (He’s repaying the favor by being her “editorial sherpa” on a music-based art project.)
They were thrilled when advance copies arrived in the mail. “It’s like seeing your byline for the first time, but it’s a book,” beams Milward, whose first book, The Beach Boys Silver Anniversary, came out in 1985. “For all the toil, we’re both pretty proud of it.”
He worked on Crossroads nonstop for two-and-a-half years. “The first year, I read everything,” he says, and it’s barely an exaggeration; the bibliography cites nearly 200 titles. “And, of course, there are all these conflicting accounts. Did Muddy Waters make Buddy Guy a baloney sandwich, or a salami sandwich?”
He also interviewed artists such as Bonnie Raitt, Geoff Muldaur, and Jorma Kaukonen. “I realized I was not going to get quality time with Clapton and Keith Richards,” he says drily. (He did interview Richards for a 1986 feature on Dirty Work; they shared a bottle of Makers’ Mark.) For such marquee names, he relied on painstaking research and well-chosen quotes, such as Richards recalling how Brian Jones named the band while placing a phone ad, “The Best of Muddy Waters album was on the floor—and track one was ‘Rolling Stone.’ So the band’s name was picked for us by Muddy Waters.”
The Stones went on to adapt blues classics by Robert Johnson (“Love in Vain”), Willie Dixon (“Little Red Rooster”), and more. Blues-based rock, along with an earlier wave of folk-era rediscoveries, like Mississippi John Hurt playing the Newport Folk Festival, injected new life into faded careers. Crossroads recounts moving stories of elderly players—some of whom had to relearn their old tunes—becoming “strangers in a strange land: Southern black men in a northern white world. Songs that they once played to rowdy neighbors in a juke joint or at a fish fry were now performed for attentive college kids.”
“B. B. King once said, ‘Playing the blues is like being black twice,'” Milward says. “Young blacks didn’t want to know from the blues. A) it was their parents’ music; b) they didn’t want to go back to Alabama. They were listening to Ray Charles, the Coasters, the Drifters. So was B.B. King grateful to find a white rock’n’roll audience? You bet. He had a whole second career, especially after ‘The Thrill Is Gone.'”
Crossroads‘s title refers to the site where Robert Johnson reputedly sold his soul to the devil in trade for musical genius. But it also alludes to the cross-pollination of musical styles. “Folk music purists, blues purists, and rock’n’roll purists don’t meet very often,” Milward notes. “As I got older, I related more to the rootsier players. I knew of these players—Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Mississippi John Hurt—but didn’t really start listening to them till I was in my forties, when the music on the radio wasn’t the music I loved anymore. It was my midrock crisis.”
That “midrock crisis” also launched a band named for Monty Python’s Spanish Inquisition skit (“Not … the Comfy Chair!”). Principals include Milward on vocals and rhythm guitar, with Josh Roy Brown, Steve Mueller, Larry Packer, Eric Parker, Baker Rorick, and the late Steve Burgh; according to a recent flyer, they play “music at the crossroads of blues, rock, country, and soul.”
That’s a busy intersection, and many names weave throughout the book. Milward cites legendary music collector Harry Smith, whose Anthology of American Folk Music was the gateway drug for a generation of blues fans, demonstrating string tricks to a young Patti Smith at the Chelsea Hotel and producing the Fugs’ first album. “And then you have Ed Sanders of the Fugs visiting Joplin two days before she died and noticing the bangles she wore to cover her heroin tracks.”
Sanders, like many of Milward’s other sources, lives in Woodstock. Crossroads‘s local connections cover the waterfront, from the exploits of local impresario Albert Grossman to Muddy Waters receiving a key to the town while recording The Muddy Waters Woodstock Album, with such local stars as Levon Helm and Paul Butterfield.
Indeed, the web of interconnections is so dense that one waggish GoodReads reviewer called it “Six Degrees of Robert Johnson.” But the real joy of Crossroads is well-tuned prose that illuminates the music along with its history. Here’s Milward on Hendrix:
“‘Voodoo Chile’ is a 15-minute musical meditation in the key of E, a virtual Gone with the Wind of the blues that opened deep in the Delta with Hendrix repeatedly hammering on a single string before casting our long, reverberating lead lines. Hendrix references ‘Catfish Blues’ in the introduction, but by the time the band enters, it’s as if the blues had already moved from Mississippi to Chicago, with Hendrix’s lyrics suggesting Muddy’s “Hoochie Coochie Man.'”
For added pleasure, Milward suggests, “You can YouTube your way through it. The book starts with a blues collector who was willing to travel from Brooklyn to Washington to listen to a rare 78—not to buy it, just to listen—and now, boom, it’s all right there on YouTube.” Pull up a comfy chair.
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This article appears in August 2013.
