Crafting The Almighty Blues

BY MICHAEL METZGER

The cars hiss by on the wet black streets outside the Epic Café as Rainer sits down on an old Fender amp to play his blues. Without a word of introduction to the people crowding the small coffeehouse the notes begin to fall like soft rain from his worn, beautiful 1937 Dobro.

At first, many are content to sip their mochas and cappuccinos while reading their newspapers. But as Rainer begins to pluck out rhythm lines with the pick wrapped around his thumb, the papers are put aside and the coffees are left to cool. Church is now in session and the soft-spoken minister is preaching the blues.

The bluesman with son Rudy Photo: Kate Donovan

It’s too bad none of us there that night in the Epic Café could have been in the San Pedro Chapel when he played and sang into a tape machine. No doubt the old walls of the building on Ft. Lowell Road warmed to the sounds and presence of Tucson’s premier bluesman when he recorded two new albums, as yet unreleased, in just one week this spring.

When Rainer Ptacek (pronounced: RYE ner – pTAH check) first began gigging in Tucson he wasn’t preaching, or even playing, the blues. Soon after he arrived here from Chicago in 1972, he found himself playing guitar around town in a country-trash band behind Wayne Newton'’ stand in.

"I kinda got roped into playing this Las Vegas style country," he says with a chuckle. "It’s so embarrassing. If you knew this guy you would sigh. His name was Roy Clayborne and he was Wayne Newton’s understudy (when Wayne was sick or on vacation, Roy would play in his place). That was his claim to fame. He was a real sleazeball. He would come on and do his Johnny Cash impersonations and Elvis impersonations and he had a Las Vegas spiel down, telling the same jokes every night and doing the same song every night. I did a sentence of about three months with this guy."

After his parole from "The Roy Clayborne Show," Rainer began playing solo blues gigs at long-gone nightspot’s like Bogy’s and The Night Train (better know among old-timers as The Night Stain).

In 1980 he spent some time with Giant Sandworms (now Giant Sand) and his friend Howe Gelb, before splitting off and forming Rainer and Das Combo in 1983.

"(Bassist) Nick (Augustine) was the constant in that band," he says. And the drummers would keep changing. Howie Salmon lasted about "one and a half days" before John Lowrey took over. He was replaced by Will Clipman, who gave way to Bruce Halper, who was succeeded by Ralph Gilmore.

The group (with Clipman) released a lean, powerful album of Rock "n" Rolling blues in ’86; recently re-released on compact disc on the Demon label. Exactly when copies of it will be available in this country is anyone’s guess. It’ll probably show up in stores the same way Rainer’s "Texas Tapes" album did last year (also on Demon); via the mail with a hefty import fee included in its price tag.

(Because of contractual entanglements Rainer has never been able to publicly disclose the name – or names – of the famous person(s) he recorded the Texas Tapes with. Rumor has it that the group was ZZ Top, but Rainer says that’s not true. Listen closely to the album and you’ll probably be able to figure out who was really with him in that Houston studio.)

It’s also anyone’s guess as to when his latest recordings will be stocked in stores. Right now the tapes are in the proverbial can while he searches for an American label, or at least a European label with American distribution. But it has always been, and will always be, the making of his music, not the business end of the sleazy industry, that fascinates him.

He became intrigued with the idea of recording at the San Pedro Chapel after seeing a video about the yearly Easter mass held there.

"It’s another one of those kind of blitz recordings," he says. "The building was available for a week. We (he and the recording engineer) moved everything out, it was just bare walls. Me, being the kind of compulsive musician-type person that I am, I went for it for as long as I could, until I dropped. And then I went back home and slept and went back. You have a week, why not spend 24 hours a day there for seven days? Which might not be the right thing to do, but that’s the way it was done."

The hours and hours of tapes have been whittled down to enough material to fill two albums.

Photo: Kate Donovan
 
 

"Part of the thing about that building is that it really is kind of a magical place, especially in the morning. There was one song that got recorded that ended up getting used (on one of the albums); it was a song about a child that, after 18 years of being abandoned the father, decides to write a letter back to the father trying to make contact. Telling the father "I know that you and mother had more than just a casual affair. You should see how she looks at me." The first time that song was recorded, it was about six o’clock in the morning and the sun was just coming up. For some reason, after spending all night in there I decided to open all the doors.

And, of course, the microphone was left on. So you can hear in the background the trucks going by, mockingbirds chirping, insect sounds, I mean (the microphone) picks up the air. When someone else listens to it, hopefully they’ll say, "That must have been nice. You’re actually capturing the moment." That was one of the high points of the recording."

That style of preserving music goes completely against the grain of sanitized modern recording techniques, where one song can take weeks of retakes, overdubs, and anal retentive attention to details – until everything is absolutely perfect (or the money runs out).

"Listen, the most memorable thing you’ll ever hear in a recording is a mistake. Little quirky things that happen in the recording process that just fit. You hear ‘em over and over again, you take that mistake out and say, "Where’s that mistake?" It touches off more things in a person’s mind than the correct note would. Mistakes are a beautiful part of life."

Back at the Epic Café there seemed to be no mistakes coming off the strings of Rainer’s instrument. If there were any, they were lovely.

It was just a tune-up gig before he took off with Gelb on a three-week tour of Europe, but he played as if he suspected a higher power was listening.

"They call it the good book / It’s a shame how much evil could be done in a good books name," he sings in a plaintive wail. "Good God how can you be so cruel? / To let men name you and claim you as a tool? / They call it religion / They call it reading signs / They call it a calling to be with the divine."

The service comes to an end and the caffeinated blues worshipers file out of the café quietly, leaving the musician behind to pack up his Dobro, his 60-year-old National Steel guitar, the amp and assorted electrical cords.

The very last person to describe Rainer as some kind of blues deity or sanctified music preacher is Rainer himself. He says he’s a craftsman, nothing more.

"Music just isn’t that important," he says quietly. "You can’t bake bread with it, you can’t build a house with it, you can’t even clean a toilet with it. I hate the music business."

Then why does he play, record and tour?

"I don’t know. There must be something good about it, but I don’t know what the fuck that is."

Maybe the answer lie in the questions he asks himself about his performances.

"Why do you play music? Why did you start playing music in the first place? Because you want to make great music, so what is great music except trying to do something the best way you know how?"