Watermelon Slim - Sittin' In With Watermelon Slim

Sittin' In With Watermelon Slim

by Mark Hummel
August 25, 2004

Bill "Watermelon Slim" Homan

Perhaps the opening paragraph from Bill Homan's website www.watermelonslim.com sums it up best: "Born in Boston, Massachusetts, and raised in North Carolina, Bill Homans, aka Watermelon Slim, has taken the Blues all over the United States, Europe, and Southeast Asia. His buzzsaw-raw, intensely personal vocals, harp playing, and slide guitar are the products of a life spent scuffling in hard, dirty day jobs, and nights in innumerable Blues lineups in clubs from coast to coast." If you haven't had the opportunity to hear this man's music you are doing your Blues-bone a disservice. Listen to his story and then go check him out. You'll be glad you did.

Mark Hummel for BluesWax: Your new CD, Up Close & Personal starts with a track done a cappella, a rare way to open a CD, I thought. What inspired this track and choosing it as the opener? I thought it's a great way to open the CD; your singing on it is awesome, by the way.

Watermelon Slim: This is the kind of music I have been singing all my trucking life. Rolling down the road with the truck in "the big hole" [top gear], alone with my thoughts, I sing. When I was a teenager, I had a record of chain gang hollers from Texas. This record, like every one I ever had, in three different collections spanning 20-plus years, was stolen; the last collection in 1987, just before I left Eugene, Oregon, for my first try at making music in Europe. I still sing certain numbers from it, including "Ol' Rattler" and "18 Hammers." As I've said to many people, work -- not computer-punching or selling real estate or anything like that, in an air-conditioned office, but hard labor -- is one of the major inspirations of the Blues. You'd never have heard from Muddy Waters or John Lee Hooker if they'd been white-collar professionals. I'm an educated man, but my education is almost a coincidence in my life because, in spite of repeated attempts to re-invent myself as something more than a grunt laborer, it's what I have always found myself doing to make a living. I suppose I should be grateful that God didn't let me succeed at those re-inventions, because my body is that of a much younger man. But as a verse I did not include (by mistake) in "Got My Will Made Out" says, "... A poor poet's bound to die, beaten down and chained by what he has to see."

BW: This CD is so different from your previous ones in tone, sparseness, etc. It sounds like you've been playing this way all your life, is that the case?

Slim: It is. Only I haven't actually gotten good enough on the guitar until the last few years for people to really want to hear me and pay for the privilege. I'm a very late-blooming musician. If I had been as good as the whole slew of 20-30-year-olds I've been playing with over the last five-six years, or so, I would be a household name now; Adrian Barber would never have let negotiations over my first album in 1973 lapse. On harp, on the other hand, I've been good enough to play with professionals for a long time (though of course, you are a far superior harp player to me, Mark). Masterclass harp teacher Annie Raines counts me as one of her influences. But professionals don't hire harp players. If a harp player is really good enough, he hires musicians. I've never been hired by an established touring professional to play as part of his/her band in my life, though Stovall Brown and others have used me as a "spot starter," gig to gig.

BW: How do you compare solo or duo gigs to playing with an electric band? I felt this was the real Watermelon Slim on this CD; it certainly captures the most soulful side of what you do, not to negate your electric side, mind you.

Slim: Well, when I'm playing solo, I get to express myself most freely, not just musically, but personally speaking. That should be no surprise. As far as duos, the one I have been part of more than any other is what we call The Stillhouse Boys, with my wife, the spoons player Honour Havoc that you hear on Up Close and Personal. Honour, by the way, is a Blueswoman and musical voice in her own right, and one of the trendsetters in the original Punk Rock movement. She taught Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious how to dress their parts, and besides that numbered Bob Marley and Peter Tosh among her earliest musical friends. We are separated, and are going to stay that way, but we remain friends -- we have a child, and it is our duty to remain so, for her sake. It's a little tougher playing with her than playing alone, partly because Honour has never been more than moderately comfortable letting me run the show. This last tour I did solo in England was a roaring success on a limited scale. If people come to listen to me, and not just to get drunk and/or get laid, I can now put on a fine show for them because I have lived the Blues. Joe Bonamassa and Johnny Lang are incomparably better guitarists than I shall ever be, but they're kids. They've never sweated or bled for a bare living in their lives. They may play the forms, but they're going to have to get their dicks knocked in the dirt a few times before they convince me that they're actually playing the Blues, much less singing 'em. I don't negate the electric side of myself by any means. Yesterday I was playing in Oklahoma City at a biker bar I sometimes play at with a pickup group that included an excellent sax player, a great burly biker himself. I was elated to be able to not only sing up front as I virtually always find myself doing, but also to stand aside and blow horn lines along with the saxman while the two guitarists traded leads. It was so hot and so integral; we got a standing-O from this bunch of rough, rowdy men and women. Bikers are a very tough audience; guess you know.

Watermelon Slim's Up Close & Personal

BW: The second cut of the CD, "Blue Freightliner," has a old Muddy Waters feel but with your own twist in there, is this in G tuning, like Muddy used to play a lot of his slide in? Cool spoons too. I love the backwoods flavor of this number.

Slim: This is one of my trucking Blues. I play in that G tuning more than any other (D/G/D/G/B/D), and sometimes I use a variation on it where I tune the bottom string up to E, allowing me to play using the 9th fret as tonic and the flat third as the open chord. I also occasionally tune the second string to B flat, and play in G minor ... doing it that way uses much of the same technique as playing slide on a standard finger tuning. I started playing slide guitar in Vietnam in open D, a la Fred McDowell, but I rarely use it anymore.

BW: Another of my favorite cuts on the CD is your cover of Sonny Boy II's "I Don't Care No More," it captures the spirit of the original without sounding like a copy of it, how'd you pick this number? Did you have a similar experience?

Slim: Obviously you've heard the original, which was recorded in 1963, two years before Rice Miller's death, with the Yardbirds, including Jimmy Page, in Germany. I don't really count Sonny Boy II (or I, for that matter) as one of my major, direct influences on harp. He does much more with his hands than I do, although, of course, I can play that style, if someone asks me to. But any harp player worth his salt has long since incorporated what he did in the Blues. And, yes, I have had such experience. Lots of it. My entire 15 years of marriage to Honour Havoc has been an object lesson in the Blues. I still love her, even like her, but she has tried my patience beyond what most men would have ever put up with.

BW: "Cynical Old Bastard" made me laugh out loud when I heard it; I can definitely relate to that one. Is the harp on it played on a neck rack when you played the guitar live, or did you overdub on that? It sounds like a rack, live. Do you feel this way on a daily basis or just some days? Do you still get the kick from playing music that you did a long time ago, when you starting playing the Blues?

Slim: I've never used a rack. The technology of harp racks is basically unchanged since the days of early Bob Dylan, and I've just never been able to find one that stayed in place. As I noted, Stovall played guitar on the track. It was done "studio live." took a number of tries to get the one I wanted -- I am like that more often than not in the recording studio. I have every reason to feel like a cynical old bastard daily (can you spell B-U-S-H?). It is a face of me that is every bit as real as the loving, devoted papa, or the fiery lover, or the senior-grade leftwing political activist. But I retain hope for my own future and for the world. I still give to people who come to me moaning money, and more often than not they rip me off. But I am my brother's and sister's keeper, and one can hardly claim full-scale cynicism in the face of that.

BW: I first met you years ago in Eugene, Oregan, when you put out an album called Merry Airbrakes, I understand it was one of the first albums recorded by a Vietnam vet dealing with your experiences overseas? I've heard it's something of a collector's item? That album was solo, was it your first?

Slim: Merry Airbrakes is, to my knowledge, the only album that was ever recorded by a Vietnam vet, certainly the only one that actually was produced over the entire duration of the war. Correct me and Country Joe [McDonald] if that's not so. It was not solo, it had several solo tracks on it, but it also had full-band orchestration on most of the songs. The last track included a studio pianist who put on a lovely lead part, and a pedal steel guitarist who added depth and drone. Other instruments that appear in Merry Airbrakes include both Hammond and Farfisa organs, and Moroccan clay drums. The album only had three songs, which dealt directly with the Vietnam experience, and one was an instrumental (a solo guitar piece). None were autobiographical in the sense that some of Big Shoes to Fill and Up Close and Personal's cuts are.

Watermelon Slim
Photo by Jen Taylor of vividpix.com

BW: Slim tell us what inspired you to put out the acoustic CD? Fans? What gave you the inspiration to release this?

Slim: Well, as I have explained, I've been playing this way all my career, which basically really gets going when I came back from Nam in 1970, although I actually started playing guitar in Vietnam when I caught some un-named disease and was shipped to a hospital in Cam Ranh Bay for several weeks recovery. My grandmother gave me a present for returning alive and well: she reimbursed me for my first National Type O flat-bottom neck guitar (saw one of this style on "Traveling Road Show" estimated at $7500 -- I bought mine in 1970 for $475); it was stolen in a year and a half, but I had gotten a good start. A couple of English reviewers recently compared my live performance, and the "Truck Holler" acoustic pieces, to Son House. I don't know if I warrant that, but one of the records I played the grooves off starting before I ever went in the service was the Son House record with "John the Revelator" and "Grinning in Your Face." I still keep those, and other Son House stuff, in my active repertoire.

BW: The most moving song I've heard written about 9/11 is your "Red, White and Blues" off your previous Southern records release; some of the best descriptions of all of our reactions to the event in that song. Tell us about most folk's reaction to that song live?

Slim: "The Red, White and Blues" was written two days after the attack, and Fried Okra Jones first performed it the second week after that at the Stillwater Bikes 'n Blues Festival. Lotta Vietnam vets in that crowd, of course, and it went over very big with them, given the atmosphere of the time. Naturally, much has changed since then. Our president has launched us into exactly the wrong war at the wrong time. He seems to have completely forgotten that it was al-Qaida that struck us in the World Trade Center twice, the Pentagon, the U.S.S. Cole, and plenty of other provocations. I am going to have to write some sort of sequel that stands up well to Willie Nelson's "Whatever Happened to Peace on Earth?" I always make sure to say, either before or after, "God Bless the United States of America." That seems to make almost anything politically difficult go down easier. I'm not being cynical about it; I love my country, I volunteered for Vietnam service. But I will never tolerate liars and greedheads, and that's what's in the White House now.

BW: I've heard it thru the grapevine that you went to or could have gone to a major university back East and could have had a much different lifestyle than the one you chose? Is this true or just rumors? I guess that would have something to do with picking the Blues over Classical music?

Slim: When I went to Middlebury College (not a "major university", but an elite academic institution nonetheless) in 1968, I had no idea whatsoever what I was going to do with a college education. I had never had a sliver of vocational guidance as a student. I'm sure if I had been a nice conventional college student, on the normal post-high school track, you would never have met me. Chances are I'd have been some sort of academic person now. But I had my own agendas even then. LSD, for instance. I certainly had more than enough drugs and music in college, just not much classwork (I got an "A" in French -- and 3 "D"s my only semester), and no sex to speak of. I was also a talented fencer (I made the finals at the Amateur Fencing League of America (AFLA) national championships in Miami that year), but the place had no fencing team, so I didn't have that alternative outlet available. I dropped out, joined the Army and volunteered for 'Nam. I was naive to the extreme, of course, but I did it willingly. I am (as you surmised) a Bluesman in spite of my family, not with its support (until now, when I am finally getting somewhere with it). It's mostly a pretty conservative family. Dad thought it was okay, but Ma never did really take to the idea till my recordings got good enough and it was clear that I had some real backing from the inside of the industry.

Photo by Jen Taylor of vividpix.com

BW: What's your connection to Chris Stovall Brown? I met him in '72 when he played with Luther Snake Johnson in Boston. Did you live there for a while?

Slim: Uh, duhh. I lived in the Boston area for two different periods of the 20th Century, from 1971 to about 1978, and 1987 till some time in 1993. I knew Stovall from hanging out in the Cambridgeport/Riverside section of Cambridge, back in the first stretch. He will tell you that he never met me till the '80s, but Stov wasn't a teetotaler like he is now. He was already a great musician, and I was still a wannabe. Stovall Brown remains one of my great musical heroes, and he is the only one who is my age (I think I'm two years older than he is). I had been wanting to record with him for year, and especially since he produced the last record of my old mentor, Earring George Mayweather, the legendary Chicago Bluesman who was Little Walter's replacement during Walter's long illness somewhere around 1954-55, and spent the last years of his life in Boston. There weren't that many legitimate, dedicated Bluesmen in Boston during the '80s and '90s (plenty of players, of course), and I was accredited to have been one of them, in the same breath as Stovall Brown and George Mayweather. I hope to have more chances to play and record with Stov.

Mark Hummel is a contributing editor at BluesWax.