PITTSBURGH — Mark Wenner discovered the blues while he was in high school in Bethesda, Maryland, and started messing around with harmonica, in part, because of a 1965 recording of “Born in Chicago” by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band.
The following year, the future Nighthawks frontman went off to Columbia University, where the homecoming dance band was none other than, yep, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band.
“And I was screwed,” Wenner says. “My poor girlfriend came up on a train in a nice little dress and a handbag, and I put on a coat and tie. Then, I just stood at the foot of the stage in front of Butterfield and just let it wash over me. Then, I spent the rest of the year working on harmonica in my dorm room, when I should have been reading Plato and Socrates and all that (stuff).”
Everyone in his dorm was playing something, and he did his first public gig with a drummer and the pianist-singer who would go on to become Screamin’ Scott Simon of Sha Na Na. After graduation, Wenner returned to D.C., where he hooked up with a 17-year-old guitarslinger from Pittsburgh named Jimmy Thackery. In 1972, they formed The Nighthawks much in the vein of the J Geils Band, playing blues-rock, boogie and soul.
The Nighthawks would go on to become one of the great rough-and-tumble blues-rock bands, making more than 20 records and playing with everyone who was anyone. After Thackery left in 1986 to pursue The Assassins, The Nighthawks forged on through many personnel changes to make it to this 50th Anniversary Tour.
Here is part of a very long conversation with Wenner.
Q. What do you remember about first playing Pittsburgh?
A. We opened for Roy Buchanan in 1973 even before we solidified our four-piece personnel, with Jan Zukowski and Pete Ragusa. And there was this white guy singing with Roy and wearing shades and greased-back hair and he just blew me away. So, of course, we struck up a conversation and he said, “Well, I've got a band in Pittsburgh you'd really like. We're doing the same kind of things, we're a horn band.” So, Billy Price and I remained friends, we kept in touch, and it was one of the first musical exchanges that I was involved in. I got Billy a gig down at the Bayou with us in D.C., and he got us a gig at Fat City in Swissvale. We double-billed. You can imagine how we felt. We were just these guys in black T-shirts and jeans, and Billy’s band came down all wearing like pimp suits and there were four or five horns, and steps, and Billy was falling on his knees doing “Cry, Cry, Cry.” It was like a whole dynamic show. I think they did a crowd walk on “Let the Four Winds Blow.” They just ripped the place down. He opened the door for himself in D.C. wide open and we did pretty well up there in Swissvale.
Q. I’m surprised you remember the name of that club.
A. Oh, I’ll never forget the name of that club. There were some real wild adventures that went on there I can't even tell you about, that was during the cocaine-quaalude wars and all kinds of other stuff. The whole music scene was wild and wooly back then. There was a lot more fighting. A lot more craziness.
Q. The first time I ever saw you guys was at the Evergreen.
A. Well, when we first played the Evergreen, the guys at Fat City were so flipped out because we were playing Friday and Saturday at Fat City and Sunday over at Evergreen. They were like, “After all we've done for you, how could you be so disloyal?” I thought it was like the other side of town. It was that gangster mentality of “You belong to us,” which I encountered a lot. I dealt with some pretty serious guys back in those days that were club owners. I had a guy down here, a former Pagan, who had a club and he used to talk about how he owned us and we would just play exclusively for him and he'd put us in a house where we could jam and get high. It was totally that old-school mob mentality.
"We had a look but it was a little weird. We looked like four guys who all came in different cars."
Q. And you would also play the Decade and Mancini’s.
A. Yeah, it was a progression. We went from Fat City and Evergreen to Mancini's and the Decade, and that’s where we met Moondog. And the guy at the Decade (Dom DiSilvio), he was almost a stereotype, if you will. Mancini's, there was a whole vibe going on there that was kind of interesting. The coolest thing about Mancini's was people were still working in steel mills and getting paid a lot of money, and they were spending it. At Mancini's, all the waitresses were like little Italian aunts, like your mom and your aunt. So, in a way, they were the best possible chaperones ’cause you couldn't be rude to them. They were these older mom- and auntie-looking women that kept a very wild, very drinking, very drugging crowd from being very dangerous. It was a really interesting phenomenon. If I ever had to do that kind of thing, I would take a lesson from that.
The greatest blues show I ever saw happened at Carnegie Music Hall in Oakland in the mid-’80s with the Nighthawks, John Lee Hooker and John Hammond.
After Thackery left, me, Jan and Pete made up a hardcore East Coast band that would back up John Lee Hooker, Pinetop Perkins, John Hammond. Everybody was on the Rosebud agency, and Elvin Bishop was involved in that, too. It was a neat thing because John Lee Hooker could bring two people, Elvin Bishop could bring one guy and they’d just fly out. We were on stage for like four hours, and our little break was John Hammond's acoustic 20 minutes. We could go pee and then back at it.
Q. Do you remember the first time you played with a John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters or anybody of that era?
A. We were playing at the Bayou six nights a week, and Monday would really suck. You’d be lucky if there were 30 people. I talked the club owner into giving us a budget to do blues shows on Mondays. And since we knew J.B. Hutto, and we knew how to play his style of blues, we had a budget to fly him in. Normally, he’d make 20 bucks on Monday in a Chicago club. He probably went home with $300 in his pocket and we had 350 people on a Monday night. Well, the club owner liked that, so we got license and we went through our record collection. We would have Otis Rush, Big Walter Horton, Jimmy Dawkins, Fenton Robinson, Jimmie Rodgers. The other thing we could do was bring in these bands from other cities to open and then we would have a real blues guy come play with us. The time that Billy Price played with us, Otis Rush was on the show, so Billy’s horn players put together horn parts and backed us, backing up Otis Rush. And then we wriggled our way into the Cellar Door, which was basically a folk club, and we got to open for Linda Ronstadt there. We got to start opening for Muddy Waters and James Cotton, and Albert King. We developed this relationship with Muddy Waters. It led to us making an album with his band, the “Jacks & Kings” album in 1978. And I got to have an awful lot of one-on-one interaction with James Cotton, who really encouraged me and was a real model for a harmonica frontman performance, ’cause it was him and Matt Murphy at the time, and for the totally authentic, really get-down blues thing, Muddy's band was our mentors, and then for the take-the-blues-and-kick-it-out-and-boogie, that was the James Cotton band of that day. And we could do both, and we did both.
Q. Yeah. I was going to ask what you learned from just being around those people.
A. Everything, anything we could. We learned from Muddy how to bring it down to a whisper in a slow blues, and from Cotton we learned how to keep them rocking and still be playing something that would be considered blues. All those bands in the Northeast, J. Geils included, owe it all to the James Cotton band, I'm convinced. And then Bob Margolin, of Muddy’s band, was like the ambassador. He became a kind of fifth Nighthawk, and he would tell other bands about us. The first time I heard the Thunderbirds, Bob and I were riding to a show together and he had a little cassette player and he played me The Thunderbirds live on a Boston radio station. Well, I had to stop the car. I never heard young white guys play blues like THAT. I mean the Thunderbirds went up to Boston and turned that whole world upside down.
Q. What was different about the Texas blues?
A. Well, the only people I’d ever heard play like that, the “chonka chonka chonka chonk” was Slim Harpo and Lightning Slim in a club in New York once. The Thunderbirds had a feel, plus they had a look. We had a look but it was a little weird. We looked like four guys who all came in different cars. The Thunderbirds had pompadours, they had two-tone shoes. They were just the coolest. They would misbehave to quite a degree on the road in those days. They were just wildmen.
Q. And what about Stevie Ray?
A. Stevie Ray was just Jimmy's little brother back then. The first time I went to Austin, I was excited to hear Stevie. When I heard a tape of him doing “Little Wing,” I was just blown away. Everybody in Austin was snooty about, “Oh, he just plays like 20 choruses on ‘Texas Flood,’ we don't want that.” Jimmie Vaughan was God down there in terms of leading the charge that turned Austin from the country-rock capital of Texas to the blues-rock capital of Texas. Yeah, and it was all that sparse, tasty, you know, leave a million holes and just play real authentic low-down [stuff]. And everybody was a little snooty about Stevie and what he was doing. They didn’t really care for that blues-rock and they didn't really want to hear Hendrix. The first night we played in Texas, we opened for Delbert McClinton on the night before Thanksgiving in Austin and when we finished, I rushed over to see Stevie Ray at a place called After Hours, and it was him, Lou Ann Barton and Johnny Reno, and Lou Ann wigged me out as much as anybody. I never heard a girl singing “Scratch my Back,” plus, she sang like Wanda Jackson, so I thought it was just the sexiest thing I'd ever heard. And, of course, I really enjoyed Stevie. We were instrumental in bringing Stevie up to the mid-Atlantic. Our manager booked him before he even had an album out. And that first album is still groundbreaking, earth-shaking.
Q. Who do you consider the best guitarists you’ve ever seen?
A. At what? I mean, I’ve seen great performers. I've seen great pickers. I mean, Danny Gatton was probably the greatest guitar player I ever saw. He was an OK, an interesting performer, but the two people that unleashed Thackery’s bad excesses were Stevie Ray and Danny Gatton. And I stood between Stevie Ray and Thackery the night they met and there was no room for a harmonica. I just stood there.
Q. Stevie Ray had “Pride and Joy” and The Thunderbirds had “Tough Enough” and Thorogood had “Bad to the Bone.” You guys were kind of lacking that sort of signature radio song.
A. Exactly. “Pretty Girls and Cadillacs” did a little bit, but not enough. We got airplay with that in the beach music world for a little while, but nothing like a “Pride and Joy.” To me, hearing that, it was like one of our guys is out there on the radio. Our manager tried to come up with a name for it, Blue Wave, but it never caught on. We never had a name like New Wave. What did New Wave mean? That went from Talking Heads to the Sex Pistols, which is quite a broad spectrum. What really put our thing back into the public eye was The Blues Brothers. In some ways, it was embarrassing. And in some ways, it gave people some idea of what we were all doing.
Q. It seems like despite not having big commercial success, that sell-out J. Geils moment, you've been able to have a good career and survive and go 50 years and be happy with it.
A. I mean, it's amazing. I don't have some of the things that I know Kim Wilson or George Thorogood have been able to have, financially, but I've survived. I got a wife who's got a good job, and I make a little money on the side restoring motorcycles, and you know, I can live happily ever after.
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