BAD NEWS TRAVELS FAST - an interview with Chris "Badnews" Barnes

Blues Matters caught up with the undisputed King of Hokum, Chris Bad News Barnes, in Nashville, now stretching his wings with a fabulous new album, his first on the Gulf Coast Records label, a release that is roaring up the global charts.

WORDS: Iain Patience PIX: Laura Carbone

Great new album, Chris. You must be pleased with progress:

“Bless you. Thank you, I’m so happy that I can’t complain. My bank account hasn’t increased one bit but I’m just so happy to be on Billboard, in the top 10 is a big goal of mine.”

“You know, to have Walter Trout on the album, like, that’s huge. You know, it’s a lovely glow.”

How did you get him involved?:

“Well, that’s the beauty of it. I got a Facebook chat message, a Facebook direct message from Walter Trout saying that he really enjoyed my last album, Bad News Rising. Yeah. And then he would be honoured to play on my next album. So I told Tom Hambridge and he goes, well, we gotta do that. So the only problem is that Kenny Greenberg, who’s on the album, is one of the best studio musicians in the world. So it was, it’s like, where are we gonna use them? So I, I sent him a track. It was the wrong track.”

“And he goes, you know, ‘is this the one you want?’ I said, actually, it’s not. So I told him that it’s the most personal song on the album is called True Blues. It was very painful. You know, Tom said, you know, to write the Blues right from your most painful experiences. And my father had an affair with the woman next door. I lived in a housing project with 40 apartments and four apartments in each building. And my father had an affair with the woman literally next door, my bedroom wall, you know, went up against her wall. And my mother used to smoke true blue cigarettes. And so the song is the story about that, the effect it had on my mother and our life. Walter had saw it like that, set on track right . I told him it was like the angst of the child, of the innocent child whose life has been warped by this.”

“And he goes, ‘I got this.’ And he just put this searing, wailing, you know, skill on there and these rifts in between that was like, yes, there’s the angst, there’s the pain. And I loved it. It was great. It was. Yeah, it was a cracking track. But I mean, this, this almost seems to me you’re much more. You’re always the the king of Hokum and, right, you’re famous for your sort of comedic approach. But this album seems to me a much more serious bit of work.

And it’s almost as if you’ve not dumped it completely because you’ve got, you know, ‘Mushrooms Make me a Fun Guy’ and maybe ‘Do the Houdini’ both might fall into that same genre if you like, but it’s much more a genuine straight on, in-your-face Blues album or Blues rock album is my take on it. What do you think about it?

“Well, that was by design. You know, the last album, it had almost too much Hokum in it. It it had a lot of humour in. It was, they’re great songs and they’re still the meat of my shows. But I realised I didn’t have the contemporary blues to wrap around. There’s this decision, it was based more on the live show and well, I got the good funny stuff, but I don’t have the I don’t have the the meat of a show to keep this on a high- level blues show. Because there’s because like what happens is is the, you know, the Blues Booker, the festival people, the radio people, they’re all like, - ‘was he? Is he a comedian or is he a blues guy? Is he a blues guy? Is he comedy? Like, they don’t get it. Like, Europe, there’s never a problem. They just get it. But here in the States, for some reason, they have a hard time wrapping their mind around it because they never really understood Hokum Blues to begin with.”

So I said to Tom, ‘This album, I need your Buddy Guy, or Kingstone, you know, Christone Kingfish, contemporary blues hat on. I want to go straight down the middle of contemporary blues. I’ll write a couple of songs, you know, blues, blues-rock, couple of the Hokum songs, just for seasoning. But I want to round out my 90 minute show with great Blues songs and I’m gonna write. So I’m gonna write from the Tears of the Clown side of my brain, this album, then the jokester side of my brain, right?”

I think it comes through very clearly, to be honest:

“There’s no question at all. It’s a completely different approach in many ways, it seems to me. But yeah, I wanted to go breakdown, the straight down the middle and by doing that, I knew we would, you know, water would spill out on both sides. So, that’s exactly what happened.”

Looking at it against the previous albums, this has probably done better for you than any other album:.

Not losing your roots then. You mentioned National Lampoon. You worked on that, didn’t you?:

“Yes, I did yes, I produced after John. I was after John Belushi. I took the reins and was doing the National Lampoon radio show. As a matter of fact, I was editing that show in John Belushi’s, 55 Morton St in the Greenwich Village, his house. I used to use his studio and I was in his house the night he died. Ohh shit yes. And what? Danny Ackroyd and Judy, But Judy? Jacqueline Belushi is still one of my best friends. I spoke to her Thursday. She’s very proud of this album as well. I was Jim Belushi’s writer at Saturday Night Live, so I have a very deep tie to that family and Danny and the Blues Brothers. And, I’m considered one of the guys - the king of Hokum Blues, which was given to me by Mr Patience himself here!” We share a laugh and he continues:

“They really love that. And that was my only regret of the Blues Brothers is they never did original music. So that was part of my mission to take it from when I was doing cover songs. It’s like, ‘who cares?’”

I remember you saying to me that in many ways because of your training and your comedic background, you work with everything, acting, scripting, televisual stuff too, an extraordinary career:

“We’re all Second City Theatre alumni. They call Second City the Oxford of comedy. I was part of the society and I revered those guys and those guys took me under their wings. I feel a lot of my work is an homage to what those guys did. And more importantly, their ability to always give credit to the blues artist. They should be recognised with a Keeping the Blues Alive Award as well because of the careers they brought back. That was what I was trying to do like a John Lee Hooker. What people don’t know, in the movie that was supposed to be Muddy Waters, but Muddy was sick that weekend and John Lee Hooker filled in for that spot in the movie.”

I’m guessing from your personal point of view the new album has made people view you more seriously:

“It was imperative because the booking agents would say I don’t know if he’s a comedic act, why isn’t he MC and stuff like that? And it’s like, that’s not what he does! I’m not sure people understand that he’s this. That’s no longer an excuse.”

“When you’re eight on Billboard, your albums playing everywhere, you’ve got Walter Trout, Sugar Ray Rayford and Jimmy Hall playing on it and Tom Hambridge producing it. But he’s not a comedian, you know, He’s a blues as it gets.

They said, come on with it. I’m going, OK, so this is the big level. This is the high level. This is what everybody’s talking about. You know what I mean? Yeah. But I mean, I wasn’t for Springsteen holding out the mic and then singing the whole song. But, you know!”

You’ve been very fortunate in your career, haven’t you?:

“It’s pretty amazing. I base this all on I will do this till there’s no more opportunities. You know, I I’m going to until I’ve went through every door and I’ve tried everything. When I see that there’s nothing down the road. For some reason, I do one show and something else opens and another show, something else! I’ll do another album, something else opens. So I’m just following, I’m just sitting up and showing up and letting the results dictate what happens next!”

I notice in the cover photo in the new album, Bad News Travels Fast is by our great mutual friend who works with the magazine, every issue of our Blues Matters, Laura Carbone:

“You know, Laura Carbone is so great. And, and you know, that was not a photo shoot we were having. There was a bunch of us having breakfast, the blue plate and we’re walking down the street and Laura calls out, turn around.’ I mean, that’s not planned. She goes ‘turn around.’ I turn around and I folded my arms and she goes, oh, this is great. She took like 4 pictures and when it was time to submit pictures to the label, everybody, especially their PR department, went this is a great picture I think it’s a cover. I go, I’m so glad you said that because that would be great. Laura has been great, one of the great, if not the greatest photojournalist for the blues. She just got the Keeping the Blues Alive Award, so well deserved. I did a show in New York City and I look out in the audience and she’s in the audience, she’s a supporter.”

Chris, before we finish up, can mention ‘Ambushed by the Blues,’ a cracking little track?

“That’s getting some really good reviews. I didn’t release it as a single. I just wanted to see what happens with it. A ‘Blues Man Can’t Cry’ was my big ballad and it’s doing very well. But ‘Ambushed by the Blues’ - here’s what happened during COVID. I had a lot of my friends, people dying, and young people. That’s what the song is about. The song is just overwhelming and being ambushed by all this, all this horror and pain and suffering that everybody was feeling. It was awful. We hadn’t had a situation like that since the AIDS crisis. We will look back at history as being ambushed by this horrible disease and our utter inability to deal with it on a timely basis.”

“No way should this many people have died from this. This was this was curable at an earlier time if it was addressed properly. I definitely wanted to record a song that dealt with probably some of my strongest current emotions during a crisis. ‘Blues Men Can’t Cry’ is about slavery and Parchment Farm, the fields. ‘True Blues’ about my personal historical life, but ‘Ambushed by the Blues’ was a current strong, passionate feeling of blues and I wanted to capture that before it left.”

The opening title track is your your own eponymous track:

“I always open with a high energy fast song and I wanted to kind of set the tone and that was always a really good hook. Bad News Travels Fast with , the horn section from The Mavericks for that. And I think that kicked it in, and Jimmy Hall’s harmonica playing.”

“I had Tommy McDonald who plays bass on all of, Buddy Guy’s albums. This is Tom’s band. I had Mike Rojas on keyboards, phenomenal keyboard player, and Kenny Greenberg on guitar and that song just ‘boom’ came together. I think it was one take and it was just bang.”

A few years ago, you said you’d started out playing drums as a kid. You’re working with Tom Hambridge, who’s one of the most in demand drummers, a multi-Grammy producer, also a great drummer. How does that work? How do you and he get on with that one?:

“It’s a great question because, you know, I started doing drums when I was in like 1st grade., I did a recital in second grade. I was in a band, 4th grade. Clarence Spady and I were in a band. We’re both from Scranton. We were in fifth grade and we were playing the hotel bars in Scranton, PA. We weren’t even old enough to be in the bars. I have this conversation with musicians all the time. I think the drums is the key to the band. And I’ve been fortunate I ha, Tom Hambridge as my drummerwithout a doubt. I’ve been blessed by being around great drummers. And that’s really even in my in my inner self. I’m just listening to the kick drum, that’s all . I just let that drive me. That’s all I need to hear.”

“I work better with the musical director who’s a drummer than I do with any other musician. Working with Tom and these guys are all following him. If he’s driving it, I just have to stay in tempo with him.. I don’t read music well. So I’m lucky that my background is in drum training because at least I know tempo; a lot of singers have a hard time with that. And I’m lucky because that’s the only thing I do have, you know, keeping in tempo with him and you can see him, you can tell when he wants to go big. You can really start hearing his conducting. He’ll hit a TomTom a certain way when he wants to build and he’ll hit a floor Tom a certain way when he wants to come down - to the untrained ear, you won’t hear it, but I hear it every time. He has a built- in metronome in his hand almost. I love it and I love working with him in the studio for that reason. I’d be in pretty big trouble with somebody else.”

Check out www.chrisbarnesnyc.com for more.