R.I.P. Connie "Guybo" Smith, 1939-2023

Sadly rock 'n' roll bass boss Connie "Guybo" Smith who recorded with Eddie Cochran and Glen Glenn has passed away. 

That time Lenny Breau played bass with Terry Hawkeye's Quintet in 1961

Here's a rare audio clip of guitar great Lenny Breau playing bass in drummer Terry Hawkeye's combo at Edmonton's Yardbird Suite.

Here's the scoop...

In 1961 drummer Terry Hawkeye hired Lenny Breau to play bass in a band featuring trumpeter Michael Downs who had recently performed and recorded with Philly Joe Jones. Dale Hillary, the alto sax player on this gig, had also worked with Jones and Downs and had brought Downs back to Canada from San Francisco the previous year. Downs played often in Edmonton and Vancouver over the next few years.

Hawkeye had probably met Lenny through his good friend and mentor pianist Bob Erlendson who was a well known figure in the Western Canadian jazz scene. Lenny and Bob had been working six nights a week at the Stage Door in Winnipeg with Lenny often playing Bob's 1957 Hofner "Violin Bass", which he used on the Yardbird Suite gig. This instrument later became known as the Beatle Bass when Paul McCartney began using it on early Beatles albums and performances. In 1961, it was virtually unheard of to perform jazz on an electric bass so Lenny was something of a pioneer in this regard.

The band performed their two week gig at the Yardbird Suite in Edmonton, Alberta, one of Canada's premier and longest running jazz clubs. The show was broadcast live to air by the University of Alberta's CKUA radio with CBC host Glen Buick announcing. The station recorded two tunes on an acetate disc: 'Spontaneous Combustion' and 'Blue'n Boogie'. Lenny takes a solo on the first tune at 07:27.

Although Lenny played bass often with groups between 1960 and 1964 and was highly regarded for his playing on the instrument, this is the only known recording of him playing bass.

00:15      announcer intro

00:50      Spontaneous Combustion

10:03      announcer patter

10:43      Blue 'n Boogie

Listen below. For more rare Lenny Breau clips, check out The Lenny Breau Archives channel on YouTube right here. 

 

Watch the bass fishin' video for Tony Joe White's "Bubba Jones"

"Bubba Jones" is off Tony Joe White's posthumous Smoke From The Chimney album out May 7th. 

Here's the scoop on "Bubba Jones"...

Leave it to the late, great Tony Joe White to write what may very well be the only bonafide badass bass fishing song and never get around to sharing it with the world. That is, until now. Appearing on his upcoming posthumous album, Smoke from the Chimney, "Bubba Jones" follows a mostly-fictional character on his chase to land a world-record largemouth bass. 

“My dad loved to fish. It was his favorite hobby,” says White’s son, Jody White. “He would travel many miles to find the best fishing holes, or to explore places he heard about where large fish had been caught.” Jody describes the character as “a hybrid, fictional character that Tony Joe made up in his head, combined with his inner self who had a burning desire to catch the world record largemouth bass.” 

In pure Tony Joe White fashion, along with the greasy production from Dan Auerbach, Bubba Jones’s tale unfolds with a rollicking backbeat and deep and smokey vocal delivery—not to mention sweltering slide guitar from Marcus King. Auerbach pegs “Bubba Jones” as quintessential Tony Joe White. “No-one else could do it like Tony Joes does,” says Auerbach. “When is the last song you heard name check Red Man and Gatorade?”

Watch the clip for Tony Joe White's "Bubba Jones" below.
 

Smoke From The Chimney

Smoke from the Chimney, a nine-song album of never-before-heard Tony Joe White tunes, will be released by Dan Auerbach’s Easy Eye Sound label on May 7th (you can pre-order a copy right here). Produced by Auerbach and rounded out by Nashville’s most seasoned studio musicians, Smoke from the Chimney started out as a number of unadorned voice and guitar demos from White’s home studio before being transformed into full band arrangements harkening back to the albums he recorded in the late 60s and early 70s in Nashville and Muscle Shoals—just as he was emerging as an internationally recognized songwriter and recording artist.

 

In the last 10 to 15 years of his life, White would preserve new compositions or revisit older tracks in his home studio with only a guitar—usually his Fender Stratocaster—and that inimitable voice. After his father’s death in 2018, Jody White started transferring those multitrack home recordings to digital files. Looking back on the moment he unearthed the demo of Smoke from the Chimney, he recalls a mix of happiness, gratification, and shock. As he continued to find other songs that didn’t make an album, he moved the material into a separate folder. Within a year, those select recordings would evolve into Smoke from the Chimney.

 

“These songs feel like a collection to me and they all seem to work together, in a weird way, even though they’re so different,” says Auerbach. “There’s some heartbreaking ballads and some really raunchy carnal blues. But it all works together like scenes of a movie.” The cast of musical characters brought in by Auerbach to accompany White’s guitar and vocal recordings includes legendary keyboardist Bobby Wood (Elvis Presley, Dusty Springfield, Wilson Pickett), Nashville pedal steel ace Paul Franklin, next-generation guitar hero Marcus King, and Grammy and ACM award-winning fiddler Stuart Duncan, just to name a few.

 

Jody believes that his father would love the way Smoke From the Chimney turned out. “I feel like it’s validation that Tony Joe was one of the greatest of all time,” he says. “That he could make something so potent, even so late in life, is something that not many people can do. I think it’s going to make people who loved him already love him even more.”

 

 

Tony Joe White - Smoke From The Chimney

1. Smoke from the Chimney

2. Boot Money

3. Del Rio, You’re Making Me Cry

4. Listen to Your Song 

5. Over You

6. Scary Stories 

7. Bubba Jones 

8. Someone Is Crying 

9. Billy