Ted Drozdowski’s Scissormen Cuts Through The Noise

A music journalist as well as a musician, Drozdowski just published the first in a series of e-books – Obessions Of A Music Geek, Volume 1: Blues Guitar Giants.  The latest Scissormen album, Love & Life, arrived last month and his touring schedule just keeps on growing. 

Drozdowski spoke with Pollstar while preparing for a 12 hour-drive to New York to launch the Scissormen’s latest road trip.  The man whose band was profiled by documentary filmmaker Robert Mugge chatted about his music and how he loves to jump from table to table as he gets really up-close-and-personal with his fans.  Then there’s his hobby of using just about anything  and everything available to him for playing slide guitar, including forks, knives, bottles and … pistols.

What moves  the Scissormen from one stop to another?

It’s a beautiful 2007 Dodge Caravan minivan. Since I’ve been playing in bands since the ’80s, I believe it’s the sixth or seventh Caravan that I’ve chewed up.  This one’s a baby. It only has 100,000 miles on it.  I think our record is 249,000 miles.

Musicians endorse instruments, gear and such, but why don’t you see vehicle endorsements?

I do not know.  To me, the other thing I think musicians should endorse but they’re probably embarrassed about, is Imodium. … You got a lot of bad food.  I jokingly call Imodium “the musician’s friend.”

What was your first band?

The first band I played in was called “The Liggers.” That’s a British term for people who kind of hang on in the rock scene for free drinks and beer. It was kind of an inside joke.  Three of us who were in the band were music journalists, local rock critics in Boston.  We thought that would be pretty funny.

There’s been a pretty interesting succession of things since then. That was kind of a punk rock/garage band. From there I moved into a group called Vision Thing.  That was in the era of George H.W. Bush … the first George Bush presidency.  He, according to the press, had problems with “the vision thing.”  He addressed it once at a press conference, saying, “About the vision thing.”  We thought that would be a good name for a band. … That was an alternative rock band and we were on the CherryDisc label.

Parallel to that I had an improvisational all-guitar ensemble – five guitars.  We advertised ourselves as “five guitars and no tunes.”  That was called Blood Blister.  We played the Knitting Factory and places like that.  After that I had a band called The Devil Gods which was kind of a clearing house for every kind of vocally oriented guitar music that I enjoyed.  We also did some live looping and some instrumental stuff, too, on the albums and during our sets. 

During the last year or so that The Devil Gods were around, I started the Scissormen.  We started as a Mississippi hill country inspired juke-joint duo.  Now it’s a trio.  This is our first album as a trio.  It’s our sixth album [overall].  Along the way … Robert Mugge, the great documentary filmmaker even made a movie about us [“Big Shoes: Walking & Talking The Blues”], that came out in 2012.  There’s a live album with that.  Working with Robert was a thrill.

I was always a blues man.  I [always] of my playing as an extension of blues.  I even thought of the bands I was playing in as kind of covert blues band.  But with Scissormen I made it over.

So even during the punk days there was a blues band struggling to break out?

I feel that there was.  Certainly in my guitar playing and in a lot of my song structures.  Whenever I took a solo it was pretty much a blues-derived solo.  The funny thing is, at the same time I never really believed myself when I played Chicago or Memphis blues.  It was really traveling in Mississippi and being exposed to the electric Mississippi blues and guys like R.L. Burnside, women like Jessie Mae Hemphill, and, of course, Junior Kimbrough, that I felt that I had found blues that I could really … feel comfortable [with], and be authentic, genuine and honest in the music.  Not to try to be someone I wasn’t because nobody wants that.

You and the Scissormen follow a very long and talented lineage of great blues rock bands, such as Savoy Brown, Yardbirds and early Fleetwood Mac during that band’s Peter Green era.  How do you honor that tradition and keep it fresh at the same time?

I think part of it is our live performance.  We’re extremely high energy.  I like to engage with people.  I get off of the stage and right in front of people.  One of the things that keeps it fresh is that we are more deeply rooted in some bands.  When I was making this record one of myreference points, sonically, were records like [The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s] Axis: Bold As Love and Electric Ladyland and Fleetwood Mac’s Then Play On.

People hear music from us that’s based in the ’20s, ’30s, ’40s and ’50s, tradition, stylistically very often in its foundation.  Yet we skip over a couple of decades, touching down briefly in that psychedelic  era you just mentioned, but then carry it forward with improvisation, textural sound, experimental sonics. When we play live we really don’t tend to play any of the songs exactly the same way at the same time.  There’s always room for improvisation, changes, sessions that can open up a lot wider and we all go on instrumental forays.

I think we bring a very contemporary energy to the music.  I am really dedicated to the idea of breaking down that wall between the performer and the audience.  I spend a lot of time on the floor with a wireless guitar rig playing to people’s tables, playing with their knives, forks, beer bottles … some crazy  stuff.

At one point [somebody] handed me a machete.  Another time in Mississippi somebody handed me a 9mm Beretta to slide with.  Which I did but only after making sure there were no bullets in the chamber and that the clip was out.

In some ways it’s very roadhouse, very old school, very Guitar Slim.  Then, in other ways, it has an energy and vitality.

I found in Mississippi the primal roots that, as a musician interested in psychedelia his whole career, I felt I could relate to instantly and kind of adapt to my own style while working in that context.

At home, when you’re not performing, recording or writing, do you always have a guitar within reach?

I do.  There are always two guitars in the front, in the living room, in case I get an idea.  One’s a resonator.  The other is my road guitar, which I call my signature model because it’s a reissued Esquire that I had extensive modifications done to.  I hated the finish so I started having people who are friends and influences I would trust, sign it.  It’s covered in signatures.  That’s my signature model.

Those guitars are always there, an acoustic and electric, and there’s always an amp plugged in and sitting in the background. … Always ready for a moment of inspiration and always ready to pet the dog. … We have a Labrador retriever mix and she’s pretty awesome.  In fact, when we decided to go indie with this record, we named our record after the dog.  The label is called Dolly Sez Woof.

You mentioned improvising during the live show.  How spontaneous is the band? Can it switch directions on a whim?

We will write a setlist but we are known for completely disregarding it.  Occasionally I’ll pull out a tune that the band has never played before.  I’m really lucky to have the live band I have now.  These guys are extremely flexible musicians.  They’re also great guys to tour with.  They’re the most mature musicians that I have ever had the pleasure of spending time with and that makes the whole road experience so much easier. 

So If I decide to suddenly extend the solo or take a solo somewhere where I haven’t gone before, or decide I’m going to have a key change in the middle of a song, they’re right there to jump on it with me.  That is an incredible gift.

Does audience reaction to the show inspire you to change direction?

Always.  I love playing for people. To me, that’s what music is about.  I know a lot of musicians who would really be happy if they spent all of their time in the studio.  But I wouldn’t.  I love making records but one of my big motivations for making records is to be able to go out and support them. … I love that energy, that affirmation … the people, I love responding to them.  To me, the whole experience makes me a better person.  To perform in a way that can affect people is to open your heart. And it’s hard to  open your heart in today’s culture.  We’re so overwhelmed and there is so many things coming at us, we have a tendency to be defensive.  We’re always marketed to, there are always angles.  But when you’re on stage and if you’re really interested in communicating with people and playing music the best you can, you have to do it with an open heart.  That’s something I learned from the scene and talking with Stevie Ray Vaughan a lot.  You just have to put yourself into it.

On your live album Bootleg Live at Blues Rules 2010, you talk about “devil songs.”  What makes for a good “devil song?”

It’s funny. I am obsessed with the devil.  Not in a mental way.  To me, one of the great things about Son House and Charley Patton, two of the originators of delta blues, is this wonderful, visual and visceral conflict between good and evil in their music.  It’s right there.  That’s a real human thing.  Are you poorly motivated or well-motivated?  What are you intentions?  What do you want from life as a person?  I think the music of Son House in particular, all of those questions play out in such a beautiful and blatant way, that I find that really fascinating.  You’re dealing with honest questions about identity, who you are and how you want to be perceived.  God and the devil can be handy symbols for dealing with that stuff. I love it and that’s one of the things that first attracted me to really primal delta blues, and later on the Mississippi blues of R.L. Burnside and Jessie Mae Hemphill. … Just that idea of God and the devil always being at odds within the human soul.  Like those 1940s cartoons where Porky Pig is getting angry and he’s got a little devil pig on one shoulder and an angel on the other?  The blues has a lot of that aspect in it. It’s so human.

When did you stop writing about music as a full-time job?

1998.  It was during the tenure of The Devil Gods.  At that point I wanted to pursue music more actively.

When you first crossed that line from writing about music to being paid for making music, what was the first big surprise about that world you had chronicled for so long?

Having already been playing in bands while I had a job, the previous 10 years or so, it wasn’t that big of a surprise.  I knew it was going to be a real punch to the chin.  Playing music at that level, unless you’re selling tens and tens of thousands of copies of records, you’re getting … on a great night, $700 to $1,000.  On a typical night you’re getting $300 to $500.  You divide that among the other band members, the expenses it took to get you there, posters, media, outreach, and, of course, gas, tires, van maintenance, hotels, the money starts to get really, really thin.  So if you decide to turn down that road you really have to love the music above all else and pursue it with your whole heart.

It’s funny.  Had I stayed employed as a full-time editor, which I was at the time, I would probably be making, handily, six figures at this point.  But there are so many things I’ve seen and done, experiences I wouldn’t have if I [held] an office or a desk job.  And when I do an interview with someone like Billy Gibbons and he starts talking about obscure blues guys or starts talking about a certain kind of Lightnin’ Hopkins guitar lick, I am totally there.  I know everything about it.  In the case of some of the Mississippi stuff, my knowledge handily exceeds his.  Everyone has their areas of specialization.

It’s also a gift to be able to spread the gospel of this music to other people.  To have assimilated it and grown to understand it … and to be able to talk to people in workshops, music history workshops.  Even our shows, if it’s the right environment, are kind of a history lesson, sometimes. 

Every year we play a showcase in Memphis during the International Blues Competition.  And we played a set that was designed to be a timeline of blues … all the way to contemporary music. We played songs through 100 years of history.  It was really fun. To be able to have the tools to do that is something that I’m very proud of and very happy to have accomplished over the years.

What is the creation process like for you?

It depends.  I don’t necessarily stick to one, four or five chords  One of the things Junior Kimbrough said that I always found amusing but also very true, is “I don’t need three chords for a song.  Gimme one chord – that’s a song.  When I find another chord – that’s another song.”

What I liked about that is, in a way it’s very jazz-like and it’s also very African.  He’s talking, essentially … trance music, where you take a certain chord, a certain anchor … and just build on it.  That’s there, too. Unlike a lot blues songs, I also believe in chromaticism.  So if you listened to “R.L. Burnside (Sleight Return)” on the new record, and if you listened to “Let’s Go To Memphis” which my late and very dear friend Mighty Sam McClain sang on the record – those are chromatic things. So I’m not bound by any sort of tradition and yet I feel there are aspects of the tradition in every single piece I play, whether it’s a slide, open tuning or a certain grungy old amplifier sound, or a finger-picking approach.  So I’m not bound to it, but nonetheless I think it’s actually become a part of my DNA at this point.

When performing live do you have to mentally focus on your playing or does it all come out as naturally as a bird takes flight?

It just comes out. It really does.  It took me a long time to get there. … Since I was already writing about music at the same time I was playing, probably the first 100 shows I played in my old punk rock band, [were] like the “The Thing With Two Heads” that movie with Rosey Grier and Ray Milland.  There were these two heads pulling [me] in different directions.  I’d be playing a lick and critiquing it at the same time. And that does not work.

One of the things I like about playing live is that it keeps me in the moment.  I’m generally very busy and have a lot of demands on my time.  I write while at home, I produce other artists, do some consulting and stuff – all of that can pull you in different directions. But when you’re on stage, in order for it to work, you have to be completely in that moment.  For me, anything that pulls me into that moment is an absolute gift as well.

Are you your own worst critic?

I don’t think so.  I think I used to be.

When writing about music, were you a big critic about other bands or did you accept a band for what it is and what the members were trying to accomplish?

I was specifically critical of a number of artists, including blues artists. It made me a number of enemies early on and I’ve made amends with most of those people.  I believe in being honest above all, and that was an important part of it.  For most of the last decade I’ve been in the fortunate position of only doing feature stories, mostly, and being asked, or volunteering to write about bands that I already have some certain interest or passion for.  It’s been great for me because I’ve been able to interview and work with people who I already have a fairly high level of insight to, ask intelligent questions and gain more insight.  That’s been really cool and it’s also improved my own guitar playing.  It’s given me ideas about sound, gear and technique.  Things like that.  That’s another motivation for me.  These days I just write for guitar magazines so it keeps my nose in guitar 24/7.  I love that. I feel it has helped me grow as a player and it has helped me grow in my understanding of how the guitar functions, its history … and what I can expect from it.

Do you hear music in your sleep?

I sometimes do and I sometimes dream that I am playing as well.  Sometimes I have that terrible dream where we fight to get to the gig through a snow storm.  We get there, I open up my guitar case and two of the strings are busted.  I also have a dream that I’m playing with the musicians that I love.  With R.L. Burnside or Otis Taylor.  I had a dream where I was jamming with Stevie Ray Vaughan and B.B. King and they completely kicked my ass.  And I never felt happier in a dream in my life.

Sometimes I also dream lyrics, a sound, a chord change, and I’ll get up and try to write it down. … Again, with all of these distractions, it’s easy to lose things. … Talking about writing, my ideas will either come with a lyric or come with a musical change or a riff.  They come in all of these different ways.  I have these storylines kicking around in my head.

For example, the song “Black Lung Fever” on the record. … I’ve been really interested in writing more about my family.  My grandmother was a healer from the woods of Poland and my two grandfathers were coalminers who died of black lung before they were in their late ’40s.  My mom was one of 11 kids who grew up on a farm and didn’t have shoes until she went to school in first grade … and grew up wearing flour-sack dresses.  I wanted to scrape the surface of that which I did with “Black Lung Fever.”

The song “R.L. Burnside (Sleight Return)” is a true story that I couch as a dream.  R.L. was at the house one day, wanted to watch a movie, decided it should be an Amos ’n’  Andy DVD, which I had mostly because it is a historical artifact. My thought is that in 10 years kids won’t understand it was that bad at one point.

And he told us a story about him and his friends.  They gathered their money together and rode their bikes all the way to Memphis from Holly Springs, about an hour and a half ride or more, to see the Amos ’n’  Andy film. On their way back home, when they saw headlights, they would turn their bikes into the ditch and jump off because they afraid [the people in the car] were nightriders.

For me, it’s funny to talk about that song as a dream because it gives me a license to do psychedelic music. It also gives me another way to tell a true story.  But the thing about the nightriders is that it’s a reminder that race in America can pop into the conversation at any single time. … Here we were hanging out in the living room and he tells us about growing up being afraid of nightriders. 

After you have recorded a song, do you consider it to be done or do you still tinker with it years later?

I generally feel that the song is done.  Although I sometimes redo my songs and they might evolve a different way live … but once it’s done I’m ready to move on.  Steve Jobs said “real artists ship.”  And I take that to heart.  I know people like to spend years in the studio making albums and if you’re U2 you have all the money in the world, you can afford to spend months and months making albums.  But I believe in conceptualizing a song, bringing it to life and moving on.  Real artists ship.

What do you see when you’re on stage?

Generally pretty happy people.  Even places that we play like tourist clubs where people might not anticipate a band that tends to have some edginess, we go over.  So I really love seeing people.  Occasionally … images from a song will dance in my head or the memories will come back. If it’s something beautiful or something sad, I feel myself, sometimes, getting emotionally affected by that.  I might hear my voice break a little bit.

I also like to pick my spots. If someone looks as if they’d be especially delighted if I ended up plopping on top of their table and taking a slide guitar solo with their beer glass.  Sometimes I’ll pick people who look like they’ll be irritated by that, just to loosen them up.

Do you consider yourself a lucky man?

It’s funny you’d mention that. In all manners, yes. But my friend Mighty Sam McClain, who recently passed away [June 2015], we were very close, we would talk on the phone every two weeks or so.  It would always start by bitchin’ about the music business and all the shit that has gone wrong, blah, blah, blah.  By the time the conversation ended, we’d always come to the realization that we were really lucky people.  And I’ve been missing him because those were beautiful conversations.

But I am lucky. I think if you are able to spend your life in music and that you are able to survive to the point that you have a home, a roof over your head and nothing terribly wrong is happening, that you can have a long-term relationship – my wife and I just celebrated our 32nd anniversary – then you’re lucky.  To have all those nice things, and an awesome dog … and to still be able to create music, go out and play it, have people accept it and love you for it, and you love them for being there – shit, I don’t really know how much more lucky you can get.

Upcoming shows for Ted Drozdowski’s Scissormen:

Aug. 9 – Nashville, Tenn., The Bluebird Café
Aug. 13 – Nashville, Tenn.,  Grimey’s Too
Aug. 15 – Nashville, Tenn., The 5 Spot
Aug. 28 – Winona, Minn., Broken World Records
Aug. 29 – Minneapolis, Minn., Hell’s Kitchen  (morning)
Aug. 29 – Annandale, Minn., Rich’s Bar @ Russell’s (evening)
Sept. 1 – Indianapolis, Ind., The Slippery Noodle Inn
Sept. 2 – Kansas City, Mo., BB’s Lawnside Barbecue
Sept. 3 – Lincoln, Neb., Zoo Bar
Sept. 4 – Fort Collins, Colo., Avogadro’s Number
Sept. 5 – Denver, Colo, Ziggies Saloon
Sept. 6 – Denver, Colo., Ziggies Saloon
Oct. 28 – Franklin, Tenn., The Factory At Franklin (Music City Roots)