He's the king of West Coast harp: an emotionally intense player who's sent several generations of fans spinning onto the dance floor at countless venues, not only around his home base of Los Angeles but also everywhere in the world where the blues still matter. Those fans will testify that Rod Piazza epitomizes the best in live blues performance. He's been gigging since the mid-'60s, when he cut two albums with the Dirty Blues Band before leaving to join one of his great influences, George “Harmonica” Smith, in an act they called Bacon Fat. After more than ten years learning the ropes with Smith, Piazza put together his current band, the Mighty Flyers. It's with them that he's earned his widest renown as a band leader, harmonica wizard, gut-wrenching singer, and riveting performer.
The Mighty Flyers put a lot of mileage on the van and a lot of music on disc since playing their first jobs together in 1980. You can hear the most recent examples of their work on Beyond the Source, their latest CD on the Tone-Cool label. The sound they put out stimulates mental pictures of the places they've played — from the steamy, crowded saloons of blues legend to outdoor festivals with families scattered across lawns that open before a vast stage. Piazza knows both settings well and everything in between. He also knows how to scale his show to fit the demands of any venue.
SEEING EYE TO EYE
He didn't always. Back in the '60s, Piazza recalls, audience standards weren't so high. “When I started out,” he says, “we were just playing for kids our own age. We weren't nervous about it. Most of the time we were probably too drunk to feel nervous. But we weren't that good, either.”
His education as a performer began after he hooked up with Smith, a seasoned blues performer who learned at the feet of Little Walter and performed with Muddy Waters on and off for more than 20 years. “That's when I started playing for older people, adults,” Piazza says. “George and I started working these little bars down in Watts. Older black people came in and dug the music they'd grown up with, which is what we were playing. I gained a lot of confidence by working down there and playing in front of other great musicians. Like, T-Bone Walker or Pee Wee Crayton would be in the house on any given night.”
Smith pushed Piazza into taking greater risks. “George showed up one night and said, ‘I have two long cords, Rod,’” Piazza says. “‘I'm going off one side of the stage into the crowd with one of those cords, and you're going off on the other side.' I said, ‘Oh, my God!’ It was pretty frightening. But that's what broke me into not having any stage fright, and now I know that if I walk into a crowd and play my harmonica into a wireless mic, it'll get over with the people more than anything else.”
Smith imparted another important lesson. “He got me started on making eye contact with the public,” Piazza says. “I'd never done that, but it's really important. Now when I'm playing, I always look out to the people, and I think they pick up on that. It lets them know that I'm playing for them.”
VENUES: SIZE COUNTS
The blues scene has expanded dramatically since Piazza broke into the business. Electric blues took shape in cramped quarters back in the '40s, and the claustrophobic vibe helped enhance the music's intensity. During the '60s, as blues began building a wider (and whiter) following, veteran artists found themselves playing not just for neofolkies but, eventually, for crowds liberally sprinkled with moms, dads, and kids out for a day of sunshine, Frisbees, and music.
For blues musicians, any change that brought more work was a blessing, though a mixed one. “The problem with doing a big festival gig is that the subtleties in playing and in entertaining are lost,” Piazza says. “You have to take more of an in-your-face approach. You have to deliver a lot stronger of a show in regard to how it's paced than you do in a little intimate club. For example, you won't get over at a festival if the drummer is playing with brushes, because the P.A. is not going to carry it in a mix where you can control everything. On the other hand, you can control the mix if you're playing just through your amps at a small club.
“Festivals are big events, not just one band's gig, so people there are just out to have a good time rather than listen to this or that act. Plus these audiences have already been bombarded by a ton of stuff by the time you start playing, so you have to try not to lose them. You want to suck them in to what you're doing. You have to give them a change of pace. Then once you have them listening to you, maybe you can perform some of that subtle stuff and make it happen.”
For Piazza, playing to the room also means picking material that best reflects the vibe. “There are tried-and-true songs on my set list that I know will get over to a wider audience — let's say, an audience that's not all blues diehards,” he says. “If the spectrum of people is wider, there are songs in our repertoire that will hit them. They're not that far away from the blues, but maybe they have a little more modern funk to them. For those types of songs we'll do ‘Lowdown Dog’ or ‘Sinister Woman,’ for an up-tempo shuffle with a real strong, hard-hitting backup. Then there are some cool little gems from Little Walter, like ‘Too Late, Brother’ or ‘My Babe,’ which work well in the clubs. I'm not saying they won't get over in the bigger rooms, but they're not going to be heard by as many ears as something else that we'd blow right into your face.”
More important than the songs themselves, though, is how you play the songs. “It's not so much how they're written as how they're performed,” Piazza says.
SOUND ADVICE
To get a feel for what kind of room he'll be dealing with next, Piazza asks his roadie for advance information: “Is it a good stage? Is it big enough to do what we have to do?” He arrives at the venue no more than an hour before show time — usually less. That's the time to run through a few songs from the set for the benefit of the sound crew and to talk with them about how they can work together to deliver the goods that night.
To Piazza, sound is what determines whether your show rocks or reeks. “Bad sound on the bandstand is the worst,” he says. “If the crew running the house system is not together, that will ruin it for us. We play a lot off the tone of the instruments and the sound of the mix, so if the sound crew isn't in our corner, that can alienate us.”
Bad sound — and beyond that, bad gear — led to the worst gig in the Mighty Flyers' long career. At a festival in England, Honey Piazza, Rod's wife and the band's piano player, was playing a boogie-woogie duet with the drummer as the other musicians left the stage. “When you go to Europe,” Piazza says, “you play mostly on gear that they supply for you. So on this gig, the piano stand broke right in the middle of the song, and the piano fell straight onto the floor as Honey was playing it. The drummer continued playing as all these stagehands ran out and tried to fix it. The rest of the gear they supplied us with was crap too, so that was probably our crummiest show as far as keeping the energy level on the move.”
THE BOTTOM LINE
But high points greatly outnumber disasters for the Mighty Flyers. There's no mystery about it and no exotic preshow preparations; doing a great show is second nature for Piazza. “I just know that when I walk out there, I have to give everything,” he says.
In the end, it's all about serving the audience. “Self-indulgence is a sin when it's misused onstage,” Piazza says. “When you're playing for people, you have to forget about playing for yourself. You have to do some of that, sure, but you mainly have to put it where people can appreciate it … where it can be understood and assimilated.
“Those people expect to see you put out 100 or 200 percent,” Piazza says. “They expect to have a good time. I try to give them not just a musical experience but a visual experience at the same time — the whole cake, not just a piece of it. I want them to get the show and the blow.”
