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Nothing Personal
Gobsmacked II
Rupert Everett muses on transubstantiation; Trevor-Rees Jones dabbles in exploitation; Julia Roberts half-naked before the nation. We're gobsmacked!
By Amy Reiter
[03/14/00]

People Feature
"Hey Nineteen"
Hearing Steely Dan's new single sent me back to adolescence and reminded me of the future I had forgotten.
By Steve Burgess
[03/14/00]

Nothing Personal
Re-heat after me
Hollywood's favorite girl-gripe is back! Also: Dino De Laurentiis gets cranky about Clarice; Chrissie Hynde's gonna use her knife; and Paul MCartney shakes his bootie on the bar at Hogs and Heifers.
By Amy Reiter
[03/13/00]

People Feature
"The Real Island"
It's not what you know, but who you know -- and what they think of your hair -- that determines whether you'll survive!
By Carina Chocano
[03/13/00]

People Feature
Throw me a quote
All I needed were a few pithy comments from celebs on the subject of sports gear. After hundreds of messages, I've finally realized that Hollywood doesn't like me.
By Stephanie Gregory
[03/13/00]

Complete archives for People

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As the show-biz name he has worn and discarded will tell you, Bobby "Blue" Bland sings the blues, but that doesn't really do him justice. Though he began as one of many Roy Brown imitators, shouting his way through the jump blues, he grew closer to -- and further from -- a true blues singer. In a number of remarkable songs ("Cry, Cry, Cry," "I Pity the Fool," "Turn on Your Love Light," "Lead Me On") recorded primarily in the 1950s and '60s, Bland invented a sound that felt both unique and downright lived-in.

While the horn-driven Joe Scott arrangements that buoyed Bland's work formed a natural bridge between the big band sound of the '40s and the soul revues of the '60s, there was something odd and angst-ridden about the tales they told. Beneath titles as lurid as pulp fiction paperbacks ("Woke Up Screaming," "A Million Miles From Nowhere"), penned by anonymous artists under the single moniker of Deadric Malone (an arrangement that allowed Bland's manager, Don Robey, to pocket all the proceeds), were songs that snuck in just under the curtain of kitsch. They were songs written in lipstick on bar napkins, found beneath half-empty glasses in roadside taverns. While Bland's singing owed something to crooners like Tony Bennett and Perry Como, the sound was rougher -- and just slightly removed. It was, as one of his early '60s songs had it, "Two Steps From the Blues."

Of course, there is no justice, and you won't hear Bobby Bland on the radio, or much of anywhere, really. You are more likely to hear some white band covering one of his tunes. Eric Clapton is still performing "Farther up the Road," the Grateful Dead used to close their early San Francisco shows with "Turn on Your Love Light" (Pigpen McKernan was no great singer, but the band's two-drum attack owed something to blues revues) and the Band paid homage with "Share Your Love With Me."

But Bland is still going strong. Despite bouts with drink, drugs and depression -- not to mention a triple bypass in 1995 -- he performed over 100 shows last year. (That's down from the 300 gigs a year that was his standard for decades.) A fair amount of his work remains in print (the best of it captured on three double-CD packages from his day on the Duke label), he still records for the Malaco label (a sort of living Smithsonian for blues musicians) and he has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. And like some roadhouse Sisyphus, he seems by and large resigned to the life he has chosen.

"Oh, it gets kind of tiresome sometimes," he told Peter Guralnick back in 1979, "but you get a schedule and you just go and do your work. Because, really, that's what's paying the bills."

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"One month from the day I first met you/Your promises proved to be untrue
Step by step, I've been a fool/That's why I'm two steps from the blues."

The cover of Bland's 1961 album "Two Steps From the Blues" is a work of art, a Mondrian in black and blue. It's a color photograph of the singer standing in front of a one-story building at the bottom of, yes, two steps. His pants are gray, his shirt is black. His coat is thrown over his shoulder, Sinatra style, and dark glasses hide his eyes from the sunlight. The building that represents "the blues" is paneled in squares of blue and white -- you would think it was his hotel room except his name appears on one of the panels, as if he were perpetually playing there. (Talk about bringing your work home with you.) In fact, the only thing that isn't black or blue or white in the photo is Bobby Bland's brown skin.

The road that brought Bland to this place of perpetual emotion began in the South and crisscrossed the country, six nights a week. The singer was born Robert Calvin Bland on Jan. 27, 1930, in the little town of Rosemark, Tenn., just outside of Memphis. He quit school in the third grade and remains practically illiterate today. He speaks in a garbled syntax at times, and is suspicious of talk he doesn't understand.

"I didn't like to work much, but I got a job at Bender's Garage, which was $27 a week," Bland told Guralnick in what remains the definitive piece about the singer (collected in "Lost Highway"). "And I started to sing on weekends. Spirituals. Just a small amount of it. We called ourselves the Pilgrim Travelers after a group that was big at the time. Then I started hanging around Beale Street with a bunch of guys. They used to give an amateur show down by the park at the Palace Theater every Wednesday night. Naturally we came to call ourselves the Beale Streeters."

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