ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, March 15, 1996 TAG: 9603150021
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: KEY WEST, FLA.
SOURCE: JAMES REINDL ASSOCIATED PRESS
James Harman steps off the open-air bar's cramped and sagging stage after a long set, most of his voice still in the Caribbean where a day before he completed a week-long blues cruise.
He has been happier.
The wiring of the stage monitors makes it difficult for Harman to hear himself when he sings and plays the harmonica. The sound man he requested failed to materialize. The kitchen closed without providing the dinner he was promised. And, to add insult to injury, the bar manager called him a jerk.
``And I'm a jerk,'' he says, still stinging as he eats soup and salad rescued by the bartender from the dark kitchen.
It's a bad night in Margaritaville. But it's only one date in a 34-year career that has let Harman do what he loves best and make a living at it. Harman has progressed from pine-woods clubs in the South to the world's biggest blues festivals and Hollywood's House of Blues, where he is a card-carrying house musician.
It has been an uncompromising ride dedicated to the music. Harman, 49, still makes records the old-fashioned way: a live band in a studio playing together, Harman singing every take of each song. Every time he hires a drummer he buys new heads for the bass drum he insists on. He even has rejected big record company overtures in order to maintain control of his music.
``For James, it's what he's done all his life,'' says Jerry Hall, Harman's friend, engineer and partner of 20-plus years. ``In this kind of music, whether you're a newcomer or one of the old masters still around, there's a certain integrity to the genre and if you don't maintain that, you're a bum.''
The day after his rough night in Key West, the late-afternoon drinkers are oblivious to Harman in T-shirt and jeans, a beer and a dolphin sandwich (he had to buy it) in front of him. Last night's pique has given way to reflection.
``It's my life. And when I'm on the stage, that's how I look on it,'' he said. ``You're in my house and I'm playing records - except I'm singing them. That's what it is. It's all a record party. And, if it ever becomes anything more than that, then it loses something.''
It's a record party with rules that are simple to understand but difficult to follow in the world of modern music, where bands can make discs without playing together in the studio: Tell the truth; tell a good story; and make the recording a record of what actually happened in the studio.
Listen to a Harman record and most cuts don't end when the music stops. Hall keeps the tape rolling to catch musician banter. He and Harman insist that stays through the mastering process.
``It kind of lets you into the background,'' Hall said.
Harman's background includes a lifetime association with music.
Born in Anniston, Ala., Harman learned harmonica from his father, Oliver James Harman, and piano from his mother, Kathleen.
``I started piano lessons at 4 and the harmonicas were in the piano bench, so if I did my lessons, I got to play the harmonica,'' Harman said.
By the time he was 18 and the family had moved to Panama City, Fla., church choirs had given way to sneaking into black nightclubs, first to listen, then to perform.
``I painted on a mustache and went into a bar and started singing `baby baby'' instead of `Lordy Lordy,' '' said Harman, who is white. ``I fell in love and I could do it and I started going to black joints and started hanging out with kids from the black church and singing with them and I never had any opposition because I was a guy that came in and sang like a man was a man. I could play the harp, I could sing. I knew the names of the artists.''
That is a key insight into Harman's uncompromising attitude about playing the blues. He appreciates the tradition. His love for his father, an Anniston police captain, underscores his devotion to making his own way and living by his own rules.
``He's sort of my idol and role model,'' Harman said. During the Depression, before he joined the police, Harman's father grew his own food, raised hogs and fished the Coosa River in Alabama.
``My dad had all the food he could use because of his own wit, and sat around fishing all day and playing harmonica while other people were jumping out windows.''
Harman cut his first record in 1964. By then, he'd given up his college art studies because he was making a living from music. With a horn band, Harman traveled the Southern countryside playing rhythm and blues at small clubs.
``We'd play like four sets, rockin' and reelin', swinging from the ceiling,'' Harman recalled. ``And then you'd finish up and say good night. Fifteen minutes, pitch black outside, everybody's gone. Totally empty. And there we are loading out the back door in the moonlight to go back to our motel and drive to the next town.''
Three decades later, the venues mostly are better on the more than 250 nights he works each year. But he's still passionate about his music. He rarely records a cover version of someone else's song and he demands perfection in the studio - the true sound of live musicians playing together.
``If we had our own top 10 list of things on a record, one is (Harman's) personality and the personality of the band members come through and the other is that it's not going to be another blues record that goes a-ranta a-ranta rant for 10 songs,'' Hall said. ``It's going to be different from anything anyone else does.''
True. Last year's ``black & white'' included the same song twice and a poem done to congas. All the animal and insect sounds for ``Second Voyage of Noah's Ark'' were recorded live. Hall even surprised the band by recording one tune mono and Harman liked the joke enough to keep the version.
``It's all about economy, ensemble, arrangement, texture,'' Harman said. ``That's the picture I'm painting.''
The former art student paints in music with words. A voracious reader, Harman also has dabbled in writing fiction. Now, he channels that effort to songwriting, employing the techniques of good storytelling.
``When you get down to songs, it's the shortest form, because you got to give enough clues to make it have continuity and mean something but have enough mystery and story to make it worthwhile reading,'' he said.
Harman, who lives in Huntington Beach, Calif., seems to have found a home in the 1990s on Black Top Records of New Orleans. He's released four records since joining the label in 1991 but is planning to take 1996 off because ``black & white'' didn't get out until July.
The winter afternoon light is fading as Harman winds up an interview to return to his motel and get ready to play. The conversation turned inevitably toward his definition of success, yielding an answer predictably simple to understand, difficult to master.
``See, if you get into blues, you're not looking to be a star and make a million dollars,'' Harman said. ``You're looking to spend your life doing what you wanted to do.
``That's how I'm happy. I do what I do, make a living at it and I'm appreciated for it. That's all I ask.''
LENGTH: Long : 125 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: AP. The blues wail from James Harman's harmonica at aby CNBbar in Key West, Fla. color.