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Cee Cee James’ European Diary

Part Two

From Seeds of Discontent Come The Fruits of Success

Cee Cee James is an extremely intense and creative blues artist who works out her inner demons in music that connects with fans even when they speak a different language. Her recent twenty-day tour of Europe was an overwhelming emotional experience that also overwhelmed many who saw and experienced her performances.

Her odyssey mirrors that of  many in the genre who have made Europe their second – and even first – home from Luther Allison, Walter Trout, Eddie Boyd, Champion Jack Dupree, Memphis Slim, Louisiana Red, and Detroit Junior to Peaches Staten and more.

From a father who left when she was a young child, to a first marriage that lasted too long, a second one that ended in too early a passing,  and now a third with a loving man who is her guitarist, James has paid her dues, and she bleeds with us in that experience.

In her diary she writes: “Beyond the rough ride and the somewhat crazy gig schedule, it’s nineteen actual days in as I begin to write this, and I’m still in my bliss. It sounds so strange to be happy in such circumstance, but indeed I am. Why I can’t exactly say, but I’m feeling it’s because I am draining my soul and heart of their ache to release the fire they contain through the vocal interpretation of story in song.”

Don Wilcock

Life only teaches us real courage by making us stand up to our most horrifying of fears. Walking away from my first marriage and losing my second man to cancer… well those were and will always continue to be two of the heaviest teachers I personally have encountered thus far, both involving the fleeting capture of love and then the echoing canyon of emptiness in the deepest center of myself when that love seeps out of my tightly fisted grasp.

It was February 16, the Chabah – another small but sardine-packed venue. The people, as in most of these small clubs, standing or sitting in chairs and tables that were shoved right up under the stage with their heads tilted up toward my heart with me completely and unabashedly in the direct spotlight of their scrutiny.  However, I was completely ready for them and gave every ounce that they demanded and more.

As usual, after the show, a seemingly endless stream of hugs, kisses, CD sales, smiles, tears, elation, joy, connection. After this particular show and a couple of others on this tour, I secretly yearned to run out the door as fast as I could away from the number one enemy of my voice – cigarette smoke.

The fans had no idea how drained I had become, and beyond getting away from the smoke, I desperately needed to stop talking and drop into a hot tub and then crawl into bed. I don’t drink or bump up with speed or coke or depend on sleeping pills – just natural deep rest and nourishment is what I need. I ended up giving the last of my energy to them in the hour or so after the show and then finally escaping out into the night and away to the hotel.

The sounds of the hour glass now drained down as Father Time slowly turned night toward another day.

It’s Friday and we are on the road going from Belgium into Holland, a four-hour drive. The night before, February 17, we played a sold out two-hundred-and-fifty-seat Arts Center called the Culturcentrum De Steiger. We were all exhausted, and the sound mix on the stage was a bit weak due to the drums not being miked. We all struggled a bit, but when you have that many people jam packed in front of you, you do your job. I almost fainted twice I was so tired.

They fed us late; I should not have eaten. There was a lot of salt in the food which dried up my throat – not a good thing. It took every ounce of energy reserve for me to do “my act,” but I did it, and they believed it. This was reflected in the seemingly endless CD sales, hugs, kisses, and love.

The Nixx BBBlues Club on February 18 was the lightest gig we’d had thus far in attendance with about sixty people in the small club, but it had the best overall stage sound according to the boys. They were happy and played very well. This venue actually had a dance floor and some took to dancing as I came off the stage to mingle among them preaching the good blues gospel of life. I was actually very neutral about this gig. There was a strange undercurrent of, not sadness, but something between, possibly a numbing fear, a cold wind of disconnection.

The owner of the club had a brother that is dying, and they are very close. The agent told me that the owner might not be at the club for my show, but he came and was emitting something I know very well from my own experience of death. It’s a kind of numb existence where those stark emotions of loss that are being forced upon you, are controlling your inability to connect or navigate the B.S. of life anymore. There is no light in your eyes. There is no projection of your usual game plan. There is nothing but a stark bare unspeakable reality in your vision, and you are not quite sure how to exist or communicate as death follows you around claiming what is his.

CD sales were good, the comments and love extremely generous, and, as usual, my desire to get back to the room excruciating, but the boys wanted a few beers and the road manager was moving slow.

For some reason, and I cannot tell you why at this point, a three-hour drive the next day to Barnaby’s Blues Club in Germany turned into a five-hour drive. When we arrived, I left Rob to rest in the hotel room while the owner of the club took me to a local radio station for a regional and live-streaming internet interview. Rob was supposed to go and beat himself up afterwards because the host DJ Florian had managed to acquire a beautiful National Guitar for him to play on for a couple of live numbers. But Rob was still getting over the viral infection he had caught at the beginning of the tour, so he stayed behind. Florian had attended one of our shows earlier in the tour, and so he was primed and ready for the interview. He is one of the nicest people I have ever met, a big guy and I’m sure every ounce of his blood is full of love. A special soul.

The gig that evening at Barnaby’s turned out to be absolutely brutal, and it actually ended our tour. I had to cancel our last gig in France at 7 a.m. the next morning.

All of the shows on this tour consisted either of two fifty-minute sets, two sixty-minute sets, one ninety-minute set, etc. Short showcase gigs. However, after the second set at every venue, the crowd would demand more, and then more, and then more until I finally just cut it off.

 When we booked the tour, I was under the impression that I would only be singing for those short sets each night, but it does not happen that way.  Because of the crowd response, I never got off any stage without singing at least thirty to sixty minutes more each night.  That doesn’t sound like much, but it builds up over time into more stress on the vocal chords.

So I hit my thirteenth stage at Barnaby’s and found myself standing in the middle of my number one enemy – a smokestack of secondhand cigarette smoke. The smoke seemed to gravitate up to the stage and just hung like thick fog all around us.

Three times I almost passed out – my eyes stinging so bad I could barely see. I did sixty minutes of hard-core singing and intense physical movement and entertainment. I was supposed to do two fifty-minute sets. I lost track of time. The second set ended up being seventy-five minutes as the people kept demanding more.

Back in the hotel room at 1:15 a.m., everything reeked of smoke – clothes, hair, underwear, socks. I took a hot shower, washing my hair, but the smell would not come out. At 6 a.m, I awoke in terror because I knew the smoke and the long sets had doomed my ability to do our final show.

I tossed for an hour in fear, finally calling the agent to cancel the show. I tried to talk normal, but I sounded like a ninety-year-old man with a whiskey-coated, cancer-ridden throat. In that moment, I hated that club. I hated my need to please. I hated the fact that I had to sing in a place where they have no respect for what that smoke does to people. I hated feeling like a failure. I had “men,” including the road manager, the band, and the agent I had to make excuses to.

I had to be a failure.

The little girl in me who could never do anything to get her father’s love and attention cried. But, the woman in me gathered up her courage and picked up the phone to stand up for what would be best for her, regardless of her age-old fears of being a failure.

After a few hours of navigation around my band members and the road manager during breakfast and on the road, I felt resolved that they understood and were even grateful that the tour was over. It would have been a six-hour drive to France on very little sleep followed by a late starting gig and very little sleep before a mad six-hour drive back to the airport. Had I not been literally smoked out of my ability to continue I would have taken on the challenge as this cancellation was going to cost me gig pay, CD sales, a hotel room, and a meal – all of which would now have to come out of the gig money we had made thus far.

It’s Monday, February 21, and we are headed home on the plane ride from Germany to Philly. Being forced in upon myself by flight delays and a movie entitled “Wall Street II,” the fragility of all life is coming at me again. During this stressful three-week whirlwind, I ached in my heart from past wounds inflicted unknowingly upon myself by my own hand – a puppet of life.

I had flashbacks of the period of my life when my first marriage was ending. Pipes of our relationship eaten away by the rust we never knew was growing. The ten years I stayed after I had already left in my heart, during which time I searched diligently for the “knight of cherishment on the shining white horse of love and lust.” I finally found him and for two and a half years before he died, I boldly walked a road of deceit and sweet surrender into allowing myself to be adored – the child in me overjoyed and relieved of forty-six years of ache. The Gods rolled the dice of this man’s life – rolling me into it and rolling him out of mine, when it was time for him to go home.

Cutting our hearts unknowingly as we did during that first marriage – not knowing what true intimacy was in relationship, and finding ourselves acting out in damaging ways, undermining the foundation of what we thought we had solidified in cement, pretty much caused me to turn the corner toward womanhood, finding the strength in my transgressions to see through the emptiness of the marriage and walk away, I pushed the knife further down into the depths of my heart where my true humanity and morality lay waiting like a blood red pomegranate to be broken open so all the seeds of life could spring forth with their wonderful juice. Pain, the stark hard core reality of my life, and the joy of realization and wisdom in every seed were now mine for the taking.

But knowing what to do with those seeds or even that they were now available to me was still a few years away.

So as I sit here on this yet again delayed flight back to the states, lingering in that 20/20 hindsight, where we as humans always seem to find the truth of our past if we dare to look, I can see that the Universe was at work setting us up for a different kind of ending to our tour and for me, a new level of humanity and courage in standing up for what is good for me and not hurting myself trying to please others.

Cee Cee James is an acclaimed American blues artist. This is her first writing for BluesWax. She would love to hear your comments below.