If You Enjoyed This Article Please Share It With Your Friends, Thank You!

For The Best Video Links In The Blues Follow Us On Twitter!

Follow @BluesRevue

BluesWax Sittin’ In With

Mark Wenner of The Nighthawks

Part One

Forty Years on The Road and They Take The Brass Ring

By Don Wilcock

After forty years of road-warrior touring, “The white-boy blues band from Bethesda” walked into Memphis last week and took the prize for Best Acoustic Blues album at the Blues Music Awards for their 2010 release, Last Train To Bluesville. It was the first time Mark Wenner and his crew had even been nominated, and they were up against acts with cache like Eric Bibb, Lucky Peterson, Paul Oscher, and the South Memphis String Band.

Here’s a band known for very electric performances with a strong biker appeal (Wenner has a sleeve of tattoos and rides a Harley) doing an acoustic album that wasn’t even intended to be an album. The group recorded a set at Sirius/XM for Bill Wax, and everyone liked the set so much, they decided to put it out as a CD release.

The Nighthawks performed “Rollin’ and Tumblin’” and “She’s Nineteen Years Old” at the BMAs with a standup bass, but this group is electric in almost every definition of the word.

Wenner and I talked a week before the group took the prize, and even then he thought they had a shot. He has a new drummer and singer in the band, Mark Stutso, who actually moved over from Jimmy Thackery’s band after twenty years with Wenner’s former partner. “This is really an incredible team right now,” says Wenner. “I think it’s the best team. The four-piece band that made the reputation from ’76 to ’86 was certainly a pretty hot-shot deal.”

Mark Wenner: I spent a certain chunk of my life trying very hard to be cool.

Don Wilcock for BluesWax: You’re going to admit that, are you?

MW: Yeah, I will.

BW: What are some of the things you did as a younger person that you thought would make you cool?

MW: Smoking cigarettes.

BW: Horrible!

MW: There was a whole greaser thing when I was in junior high [where I wore] pegged pants and pointy shoes.

BW: Your daddy let you get away with that? My parents wouldn’t let me get away with that.

MW: Well, I had to do certain things. I would leave the house in one pair of pants and change somewhere.

BW: You’re smarter than I was.

MW: My mom would take me to Lord & Taylor to buy me some friggin’ slacks, and I would go to Robert Hall and buy me some pants that would cost me a dollar with money I probably stole.

BW: What has the addition of Mark Stutso last year done to your sound? You’ve said this is the best you’ve sounded.

MW: Well, in terms of the changeover that’s been going on since [bass player] Johnny Castle and [guitarist] Paul Bell joined the band [in 2004]. I mean, God bless Pete [Ragusa, drummer 1974 to 2010]. He hung in there, but I think he was not quite ready to admit that he was done. When Jan [Zukowski] bailed [in 2004] he probably should have bailed, but there was a very high-paying band breathing down Jan’s neck, and I don’t think Pete had anybody banging on the door saying, “Quit the Nighthawks and come with me.”

BW: What was the time period when that happened?

MW: About eight years ago that Jan and [Pete] Kanaras [guitar 1995 to 2004] left. So things really changed dramatically in terms of everything with Paul and Johnny and really getting Mark [Stutso] in the band kind of completed that transition in a way.

BW: Changed in what way, ’cause I tend to think of you as rather consistent through your career. How do you see yourself as different?

MW: The impact is ideally consistent, but getting there is a lot less complicated. It’s actually a lot more behind-the-scenes stuff, but also the visual interaction of the players on stage; people are smiling and really having fun and intercommunicating, and there’s a degree of – always a great potential with spontaneity.  The degree of teamwork that goes into loading, unloading , going to and from, the lack of drama and crisis behind the scenes lends itself to a performance that’s just wonderful.

It’s something that no one sees and knows about, but it really helps make a difference. This is really an incredible team. The four-piece band that made the reputation from ’76 to ’86 was certainly a pretty hot-shot deal, but again it was like weirdly four individuals that didn’t look like they quite belonged together. Maybe that was some of the magic and not that I wanted everybody to wear the same uniforms, but we were different personalitise, but when we get out of the van, we don’t look like one guy picked up three separate hitchhikers. There’s just a kind of consistency to who we are in a way.

BW: I’m interested in your comment on the preparation that goes into getting you to that moment in time when you actually take the stage. Never did that come home to me more vividly and focused than on the Legendary Rhythm & Blues Cruise when I was watching acts that the only time in their regular career they didn’t have to schlep equipment from point A to point B and make a scheduled departure and arrival and make sure they had a motel room and was okay, and blah, blah, blah. That’s the kind of thing you’re talking about that’s coming easier now?

MW: Yeah, exactly. [Chuckle]

BW: That’s a telling laugh that you use to describe that.

MW: Exactly.

“I was even a roadie before I was in bands, schlepping.

The schlepping hit before getting to play.”

BW: What does it take to be a road warrior? You’ve done it now for what, forty-five years?

MW: Well, yeah, more than forty. I mean we’re about to have forty years of Nighthawks. I was even a roadie before I was in bands, schlepping. The schlepping hit before getting to play.

BW: What kind of a band were you schlepping for?

MW: The last two bands I schlepped for, one was kind of Who quartet kind of band that was pretty incredible actually, but they were – it was herding cats. They were a bunch of real maniacs. This was in New York City, one Columbia [University] guy [Wenner] and three way upper West Side Italian kids.

BW: That sounds like a violent combination.

MW: I mean they were spectacular, but the most fun with them was the singer was drinking Southern Comfort. That was his – I guess because Janis Joplin drank it or something, and he would get pretty nutty and our venues were primarily frat parties and school dances. He had hair down to his ass and wore patched velvet and patched bell bottoms and would do the Roger Daltry stuff, and when a frat boy would come up and say, “Hey, we can’t dance to this.” He would have no qualms about saying “F*** off!”

It was my job to keep him from getting killed. The other band was actually a pretty incredible band with a lot of cool originals and a guy sang and played rhythm and a guy – the other band sort of moved over toward becoming my first band as I finally decided I was not gonna drag three other guys around. I was gonna have a band myself, and they started out as a pretty hard-core blues band and then sort of evolved in to a lot of influence from people like The Band and stuff like that. And they wre both really good bands. And these guys I discovered hated carrying their stuff around,  and they didn’t have any way to do it and I was in New York City with a station wagon, and then I discovered they formed a band and then sat around waiting for something to happen, and I would run up and down fraternity row and knock on everybody’s door and say, “Got a great band for ya,” and so they’d call me.

BW: Nice. This is when you were at Columbia?

MW: Yeah. And by the time I started my first band, I got all the best players. They all said, “I’ll play with your band ’cause you’re doing dances and stuff, but I really have my own band, and we’re doing a demo for A&R Records. I’m getting ready to f*** Janis Joplin.”  I had a couple of bands. Starting three bands, I was just a harp player, I didn’t sing at that point.

BW: Really!?

MW: I started several bands and got singers and watched the bands evolve over into being the singer’s band because that’s where the real focus and energy of the band had to be. I got tired of that stuff, and the next band I started declared myself as singer and in those days the PAs were so funky I approached the job with great attitude, a little bit of style, and like a jump suit and Tom Jones shirt and some shades and pointy boots, jumped around, I was doing material that I wouldn’t even dare to touch at this time. I was doing “There Was A Time” into “Cold Sweat,” James Brown at the Apollo II and stuff like that. Everything was funky at that point in time. It was an interesting period of time dancing wise.

BW: I’m trying to imagine – I’m trying to get the visual image in my head of you wearing those clothes doing that song. Were you able to do the split?

MW: No, I didn’t do the splits, but I kind of hurled myself around.

BW: How many tattoos did you have at that point?

MW: Just a few. This might have been even pre-tattoo. So I got the first ink in 1968 I think, right around the same time that I started getting the ink, but I had a hell of a band. In those days if you did a shuffle, the frat boys would stand there and look at you stupid. So everything was – my business card said, “B-Town Slim and His Rhythm Revue.”

BW: B-Town?

MW: B-Town, that was Bethesda. B-Town Slim and His Rhythm Revue, and then in quotes it said, “That Memphis Soul Beat,” and everything had to go Brump-gump-ha-ha. Bump, grump gaga. It was a fundamental core of that I first started of a lot of Junior Walker and Booker T., except using the harp instead of the sax and the organ.

BW: Did you ever think they’d be using the instrumental of “Green Onions’ to advertise Depends diapers?

MW: No, how about “Smokestack Lightening” to sell Viagra?

BW: I know.

MW: Oh, my God. Actually, it’s nice to hear “Smokestack Lightening” on mainstream television.

BW: Yeah, yeah, it is.

MW: I’ll give it that. But everything I was doing and the Buddy Guy, Junior Wells early stiff, “Snatch It Back and Hold It,” “Messin’ with The Kid.” I mean they were dealing with the same thing I was dealing with. They were playing Chicago clubs to a younger audience where they had to play James Brown. James Cotton, too, was doing a lot of “Hold On, I’m Coming” and James Brown songs at that point. So that’s kind of how I was working it, and the band I had – I had one guitar player that did nothing but chicka-chick-chicka –chicka-chick  soul scratching. Even on a slow blues he was scratching like on some of the Slim Harpo records and another guitar player…

BW: Wait a minute, “Rainin’ in My Heart,” I’m having trouble hearing that.

MW: Well, the slightly later ones. Around this time in the late ’60s Slim Harpo was still putting out some pretty cool records, but there was a little soul scratch on almost everything, and the other guitar player was a Steve Cropper-B.B. King guy who was awesome, and I had a bad-ass rhythm section, and I had a percussion conga guy, but we were doing these long jams on “Wish You Would” and …

BW: I’ll bet you drove those frat boys right out of their minds.

MW: Well, you know, I had a bead on what they wanted. So it worked prettty good. Frats at Columbia were pretty lame. If you were in a frat, you were not very cool on our campus. If you were in a frat, you were not very cool on our campus in ’68, ’69, ’70. Frats were not the happening thing.

But I was also playing some of the hippie stuff at the school dances too, but the only stuff I got paid for was the frat parties, but at Columbia the scene was musically very competitive. When I arrived on campus, Billy Cross and Rob Stoner, who were still Billy Schwartz  and Rob Rothstein, had this phenomenal band called The Walkers, and they were actually putting out records – The Druids, a band called The Druids. I’m sure the guys that did Spinal Tap were aware of them. Their album came out, The Druids of Stonehange, and that was like Tom Werman and some guys that went on. Tom Werman produced everybody from Ted Nugent to Molly Hatchett.

So there was some shit going on. I mean we watched Sha Na Na evolve out of a one-shot campus event into a giant – somebody saw it and smelled money and jumped in and took the reins and steered ’em to Woodstock and Madison Square Garden and ultimately to television. So there was a lot going on. There was a lot of heavy players.

Even in my freshman year I could take my harps and walk up and down the hall and go out on the lawn and find someone playing guitar. “Blues in G, man, blues in G. Wha ha, wha-ha, wha-ha.” Then we had New York City at our disposal. So many a night I was in Cafe Au Go Go, the Gaslight, The Electric Circus, The Fillmore East, coming home too late to make classes at 9 a.m., but these bands that I was involved with we’d kinda come out of the basement to showcasing down at the Bitter End or something, and I watched these guys that I would turn the band over to, the singers and frontmen I’d turn the band over to, I’d watch them clutch and not handle it. It would drive me crazy. I guess they were all neurotic, intellectual assholes or whatever.

To be continued…

Don Wilcock is Editor in chief of BluesWax. He would enjoy responding to your comments below. If you like this interview, please click on “Like” at the top of the page.