return to the familiarity of Portland again. Although his prospects are good, the life of a bluesman is wearing, and a sense of constant struggle is always with him. “Sometimes I think it'd almost be a relief if Susie couldn't work anymore and I had to get a straight job; it’d be an easy way to get out of playing the blues, to escape that one responsibility.... ” Tom McFarland is a blues musician, a calling he has pursued with single-minded devotion and increasing excellence for nearly twenty years. People define the blues in many ways, but most would agree that expressing emotion is its chief characteristic. A blues performer can become a spokesman for his audience, focusing the experience we share with an intensity of feeling that helps us to understand it. The rocking dance beats and slow grinds of the blues evoke our sexuality, while the lyrics sing parables of loss. The blues can be gritty and sweet, raw and country or citywise and polished.... Tom's blues are in the West Coast style, iazz-inflected and smooth, with fluid guitar lines that glide over the long neck of his Gibson, running from chords to chromatic single-note passages. His expressive improvisational facility demonstrates not only the technical mastery that results from years of method work, but a sense of timing and phrasing that testifies to original musical ideas. His up-tempo numbers really rock, as chords vamp and break into hot triplets, while his ballads lilt and mourn with conviction. Tom’s voice surges and declines, augmenting the tension created by his slightly behind-the- beat guitar attack.... The tension of emotion, the release that accompanies its expression, make the blues an affirmation of life.... For Tom McFarland, the blues is a way of life. /first met Tom in Portland in 1966, when he was rehearsing a band called the Portland Zoo eight hours a day for gigs at the Charix and the Pythian, and for the past fifteen years, Tom has been my main man in the blues. I've watched him develop into a powerful, persuasive singer and a clean, masterful guitarist whose music has the force, originality and maturity to really offer something of value.... A bluesman, a strange career for a boy from Grants Pass, Oregon, who pursued that sound he first heard in his head up and down the Coast and across the country, in widening circles that always bring him back to Portland again. Tom was born in 1945. Naturally short and stocky, with hands smaller than you’d expect, his frowns have become heavier over the years, but his wit and smile still rise easily. Black curls tumble over his forehead and perspiration streams past his tightly closed eyes when he's on the stand, where he says he feels the safest and most alone.... He played his first professional job in 1961, and since then has had both feet firmly planted on bandstands from Germany to Oakland. After the Army and a stint as a guitar teacher in San Francisco, he came to live in Portland for the first time in late 1965, then bounced back and forth for several years before settling into the blues scene here around 1970. For two years he performed steadily at the White Eagle tavern to large and enthusiastic crowds, for a while appearing under the name Sonny Black (“...that was more or less a publicity gimmick...and it worked.’’) There was a strong feeling of community when he performed the, and if it hadn’t been for the since- altered cabaret laws, he probably wouldn’t have moved on to Seattle in early 1973. He stayed on Puget Sound until 1976, appearing in a number of clubs and festivals but sustained primarily by a steady gig at the Boulder Cafe on Second Avenue, a seaman’s bar with B-girls, pull-tabs and an orange wall just ten feet in front of the bandstand, giving him no choice but to burrow deeper into the music. Feeling that the Bay area offered more opportunities for a blues musician, Tom and his family moved to Richmond, where he stayed for the longest stretch of his career. Thanks to job offers from an enthusiastic club owner and the support of music critic Tom Mazzolini, he soon established himself as one of the regular working blues musicians in the area, with steady club work and occasional tours. He was a featured performer at the San Francisco Blues Festival, toured the West Coast with Otis Rush and the Midwest with Charlie Musselwhite, and appeared with and backed up some of the greatest blues performers of our time: Lightnin' Hopkins, Albert Collins, John Lee Hooker, Lowell Folsom and Fenton Robinson. In 1978, Arhoolie Records issued his first album, “Travellin' With The Blues,’’ and a San Francisco Chronicle review called him “the most exciting young blues performer to emerge on the local scene for years." Black curls tumble over his forehead and perspiration streams past his tightly closed eyes when he’s on the stand, where he says he feels the safest and most alone.... Seeing Tom here in Portland again reminded me of a visit I paid him back in 1977, when he was working at the famous Coffee Gallery in North Beach, where our heroes Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady had drunk their holy beers and screamed “Go! Go!" to the strains of be-bop.... When Tom was seventeen, he left home for San Francisco, following the dream of wild excitement and spiritual enlightenment that Kerouac said could be found in “that great American night, that Negro night...." Our generation got there too late to join the beatniks, but we did finally arrive on the hallowed ground where America's artistic life was transformed. That spirit had reached us years earlier in our small Oregon towns, inciting with the same rhythm of adventure we heard in music we knew then only as rock 'n' roll. That night when Tom played the Coffee Gallery, even though there were only a few scruffy patrons scattered around the once- famous room, we had become the artists ourselves, our own heroes, and I shouted “Go! Go!” to Tom’s blues for our time. It would be great if Jesus would ride down on a white horse and say, “Come on, Tom, let’s go to heaven!” What could be better? But instead, what grabbed me was B.B. King saying, “Come on, Tom, let’s play the blues!” BLUES GOT ME... Icome from a musical family, but like most little kids I didn’t become aware of what music is supposed to sound like until I started listening to my mother’s old 78s all the time, real funky western and some swing. When I was around twelve I heard some Elvis, and the type of music and the sound of the electric guitar really knocked me out. Then a cousin of mine from LA. came up to visit. He put on Chuck Berry’s “School Days” and said, “This is the way we do it in LA.” So I started getting hip to the black roots in the music I’d been listening to. In the rock and roll and country-western I was hearing while I grew up, there’d often be a certain thing on the guitar that I liked.... I guess it was the bending of the strings, or those weird chords. Anyway, that particular sound really got to me. One day in 1962,1was in Berg’s Market in Grants Pass, where they had a rack of 99c records. I don’t know why, but there was a B.B. King album. I’d never heard of him, but I took it home because it was a guy playing the guitar, and he had a Gretsch, like Chet Atkins and Duane Eddy, who I was really into at the time. My friend Gary Beck recently reminded me of what happened next.... I called him on the phone and told him he had to get over to my place immediately. But it was clear across town and he was babysitting and couldn’t come. So in fifteen minutes here I come up to his place in this taxL waving the record and shouting, “This is it! This is it!” B.b.’s guitar and the straightahead blues arrangements were the culmination of everything I’d heard and thought about before. He turned me on to the actual fact of blues, and since then I’ve seldom played any other kind of music: my goal has always been to get as good as I can at the blues. / So it was the guitar sound that originally got me into it. One of the reasons I was more into the instrumental aspect at first was because, when I sang in those days, people would make real rude noises. So my singing came about a lot more gradually.... People tend to forget that the blues is primarily a vocal art, and even though I was only sixteen, the lyrics really grabbed me too. The things that B.B. was saying expressed how I felt. The first time I saw B.B. King was in 1963, and one of the things that hit me about why people love him so much was that he was saying, in words and through his playing, just what the audience would if they had been standing up there. He hit a nerve. And that’s what it means to really “get across.” You want the people to know what you’re talking about, to realize that you’re not spewing forth some alien kind of bullshit that’s just original with you, but that you’re talking about experiences that are personal but which you have in common with everybody else. On a performance level, I give an audience my singing and playing, then they give back a response, and I try to feel what’s happening and go with them. So we’re giving back and forth to each other, and the more an audience responds, the more I can give. It’s the same thing on a sociological level. Through the blues I’m sharing my experience—all of us who listen to the blues have a whole lot in common, so my personal experiences are tied into everybody else’s. In a way it’s like looking in a mirror: what I’m giving is what I get. If somebody asked me what my religion is, I’d say blues. People would think I was crazy or putting them on if I made very much of that, but I feel real strongly about the mystical aspects of it. Like when you went to Blues is life. All the things you have to do in life are the ingredients, and the blues is the cake. Even if I had to quit playing to take care of the family, then that would be the blues too. Sunday School and they said someday Jesus is going to come back and we’ll all be saved. I just can’t swallow that story, but I wish it were true; it would be great if Jesus would ride down on a white horse and say, “Come on, Tom, let’s go to heaven!” What could be better? But instead, what grabbed me was B.B. King saying, “Come on, Tom, let’s play the blues!” Besides B.B., the guys who really influenced me are T. Bone Walker, Clinton St. Quarterly 11
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