While this year’s Pittsburgh Blues Festival is somewhat leaner than in past years, the 20th Anniversary Festival is no less meaner because it has one thing recent festivals have not: A Pocket Full Of Kryptonite.
That’s right, Spin Doctors, the band that cut its teeth in the New York City blues club scene and on the college tour circuit before hitting it big on the pop charts in the late 1980s with tunes like “Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong” are the penultimate act for this year’s the three-night festival.
Returning to their blues roots with last year’s release of “If The River Was Whiskey,” has been musically liberating.
“Every note feels dangerous,” said vocalist Chris Barron on the band’s website. “It’s just like this ramshackle, broken carriage running down a cobblestone hill, with pots and pans, and a screaming baby.”
The Spin Doctors will warm things up for Sunday headliner and festival veteran JJ Grey & Mofro.
The festivities begin Friday, July 25 at 4 p.m. with local favorite Norm Nardini and the Pittsburgh All-Stars warming things up for second-generation blues guitar master Bernard Allison. Like his incomparable father Luther.
He picked up the guitar at age 10. Listening to Luther’s collection of Howlin’ Wolf, T-Bone Walker, and Lightning Hopkins while his father was away on tour, he garnered the same influences and the same passion.
His opening night performance will mark the third time Allison has played the Pittsburgh Blues Festival. He was last here in 2007 and again in 2012. And don’t be surprised if he pays a slide guitar tribute to the man who taught him the style, Johnny Winter, who died last week at 70.
Saturday night’s headliner is another veteran of the festival, New Orleans’ own Dr. John. He’s played with and written for everyone from Professor Longhair and Joe Tex to the Rolling Stones and Van Morrison. Though most know him for his honky-tonk, rag-influenced piano work, he started out as a session guitar player in the 1950s.
The six-time Grammy winner opened his heart and his wallet following Hurricane Katrina staging a number of benefit concerts and releasing a benefit album with all proceeds going to storm relief.
That spirit is what drives the Pittsburgh Blues Festival because, as always, the proceeds from the event go to the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank.
In addition to the headliners, other national and local acts include Trampled Under Foot, Albert Cummings, the Ben Miller Band, Wesley Bright and the Hi-Lites, Eugene and the Nightcrawlers, Billy The Kid, Jill West and the Blues Attack, and Bo Hogs.
For more information visit www.pghblues.com.
(Send comments to cmorrow@newpittsburghcourier.com.)
