Notes

The following originally appeared in the GRAND JUNCTION FREE PRESS:

There is a powerful magic in the realm of music.  Not even the unrelenting flow of time can contain music’s unique ability to enrapture and transfix, to seduce across miles and decades.

Submitted for your consideration is Alan “Blind Owl” Wilson, the groundbreaking member of Canned Heat who brought both tradition and innovation to the blues guitar.  Wilson passed away years ago — and yet, thanks to the transcendental magic of his music, he continues to inspire, mesmerize and, yes, seduce blues aficionados not yet born when he shuffled off this mortal coil.

For example, there’s Rebecca Davis.  A long-time KAFM volunteer, the lanky, energetic Utah native’s deep knowledge of the blues has earned her the on-air sobriquet of “the Music Goddess.”  For years, Davis has enjoyed a spiritual love affair with Blind Owl Wilson… and yet, she was still seven years away from being even a gleam in her parents’ eyes when Wilson died of a drug overdose under somewhat mysterious circumstances in 1970.

As a high school student in the late 1980s, Davis listened to Nirvana and the other grunge rock acts then dominating the U.S. charts.  But she was never one to jump on a musical bandwagon.  “I was the Anti-Hip,” she says, and this need to distinguish her own tastes from those of her peers led her to haunt the Grand Valley’s used record bins.  While her classmates were buying the latest cassettes and compact discs, Davis was coming under the spell of old vinyl, that mysterious virtual dominion where strange wizardry can be found in the work of little-remembered musicians and bands. 

It was while rifling through a pile of used albums at a local antiques shop that Davis came across LIVING THE BLUES, the 1968 LP that was the third album from Canned Heat, the neo-blues band that had been formed by Wilson and fellow record collector Bob Hite two years earlier.  Davis had heard the song “Going Up the Country” on the WOODSTOCK soundtrack, but otherwise knew little about the band.  But the album’s psychedelic cover convinced her to buy it… and with this casual whim purchase, her life was forever changed.

When she got home with the record, Davis was electrified by Wilson’s unique guitar textures.  She was so enamored of the album that she began to seek out all of the band’s records, and then moved onto those earlier blues artists like Charley Patton, Son House and Skip James, who had first inspired Wilson himself.  Eventually, her need to know more about Wilson led her to begin work on a biography of the guitarist, who often combined Eastern musical drones and motifs with pentatonic blues riffs (as when he overdubbed the Indian instrument, the tambura, on one of Canned Heat’s best-known songs, “On the Road Again”).

After years of research, Davis is nearing completion of her biography (to be entitled BLIND OWL BLUES: THE LIFE AND MUSIC OF THE MYSTERIOUS AL WILSON).  Its publication will culminate a love affair with a man dead now for 35 years.