Tag Archives: The Heartland Cafe

End of the Night Jam at The Heartland Cafe

4 Aug

logoA couple Decembers back we were doing a show at The Heartland Cafe on Chicago’s North Side. Our friend Rudy Negrete stopped by with his Strat and sat in. Another friend, Josh Davis, happened to be down from Bloomington, with his his harps, and joined us, too. We played everything we all knew together, but didn’t want to stop. So we played “Kansas City”, which we were pretty sure we could fake. Turned out to be a nice end for the night.

Josh pretty much stole the show on it, but Alpha was having a lot of fun on the drums, too. Dorothy and Rudy were both zeroed in on the groove like snipers on a target. I’m mostly off camera, but maybe you can tell I was having fun, too: that’s me throwing in the fills on the verses.

stormy xxiv !

Another night at The Heartland

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Waitin’ For The Bus/Jesus Just Left Chicago

6 Jul

kentmcdanielwrites

By the 1980’s Z Z Top’s new songs were almost novelty numbers. They still put down some pretty nice grooves and some hot licks, but most of their tunes were cutesy little ditties designed to work well with the goofy vidoes they were grinding out for MTV. If anybody looked down their nose at that, the band cried all the way to the bank, I guess. Back in the seventies, though, Z Z Top was playing playing some strange, serious electric blues. They wore cowboy hats and rhinestone getups and marketed their stuff as southern rock, but it was electric blues. And it was good. For my money, their best album from that time was Tres Hombres, and the best thing on the album was an original medley called “Waitin’ For the Bus/Jesus Just Left Chicago”, both songs funky and bluesy.

My brother, Doug, and I played that medley many a night ourselves…

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