Freshman Seminar Project 3

Jimi Smith and The Prime Time Players

The blues is a musical genre that has a fascinating history and forever connected to its roots. When we hear someone referring to blues music, just some of the names that come to mind may be John Lee Hooker, B. B. King, Jimmy Reed, Eric Clapton, and Stevie Ray Vaughn though there are countless more legendary musicians left un-named here. One such musician, who consequently will be the topic of study for this paper, is guitarist Jimi “Prime Time� Smith. Jimi is one of the premier blues guitarists in the Twin Cities and was taught to play at an early age by Jimmy Reed (Stiles). I recently had the pleasure of attending a concert of Jimi’s, and I was both pleased and surprised by the events that I witnessed. The goal of this paper will be to describe how the venue and audience in attendance affected the performance of the musicians, and in turn how the performance of the musicians affected said audience.
The venue for the concert was the restaurant Famous Dave’s in Calhoun Square on Wednesday, September 17th and started at 8 P.M. Seeing that Calhoun Square is a very prolific shopping center containing several popular restaurants, the potential for a large audience was right there. Another contributing factor to a potentially large crowd is that Famous Dave’s is the premier blues club in the area, hosting many big-name local bands as well as an extremely popular Sunday night open jam session. What more could one ask for, save not having to pay a cover charge? Ask and you shall receive. Further drawing in costumers and viewers, the show was free. All of this was more than enough to give me a craving for some good blues music, so I went to the concert expecting a large crowd to be in attendance. However, once I arrived at the restaurant, I was shocked to see that there were no more than twenty five people, in the room that could easily seat 200, who had shown up thus far to see the concert. It is a possibility that the closure of the parking ramp right across the street from the entrance, and the lack of promotion had something to do with the small number of people there. In fact, the show wasn’t advertised in any of the local newspapers, and I only found out about it by visiting the Famous Dave’s website. This suggests that the only people who frequent Famous Dave’s or already know about their live music would be inquiring about this show.
Having arrived and surveyed the demographic of the audience, I knew that it would be interesting to see in what ways the crowd would respond to the performers and in turn, how the performers would respond to such a small audience. After taking a closer look at the people in the restaurant, it was clear that I was easily the youngest person there by fifteen years. The people ranged in age from early 30’s to about 60, were of primarily two races, and appeared to be of middle class affluence. The demographic was separated fairly evenly between African-Americans and European Americans. Everyone in the place was wearing casual clothing (i.e. button up shirts and jeans) with a blazer here and there. It was fairly easy to determine why some of the people were in attendance. A group of eight white people in their 50’s were enjoying what appeared to be a birthday celebration due to several “Happy Birthday� balloons fluttering about the table. Besides the group of eight, the other members of the audience were primarily couples who had come to eat or indulge in a few drinks from the bar and were sitting scattered about the room. The ratio or men to women was about 3 to 1. There seemed to be no great urge to sit directly in front of the stage as several tables were passed up for tables in the middle. Yet, nonetheless everyone seemed content and excited for the group to start the show.
Now it was time for the band to come out on stage and perform. I was surprised by the appearance of the band as a whole. It struck me as odd that the other members of the band were much younger than Jimi. The first noticeable thing was Jimi Smith himself, now about 50 years old, wearing a fedora and a white suit. In contrast, the rest of the band’s attire, jeans and t-shirts, was very plain and relaxed, which suggested that the performance would be fairly laid back. Jimi’s band is called the Prime Time Players and is comprised of Donald “Hye Pocket� Robertson on drums, Mick Massof on bass, and Michael Pendergast on keyboards and became popular after recording the album Give Me Wings in 1998 (Stiles). However, it didn’t appear that all of the original members of the band were in attendance that night. Later on in the performance, Jimi explained that the sit-in members of the band were sons or relatives of the original Prime Time Players. In some cases this would cause disappointment because the band that people had come to see wasn’t as they knew it, but the audience seemed unfazed and the young musicians held their own very formidably.
The concert then proceeded as one would expect any gig in a venue such as a restaurant to go. The audience and performers each took up their respective roles. The players remained on the stage at all times and attempted to establish their positions as the prominent authority in the room. In turn, the audience responded to the music. Once the music started playing, the room was packed with sound. There had been recorded music playing over the speakers before the band began playing, but their sound blasted away recollection of what had been on. People continued with their meals and conversations as the band played and cheered raucously at the end of each number or solo. The basic demeanor of people changed slightly, and it was apparent that they were smiling more while subtly moving to the music in their seats. This responsiveness was urged on by Jimi Smith as he would call out, “Ya’ll wanna hear some blues?� and other colloquialisms to the same effect. It was interesting to gauge the amount of feedback from the audience after solos and complete numbers because it was clear when they really liked something and when they didn’t like something as well. For example, one of the keyboard player’s solos wasn’t as high energy or put together as well, and the audience only gave polite applause. Yet, later, when he played a solo that was really rocking, the crowd shouted out and whistled.
The manner in which the performance was set up was difficult to interpret at times. This, in turn caused interruption in the overall flow of the concert. The gig was broken up into two sets that were quite different from each other. Set one consisted solely of the Prime Time Players performing, and in the second set musicians that Jimi knew in the audience were allowed to come on stage and play in a jam session type style. The first set seemed to be planned out in a set list of some type because the songs were not called out on stage. Most of the numbers were up-tempo straight blues with a couple slow dirty blues songs thrown in for contrast. Distortion was used, but only enough to give the music a crunchy blues feel. There wasn’t much use of vocal harmony, and almost every song followed the 1-4-5 chord progression of the standard 12-bar blues. However, all of the numbers were given special twists, and my personal favorite was their take on Howlin’ Wolf’s “Shake for Me� which they rocked up in a style similar to that of Stevie Ray Vaughn. The second set was comprised of a lot of switching instruments and players from a group of Jimi Smith’s friends in the audience. This set was more of a “call out a key and play� set in which someone knew a song and everyone else followed along.
During the show itself, it was very interesting to watch what was happening both onstage and in the audience. The audience was most responsive to the solos, and it was always known if the musician had delivered by the cheers from the crowd. It was very obvious to see who the leader was on the stage. Jimi Smith did all of the lead vocals, determined when everyone would solo, and was the only one to talk to the audience. His stage presence was very strange, and he would sometimes, after a song, start talking about something and just trail off into mumbling gibberish. No one around me really seemed to understand what the point of this was, but found it very amusing. For the most part, Jimi did a good job of seizing the attention of the audience through his strange mumblings, calling out specific people in the audience who were dancing or cheering especially loud, and through his amazing guitar solos. All of the musicians were very skilled, and that was incentive enough for the audience to be fixed on the stage yelling out appraisals and applauding.
We can now ask what the effect of the concert was on the audience members and performers. This is an interesting question to consider in a venue where half of the crowd simply came in for a drink or a bite to eat. However, I believe that there was a certain amount of communitas based on the behavior of the people during and after the concert. The fact that everyone sat at their individual tables prevented everyone from communicating on a personal level, yet throughout the performance I saw people gesturing at each other in approval or joining tables to share a drink together. Afterward, almost everyone who passed by one of the musicians who had played shook hands or exchanged a few pleasantries on the way out the door. It is difficult to tell what exactly everyone took from the experience (especially the musicians since it was a free show), but personally I walked out feeling brighter and in a better mood than when I walked in. Many people were in high spirits, and everyone seemed to be experiencing a certain type of comradery. It was through this music that these people came together, put aside any differences that may otherwise have intervened, and became part of something that more tightly bonded them to each other than they would have anywhere else.
 
Works Cited
Stiles, Ray M. "Blues on Stage." 1998. 17 Sept. 2008 .
Stiles, Ray M. "Blues Profile: Jimi ‘PrimeTime’ Smith." 1999. 17 Sept. 2008 .