Your old lady took off with your best friend. The boss works you like a dog. The rent is past due, and the ceiling leaks. What to do? Why, sing and dance and make a joyous racket. Because that’s what having the blues is all about, according to Portland duo Hillstomp—who play the Funhouse on Saturday, October 21.
“One thing I’ve learned through playing this music is, the blues isn’t really about being sad,” opines drummer John Johnson. “It’s about using music as a celebration, to bring yourself up and out of something.” Hence Hillstomp’s cheery disposition. “Maybe we seem relatively happy because playing this music is having the effect it should.”
“We play this music because it deserves to be played, and isn’t being played properly by enough people,” he continues. “And it needs to grow. In a lot of ways, blues is a genre that has been sputtering out. Which is why, for the most part, when you ask young people if they like the blues, they say, ‘God, no!'”
For Johnson and his partner, singer/guitarist Henry Kammerer, the blues is a living, evolving sound. It is neither exclusively the domain of a clutch of wizened, rural African Americans, nor of ponytailed dudes unfurling extended guitar solos. Their sophomore album, The Woman That Ended the World, features 11 songs fashioned from the simplest materials: lively, concise guitar figures, plucked and picked over and over, and sparse but driving percussion. Kammerer doesn’t bark, he sings, using dynamics and phrasing to add texture to simple, repetitive lyrics. The album includes a few brooding numbers (“In the Hole”), but mostly, this is uplifting music. And unless you are a well-versed expert, the originals are nigh indistinguishable from their covers of Muddy Waters, Fred McDowell, and R. L. Burnside.
Still, Hillstomp catch the odd round of flack from purists—skeptics who think young white guys can’t genuinely play the blues. Nuts to that. “The minute you understand blues, you totally understand that at its very deepest core it is a music of inclusion,” says Kammerer. “Sometimes it is about not being able to be included—and we have all had our experiences with that, with being the strange person—but it is inclusive.”
Johnson adds that they face similar challenges about their credibility from other camps. “Not knowing exactly what to call our music, on some occasions we stick the word punk in there, to try and differentiate the kind of blues we’re talking about. And people get in our face about that, too.”
The blues and punk. Two of the most primal, iconic forms of pop. Do Hillstomp ever feel cowed, knowing all the great songs and artists of yore they must compete with? Nah. “It’s funny, but you could ask the exact same question of both Mississippi John Hurt and the Sex Pistols,” Kammerer concludes. “Because so much had come before them, too. I don’t want to sound big-headed, but I’m just honored to be a small part of that great tradition of original, rootsy music.”
