Eighteen Again

Sadly, that title does not refer to the distance of my latest long run. I ran a whopping 9 miles on Sunday, but I plan to run long tomorrow. I'd love to be able to do 14, but that may be too ambitious. I want to get my mileage up again but not at the risk of injury. Bunny, M.A. and I are running at the beach tomorrow for a somewhat flat distance.

What the title refers to is the Avila Blues Festival that SD and I attended yesterday. This year's acts were people I had never heard of, although SD knew of Susan Tedeschi. Shemekia Copeland opened the show and she was great. Very engaging; she had a radio show on Sirius radio until they merged with XM and got rid of her. She sang a song title, "Who Stole My Radio?", but she wanted to say "Who stole my damnned radio show!". Uh, Bob Dylan?

Susan Tedeschi followed and at first it was hard to warm up to her, since she didn't interact with the audience. She just played guitar, but wow, she can really play! Not a bad singer, either. She has a style similar to Bonnie Raitt. She closed with a great song, but I don't know the title. I wanted to buy it and asked several people if they knew what that last song was, but nobody did.

They saved the best for last--Kenny Wayne Shepherd. This man is H-O-T-hot, and he's a decent guitar player too. ;-) I don't know anything about him, but I could watch him play guitar all night. He finished with a Jimi Hendrix song--Voodoo Child. He even played some of it with his guitar raised behind his head although he didn't light his guitar on fire at the end. It was still smoking, though.

When I was a teenager, I listened to "underground" music. The stations on FM radio used to only play classical music; AM was where all the popular music was played. The counter culture discovered they could use FM to broadcast album cuts, similar to the Deep Tracks on XM today, and that what I listened to. I loved blues guitarist, like Johnny Winter and of course, Hendrix. Watching Kenny Wayne play returned me to my lost youth.

Here's Kenny Wayne in action. Let me know what you think.