Looking back at 2006

Some fun stuff has happened to me this year. I got to see a new incarnation of the Meters, now known as the Funky Meters, in concert on Nov. 10, and they were great. I couldn't help but think about how John Paul Jones would have liked the way Art Neville handled the organ during the set, which included the Meters' longtime instrumental favorite, "Cissy Strut," plus a cover of Bob Dylan's "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35."

Incidentally, I was contacted in June by Ben Sandmel, who was researching an upcoming book on Ernie K-Doe, a New Orleans native who played at the Led Zeppelin party. Among other things, Ben directed my attention to a story about the party, penned by Phillip Rauls, with photos by Sidney Smith. The write-up includes a joke Ahmet Ertegun played on Plant. Ben was also nice enough to send me a CD of some zydeco bands and some interesting reading material on the local flavor.

In September, I went to a weekly blues jam at the Archie Edwards Barbershop in Washington, D.C., where by chance I met the son of a famous blues singer. After I played along with about an hour's worth of blues tunes, a new acoustic guitarist who had just sat down to my left started playing and singing the Richie Valens tune, "Ooh My Head." The song is better known to Led Zeppelin fans as "Boogie with Stu," which of course was the first thing I thought as I joined him.

After that, this mystery guitarist started playing something else that I immediately recognized as from the Zep songbook; to his surprise, I went along with it. He started up a third Zeppelin song, and I played and sang along with that, too. We joked between these numbers, although I was not mentioning that Led Zeppelin was my favorite band or that I have this newsletter. Together, he and I belted out impromptu renditions of "The Crunge," "What Is and What Should Never Be" and "Thank You." None of this is par for the course at the Archie Edwards Barbershop, and the roomful of strict blues aficionados started depleting as he and I took the jam session down this unusual path.

Once the two of us were done entertaining each other, he brought the blues worshipers back into it with a more traditional number they could all play along with, "I Put a Spell on You," which is mentioned above as a possible Honeydrippers outtake. After the song was over, the man nonchalantly told me that his dad wrote the song. I rebutted, "Wait, your dad is Screamin' Jay Hawkins?" Indeed, he said, then regaling me with some stories of growing up in Cleveland with his famous father ("Big Jay used to scare the hell out of us when we were kids"). He told me he had just moved to the D.C. area and that he hasn't played to a real crowd for the first time in about 25 years. That will change soon, if I have anything to do with it.