Music
Omar's new experiment: Howling with local tunesmiths
By John T. DavisFebruary 12, 2004
The bluesman's life is a lonely, hard-bitten lot. It's full of crossroads at midnight, neon-lit hotel rooms in strange cities, deceitful temptresses in red dresses, empty gin bottles, long lonely highways, back-road juke joints and . . . science fairs?
Well, yeah. At least science fairs figure in if you're Omar Dykes, and you're a proud parent who just finished watching his son ace the fifth-grade science fair with a project illustrating electromagnetism. "One rebel in the family is enough," Dad says.
It seems safe to assume that Jake Dykes is the envy of his 11-year-old peers every time Career Day rolls around at school. His dad plays guitar for a living. Real loud. He travels to Europe the way other dads run down to Home Depot. He gets to stay up late. He even looks cool: a big slab of a man whose size reduces an electric guitar to mandolinlike proportions. Histowering cliff of black hair recalls the classic conks of Bobby Blue Bland and Albert King.
The occasional science fair aside, he's still a bluesman, albeit a happy one. A fixture on the Austin musical landscape since he moved to these precincts from Mississippi in 1976, Omar (his given name is Kent, but c'mon -- a blues singer named Kent?), and his band, the Howlers, have been landmarks of consistency. They play greasy, old-school blues and R&B, redolent of boogies and shuffles and 12-bar tales of woe. Issuing albums with metronomic regularity (15 in the past 24 years), they have surfed over the fickle tides of musical fashion and carved out a loyal following in Texas and the South and, especially, in Europe, where they are beloved on the festival circuit.
"I just kind of made co-writing my theme for this album," he explains after he returned home from the science fair. "I started thinking about all these guys I knew in Austin. It turned out to be a monumental task, a good year of calling and seeing what people's schedules were like, because they're all on the road and doing different things, too, you know. But once we got everybody together, it sure was fun."
"All these guys in Austin" included songwriters on the order of Stephen Bruton, Ray Wylie Hubbard, Darden Smith, Papa Mali, as well as an old crony in Florida, Michael Dan Ehmig. Another local talent, Steve Califf, co-authored the John Lee Hooker tribute that became the boogie-laced title track. Most poignantly, perhaps, he was able to enlist Alejandro Escovedo to sing and collaborate before he became sidelined by hepatitis. Their duet, "Right There In the Rain," recalls some of the sweeter-tempered Mick Jagger/Keith Richards performances.
The common denominator for the contributors to the album turned out to be "fun" (there's that word again). "All the guys that co-wrote and all the guys that played on it had a sense of humor," Dykes observes. "All of us spent more time laughing and telling war stories and drinking coffee than we did writing. I didn't force anyone to sit down and write, but we didn't come up dry one time."
Hubbard, who contributed "Bamboozled" and the album-closing "All the Love We Can Stand" to the project, recalled his session as being a little, well, intimidating. "I told him to come on out to the house," Hubbard recalls. "We were sitting in my kitchen, and all of a sudden, he became Omar Onstage -- 'I been HOOD-winked!' And I'd say my little line, and he'd go, 'I been BAM-boozled!' I started backing out of the room real slowly . . . We had a great time."
With songs like "Mississippi Mud," "White Crosses" and the spine-tingling "Shakin' " (picture Screamin' Jay Hawkins fronting the Neville Brothers), Omar has reimagined his native territory -- he was born in 1959 in McComb, Miss., Bo Diddley's hometown -- in the spirit in which William Faulkner conjured up Yoknapatawpha County.
"Some of my stuff is kind of Gothic," he agrees. "But it's based in reality. McComb is only 12 miles from the Louisiana line, so that imagery, with the swamp and all that, is true to form. I didn't live in the Delta; I lived in the swampy area, so it came pretty naturally to me."
European and Canadian audiences respond to that regional authenticity as much, if not more, as his countrymen, Dykes says. "Everybody is so concerned with celebrity here," he observes. "American TV and radio . . . people are just entertained to death. I think (foreign audiences) kind of look at me as a real Southern boy, playing the real stuff."
To hear him tell it, that's celebrity enough.
