Blues Interviews
Bruce Iglauer
April 2012
Interview contributed by Sean McCarthy
It is our absolute pleasure to bring you this series interviews with Bruce Iglauer, founder of Alligator Records (one of the world’s leading Blues record labels), as well as a personal friend of such legendary artists such as Hound Dog Taylor, Albert Collins and Koko Taylor.
Bruce is without doubt one of the most important men, in what is the untold and, for many, the unknown back story of the blues.
He has so much to tell that despite all the material Bruce has provided us with, we could really only scratch the surface.
So the interview series is broken down into three parts.
In Part One we discuss with Bruce how he got started and some of the history of the Alligator label.
Part Two is all about the modern day Alligator records and some of the artists Alligator has signed to its label.
In the third and final part we talk in more details about Hound Dog Taylor and Albert Collins history.
Welcome to Part One.
ABC: Hi Bruce, it is extremely nice and a great thrill to speak with you. Could you please give us a little bit of a history lesson… How did you get interested in blues music?
BI: In the 1960s, I was interested in folk music. There was a small folk music ‘boom’ going on, and I liked the acoustic sounds and the somewhat more serious lyrics, which seemed more ‘honest’ to me than the commercial rock and roll on the radio. Some of the songs I heard at that time were blues tunes, but done in a folk style.
The first real blues by a real blues musician that I heard wasn’t until I was in college. That was about 200 miles from Chicago. My sister was at the University of Chicago and they had a very good folk festival (much more traditional music, not like the commercial folk music that I had heard). I came to Chicago in January of 1966 for that festival and heard Mississippi Fred McDowell. It was like a revelation for me—a magic moment when the music leaped across 20 rows of seats and grabbed me by the throat and shook me.
Although Fred was an illiterate, poor, middle-aged black man from the South and I was a young, well-read, middle-class white college student, his music seemed aimed directly at me. And it seemed more honest, more real, than any music I had heard before. It made the commercial folk music I was listening to seem “plastic” and false.
I returned to the small town where I went to college and ordered the one available Fred McDowell album (on Arhoolie). It took six months for the store to locate a copy, so I learned something about small, independent record labels as well as learning a little about the blues. This began my fascination, and I began to buy all the blues records I could find (not very many).
Within a year or so I was hosting the blues program on my college radio station.
ABC: So Blues music was the reason you moved to Chicago?
BI: I had read about the Chicago blues scene and of course bought as many blues records as possible, though there were very few available. I knew Chicago was a huge blues capitol, and also that almost all the music was played in clubs in the black ghetto.
Starting about 1968 I wanted to go to Chicago to see the clubs and hear the music by the real bluesmen and women. I had read that the man who knew all about the scene was Bob Koester, the founder of the Delmark Records label and the owner of a store called the Jazz Record Mart. Having only this information, I took the bus to Chicago and found the store, which was small, shabby and fascinating.
As promised, Bob Koester, a very outspoken and charismatic man, became my guide to the Chicago blues clubs, and took me to places like Theresa’s, The Blue Flame and Pepper’s. I met musicians like Junior Wells, Lefty Dizz, Eddie Shaw and Otis Rush. In 1969, I continued to visit when I could and became fascinated with this “parallel universe” of music that was not listed in the newspapers or played on the radio stations, but played in 40 blues clubs in the ghetto every weekend.
Finally I decided to move to Chicago to be on the blues scene. I expected to stay for a year and then continue my college education. I began to hint to Bob Koester about a job. Meanwhile, I presented Luther Allison, a Delmark Records artist, in a small concert at my college. I did a very aggressive promotion job for the concert and people came from as far as 100 miles. We sold out and did a second show. Bob Koester was impressed.
Mark Hummel
