My immediate, visceral reaction to this CD was that, instinctively, I started shaking and shimmying. So did my wife and daughter. This is swaggering, pulsing, get-off-your-butt blues that gets me moving like two of my favorite bands – Canned Heat and Los Lobos.
Hoodoo Revelator can do straight-ahead blues (the choogling “Don’t Want You Know More” and the slow burner “Do Me Right”) like Canned Heat, and they can get out there and funky (“If I Can’t Have You” and the soulful boogie “Come Home”) like Los Lobos. I bet these guys fire these tunes up in front of a crowd – I’d love to hear these ravers stretched to the breaking point in a steamy tavern.
I admire Hoodoo Revelator for having the guts to take on some classics. War’s “Low Rider” and John Lee Hooker’s “Boom Boom” are bar-band staples, and it would be easy to play them like everyone else does. But “Low Rider” zips along at a quicker pace than the original, and it’s laced with harmonica hooks from Mike Chipperini. “Boom Boom” soars when Chipperini and guitarist Jim Chilson cut loose.
The band also puts its stamp on Willie Dixon’s “Do the Do” and Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Checkin’ Up on My Baby.” “Checkin’ Up” has fiery rhythm guitar and a cool tempo shift, but it ends too soon. I think would be a show-stopper if it made the change from r&b into harmonica-intensive straight blues (maybe with a dueling guitar) a second time.
Rock-solid drummer Dave Darling gets a chance to step out, along with Chipperini, on “Chipper’s Blues.” Darling is a force throughout the record, the anchor that drives such get-your-insides-vibrating pounders as Chilson originals “Don’t Want You Know More” and “Eliza.” And what’s cool about Chipperini’s blues harp is that he lays back and contributes rhythm on tunes such as the call-and-response Diddley romp “Eliza.”
“Do Me Right” is the only respite amid the up-tempo numbers, and it’s powerful. It’s written by vocalist Jay Scheffler, and it moans with the wailing organ of guest Tom Nunno. Scheffler is a great, growling vocalist in the esteemed tradition of so many leave-it-on-the-stage-floor bluesmen.
I can picture the barroom and I can see the crowd for a Hoodoo Revelator gig – cool guys bobbing their heads, their girlfriends pulling them onto the dance floor, swaying hippies and fist-pumping bikers. I don’t get to spend too many late nights on the town anymore, but I know the type who likes to cut loose on Saturday, and they would dig Do Me Right.
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They're an American Band
By Chris Bergeron/ Daily News Staff
Thursday, May 18, 2006
Back in 1986 when his pals were listening to Motley Crue, Jim Chilson heard BB King growling about heartache and hard times and the thrill was gone from heavy metal.
After 20 years in bands that came and went and more small clubs and dive bars than he remembers, Chilson and four friends are singing their own blues with Hoodoo Revelator.
Their up-and-coming band plays a raw mix of Chicago blues and boogie, singing originals and classic covers with a signature edgy sound.
For Chilson, Hoodoo Revelator provides a chance to play the “old-time blues” he’s loved since first hearing Howling Wolf and John Lee Hooker.
“I wanted to put together a band that gets the crowd on the floor,” explained the 33-year-old project engineer for Perini Building Company of Framingham.”I wanted to play a kind of music not a lot of people know about but it’s a sound Americans invented.”
Hoodoo Revelator features three musicians with MetroWest roots. Lead guitarist Chilson and drummer Dave Darling grew up in Franklin, and lead vocalist and guitarist Jay Scheffler lives in Maynard. Jeff Fabrizio, of Quincy, plays bass and Mike Chipperini, of Gloucester, plays harmonica.
The band will play Friday, June 2 at the Chicken Bone Saloon on Waverley Street, Framingham.
Since coming together, the band released its first CD, “Do Me Right,” and has earned growing radio play and an expanding fan base.
Born in Franklin and now living in Framingham, Chilson said the group’s name combines slang for a “someone who causes bad luck” and an archaic word that means “Someone who celebrates.”
“That’s basically what the blues does,” he said. “It celebrates the downtrodden in life.”
Hoodoo Revelator sounds like its name, a spicy musical gumbo that could have been cooked up in a West Texas roadhouse.
Recorded at Cove Studio in Rockport, the album offers an impressive mix of original songs and distinctive covers of Hooker’s “Boom, Boom, Boom,” Willie Dixon’s “Do The Do” and War’s “Low Rider.”
Scheffler’s gritty vocals remind listeners the blues were supposedly born when Robert Johnson sealed a pact with the devil at a crossroads in Mississippi. Backed by throbbing guitars, he sings about cheating women and long nights with the passion of someone who’s known too many of both.
About a year ago, Chilson and Darling decided to put together a band that’d put a “harder edge” on the blues they both loved.
After answering a newspaper ad, Scheffler impressed them with his impassioned delivery. They liked Fabrizio’s throbbing guitar and agreed Chipperini’s wailing harmonica added the unique sound they were looking for.
Like his band mates, Chilson’s musical evolution includes twists and turns but rarely strayed away from his early interest in the blues.
Following his cousin’s footsteps, he began learning bass guitar at 15 and a few years later studied jazz.
Hometown buddies Chilson and Darling played together in the band Shaky Deal in 2000 performing around the Boston scene at clubs like Harper’s Ferry, Abbey Lounge and the John Stone Inn in Ashland.
Chilson earned an engineering degree from Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston and joined Perini in 1998. He’s currently working on a hotel project at Foxwood Resort Casino in Connecticut.
Band members juggle full-time day jobs with weekend gigs.
Darling drives big rigs for Owens-Minor in Franklin and Scheffler is a home construction estimator. Fabrizio is a financial consultant and Chipperini is a firefighter.
“It can be very demanding working days and playing gigs on weekends,” said Chilson. “We do everything ourselves.”
Darling began drumming at the age of 8 when he got a snare drum for a present.
He admired Ringo Starr of the Beatles, Buddy Rich and Neal Peart of Rush and learned different percussive styles like Big Band and swing. “I pretty much bounced around playing as a hobby,” he said. After playing in a Top 40 band “4 to 1,” he joined Chilson on Shaky Deal and together they formed Hoodoo Revelator.
After driving a trailer to New York or Vermont, Darling said he’s sometimes “running on fumes” for Friday night shows.
But he’s convinced the band has captured the right mix of “heart and fire, flamboyance and technical skill.”
“We’ve got a really unique sound going with a certain drive and rawness,” Darling said. “We’re definitely playing with a lot of emotion.”
Growing up on the Cape in the mid-1980s, Scheffler said he never began singing “until I had a car radio with stereo.”
One day he tuned into Johnson, “king of Delta blues,” and “the impact was unbelievable.”
“I wanted to find out where that sound came from,” said Scheffler.
Attending college in Maine, he began singing covers at parties and Cape clubs like The Bottom Line and Rum Runners which he remembers as “a colorful place like the bar in ’Star Wars.’”
“It was quite an experience. I decided never to stop,” said Scheffler who’s been true to his word. Over the last 20 years, he’s played with The Burning Seeds, Guaranteed Katch, Electric Sinners and The Cyclones. “As soon as one group flags or someone gets married, I start right in with a new band,” he said.
Including two years performing solo in Taos, N.M., Scheffler, 39, has played in pock and punk bands but “always comes back to the blues.” He was performing solo in Boston when he saw an advertisement for a start-up band that “wanted to play real blues like Muddy Waters and Howling Wolf.”
By the end of his audition, Scheffler knew he’d found a musical home with Hoodoo Revelator. “These were guys I’d never met before,” he recalled. “But I felt like I’d been playing with them forever.”
Scheffler said the band’s live shows demonstrate its “spirit of improvisation.”
“We take a lot of chances. We take our songs to unpredictable places,” he said. “People tell me we’re playing like we really mean it. Things are really clicking for us. We have a certain telepathy. We’re just going for it trying to get that feeling across.”
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