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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Despite bloat, a white-hot must-read for music fans, February 11, 2000
In "Mister Satan's Apprentice," street musician extraordinaire Adam Gussow has left in just about everything, and it's about 40 percent too much; the book would have read far better at a sleek 250 pages. But the good stuff is really good, and the book is well worth reading despite its distractions and digressions. In his early 40s, Gussow is currently a doctoral candidate in Princeton's English department. But thousands know him as the harmonica-wielding half of the "progressive gutbucket blues" duo Satan and Adam -- three-CD recording artists, photogenic subject of any number of newspaper and magazine features, and cameo stars of the U2 movie "Rattle and Hum."In his autobiography, Gussow gets deep inside blues, and his relationship to it, and manages to successfully translate the music into language. "Blues harmonica played well was a miniature tongued slalom, a tornado swallowed and contained," he tells us, and his words capture every bit of excitement that the grooves and notes have to offer. "Mister Satan's Apprentice" is about much more than the blues, though -- it's a provocative meditation on race from a white man immersed in a traditionally black genre, neighborhood and world. Playing around with his first harmonica, in 1974, Gussow contemplates the subtleties of playing blues. "It had something to do with being a black guy," he muses. As the protagonist in his narrative, Gussow pales (no pun intended) next to two marvelous characters: his two mentors, Nat Riddles and Sterling "Mister Satan" Magee. Twenty-two years older than his protégé, Mister Satan is as colorful as they come. He's a visual artist and apocalyptic numerologist with a murky music-industry background, and a font of, if not wisdom, then brilliantly idiosyncratic aphorisms and soliloquies. A Harlem fixture when Gussow approaches the guitarist to jam along, he shouts and hollers, runs hot and cold, towers over other men. Mister Satan looms larger than life, but harmonica player Nat Riddles is entirely real, an odd-job taxi driver with a dazzling smile and soulful tone. "He was perpetually on the verge of becoming the blues world's Next Big Thing," Gussow writes. "A young black harp-player with the Sound." Riddles flits in and out of fortune, showing up unexpectedly to astound a New York club, phoning from somewhere in the South, destitute and desperate, surviving gunshot wounds only to eventually succumb to a cruel wasting disease. It's the music, finally, that counts most -- Gussow gives his story its own soundtrack, one of restlessness and yearning, of his struggle to capture the Sound: "The Sound was Southern-bound, it was cocky, playful, manic, chucking, resentful, edgy, comforting, relentless. It took incredible lip strength and finesse to produce. It was sexual. It was the haunted, restless feeling of a guy's apartment late at night after the woman who used to live there had moved out. It was whatever nasty things she was doing with the other guy-a virile sensitive soulmate-this very minute. It was the best way of beating those visions back into the ghoulish cave they had crawled out of. Working hard at the Sound was a socially acceptable way of sobbing, raging, and primal-screaming from a hot heart while pretending merely to be practicing." A little of this kind of writing goes a long way, and there's an awful lot of it here. Granted, it's a real challenge to maintain a level of excitement in writing about music page after page, particularly about blues, a genre built on the same few chords locked in a repetitious groove. So it's forgivable that Gussow often leans out a little far: "The sidewalk scene dissolved; I was wandering in a garden of earthly delights, hands cupped against the sweet cold fluid air. Every bent note was a pitch-perfect arrow puncturing the gray dusk. You only live now. Blue notes danced and spun, lines endlessly unfolding like so many wrapped gifts laid bare." You have to remind yourself that he's talking about a harmonica, one of the more prosaic of instruments. For all Gussow's breathless adjectives and action verbs, he's frustratingly vague about the technical aspects of the duo's "huge raw perfect sound." The book's photos show Gussow with effects pedals at his feet, but he makes no mention of them; he doesn't mention the basic information that he plays in "cross harp" style until page 386; Mister Satan's "phase-shifted guitar wash and deafening clatter" is described pretty much only in metaphorical terms, as, for instance, "an endlessly unrolling Persian carpet with gristle and clanks added." Gussow is so good at getting inside his playing that the narrative sags whenever it moves to other topics. A hefty amount of the bloat deals with his failed relationships. We meet mercurial crackhead Robyn and inconstant ex-fat girl Gail, but mostly there's erratic, irritable hyperfeminist Helen. Gussow tells us on page 30 that Helen left him back in 1984, so we're predisposed to dislike her, and we indeed do. "Most men had a girlfriend," he writes. "I had Aphrodite crossed with Kali the Destroyer, She of infinite ravenous limbs." Worse, the book's artfully jumbled narrative, with short sections ordered sort of sequentially on several tracks, dooms us to read about Helen over the entire course of the book. We think we're finally through with her, and then: "1983. Things with Helen had turned out surprisingly well . . ." Enough already! In the late '80s and early '90s, a period when racial violence kept flaring up in the outer boroughs of New York City, Satan and Adam's young-old, white-black novelty made a splash, but momentum slipped away. "Minor celebrity beckoned, then faded," Gussow writes. And despite the book's vibrant cover photo of the pair, they no longer perform, according to an e-mail Gussow sent me. "[I]t's impossible to keep the act together," he wrote, noting that Mister Satan now lives in south-central Virginia and has no telephone. That's a real shame.
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~ Satan & Adam
~ Satan & Adam
~ Satan & Adam
by Hal Leonard Corp.
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