"Smokin'" Joe Kubek

Popular blues guitarist rocks on, Texas style, just like Stevie Ray

by Don Fluckinger

With Texas blues, you're either the real deal, or a pretender. There's no in-between. It's a rough-and-tumble genre that's brought the world characters like Albert Collins and Lightnin' Hopkins, who played coarser riffs than their smooth West Coast contemporaries or the urbane, contemporary Chicago bluesmen. Young Texas-style guitarists typically sound transparent, just mimicking Stevie Ray. Even the grizzled road warriors--with nothing left to prove--sometimes sound trite.

The Smokin' Joe Kubek Band featuring Bnois King, however, is the real deal. Not only does Kubek--the 25-year blues veteran and Freddie King protege--have an exceptionally deep trick bag and a command of the blues vocabulary, but he's got a perfect foil in King, a jazz guitarist and street-wise vocalist who adds a depth to the music that isn't heard with the typical Texas band.

King's rhythm riffs and solo guitar roam the musical periphery around Kubek's solid blues playing. "It's phenomenal," Kubek says. "He's got a knack for playing outside and around what's going on. It fills it up, it makes it big."

Moreover, instead of country-style, twangy singing, Bnois King injects a sly uptown toughness into the songs; his keen sense of vocal timing allows him to drop in and cut off in some interesting places. When writing songs, Kubek and King use a collaborative method, which explains how they sound so well together: "I have little bits and pieces of stuff in my mental Rolodex," Kubek says. "He comes up with some lyrics, and we put it together and make it fit."

They don't record covers; it's all inventive, new stuff. One of their songs, "Damn Traffic," deals with road rage, an unusual topic for a blues number: "Ain't got no heat in my car, you know my radio ain't workin'/the driver right behind me's actin' like a jerk/I wanna flip the finger but it wouldn't be cool/'cause a pissed-off driver just might act the fool."

Great songs and solid cooperation have held the group together for seven years, through seven solid albums--all but one on Bullseye Blues. For Take Your Best Shot, the band hired a blues and rock studio master, Jim Gaines, to produce the record. They weren't unhappy with Ron Levy, a Bullseye exec and gifted blues producer himself; Kubek says he just wanted a change of pace.

On Take Your Best Shot, Gaines brings a breadth of experience from engineering, mixing, and producing albums since the early '70s from rockers like Steve Miller, Blues Traveler, and Journey to blues greats such as Albert Collins, John Lee Hooker, and Luther Allison. With Gaines at the boards, the recordings sound more expansive and powerful, the downbeats more crunchy and forceful.

"They're two different bags," Kubek says of Levy and Gaines. "I wouldn't want to compare 'em. Gaines has worked with people like Santana and Stevie Ray Vaughan. This new album right here is what I was looking for, as far as the sound with Jim Gaines producing. More of something that's happening on the right side of the dial," referring to the more powerful FM rock and blues stations.

Also showing up on the album are Little Milton Campbell and Jimmy Thackery. The former, an old Chess and Stax hand, adds some rip-roaring style to "You Said 'I Love You' First" and "One Night Affair," which Kubek claims is "the best work he's ever done." A modern Texas bluesman, Thackery contributes lines in "Worst Heartache." The rest of the album is all cool King and red-hot Kubek, who definitely had some fun only a guitar player of his caliber can have with toys like a Univibe pedal, lap steel guitar, and a 12-string guitar. On "Spanish Trace," Kubek combines two great blues implements by running his acoustic guitar through a Hammond organ's Leslie cabinet.

After joining Freddie King's band when he was 19, Kubek played with him around south Dallas until his death in 1976. For 15 years after that, Kubek played in various R&B and blues ensembles, never really hitting a national audience. Then came Bnois King (no relation to Freddie), another little-known blues and jazz guitarist. Together, their strain of Texas blues went national through constant recording and touring.

"We've pretty much been on the road since the first album came out--we go home for a minute and get back out on the road again," Kubek says. "We've been traveling steady for a little over nine years now . . . but I count my blessings. A lot of people can't do this. It's rough sometimes but it's a neat thing to be able to do."