Bluesman Kenny Neal battles tragedy, illness and comes out on top

Bluesman Kenny Neal battles tragedy, illness and comes out on top
September 29, 2009
By Tim Parsons
Tahoe.com

Tommy Castro may have said it best: Kenny Neal is the real deal.

Neal's latest record epitomizes the essence of blues music. There was death all around him, and he too appeared to be on his death bed when he optimistically wrote about life.

“Let Life Flow” won every award imaginable, and Neal drove hepatitis C out of his veins.

A native of Baton Rouge, La., who now is based in Palo Alto, Calif., Neal will bring his guitar, lap steel guitar and harmonica to Saturday, Oct. 3's Legendary Rhythm & Blues Revue at Harrah's Lake Tahoe with the Tommy Castro Band, Janiva Magness and John Nemeth.

Neal's father, sister, brother and one of his best friends died in an 11-month period, at the end of which Neal was diagnosed with hepatitis C and stage 4 liver disease. Stage 5 is death.

“I was knocking at the door, man,” Neal, 51, said.

Neal's Stanford doctor told him he needed to stop playing music for a year or two. He objected.

“She said, ‘If you want to live you have to follow my orders,' ” Neal said. “I said, ‘You've got my attention.' ”

Neal was too ill to get out of bed when he penned “Let Life Flow.”

“Life is so unpredictable; that's the way it is.
Gets a little hard to bear sometimes; things out of nowhere blow your mind.
One thing I know for sure; You got to let life flow.”

“I was seven months into my treatment,” he said. “That's when your body really breaks down because they had to kill off 80 percent of my white cells for the medicine to work. ... A lot of people can't take it. A lot of people's bodies reject it and a lot get so sick they just can't take it. I got real bad there, but I didn't let it get me down. But a lot of people just can't take that bad feeling. That nausea. It's just crazy.”

During his 58 weeks of treatment, Neal, who more than a decade earlier was a lead actor on Broadway, started an entertainment talk show on a public access station. During an interview with E.C. Scott, Neal mentioned he had put together material for an album but hadn't yet looked for a label.

San Francisco's Blind Pig Records President Edward Chmelewski saw the program, and made an offer to Neal. It was a fortuitous development for everybody.
“We put that record out and it took off like wildflower,” Neal said.

The 2009 Blues Music Awards named “Let Life Flow” song of the year. The album was voted the year's best by Blueswax, Blues Critics Awards and the West Coast Blues Hall of Fame. Neal also won the Monterey Bay Blues Artist of the Year Award. In addition, Neal was nominated for a Grammy Award in four categories.

All 10 of the Neal brothers and sisters are professional musicians.

“I don't even remember learning the stuff,” Neal said. “I got it from my dad. I remember crawling up his legs and grabbing the harmonica from his hands or pick from his guitar. ... When we got older, the other kids started joining football and baseball teams, but we started putting bands together and making music on weekends with our dad.”

Castro, who also lives in the Bay Area, recruited Neal to join the Legendary Rhythm & Blues Revue, which has annual week-long Caribbean and Mexican cruises.

“Kenny's amazing because he is so much the real deal for a guy his age,” Castro said. “He's as close as you're going to get to another generation of blues guys. He grew up around this music.

“We're all just learning this stuff. We learn it from listening to records and pop culture — somehow we find out about this stuff. But guys like Kenny, he just grew up in that type of music. That's cool because he can give us a little bit of schooling.”
Neal's father, Raful, was the bandleader of a Baton Rouge group which included Buddy and Phillip Guy, who both moved to Chicago to start their own bands.

“Buddy and my dad were very close and Buddy told him he needed a bass player,” Neal said.

So at the age of 19, Neal joined Guy's band in 1976 for a gig at Antone's in Austin, Texas. Neal decided to move to Chicago where he played with Guy for a few years.

“I went to Chicago and it did change me in having a look at different artists who were playing guitar and singing, and all of them had their contracts in their back pockets telling me, ‘Hey I'm going to Europe next week,' ” Neal said. “I'm going, ‘Damn, these guys are not that good and they're taking off to Europe with their own band. I think I need to get me a band.' That opened my eyes up to a much broader music business. We were just playing weekends in the South at the regular local scene. So when I went to Chicago, I just saw everything just open up for me. Yeah man, I can make a living at this and travel all over the world.”

Now a bandleader and lead guitarist, Neal landed a deal with Chicago's Alligator Records.

Neal's first hit song with Alligator, “Outside Looking In,” was released in 1988, around the time he met Albert Collins.

“He was always my idol, so when I made my first record, I was nervous about going up and introducing myself to him,” Neal said. “He was on his bus. I knocked on the bus door and walked in and he goes, ‘Wow man, you're that little dude from Baton Rouge.' He said, ‘Check this out,' and he turned the volume up. He was listening to “Outside Looking In.”

Shortly after releasing his third record on Alligator, Neal received a singular offer.
The 1930 play, “Mule Bone,” written by the African-American poet Langston Hughes and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston, was being put together for Broadway. Taj Mahal wrote the music, and a 27-member cast was assembled. But producers struggled finding a lead actor to play the role of a young bluesman. None of the actors who auditioned were authentic enough to land the part. So instead, a real bluesman was taught to become an actor. Neal received intensive training.

“They just drilled me, man,” Neal said. “Broadway don't believe in mistakes and they don't believe in being slouchy about anything. You need to be on the button, on time and you can't ad lib. They really drill you in rehearsal and that made me much more disciplined when I came back to the blues stage.”

“Mule Bone” played for more than a year and won a Theater World Award for “The Most Outstanding New Talent On and Off Broadway.”

Although he said he may someday return to acting, Neal is content playing the blues and letting life flow. He recently had his third six-month test for hepatitis C. He came up clean.

“Prayers work,” he said. “I'm one of the lucky ones. I beat this hepatitis. Your time up ain't till it's ready.”