Much magic transpiring... that great wizard of the fiddle and mandolin, Peter Ostroushko, sat in the entire evening on Thursday January 18, at the Riverview in Minnie and the ensemble smoked beginning to end. Peter had sat in the whole second set at the Loring Bar with Zeke two nights earlier, adding his soulful nimbleness to a great panopoly of the original and traditional. Zeke ended with a medley of Robert Johnson's "Hellhound on my Trail" and the Dead's "Friend of the Devil". Off stage, Peter said he'd like to record the "Hellhound" song sometime.

"Hellhound" is the most unique blues ever and I've wanted to play it for years. When Becky Kury and I were in NYC in 1977 staying at Nancy Earl's place in Manhattan, in pursuance of a record deal with Atlantic, it came together for me. There was a piano in Nancy's brownstone and one morning I had started fooling around with the melody, trying to find piano chords that would fit with the melody - there was no way I could come close to what Johnson's guitar was doing, it still sounds like a snake from another planet. Anyway, once I dismissed the emulation of guitar, and distilled it down to sung melody, the piano responded naturally with the descending minor figures, like icy, steely quicksand, devil¹s claws in the back on a moonless black night in the wasteland.

Of course, Johnson's tunes are familiar to fishheads... such as "Last Fair Deal Gone Down," "From Four Till Late," "Dead Shrimp Blues," and, lately, "Stop Breaking Down."

Back in 1970, late 1970, I wanted to get deep into Robert Johnson, I knew there was a world there, on the one hand totally foreign, on the other immediately resonant, but I still felt outside of it's knowledge. I was sharing an apartment with Marc Weiner and Susie (later to be) Malone that Christmas season, bandless, disengaged - I wanted to get back down to the root. So Susie and Mark split for the holidays and I got the two Johnson albums on Columbia and listened to 'em over and over, eight hours, twelve hours a day... drinking bad black coffee by day, bad red wine by night, smoking mentholated cigarettes, eating burnt brown rice... just drenching myself, saturating myself in Johnson's stuff... getting marinated!

And let me tell ya, the stuff is spooky... his rhythm is coming from backwards - it's like he's creeping up slowly from behind the song, scaring the devil out of it into life, into the life of the song... that animating power, the soul of the song.

And nobody can play RJ's stuff like RJ... it totally defies anyone's powers of imitation or flattery. But the songs can become digging tools for your own personal pit... or lightning rods for the strange lightning that still is flashing out there...

that magic...