Sonny Rhodes called himself “the Sheik of East Oakland” during his days as a mainstay on the San Francisco/Oakland Bay Area blues scene, from the mid-1960s until the late ’80s. He wore a turban on his head as he wailed the blues in a manner that combined the smooth phrasing of his hero, Little Junior Parker, with a rough Z.Z. Hill-like squall. Sometimes he’d answer his vocals with biting obbligatos on standard guitar or, more often, with screaming shards of sound played on Hawaiian lap steel guitar.
The Smithville, Texas-born musician operated a nightclub called the House of Blue Lights in Berkeley during the mid-’70s before becoming a fixture at Eli’s Mile High Club in Oakland. He played there when Eli Thornton owned it and later, after Thornton’s girlfriend, blues singer Frankie Williams, shot him to death while he was tending bar. Bluesman Troyce Key bought the place not long after. Rhodes had earlier followed Key and J.J. Malone from Fresno to Oakland after answering a “talent wanted” ad in the Fresno Bee and landing a contract with Fantasy Records, then based in San Francisco.
Rhodes had recorded singles as a vocalist in 1961 for the Domino label in Austin, in 1964 for the Boise label in Fresno, and in 1966 for the Fantasy subsidiary label Galaxy, all under his birth name, Clarence Smith. For the next two Galaxy release, however, he was billed as “Sonny Rhodes,” a stage name suggested by Fantasy president Saul Zaentz.
Although Rhodes had dabbled in both bass and guitar, he was still working as a standup singer (and wearing a suit and tie on stage) when his third and final Galaxy 45, a self-penned slow blues titled “Country Boy,” was released in 1968. The song was given significant airplay on Oakland R&B station KDIA, making it one of the last blues records a local artist to be heard on commercial radio in the Bay Area. Malone was the guitarist.
“I didn’t feel that I was good enough,” Rhodes said of his initial reluctance to play guitar in public. “I knew I had a voice, but my guitar playing probably wasn’t up to par with my singing. I just kept playing. I’d go anywhere and play, and doing it as often as I did, things got a lot better.”
And by listening to and watching veteran Oakland blues musician L.C. “Good Rockin’” Robinson, Rhodes taught himself to play lap steel guitar.
Bad habits picked up on the streets of Oakland led Rhodes to relocate to New Jersey in 1987. “I thought I could do better,” he explained. “I drank a lot, and that didn’t help my case any. When I tried to quit doing these things on my own, my so-called friends would say, ‘Let’s go help him.’ They would call themselves helping me by bringing me drinks and drugs.”
Rhodes has been clean and sober since 2002. “I can play in bars and have it (alcohol) all around, but I don’t think about it,” he said.
He moved back to the Bay Area in 2004 so that his wife Annie, who had been battling cancer, could be near her doctor in San Francisco. And he was having trouble with his hips, both of which have since been replaced. They live in a large two-story house with a three-car garage in Antioch, a bedroom community 36 miles northeast of Oakland. All 25 of his grandchildren live within a 30-mile radius of his home.
His return to the Bay Area has been little-noticed, however. “I don’t play here because there is no work here,” said Rhodes, who had just gotten back from a two-month tour of Europe. He’s lost count of the number of times he’s been to Europe since first going there in 1976 as part of a San Francisco Blues Festival tour. Most of his gigs, however, are in Canada, which he’s been crisscrossing for the past three decades. Annie travels with him and handles his bookings.
Rhodes no longer wears a turban. He stopped on September 11, 2001, after three men with guns surrounded him outside the Yale Hotel in Vancouver, British Columbia, where was performing with his band.
“I had been mistaken for a terrorist,” he explained.
He calls the company that manages royalties for his compositions “Rhodes Warriors Publications,” an apt name for road warrior and blues survivor such as Rhodes.
Harmonica blower Carlos Zialcita — who traveled as a member of Rhodes’ band during that period while on breaks from his day job as a high school computer teacher and can be heard to outstanding advantage on the present disc recorded in San Francisco in December 1999 – remembered one particular survival strategy Rhodes and rhythm guitarist Big Bob Deance used while on tour.
“Everyplace we went,” Zialcita explained, “he and Big Bob would go to Chinatown and clean out all the pig’s feet we could buy, bring them back to the motel, and cook them. Bob was the best at turning the coffee pot in the motel into an all-purpose casserole dish. He would cook everything in that thing. They would serve up some dishes and call all that stuff ‘la oink.’”
Then & Now was recorded in front of a live audience at Broadway Studios in San Francisco a year following the Rhodes album Blue Diamond, produced by Bob Greenlee in Sanford, Florida, and released by Stony Plain Records in Edmonton, Alberta. New versions of three tunes from Blue Diamond – a hard-shuffling treatment of Eric Culburson’s “Blues Is My Religion,” the still-timely Rhodes-Greenlee composition “Shame on You,” and the Rhodes original “Meet Me at the 10th Street Inn,” named for a Berkeley club where he regularly played in the early ‘70s.
Rounding out the program are winning renditions by Rhodes and company of the Jimmy McCracklin hit “Think,” Percy Mayfield’s “My Jug and I,” “Put Your Shoe on the Other Foot” (previously recorded by Albert Collins, whom he cites as his main guitar influence), “My Woman Has a Black Cat Bone” (written and originally recorded by Houston steel guitar great Hop Wilson and subsequently rendered by Collins, Robert Cray, and Johnny Copeland, as well as by Eric Clapton), and a tune of unknown origin titled “You the One.”
Today, 16 years after Then & Now was recorded, Sonny Rhodes remains in peak form musically, relative good health, and the type of high spirits that have sustained his career as a bluesman for more than half a century.
“I still have the desire to play,” he recently stated. “I think that’s one thing that gives me the energy to keep going. I’m doing what I love, and I love what I’m doing. There’s not too many old musicians who can say that.”
–Lee Hildebrand, contributor to Living Blues and the San Francisco Chronicle
