In 1969, the first time Bruce Iglauer met the late Chicago harmonica player Junior Wells, the diminutive blues great was wearing a cape.
It was a typically flamboyant first impression of a man who enjoyed his clothes almost as much as his beloved blues. And it would not be the last time that Wells–who stood 5 feet 3 inches tall and weighed barely 130 pounds–would seem larger than life to Iglauer, who would go on to become the president of Chicago blues label Alligator Records.
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Wells, who died Thursday at 63 after a battle with cancer, cast a huge shadow over Chicago music, not only because of his fierce harp playing and soul-spackled singing, but for his enigmatic mix of showmanship and compassion, bravado and loyalty, sartorial elegance and down-home grit. With his flashy style, simmering tone and electrified sound, he became one of the signature voices of postwar Chicago blues.
“He was sort of a patron to me, even before I was in the record business and was just packing boxes,” Iglauer recalled. “When I came down to Theresa’s Lounge, he would make sure I would get in for free. He let it be known that I was his friend and that you shouldn’t mess with me.”
Wells backed up his word in 1971 when Iglauer was confronted by a gang of South Side toughs outside of Pepper’s Lounge on 43rd Street. “They had already trashed my car, but Junior arrived and backed them off, all by himself,” he said. “That was typical Junior Wells. When he was your friend, he would do anything for you. . . . To me he was like a knight in shining armor. He had very specific feelings about proper behavior and had a code of ethics.”
Wells, born Amos Blakemore in Memphis, was generous to his friends, lending them money, paying his sidemen top dollar, and even shelling out for a needy blues man’s headstone. He sometimes demonstrated his faith in his friends in startling fashion: “I was at Pepper’s and Junior had just come back from a tour of Europe,” said Bob Koester, founder of Delmark Records. “We’re sitting at the table and he said, `Here, hold this for me.’ And it was a wad of bills–I found out later it was maybe 10 or 20 grand. He didn’t want to go on stage with a bulge in his clothes. I thought it was an incredible sign of trust.”
But Wells could also be stubborn and demanding. He once said he went AWOL from the Army and was dishonorably discharged after being drafted in 1952 because he couldn’t deal with authority.
“I wasn’t used to nobody telling me when to go to bed and when to get up, or when to eat,” he told an interviewer. “They were calling me `soldier’ and saying they were going to make a soldier out of me. And that pissed me off. I just told them, `Man, I’m not no soldier. I’m a musician.’ “
Yet in 1966 Wells headlined a U.S. State Department-sponsored tour of Africa, and was a virtual ambassador of the blues all his life. He toured almost non-stop; only after he got off the road from a show Aug. 23 in Toronto looking more frail than usual was his cancer discovered.
“If Junior would be meeting with Vice President Gore at the House of Blues grand opening, he wouldn’t treat him any differently than the person who parked his car,” said Wells’ longtime manager, Marty Salzman.
Wells showed up in Chicago at age 12 in 1946 and within a couple of years was scoring regular gigs as one of the hottest young harp players in town.
“Junior had a style that was a lot harder than it looked,” said Billy Branch, who met Wells in the early ’70s and played with him on the “Harp Attack!” album in 1990.
That signature style brought Wells to the attention of Muddy Waters, who hired the teenager for his great Chicago blues band in the ’50s. Wells also cut a series of singles but didn’t get around to making an album of his own until 1965, when Delmark’s Koester persuaded him to document the intense mood of his electric performances at the South Side clubs.
The record, “Hoodoo Man Blues,” was cut in two afternoons, and it’s regarded as a classic, as well as becoming Delmark’s biggest seller ever at more than 100,000 copies. “People thought we were doing something very daring, because the blues the young whites were listening to at the time were acoustic records by people like Lightnin’ Hopkins and Big Joe Williams,” Koester said.
Iglauer witnessed one of Wells’ subsequent sessions at Delmark and calls it “the high point of my life.”
“Hoodoo Man Blues” featured Wells’ longtime friend Buddy Guy as a backing guitarist, and the two had a long history, dating to 1958 when Guy bested Wells and several other greats in a Battle of the Blues at a South Side lounge. The two toured Europe together in 1970 as the opening act for the Rolling Stones and cut a series of albums produced by such admirers as Eric Clapton and the Stones’ Bill Wyman. Their regular partnership ended at the outset of the ’80s, but they would continue to reunite for occasional performances.
One such show was at Buddy Guy’s Legends in 1993. There they exhibited a level of intimacy that few married couples, let alone musicians, possess. And they achieved it with contrasting styles–Guy dressed as the Louisiana country man in overalls and leather cap, while Wells played his urban sharpie role to the hilt.
They treated the event like an intimate sitdown in their living room, using the postwar blues of Jimmy Reed and Willie Dixon as a jumping-off point for their acoustic improvisations and lyric embellishments, rather than as a sacred, immutable text.
“(Wells) thought of himself as an entertainer first, a singer second and a harmonica player third,” Salzman said. “He used to get mad when someone would invite him to be a special guest on some show just as a harmonica player. He wanted to do it all.”
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MORE ON THE INTERNET: Find more pictures of Junior Wells and listen to his music, as well as record your thoughts or memories, at chicago.tribune.com/go/junior