Black Joe Lewis: Keeping it real, in more ways than one

(The following was written in 2009 for a publication that shall remain nameless. They liked it, they published it, but they never got around to paying me for it. So it's mine now. And yours. Enjoy!)  

Black Joe Lewis has made quite a name for himself and his band, the Honeybears, over the past year by unleashing a potent mix of blues, soul, and rock he calls “garage soul.” Universally beloved by critics for both his incendiary live shows and his recent album Tell 'Em What Your Name Is!, the only question among the rock literati remains: how best to hype him? The new James Brown? The man who saved soul? Iggy Pop wriggling around inside the body of a Texas bluesman? These are the types of notices he's been getting in this, his first year of real fame.

So it's only fitting that his backstory sounds like a rock-star “overnight success,” but with a real shaggy-dog tale underneath. Consider: just seven years ago, Joe was a high school dropout with no marketable skills, recording comedy skits at home into a tape recorder, working as one of two employees in a small Austin pawn shop and knowing little or nothing about the art of making music.

Oh, he’d had an informal education in the art of loving music: his father was an avid fan who gave Joe his first taste of blues in the Austin suburbs. "I was more into hip-hop growing up," he says now, an admission which makes Honeybears titles like "Get Yo Shit" and "Bitch, I Love You" easier to understand. Lightnin' Hopkins came from the exact same area of Houston as Lewis' family, which was one reason he stayed on Dad's stereo so much back then.

But Joe wasn’t interested. "I didn't really take to that at first," he says now. "But as you start playing music, you start listening to more things. Better things. And I mean, the attitude, what they talked about, it’s all the same thing." "The blues," he muses, "is like the hip-hop of the ‘50s, and rock and roll. Everything came from blues. It all comes in circles.”

For Lewis’ blues intervention, we can thank the Action Pawn chain of Texas pawn shops, specifically the one in Cedar Park. When customers were scarce, Lewis began fiddling with the busted and broken-down misfit guitars in the store rather than speak to the only other person there at the same time – his boss. (“We did not agree on anything.”) Within months he'd trained himself to play, and since he wasn't about to try hip-hop on a guitar, Joe reverted back to his parents' stash: not just Lightnin' but also Hound Dog Taylor and any other blues and soul man from there to Memphis.

Joe still wasn’t a fulltime musician, however. The honor of turning him on to that prospect went to his neighbors, then playing in a band called The Weary Boys. “I was working 50 hours a week,” he remembers, “and they would go see the world, and get to hang out with people, and play music for money. They were like, ‘Man, just start playing the blues, you can have all of that.’ And I had nothing going but a lot of day jobs.”  

So Lewis began to write, inspired by Hopkins’ raw simplicity on vocal and guitar, and his lyrical honesty. But as he tested his material out on some of Austin’s more unforgiving open mic nights, stage fright became a huge factor. “My first show was at a place called Beerland,” he laughs. “Lot of punk rock down there. And I was doing covers, but I wrote a lot of songs back then, and they all sounded like the same four-bar blues. Same progression. Acoustic guitar, really growly sound. And here I am, nervous and shit, so I would get drunk on like 20 tons of alcohol and start cussing the audience. And they actually allowed me to come back. I really appreciate those club owners,” he laughs. (Around that time, he began using the “Black Joe” handle, a remnant of one of those old comedy skits which was done with a friend called “White Joe.”)

 James Brown was also a big influence, as anyone who’s heard Lewis callout to the Honeybears on “Sugarfoot” can attest. But that was born of necessity, according to the singer: when getting drunk didn’t work, he resorted to simply screaming his fear away. “I never wanted to even be the singer in this band,” he claims now. "I just started singing quietly. Now I’m screaming the whole time.”

By this time, other musicians in the club’s orbit began to pick up on what Joe was doing, and after future Honeybear and University of Texas alum Zach Ernst got him to open for Little Richard at the college’s annual Forty Acres Fest, the band naturally formed about him. At first, it was a trio – named after a crate of bear-shaped honey containers lying around in one of their practice rooms. Soon, however, he had the idea of a big band: “We had a lot of horn players; adding horns to what I do automatically makes it a soul band.”

The rest is recent history. The group easily conquered Austin; after agreeing to appear at SXSW in 2007, Esquire listed the Honeybears as one of the Ten Bands Set to Break Out there; they promptly did. This year, in keeping with the band’s blues-rock-soul theme, both Austin City Limits and Lollapalooza snapped them up. And with the fame has naturally come some criticism: specifically, rumbles of protest about Lewis’ attitude towards women in the lyrics of songs like “Get Yo Shit,” where he can’t even remember his girlfriend’s name. Joe insists, however, that it’s all just outsized remnants of his earlier comedy leanings: “It’s all just fragments of stuff that happened. But I was always a big Richard Pryor fan.”  

  

There’s also the question of whether the Bears wear their influences a little too proudly on their sleeves, for example the intro of “Gunpowder,” which hews so very close to the Bar-Kays’ “Soul Finger” that it can’t be anything but an homage. But Lewis promises the band “wants to keep improving,” and to that end, they’ve already begun writing and rehearsing for the next album. And even though songs like the slavery blues “Master Sold My Baby” point to possible directions of maturity, Lewis also swears to keep it as raw and dirty as his idols. In fact, he still buys instruments from pawn shops. “Hey, we’re not rich yet,” he mumbles. “A guitar’s only 40 dollars, and the main thing you’re paying for is to have it stay in tune. Unless you're using it live, why spend all that money?”