Bluesman Bernard Allison puts his spin on dad’s song

By John Benson

“My whole goal is to reach the younger audience and possibly capture some of those who really have no concept of blues.”

Bernard Allison

Musician

He likes to keep it real when recording a new CD.

When it comes to recording, blues guitarist Bernard Allison has a system: just push record and play.

“That’s pretty much been my whole recording concept since the beginning,” said Allison, calling from his Minneapolis home. “I don’t try to go in and make the perfect record. It makes no sense to me to go in and record this polished product. I mean, I can’t play it like that, so our whole concept is we go in and record live, and it normally takes us three days to record an album. So we go in, push record and let it go.”

This was definitely the case with Allison’s latest effort, “Chills & Thrills,” which was released last year and finds the son of great Chicago bluesman Luther Allison further expanding his sound and exploring his blues roots.

The 13-track effort includes a version of the 12-bar blues classic “That’s Why I’m Crying,” along with the funky title track and the power rock tune “When I’m Gone.” However, it’s a cover of his dad’s popular song “Serious” that has been turning the heads of his audience.

“My dad’s song ‘Serious’ is probably his biggest hit worldwide,” Allison said. “And we get great response from this song for the fact that everyone knows it the minute they hear it. They’re like, ‘Oh wow, he’s covering his dad’s song.’ And my dad used to tell me when I first started playing, ‘If you’re going to go out and cover my song, Hendrix or Stevie Ray, don’t go out there to try to copy it and do what we did because that really doesn’t get you anywhere. You become a copycat.’

“So you have to put yourself into anything you play, and that’s what I do. I always wanted to sing the song but never thought my voice was strong enough to cover it the way that my dad had actually recorded it. So I kind of pulled it back a little bit. It’s an up-tempo ballad, and we pulled it back into like a slow ballad, which really fits our style and my vocal capability. It gave me more range to have the music breathe a little bit more. I was happy with the outcome.”

Fresh from an overseas tour that included shows in Africa, Allison and his band are about to begin their first Stateside run this year. This includes a Tangled Up In Blues series show at the Dash Inn in Youngstown on Saturday.

While the 43-year-old Allison remains known in blues circles, he’s naturally hoping to expand his fan base into the mainstream.

Specifically, he calls out classic-rock lovers as the folks who he feels would enjoy his live show, which isn’t so much a look back at blues as a m lange of something old and something new.

“We can’t continue to keep playing old Muddy Waters and the old ‘Sweet Home Chicago,’” Allison said. “It’s all been done before. My whole goal is to reach the younger audience and possibly capture some of those who really have no concept of blues. If they don’t know, they’re going to say, ‘Oh, that’s the old stuff that my parents listened to.’ And that’s not true because there are so many different styles of blues now, from Texas to Chicago to the West Coast and East Coast.

“There’s a different flavor to it all. And a lot more people are leaning on rock and funk and even hip-hop nowadays, but that’s what it takes to keep this music alive. We have to update it and take chances. I’m a risk-taker, but I know everything I play is blues-based. I don’t forget where my roots are and where my strong points are. I just reconstruct around it.”