Curtis Salgado: Rocking With Death Down at the Dew Drop Inn

The first song on Curtis Salgado’s 11^th solo album, Damage Control, is “The Longer That I Live,” a reflection on getting older. Salgado, now 67, has survived half a century of the music business, decades of hard drinking followed by decades of sobriety, a heart attack and two cancer scares. But “The Longer That I Live” is not the somber reflection on mortality that one might expect. In fact, it’s a party song.

It opens with gospel piano and organ before shifting into a rollicking, second-line piano riff straight out of New Orleans. Over the snapping snare shots of drummer Kevin Hayes and the whistling organ of Mike Finnigan, Salgado adopts the gravelly voice of Dr. John to declare, I may be getting on, but I sure ain’t done yet, ‘cause the longer that I live the older I wanna get. This eagerness for what comes next is communicated not only by the words but also by wound-up carnival music.

“When I introduce that tune in the live show,” Salgado says over the phone from his home in Portland, Oregon, “I go, ‘I was thinking really, really deep about getting old, and this is what I came up with.’ Then I sing that, and they laugh, because it’s tongue in cheek. But there is something deep in it: You do want to keep going because you want to see where this clown car is going.”

By starting out with that song, Salgado sets the agenda for the entire album. The Stonesy rocker, “Precious Time,” tells the stories of two people who defer their dreams too many times before, realizing that lifetimes are as precious as they are short. On the slow hymn, “Always Say I Love You (At the End of Your Goodbyes),” the narrator regrets all the things he didn’t say before his friends passed away. The album’s title track, a zydeco duet with Louisiana’s Wayne Toups, describes that point in life where you’re no longer avoiding damage; you’re just trying to control it.

Sometimes the connection to the theme is more subtle. A song like the Memphis-soul groover “What Did Me In Did Me Well” seems to be about the lover who broke the narrator’s heart before coming back, but it also sums up the lessons learned over a lifetime. The rockabilly number “You’re Going To Miss My Sorry Ass” is the declaration of an inmate leaving a prison, but it could also be the kiss-off farewell of a man on his way to the graveyard. 

“I was on a blues cruise,” Salgado remembers, “and I overheard this couple arguing. When she walked away, he turned around with a cigarette and a drink and said, ‘When I’m dead and gone, you’re going to miss my sorry ass.’ That sounded like a hook to me. 

“When I write songs, I put different pieces of experience together like Legos. So, I put that hook in the mouth of this guy I grew up with, Rick. When I was 13 and he was 16, he turned me onto girls, drinking, this and that. He went to prison for holding up a drug store with a syringe, saying, ‘I’m gonna poke you and I’ve got AIDS,’ but it didn’t bother him, because he’d already been to juvie. That line, He could do 15 years standing on his head, you could hear that being said by a mob boss—or Rick.”

The album ends with wild, bar-band version of “Slow Down,” made famous by the Beatles, but originally written and recorded by New Orleans’ Larry Williams. The 12 other songs, though, were all co-written by Salgado with his fellow musicians. His most frequent collaborator was keyboardist Finnigan, best known for recording with Jimi Hendrix, Dave Mason and Crosby, Stills & Nash. 

“If a song needs a bridge,” Salgado says, “I could sit at the piano and try to pick out something, but when you have someone like Mike, who has such a creative mind, you’re crazy not to use him. He’ll come up with ideas, and I’ll say, ‘I like that right there, go from here to there.’ We just fire off each other. I can go down to L.A. and we can write a song in a day. He wrote all the music for the title song. It reminded me of Horace Silver and Dr. John, so I wrote the lyrics.”

The sessions for the album were like a meeting of the Bonnie Raitt Alumni Association, for Finnigan, guitarist George Marinelli, drummer Tony Braunagel and guitarist Johnny Lee Schell have all recorded with her. Keyboardist Jim Pugh and drummer Kevin Hayes both worked with B.B. King and John Lee Hooker. Jerry Jemmott played bass for Aretha Franklin and Nina Simone. With all this top-shelf talent in the studio, Salgado only twice pulled out his main instrument, the harmonica.

“If the song calls for it, I play it,” Salgado says. “I play it every day. But these are singer-songwriter tunes, and most of them didn’t call for it. The harmonica has ruined a lot of songs. Unless you can play the hell out of it, like Little Walter or Sonny Boy One and Two, if you’re just blowing in and out and kind of guessing at the chords, I’m not interested. I wanted to concentrate on my singing and songwriting this time. I’ve always done that, but I’m just now getting known for that.”

Salgado grew up in Eugene, Oregon, with jazz-loving parents and rock-loving older siblings. His mom bought him a copy of Tony Glover’s influential 1968 Blues Harp instructional book, and young Curtis became a harmonica zealot. He also had a strong voice and was soon leading Eugene’s Nighthawks band before joining the Robert Cray Band. Cray and Salgado shared the lead vocals on the group’s 1980 debut album, Who’s Been Talking? but management soon decided that two lead singers was one too many.

Salgado moved over to Roomful and Blues and toured with that Rhode Island horn band from 1984 through 1986. Back in Eugene, he founded Curtis Salgado & the Stilettos, which opened a hometown show for Robert Cray and Kenny G.

“I thought we really kicked ass on that show,” Salgado recalls, “and I said so to my pal Richard Cousins, who was Robert’s bass player then and now. Richard said, ‘Yeah, you guys kicked ass, except for one thing. We did a 90-minute set of originals, and you were playing covers.’ The songs I was singing by obscure tunes by Syl Johnson and Otis Clay, but still they were covers, and I went, ‘Oh.’ That’s when I got serious about songwriting.”

Like most songwriters, Salgado was following the models of his heroes, but his heroes were scattered across the decades and the genres: Hank Williams, Sam Cooke, John Prine, Bootsy Collins, Cole Porter, Earl King, Dan Penn, Al Green, Leiber & Stoller and Gamble & Huff. Salgado soon discovered he enjoyed co-writing, because it helped him put the Lego pieces together. 

For example, he heard a young woman named Jackie Miclau playing a piano instrumental that reminded him of New Orleans legend Allen Toussaint. Salgado recalled how Toussaint would take conversational catch phrases such as “I like it like that” or “working in the coal mine” and turn them into the hooks for his songs. That reminded Salgado of something his parents used to say.

“Whenever I didn’t take the garbage out or do my homework, I was supposed to,” Salgado remembers, “my father would say, ‘Oh, for the cry eye,’ like it was a cleaner version of ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake.’ As a knuckleheaded kid, I heard that quite a bit. So I put that to Jackie’s melody and added a story about a man not doing what he’s supposed to do in a relationship. Then I asked Finnigan to add a Toussaint-ish bridge. It all came together.”  

“Hail, Mighty Caesar” was Salgado’s conscious attempt to write a song in the style of Huey “Piano” Smith. Salgado, a history buff, came up with a story about a married man, his mistress and her new lover with Julius Caesar, Cleopatra and Mark Anthony playing the three roles. He asked pianist McKendree to help him find music that would connect Caesar’s first-century Rome with Smith’s 1950s New Orleans.

“We started with the baseline of ‘Let’s do an old New Orleans song,’” Salgado explains. “I know if he’s digging it; I’m going to dig it. I know if I can hear the song in my head, Kevin will know what I’m aiming for. Kevin will play something on the piano and say, ‘How about this?’ He’ll be leaning in my direction. He may not come up with exactly what I’m looking for, but that opens a door that leads to another door. We had it in about an hour. When I write a song, I want to make a mini-movie—a story with a melody and a strong hook.”

Salgado achieves that on most of these songs. He may be writing about life after 60, but he’s writing about it with the attitude that he’s not surrendering anything. Some folks just lay down and quit at the end of life’s race, he shouts on “The Longer That I Live,” but I’m gonna keep on keeping on with one foot in the grave.

Photo by Jessica Keaveny