Jeff Powers needS only his six-string to tell you stories. “Every guitar has a couple of songs in it,” he says, sipping a Stella at Tremont’s Prosperity Social Club. “Pick up even a crappy guitar, and it’ll still have a couple of stories to tell. All of a sudden, a chord you play all the time will sound awesome, and that one chord — it can spawn something.”
Powers’ journey is full of crossroads and chord progressions. Today,
he’s the singer-songwriter for Cleveland trio Dead Guy Blues, which is
set to release its second album, Cold Wind in Cleveland. Powers
notes that for the 10-song record, he picked up only one guitar —
his red Fender Stratocaster — and the strings told the story of a
Cleveland-kid-turned-classical-guitarist-turned-Mexican-bandito-turned-Cuyahoga-Delta-bluesman.
He explains the CD’s blistering basement-blues sound, proud of its
gritty electric guitar, heavy-handed lyrics and raw production:
“I really dialed in my distortion, and when [engineer and local
guitarist] JBlues mastered it, he put it at the hottest level with as
much compression as you can put for blues, which makes it sound
in-your-face,” he says.
The sound recalls Stevie Ray Vaughan’s Tex-Mex style, hell-fire
blues drunk on mescal, loud enough to raise Johnny Winter from the
grave (if he were actually dead). Cold Wind in Cleveland chronicles Powers’ travels as a virtuoso guitarist from the Cleveland
Institute of Music to Mexico City. Since he was nine, Powers has been
sharpening the edge of his axe. But he didn’t take it too seriously
until he heard Jimi Hendrix and found a teacher who could give him
basic blues lessons. Eventually, he was accepted at C.I.M. and earned
his bachelors and masters in classical guitar.
“The day after I did my final recital, I moved to Mexico,” he says.
“But I got really sick of playing classical. You just sit alone for
hours and hours, and then you’ll play your recital alone with three
people in the audience. You feel like you’re having a nervous breakdown
every time you perform.”
So Powers quit classical and played in blues groups in Mexico City
for seven years. Barely eking out a living, he wrote more than 200
songs, melding his love for blues guitar with classical
technique.
“I taught myself to groove, but it took me a long time to unravel
that,” he says. “I was technically advanced, but when I started playing
the blues, I would kind of lose the groove because of the junk I
practiced. I had to break out.”
Fast-forward to 2000. Powers had found his way back to Cleveland. He
quickly formed Dead Guys Blues with bassist Chris Boross and drummer
Steve Zavesky. In 2005, the trio released its self-titled debut, a
solid, 13-song, blues-pop album engineered by Paul Hamann at
Painesville’s Suma Recording (where the Black Keys recorded Attack
& Release). “The first record was too polished and too safe,”
says Powers. “Cold Wind in Cleveland has that rock sound I
wanted.”
From the blues-swing shuffle of “Pocket Full of Money” to the Latino
instrumental “Aztec Trot (Jose’s Boogie)” — something you might
encounter after drinking Mexican water — Cold Wind in
Cleveland is a spicy blend of blues stew, spiked with Powers’ edgy
guitar style.
“Rock folks will say it’s blues, but a stone-cold blues guy wouldn’t
agree,” he says. “But I’m not a blues guy from Mississippi. I didn’t
work in the fields, and my baby didn’t leave me. Well, that’s happened,
but these songs are not in that tradition — they’re overly
heavy-handed on purpose. It’s not a blues record all the way, but I’ve
never cared about those blues Nazis anyways.”
This article appears in May 20-26, 2009.