Share
Digg
StumbleUpon
RedditPhoto Gallery
|
Focus on the BluesExplore more photos from the story |
(Page 3 of 5)
Lately, Waterman, who retired in the early 1990s from managing musicians, has had little time for relaxing on his porch. He photographs performers at blues festivals, exhibits his pictures hither and yon, and is forever offering insights to willing listeners; he appears in Martin Scorsese’s seven-part PBS documentary, The Blues, scheduled to air this month.
On a steamy July day in his living room—puddles of unopened mail and uncashed checks and a Christmas ornament resting on a breakfront testify that Waterman, a bachelor, still spends a lot of time on the road—he pulls out a favorite print of Son House, father of the blues guitar, and takes a deep breath, as if inflating his lungs with memory: “To see Son House perform. And to see him go to a place within himself that was very dark and secretive and ominous and bring forth that level of artistry. It was as if he went to 1928 or 1936 . . . He just left the building. The greatness of Son House was to look at Muddy Waters or Howlin’ Wolf or Jimmy Reed when they watched Son House and to read Son House in their faces. They would shake their heads. Buddy Guy would say, ‘That old man’s doin’ another kind of music. We can’t even go to that place.’ If the blues were an ocean distilled . . . into a pond . . . and, ultimately, into a drop . . . this drop on the end of your finger is Son House. It’s the essence, the concentrated elixir.”
He opens a drawer, and a gust of regret seems to blow into the living room. “I don’t show this to many people,” he says. He holds up a tray from a photo darkroom. “It’s very depressing.” In his hand are 150 rolls of film all stuck together, representing some 5,000 pictures from the ’60s. “I put them in a closet, and there was some sort of leak from the attic. It filled with water, and the emulsion adhered to the inner sleeves. Many, many, many rolls, gone forever.”
Those corroded strips of negatives are like forgotten songs, the ones that somehow never found their way onto a round, hard surface. Hold a sliver of film toward the light and one can discern faint streaks: tiny figures playing guitar. They are irretrievable now. But the blues is about loss, and Waterman has known his share of the blues, including a stutter (which he has overcome), past cocaine use, whirlwind relationships (he and Raitt were an item for a time) and once-simmering feuds with rival managers. He has lost legions of friends to illness and hard living. But if his life has been about anything, it has been about redressing loss and regret through the balm of rediscovery.
Comments