Born: Henry Achilles Cooper on January 27, 1957 in Salem, OR

Interview with Henry Cooper by Jon Morris with Rosalia D’Amato recorded on June 3, 2001 at Anne & Henry Cooper’s house in the Central District of Seattle.

When I mentioned to Jelly Roller Sean Divine that I occasionally played with Henry Cooper, he said he “likes Henry’s playing a lot—he’s a mature player.” I took that to mean Henry Cooper is a “pro.” Henry has been a player ever since the late ’70s, before I met him in 1981 in Eugene, Oregon. About that time Henry’s band Los Explorers was playing a gig at Taylor’s Tavern. I asked Henry a question and he gave me the right answer when he looked at me and said, “Sometimes, Jon, you just gotta take the bull by the horns, and ride it.” At that time Henry had already begun to develop his style, and I figured he knew what he was talking about.

For over 20 years he has been riding that bull. No matter how tough the ride gets, he is constantly working at getting gigs, improving his style, and searching for different sounds in the context of his idea of what blues is. Influenced by everybody from Charlie McCoy to Albert Collins to Wes Montgomery to Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, I would imagine Henry’ll keep riding the blues bull to the finish.

JON: All right, Henry, I’ve known you over 20 years. When I first met you in Eugene you were playing with the Los Explorers.
HENRY: With John Barley and Louie Samora.
JON: And that band was a rockabilly band?
HENRY: We did everything from the Yardbirds to the Thunderbirds. The first T-Birds album really affected us and the first songs I ever sang or played guitar was Jerry McCain’s She’s Tough, and Slim Harpo’s Scratch My Back, both of which were on the first T-Birds record. But we also did Yardbirds. We did some rockabilly stuff because of Louie, Johnny Burnette stuff. We were all over the place, but it was all roots music.
JON: Were you playing more harmonica then?
HENRY: I started out as a harp player, but Los Explorers was the first band that I played guitar in.
JON: As I remember, you were more of a country harmonica player. What country players can you think of that were influential on the harmonica?
HENRY: Well, you know, like all harp players, I started off playing blues. I played in the Coltrane Blues Band. In ’76 we put out a 45, but that was right around the time of the Urban Cowboy thing when people like Willie Nelson were really popular. So I hooked up with a country singer named Jimmy Lee Holder and we would play these Mickey Rafael and Charlie McCoy harp licks behind country guys and I could work doing that. I still love Charlie McCoy.
JON: So were you playing a lot of straight position harmonica?
HENRY: No mostly second. Almost exclusively.
JON: So when did you start getting into the guitar?
HENRY: I always wanted to play the guitar, I just couldn’t afford one. I finally got an old Gibson lap steel at a pawnshop for 30 bucks in Springfield. And then I found a Fender Jaguar and a Tweed Deluxe for a hundred dollars. I started playing slide on that guitar, not the lap steel. Oh, I could still play lap steel. I just don’t do it much.
JON: So with the lap steel, you were obviously in open tuning.
HENRY: Always. From day one. I started playing
JON: What tuning were you using when playing lap steel? Were you doing more country kind of stuff?
HENRY: Well, once I got the lap steel, I started emulating a lot of blues guitarists like Johnny Winter, Rory Gallagher.
JON: Were you using the C6 tuning?
HENRY: No, open E.
JON: Open E?
HENRY: I didn’t get into the sixth tunings until later. I started out in basic open E. I was going to see Albert Collins who came to Eugene a lot back in those days at the Eugene Hotel— he got me to play guitar in open tuning.
JON: He used an open E, right?
HENRY: Open F minor is what he used, basically the same tuning as Skip James and Bukka White, but it’s tight. It’s up to F instead of down to D. They used a D minor tuning. That would be DAFDAD. High to low. Albert took it up to…like if you had an open D minor capoed on the third fret, that’s what Albert’s tuning was open. It was really taut; his strings were tight. And they bit.
JON: So an F minor tuning.
HENRY: It’s one of those…Isaac plays in that tuning. It’s like a church tuning. But I pretty much play in that tuning except I use a major third instead of a minor third most of the time. The same thing.
JON: What other Eugene bands were you in besides Los Explorers?
HENRY: Well, I was in the Chris Coltrane Blues Band in ’76. In fact, he put out a CD on Wolf Records that our own Harley Hawkins from up here played on. Kind of a nutty guy, but a good singer. I was right out of high school. We put out a 45 of Cold Day In Hell and Backdoor Man, and I played harp on that.
JON: Didn’t he say he was John Coltrane’s illegitimate son?
HENRY: Yeah, he did say that. You never knew when he was telling the truth or not. But he was a good singer and he gave me my start. Then I played in these country bands with Jack Thomas and Jimmy Lee Holder. Gary Beck was a great guitar player we played with who’s still a friend of mine. And then going to see the Nighthawks with Curtis Salgado (pre Robert Cray days in the mid–late 70’s), and the Cray band later, and seeing blues bands that came to Eugene like Muddy Waters, and Big Walter Horton and stuff. But, then we got Los Explorers together. We wanted to play blues, but we played rock too. Like I said, we played Yardbirds, and we played rockabilly, and mixed it all together. I guess I could compare us to with the Blasters, except we weren’t as good, but you know, that’s kinda what we were like.
JON: As I remember you had a lot of different kinds of crowds, more than the blues—
HENRY: Yeah, college kids. We got to jam with the Blasters, and Los Lobos. Those guys came to our gigs and sat in with us at Max’s. After that I had bands called the Milkman, Los Falcons, and the Terraplanes in Portland, and I played with Duffy Bishop. I played with Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. Kind of worked my way up here to Seattle.
JON: So, when did you play with Screamin’ Jay Hawkins?
HENRY: Only for one year. ’87.
JON: And you guys played in Europe, or over here?
HENRY: Both. We played in Hollywood a lot. That’s where Jay lived so that was really cool. And we went to Europe.
JON: What’s the story with that whole thing?
HENRY: He was using pick-up bands so we backed him up at the Pine Street Theater in Portland. He liked what we were doing because we took the trouble to learn his tunes. So he hired us. We played a bunch of gigs in Hollywood where we’d meet people like Tom Waits and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
JON: Really? That’s cool.
HENRY: Yeah, they came to the gigs. We played The Palomino. We played a lot of places around Hollywood, and in Southern California and then went to Europe with him. Yeah, it was really cool.
JON: Tell me a little bit about touring with him? What was Screamin’ Jay like?
HENRY: Jay was an interesting kind of unusual guy. He didn’t drink any more, but he liked to smoke weed. But he didn’t want anybody to know that. He’s probably rolling in his grave that I’m telling this, but he had a bunch of pharmaceuticals. He always had a pill for anything if he needed it. Sitting in the back of the bus I learned so much from talking to him about music and the old days. He loved guys like Big Joe Turner and Gatemouth Brown. I’d play him tapes I brought of Gatemouth Brown, Peacock sessions. He had great stories about blues. Like how Tiny Grimes, who was his first bandleader, was such a bastard to him because he used to make him sleep in the car. The whole band got hotel rooms but Jay had to sleep in the car because he was the youngest. He said Tiny Grimes “taught me how not to treat a band.” We have a lot of good stories about that. I remember coming back from Europe. Jay had a bunch of hash in his suitcase someone had given to him. I don’t think he bought it. He covered it with onion juice so the dogs couldn’t smell it. He said, “Yeah, I cover my hash with onion juice and the dogs can’t smell it.” So we’re all at LAX and we all have our baggage, and we’re waiting for that one bag of Jay’s with the hash in it. And he wouldn’t let us leave. He made us wait at the carousel with him. We’re all nervous as hell like the DEA, or somebody’s gonna …
JON: Customs will bust you.
HENRY: So we’re like sweating, and the weird thing is that suitcase never showed up in the carousel. It just disappeared. We were all very relieved, went running to our cars to go back to Oregon
JON: I saw him at the Ecosine Festival in Belgium when I was playing there with Eddie Burns—I think it was the year after that in ’88—he seemed like a pretty bizarre interesting character.
HENRY: He was really bizarre. I’ll tell you a good story. This is a great one. He was a good guy but you didn’t give him any shit. He was from Cleveland; he grew up with Don King and Lloyd Price, and he had boxed. Well, I got along with him great. But one of the guys kind of flipped out one night. He mouthed off to Jay and Jay didn’t like that. Later that night after the show we were all brought up to Jay’s hotel room. This was in Helsinki, Finland. It was real dark in his room, real hot, and filled with smoke. Jay chain-smoked Phillip Morris Commanders. This was just like a scene out of Apocalypse Now where Martin Sheen goes to kill Marlon Brando at the end, and Brando’s washing his head with that water. So Jay’s sitting there in his chair and we all have to stand around. It’s unbearably hot in this room, smoky and dark, like we were in front of the devil or something, and Jay made the guy who had offended him somehow kneel down and apologize like one inch from his face. I thought Jay was gonna pull out a gun and blow his brains out. We were all scared shitless. It was just some kind of intimidation thing that Jay probably had a real good laugh about later—we all did, in fact, but it was weird at the time. Man, it was a trip.
ROSALIA: From then on were the employee relations fine?
HENRY: I still had no problem. Jay just kept wanting us to do one nighters and we had a tour booked to Australia. We were all gonna make a lot of money, and then Jay got cold feet, cancelled the tour, kept the promoter’s advance, and gave the promoters my phone number. So the poor guy’s calling me, begging, “You gotta talk some sense into him.” I said, “Look, I’m just the guitar player. I can’t do anything.” And we all got screwed out of money. So then Jay tried to get us to come to LA, or play like San Luis Obispo, and we said, “Look Jay, if we ain’t going to Australia, we ain’t drivin’ down there.” So depending on who you talk to, we either quit or got fired. But I never had bad feelings for the guy. I learned a lot. I learned more being with him than at any other time in my musical career. The reason I got better was because we went from being a local bar band from Eugene, Oregon who’d never really been anywhere, to playing very sophisticated European audiences that appreciated black music — blues and jazz, and in fact appreciated it more then Americans do. You know that. We were playing in Denmark and Sweden and Germany, so we had to rise to the occasion, number one. Number two, Jay gave us lots of solos. When he was done singing he’d point to someone and have him solo while he dug through his trick bag of rubber snakes and props and he just had you keep going, and going, and going. So every night you’d solo for a long time in front of sophisticated audiences — you had to get good.
JON: And he told good stories, right?
HENRY: He had great stories and he was a great showman.
JON: He was a bit of a spooky kind of voodoo character.
HENRY: A lot of it was put on. But it was a good put on. Some of it was real though, too. He had a dark side. Like that whole thing about one of the guys and the smoky room. That was not funny. I think it’s funny now, but at the time…
JON: After you got done playing with Jay, then you came to Portland, right?
HENRY: We lived in Eugene for a year. Then we moved to Portland in ’88. I had a band up there called the Terraplanes with Boyd Small, and Andy Strange, the rhythm section from the Screamin’ Jay band.
JON: What kind of stuff did the Terraplanes play?
HENRY: We played blues and it was a really good band (Boy, was it ever. Editor.).
JON: Great name.
HENRY: Andy came up with that from that Robert Johnson tune. From the car, the Hudson Terraplane.
JON: How long did you play with the Terraplanes?
HENRY: Ah, a year or two and then we went off to the Bahamas because Anne [Henry’s wife] got a job there. When we came back here, we moved to Seattle. I didn’t play when we moved here. I started to work at Golden Oldies [Record Store] where I met Howard Hooper and Mark DuFresne.
JON: So how did Duffy happen to see you? I mean how did that work out?
HENRY: Jeff Hudis, a friend of mine, was her drummer at the time, and he was in a band in Portland called the Razorbacks. Jeff put in a good word for me—I was jamming at the Owl Cafe (now Connor Byrne), and Duffy came in one night. Tom McFarland and Ray Varner tended bar there.
JON: How many years were you with Duffy?
HENRY: Oh, about five and a half years. She is a great singer and a nice person.
JON: Did you play all over?
HENRY: Yeah, all over the region. We went to California and stuff. We didn’t travel that much.
JON: So five and a half years with Duffy Bishop and then you were doing this Monday night thing in Pioneer Square with Jamie Sheets.
HENRY: You know what? The whole time, I don’t think the blues community, such as it is, ever really did get behind that gig.
JON: What was the scene like in Pioneer Square then?
HENRY: I’m sorry, but it’s not really a place I like hanging out. It used to be good. There’s been a lot of articles written about it, how it used to be a thriving blues scene, but now it’s all a bunch of rock ’n’ roll bands.
ROSALIA: How recently was it a thriving blues scene?
HENRY: Maybe 10 years ago, maybe even a little less than that. But definitely back in the ’70s. You should talk to Kim Field or Mark Dalton, or guys like Isaac (Scott) who were there [see Mark Dalton’s January Bluesletter article]. Kim has some good stories about that era, but now it’s just a frat boy rock ’n’ roll scene. Occasionally there’ll be a blues band, but rarely. Clubs that call themselves blues clubs rarely hire blues acts.
JON: The thing that’s interesting to me is that y’all stayed with that gig for so long.
HENRY: Yeah, we had our fun. We got some good jammers to come down there. We had Billy Branch and his band. We had the Kentucky Headhunters come down. We had the drummer from Alice In Chains, the drummer from Yes, and the drummer from Rat. All these rock ’n’ roll drummers would come and sit in with us. We made them play blues. Of course, there are a lot of good local players, a lot of good harp players like Kim Field, and like you, like Doug Lynn. We had a lot of good guitar players. We had good jammers.
JON: Who have you played with in Seattle?
HENRY: Well, I’ve played with you, Kim Field, Dave Jette, Ed Vance. I played with Isaac Scott for while. I’ve played with a lot of good players around. I have met a lot of good folks up here.
JON: Is there anyone out here that sticks out in your mind as far as you’d go out of your way to see?
HENRY: There are a few. Kim Field’s a great harp player. Isaac Scott, he’s a wonderful guitarist. Dave Conant, I’ve always really liked his playing.
JON: So what do you think about the Seattle blues scene? Do people get gigs? How much has it changed over the last ten years?
HENRY: It’s getting harder. The waters have been muddied up by a lot of pseudo blues bands that are taking a lot of the work, which is fine as long as you don’t call yourself a blues band but then don’t play any blues. Everybody’s got a right to work — rock, jazz, country, whatever, but there’s a lot of bands who call themselves blues bands that are getting gigs that have no business being there. They should just say ‘we’re a rock ’n’ roll band.’ Quit lying. That’s kinda one of my things.
JON: Sometimes I think if a band calls themselves a blues band…
HENRY: Then play some blues.
JON: Why do you think wages are so crummy? Why do the club owners…
HENRY: I can tell you why. They’ve stayed frozen; I know this is something people have addressed before. Lloyd Jones and Little Bill have both talked about it before in their interviews, but musicians’ wages haven’t really risen since the ’70s because club owners have a bunch of musicians just knocking over their door to get work. So much that they can smell the desperation. Why would they increase their wages? Secondly, if you try to set a good wage for yourself there’s always some other half-assed amateur band that will undercut you. They will play for less because they just want to fulfill some kind of bullshit Blues Brothers fantasy, or something, and they don’t… I compare it to walking through a roomful of wild dogs with hamburger. If you drop a piece of that hamburger, it’s gonna be gone before it hits the ground. That’s the way the gigs are now. If you hold out for good money some other hack or amateur band is going to come along and say, “We’ll play for nothing—cause we just wanna—we’ll play for beer.” I mean that really sucks, you know? Let’s separate the men from the boys. It’s partly the good musicians’ fault for not insisting on better wages from—this isn’t a union town, you know, and the club owners are holding most of the cards with the booking agents—it’s bad.
JON: There are a lot of good players here, but it seems like they all play most of the same places. I mean, it’s a huge place, it seems like there could be a lot of other places to play in Seattle.
HENRY: You gotta wonder if the core of the “blues” scene really likes real blues, because when we played with Little Milton the place was half-empty. There have been some good blues shows that haven’t been very well attended. I know it costs money and all, but people should really get out and support it—that’s the one thing I’d like to get across in this interview: Please get out there and support live blues!
JON: Does it matter to you if there’s five people or 500 people?
HENRY: I’d rather have 500 people. Sometimes you can have a night where you don’t have much energy, and the audience can give you energy and you can feed off one another; that’s very important. Other nights you’re just into the music and you don’t care how many people are there because you’re having too much fun. It can go either way, but it’s always preferable to have better crowds.
JON: So big time influences on you for guitar?
HENRY: There are some that people might know. Ah, definitely Albert Collins and Muddy Waters, Elmore James, and Robert Nighthawk. Don Rich from the Buck Owens band; I used to see him on TV when I was a kid. He made me want to be a guitar player ’cause he looked like he was having so much fun. He was playing so good and singing so good. He was from Puyallup, I guess. A lot of the Hawaiian steel players, especially a guy named Jerry Byrd who played on some Hank Williams recordings who was the best steel player ever. And, guys like that too that you might not think a blues guy would like, but I like a lot of that stuff. Paul Burlison from the Johnny Burnette rock ’n’ roll trio, too.
JON: So when you go see the Henry Cooper Band, what kind of music would you say people were going to be able to hear?
HENRY: You’re gonna hear blues for the most part. Danceable blues. Rockabilly and country have blues influences in them. Blues is the building block of most every form of popular music. Country—if you really stop and think about Hank Williams and Jimmy Rodgers, the Singing Brakeman, they learned to play from black blues guys. And when the Hawaiians came here and played for the World’s Fair at the turn of the century, they turned a lot of black and white hillbilly and blues musicians on to playing slide. So it’s all connected, most definitely. It’s going to be rootsy, but right now the focus is mainly on the blues. Earlier I was saying if you go see a blues band they should play some blues—and we’re keeping to that. I consider some of Wes Montgomery’s stuff to be blues. A lot of jazz guys are bluesy. You can paint it with a pretty broad brush. We won’t be playing any hard rock, I can tell you that much.
JON: People that like slide guitar, they are going to come out, and wanna dance. That’s for sure. Now, what about equipment? Guitars? Amps?
HENRY: Telecasters only. That’s all I play. I got a ’64, and my back up if I break a string is a Telecaster built by the Fender custom shop. The Fender Custom Shop builds guitars by hand like they used to be made. They are great instruments. And I’ve got a Bassman amp and an old tweed Champ.
JON: Now during the last few years you’ve made a couple CD’s . . .
HENRY: Baby Please was on my label—High Action. Slideman was on Burnside. I have a new one called Automatic Trouble: Henry Cooper…live—it’s a live album recorded at the EMP. It has Dave Jette on drums, Keith Lowe on bass, Ed Vance on Hammond B3, and myself on guitar. It’s a smoking little live record. No phony audience noise dubbed in. It’s the way it was.
JON: What date was it recorded?
HENRY: It was on Cinco de Mayo at the Sky Church when we opened for Little Milton.
JON: Is Baby Please available still?
HENRY: Baby Please went out of print, but you can find it for sale. I might revive it someday, but I’m concentrating on new stuff now. Slideman’s still available from Burnside Records.
JON: And this new one?
HENRY: You can buy them at my shows.
JON: And, the name of the CD is?
HENRY: Automatic Trouble: Henry Cooper . . . live
JON: All right, I think we covered a lot. Thanks, Henry.
HENRY: You’re welcome, Dr. Marengo.

DISCOGRAPHY

• Bottled Oddities - The Duffy Bishop Band/Burnside Records (1994)
• Back to the Bone - The Duffy Bishop Band/Burnside Records (1996)
• Waterfront Blues 1996 - Burnside Records/Burnside Records (1996)
• Play Til it Hurts - Jaime Sheets/Two Sheets, Inc. (1998)
• Baby Please - Henry Cooper/High Action Records (1997)
• Slide Man - Henry Cooper/Burnside Records (1999)
• Automatic Trouble, Henry Cooper . . . Live (HAR/2001)
• The Gin Years , Henry Cooper (2007)