HIGH FREQUENCIES: Tinsley Ellis deals a Winning Hand

Tinsley Ellis and I meet up at the Majestic Diner, where, as most Atlantans know, they’ve been serving "food that pleases” since 1929. It’s also where the guitarist and I met for our first interview 35 years ago.

At the time, Ellis was only a couple of years into the Heartfixers, the group he founded after leaving the Alleycats, and was preparing for the release of the Heartfixers’ Landslide Records debut, Live at the Moonshadow. Today we’re back at the diner near the corner of Ponce De Leon and North Highland as the blues rock guitarist prepares for the release of Winning Hand, his 20th album (sixteenth as a solo artist), and a three month tour of the U.S. that kicks off this Friday night (12) at the Variety Playhouse.

Foregoing the booth we sat in the first time around, we opt for a quieter spot in the back of the once greasy spoon that’s been renovated, scrubbed clean, and even has a new wait staff since our previous visit.

“We did it because we liked it,” Ellis remembers of his early days playing with Albey Scholl and Butch Trivette in the Alleycats. “There was nothing to aspire to.” The blues were not a thing then, there were no “blues” clubs in Atlanta, and some blues bands back then were “finding it easier to call their music rock ’n’ roll,” to get gigs. Thinking back to those days, Ellis admits, “Albey was definitely my teacher. I learned more about music and how to run a band from him than I ever did from anybody.”

The Heartfixers played the frat circuit, the bar circuit, the club circuit and any circuit they could find, establishing themselves as a hard-working, high energy band, fronted for many years by “Chicago” Bob Nelson, a hearty blues singer and harmonica player that lent authenticity to the band. Otherwise known for Ellis’ theatrics, playing guitar while duckwalking across bar tables, out the front door and into the parking lots of clubs up and down the East Coast, the Heartfixers were a force to be reckoned with, barnstorming the blues across the United States.

Having recorded three albums for Michael Rothschild’s Atlanta-based Landslide Records and undergone numerous personnel changes — the original line-up of Ellis, Nelson, bassist Jim Bullard and drummer Mike McCauley, giving way to Nelson’s departure, the late Wayne Burdette replacing Bullard, Dave Cotton joining on sax, and, finally Charles Wolff replacing McCauley — the Heartfixers broke up when Ellis reached for the next rung on the ladder to success. He and Burdette decided to accept a Miller Genuine Draft Beer sponsorship.

“I was trying to take a shortcut or something, It was a great opportunity, but it just it’s not what you need to do with a band. You have to  think about  the music and stuff. It turned all the media (against) us. Athens. Atlanta. It had the exact opposite effect , in the hipness thing. and we fussed amongst each other, who wanted to do it, who didn’t want to do it. Charles Wolff didn’t want to do it. The sax player, Dave Cotton, didn’t want to do it. I think Wayne and I felt we needed to do it. We’d struggled a long time. It didn’t bring much to the table. We got some amps. and drums. And keyboards. And microphones. And guitar strings,” he laments.

Ellis, who had already been performing with Bruce Hampton every Monday night at the Little 5 Points Pub in the Stained Souls, a side project for them both, decided his next path would be a solo one.

With the help of the late Ricky Keller, a co-conspirator of Hampton’s in the studio and onstage, they began to put together what would be, Georgia Blue, Ellis’ first album on Alligator Records.

At the time of that record’s release, Ellis told me, “I needed a band that was my own band, and I wasn’t afraid to state that … Ricky produced the album. We got together and picked the players: Wayne (Burdette), Ricky (Keller) Yonrico (Scott), Oliver (Wells) … they jumped on it … and added a lot to it. It was the first time I worked on an album with a producer who made a lot of notes and had definite ideas of what to do. We tried to incorporate a lot of the things that I learned working with the Stained Souls: funk and free-form improv. Bruce brought me out,” Ellis claimed, using the term before its became commonplace in the Col. Bruce Hampton vernacular, and Hampton’s influence was realized on a whole generation of jam rock players.

Between bites of his quarter-pound cheeseburger (with lettuce and tomato, for those interested in such things), Ellis recalls the importance of that first Alligator release. “They put me on the international festival circuit,” and, in turn Ellis started gaining the recognition he deserved as a formidable electric guitarist, with the English blues magazine Juke Joint calling him “one of the top three white blues guitarists in America today — the other two being Stevie Ray Vaughan and Johnny Winter.

”Thirty years later, Ellis has made good on the proclamation, as evidenced by his most recent album, Winning Hand, a soulful collection of expressive songs and burning guitar work that exhibits Ellis continues to “play from the heart,” to quote an early bio of the Heartfixers that used a line lifted from one of my first reviews of the band. Winning Hand also finds the guitarist back on Alligator Records, a label that he’s now been on “three or four times,” he jokes, having bounced around labels, including Capricorn and Telarc, as well as releasing his last four albums on his own Heartfixer Music imprint.

~~   ~~black:

Acknowledging, “What I do is about five percent inspiration and 95 percent perspiration,” Ellis, who earlier commented that “you can’t just dick around Atlanta — you have to go out on the road and work” says, “I work all the time.”

With a studio set up in his basement, Ellis is never far from his “office,” where he’s recorded his last five albums. “It’s really great being able to record at home, nobody’s watching me, I’m in my pajamas with a cup of coffee,” he laughs. “The guitars are all set up, I can pick one, fire it up … .”

It was that easy access to his arsenal of guitars which paved the way for Winning Hand, an album that makes a point of showcasing some of those guitars (the song credits include which guitar was used on each song) and the different tones and textures Ellis achieves with them, in particular, his longtime standard, a 1959 Fender Stratocaster, along with his 1967 Gibson ES 345 hollow body, his ’73 Gibson Les Paul Deluxe, his 2000 Les Paul Standard and his 1996 Fender Telecaster.