Director John Sayles Talks about His New Movie, Honeydripper

by Tom Watson.

John Sayles talks to Modern Guitars about his new movie, Honeydripper, written, directed and edited by the fiercely independent auteur. Set in the fictional town of Harmony, Alabama, Honeydripper is a warmhearted story about if and how Tyrone "Pinetop" Purvis (Danny Glover) can save his beloved 1950 roadhouse lounge, Pinetop's Honeydripper, from impending financial ruin.

Sayles' 16th feature film and the 13th produced by his creative partner, Maggie Renzi, Honeydripper is scheduled for screenings on December 28, 2007, at two theaters in Los Angeles (Laemmle's in Pasadena and West Hollywood) and at the Cinema Village in New York City, with several more dates and locations set for January and February. Broad distribution is expected sometime in 2008.

Synopsis

Things change. This has been a hard, slow lesson for the somewhat old school blues and jazz piano-playing owner of the Honeydripper, Pinetop Purvis. While the competing juke joint across the way, Toussaint's Ace of Spades, attracts the young crowd by blaring upbeat circa 1950 R&B and jump blues through the club's nickel-eating jukebox, Pinetop clings to the good old days and his aging featured entertainers, blues singer Bertha Mae Spivey (Dr. Mabel John) and harmonica player, Metalmouth Sims (Arthur Lee Williams). As the movie opens, business at the Honeydripper is virtually non-existent and unless Pinetop can come up with a fair amount of cash by Monday, the landlord threatens to bring in a new owner.

Pinetop isn't about to lose the Honeydripper without a fight. To everyone's surprise (Pinetop has no great love for guitar players due to a dark moment in his past and perhaps a piano-versus-guitar competitive spirit), he has booked the popular (and fictional) New Orleans-based Guitar Sam for a special appearance on Saturday night. With a two-dollar-per-head cover charge plus food and liquor sales, the special event should produce enough money to save the day.

However, the "liquor man" (represented by delivery man Zeke - a cameo appearance by Sayles) refuses to deliver since Pinetop doesn't have the cash; the club's illegal tap into the local power company (who cut the juice for non-payment) lines is unstable; and Pinetop's sidekick, Maceo Green (Charles S. Dutton), informs him that Guitar Sam won't play unless he receives $100 cash, upfront. Pinetop's chicanery deals with the problems as they arise, but when Guitar Sam fails to appear at the train station on Saturday, he's forced to take subterfuge to a new level.

Coincidentally, a couple of days earlier a young, good-looking itinerant guitar slinger named Sonny Blake (Gary Clark, Jr.) slipped out of a boxcar and found his way to Pinetop who decides to pass Sonny off as Guitar Sam then cause an electrical outage that will get him out of the Guitar Sam fraud and give Pinetop a chance to steal the cash from the till. But first, Pinetop must extricate Sonny from the grips of Sheriff Pugh (Stacy Keach) and Judge Gatlin (Danny Vinson) who have meanwhile pressed Sonny into forced cotton-picking labor, the result of a trumped-up vagrancy charge.

It all comes down to Sonny Blake and Saturday night. Ace seamstress Nadine (Davenia McFadden) provides the gold-sparkle flash of Sonny's stage clothes; Pinetop's daughter, China Doll (Yaya DaCosta), sparks his hair; and sax player Time Trenier (Eddie Shaw) agrees to bring a drummer to round out the backup band. Yes sir, the futures of Pinetop, the Honeydripper and rock 'n' roll all come down to one Saturday night in Harmony, Alabama.

Honeydripper trailer

Honeydripper is a beautifully written, performed and filmed movie that demonstrates the organic nature of music and how it evolves out of the lives and environments of those who make it, reminding us that life and music share the same heartbeat. It also serves as a celebration of the birth of rock 'n' roll and how the genre arose from a marriage of the past (gospel, blues, jazz, R&B, rockabilly) with forward-looking technology - the solidbody electric guitar.

“There was no single moment when R&B, blues, gospel, jazz, and country all came together to create this thing called rock ‘n roll, but a big change came with the advent of the electric guitar," Sayles has commented elsewhere about Honeydripper. "Before that, the piano ruled - it produced a lot more sound than a little acoustic guitar. Suddenly, a poor boy like Sonny could travel around with a portable, cheap, high-volume electric guitar and peel the paint off the walls. At the same time, I wanted to capture that poignant period when the old blues styles were waning, like the salty medicine-show hokum that Bertha Mae sings. In any field - sports, music, politics - these times of change are incredibly rich.”

Tom Watson: Harmony, Alabama - an abstract Southern rural town circa 1950?

John Sayles: Yes. It basically stands in for all those little crossroads towns in between the cotton fields and the Army base. In the ‘50s, most of our Army bases were still in the Deep South. So, it’s somewhere in the Alabama Black Belt where they’re still picking cotton by hand. You know, the Korean War had started, so what happened was an awful lot of those World War II Army bases were closed, and then when Korea heated up, they reopened them very quickly. They had to cut the grass, chip the paint off, and repaint the barracks. We found a decommissioned Army base in Anniston, Alabama, where they still had the old barracks standing and we were able to use those without having to build them.

Tom: A lot of roadhouses sprung up close to Army bases.

John: Yes. What you need to support a Southern roadhouse is either a town with some kind of little industry or in the center of a lot of cotton plantations. Very often they were converted general stores, which is what we used. A couple of roadhouses that were still operating in the area that we scouted were old general stores, which were also kind of central with a lot of cotton gins and fields around them, or right next to an Army base. Anniston had about four major roadhouses because it was such a big base.

Tom: Those roadhouses are still in operation?

John: Right now, because most of the base is decommissioned, there are only one or two still going. About two-thirds of the base has been made into private residences and stuff. Very nice. The officers’ housing especially was really nice. And there are a few places where they know there’s some mustard gas that they lost track of. You’re advised not to wander in the woods in those areas.

Tom: The language also seems somewhat abstracted. It’s not heavily accented, you don't use many, if any, local colloquialisms and I don’t recall the use of serious four-letter words.

John: It’s the ‘50s, and on the Army base you would have heard a little bit more. It’s interesting. I remember seeing where the people who produced the movie Ray, about Ray Charles, have a kind of strong Christian background, and they went back to Taylor Hackford, the director, and said, “You know, some of this language is a little heavy.” Taylor Hackford went to Ray Charles with it and Charles said, “Well, you know, I say motherfucker now, but I didn’t say it in the ‘50s.” You just didn’t hear it that often. So, that’s some of the reason.

The language is based in the region, but you want to have a flavor of it without it being so thick that people can’t understand it. I played this little part of the liquor delivery man [Zeke], and I basically just went over to the Piggly Wiggly [market] and listened. I spent quite a bit of time in the South in my life, especially when I was a kid, and there were people I couldn’t understand and then the local people would say, “He’s from pretty far out in the county and he might be a little hard to understand.” But, it came back to me pretty quickly, just hanging out at the market.

Tom: Why 1950?

John: Very specifically, I chose that year because that would be when the solidbody electric guitar finally became available. A kid like Sonny, who was a radio technician in the Army, could have read Popular Electronics and seen an article about Les Paul’s new invention and built himself one out of an old acoustic and some electrical supplies. He’s makes this kind of Frankenstein guitar, which looks a little funky, because he’s not a carpenter, he’s an electrician, but it sounds fine. And Les Paul, one of the first demonstrations he did was with basically a post. He took a post off a banister of a stairway or something and put a couple of wires on it, because he said you don’t need the body, that’s really just to kind of hang electrical equipment on.

Tom: Is the idea of a crossroad the movie’s main metaphor?

John: Well, it’s kind of thrown away when the character that Keb’ Mo’ plays, Possum, talks about there being a couple [of live music] places at the crossroads. He’s not the devil. He knows the devil, but he’s kind of the spirit of music. Crossroads were where roadhouses were. You wanted people to be able to get to them.

Another thing about 1950 is rural Alabama had just gotten electrified. For this club to have electricity probably means that they’re stealing it. The idea of having electric power and being plugged in was very new to a lot of those regions. Roosevelt had just started the electrification program at the end of World War II and there were whole counties in Alabama that were just getting electricity for the first time.

So, a crossroads would have been a big deal, even if one of the roads was dirt. There just weren’t that many of them. That’s where you would see the clubs and could get a lot of people to come in, either walking there or driving their cars.

Tom: It was wise to not overuse the word, it's become a blues cliché. But, in the story, everything is at a crossroads – the lives of the main characters, the social structure of the South, the development of music, and so on. The idea lurks throughout the movie.

John: Certainly in the case of Danny Glover’s character it does. This is a guy who’s 50-something in the year 1950, so he grew up with the music. He was in World War I. He played early jazz. He was in New Orleans. He’s kind of a contemporary of someone like Louis Armstrong. He’s been through the Big Band Era, he’s played boogie-woogie. He’s played everything. And now there’s this new thing that the minute he sees Sonny's electric guitar, he can sense is coming. And the question is, do I get on board this thing that’s leaving the station, or do I get left behind?

There's also a little subplot in the movie, which is just among musicians … there was a 4 or 5-year battle between the guitar and piano for dominance and the guitar won. I think it won not because it was a better instrument, but because it was cheaper and more portable. The minute you could put out sound with that solidbody and amplifier that went with it, it had to take off. Poor kids could get the $4 Sears & Roebuck guitar in the mail. There’s no way you could carry a piano around with you from gig to gig, but you could carry that guitar. So, the piano kind of disappeared as a major factor in rock ‘n’ roll until you got the electronic keyboard, which you could fold up and throw in the van, and it became portable.

Tom: You still can’t get as many good moves in with the electric piano as you can with the guitar.

John: No, exactly. And I think, as Danny says in the movie, the guitar hadn’t been the lead instrument since those old "piss-and-moan blues players" used to sit out front and play for nickels. Well, it's about to happen again and he kind of senses it. He doesn’t articulate it, but he kind of senses it. I think, as a piano player, there is some defensiveness in his resistance, not just because he killed a guitar player when he was a young man, but because there's that competition to be the lead instrument.

Tom: Gospel, blues, R&B, rock ‘n’ roll, the music keeps rolling on.

John: And rockabilly with the one Hank Williams song ["Move It On Over]. Actually, the town you see with the railroad tracks in the middle of it, where the kid [Sonny] comes in in the morning, that’s the town - Georgiana, Alabama - where Hank Williams grew up, which we didn’t know until we started shooting there and people started coming out with their stories. The rockabilly song that you hear, "Move It On Over," if you listen to it carefully enough, it’s "Rock Around the Clock," but it was recorded in 1948. We’re going to have an album on Rhino Records and I talk in the liner notes about how one of the points of the movie is that the music you hear in the film is kind of what you could have heard from a jukebox in Alabama in 1950, and it’s a pretty eclectic mix.

All of those old blues guys, if you talk to them now, because so much of it came out of the South, say, “Oh, yeah. Once a week we listened to the Grand Ole Opry.” If you look at Atlantic Records’ first 5 or 10 years, every time they had a hit with a country artist, they would cover it with an R&B artist and vice versa. They would just do another version of it. So, you get these guys like Ray Charles who does a country album very comfortably, or Big Joe Turner or Ivory Joe Hunter or whomever, covering country-western songs and making them into R&B when they do it. And then there’s Hank Williams, who learned how to play the guitar from an old black blues player in his town.

Tom: That’s another flavor of a roadhouse. They'd often draw mixed crowds that wanted to hear a little bit of everything.

John: Yes. People talk about Robert Johnson being this blues guy, but if you paid him, he’d sing Bing Crosby. He’d sing whatever was in the air for whatever you put in his guitar case. And Muddy Waters, who came up working on those plantations in Mississippi, some of his early songs were just pop songs, because that’s what paid.

Tom: Like Time says in the movie, “If you pay, I’ll play.”

John: Exactly.

Tom: A musical style or genre doesn’t first appear fully formed. It’s organic. This seems to be one of the points of the movie, that music grows out of the lives and environments of those who make it.

John: Yes, and I think when you start to see the segregation of genres, it comes first from the record charts. They finally invented the phrase “rhythm and blues” because they used to call them race records but when they wanted to list them on the charts and in the record stores they needed a handy phrase. There are still a few artists, like Los Lobos, whose records get to the store and they don’t quite know which section to put them in. You have to look around a little and say, “Where did this record store stick these guys?” Whereas, with the players themselves, the lines are not so firmly drawn. A lot of players in the course of a week might play three or four different genres just to get over and make a living.

Tom: In the revival tent scenes, for example, the gospel music grows out of the way the religion's delivered. That gives it a very organic feel.

John: The revival tent was fun. We hooked into this local church, the New Beginnings Ministry, and it’s one of those churches where everybody sings, so the only difficult thing with working with them was to have to say, “Look, only eight of you can be in the choir.” Luckily, the pastor was one of the best singers, and he said, “Okay, I know who should be up on the stage.” But, also, the rest of the people in the congregation end up playing the congregation in the movie so they’re very comfortable with each other. That lends an incredible amount of flavor and authenticity to the thing. We weren’t hiring professionals off the gospel circuit to come in and sing. They’re just local people with incredible voices and incredible spirit.

Tom: Speaking of authenticity, how did you come to select Ted Crocker to create Sonny Blake's Honeydripper guitar?

John: We have a friend, Phil Schneider, a props guy who’s worked with us a bunch of times. He had heard of this luthier [Ted Crocker] down in Florida, and gave him our specs, which were pretty much just, “Look, it’s 1950. The guy’s kind of cannibalized an acoustic and it has to sound good.” And then I said, “Have the body look kind of like one of those great Bo Diddley early guitars, because Bo designed a lot of his guitars, something geometrical that you could make very easily without being a finished carpenter.”

So, he [Ted Crocker] put this thing together, and he made two for us, because one of them had to have a remote hookup on the back for when Gary goes out with the extension chord and plays outside. He basically made it into a radio guitar. Both of them sounded great. After about four takes, you had to re-tune them, but that’s pretty typical of a guitar like that. We were really pleased. He sent us a couple of photos of the prototype, and we said, “Just keep going in that direction.” Gary, being a very picky guitar player, was very relieved when he played it and it sounded good. The single coil thing gives it that distinctive, kind of a thin sound.

Tom: Plus, you get that identifiable 60-cycle, single-coil hum.

John: Yes, and you had to be careful with those things. The amps that we used had tubes in them rather than being modern solid-state amps. It was important to me, also, that the guitar solos you hear in the movie are all live. In fact, most of the playing, except for the piano, in the movie is live. Each take was different. I said, “Well, here’s the structure of the song, and we’re going to record it such that we can separate the instruments. So, you guys just listen to each other, and each time it’s going to be a different solo.”

Tom: Gary Clark, Jr., is actually playing the guitar solos live on set?

John: Oh, yeah, he’s playing, and the great thing was that each time he jumped up on that automobile, he got better. I’m 57 and I can barely jump on an automobile anymore, much less play great rock ‘n’ roll guitar while I’m doing it.

Tom: His playing is period correct. It’s not slick or Stevie Ray Vaughan-ish.

John: Well, he grew up in Austin, so he can also play Stevie Ray Vaughan, and has played with Jimmie Vaughan. But, Gary is somebody who grew up listening to Chuck Berry and Guitar Slim and everybody from B.B. King and Albert King and Albert Collins to Jimi Hendrix. He learned to play by listening. He didn’t take lessons. He just said, “I want to sound like that,” and started playing. The great thing is that it’s like a language. He’s fluent in the language. We told him, “Here are the guys who were around then,” and he listened to a lot of Guitar Slim and Johnny Guitar Watson and those early ‘50s guys. You know, Chuck Berry or Ike Turner, who’s an underestimated player from that period, and Gary said, “Oh, yeah. This is what I play.” So, when he does a solo, that’s where he’s coming from.

Tom: It’s not easy to authentically capture that.

John: And when you don’t have the double coil, and you can’t do the wah-wah and sustain notes quite as long, it affects the way you play. Gary really can play within that genre. They say it’s like a language. It’s as different as Portuguese and Spanish are. They’re related to each other, but when you listen to them, they sound a whole lot different.

Tom: Are you a guitarist?

John: No, no. I wrote a couple of songs in the movie, or I wrote the melody and the lyrics, and then handed it over to my composer, Mason Daring, and he made it musical. But, one of my favorite parts of movie making, always, is I go to the music sessions, and Mason will tell people about the key and how many bars and this and that and the other thing, the technical stuff, and we’re always showing them the movie as they’re playing along with it to do the scored music. We’ve worked with this guitarist, Duke Levine, a bunch of times, and we just say something like, “Well, don’t resolve it. This scene is not resolved.” Or, “It needs to be more tense.” Or, “There’s some underlying sadness in this,” and musicians love that. That’s what they put in. All of them feel like, hey, anybody can read a chart, but I’m here to put some spirit into the thing, to put some soul into the thing.

Tom: You and Mason Daring co-wrote "China Doll" and "The Music Keeps Rolling On." Were there any others you two co-wrote?

John: Yes - "You’ve Got To Choose" - one of the gospel songs, and we’ve written things together in some previous movies. We’ve written some country-western stuff and some hillbilly music for Matewan. Basically, it’s fun, it’s a lot cheaper than buying the rights, and I can tailor it exactly. The name of one of the characters in Honeydripper is China Doll, and I was kind of thinking of Buddy Holly when I wrote that song. How do you impress your girlfriend? You write a rock ‘n’ roll song with her name. It helps when you can tailor things, when you can put the lyrics exactly where you want them or have the rhythm of the song exactly match the rhythm of your montage or whatever. So, sometimes it just makes sense for us to write something within a genre rather than buy something.

Tom: Who does the singing on "The Music Keeps Rolling On"?

John: Barrence Whitfield, a Boston guy who used to have a group called Barrence Whitfield and the Savages. We had actually recorded it almost a year earlier just as an instrumental because we needed that instrumental for the two young boys to play along to at the very end of the movie. We brought Barrence in about a year later to do the vocal, and we added a couple more instruments to it after a couple of bars. The first couple bars are just piano and guitar. What we originally had was about a four-minute song that was just instrumental guitar and piano, and then we added some other instruments later on. We didn’t even have a drum originally.

Tom: A rural club in the early '50s passing a no-name player off as a recording artist isn't all that far-fetched, is it?

John: The movie is not based on, but inspired by a short story I wrote in my last short story collection, Dillinger and Hollywood, a story called "Keeping Time." It’s about a 40-year-old drummer in a 20-year-old band, and he’s wondering how did the drummer get to be the most responsible guy in the band. He runs into this janitor, who says, “I used to be Guitar Slim.” There actually was a Guitar Slim. He had a big hit in the early ‘50s with a song called "The Things I Used to Do," and he was known to miss a gig, kind of like Wynonie Harris.

An awful lot of the guys who became the icons of rhythm and blues guitar, at some point in their young lives, had a club owner turn to them and say, “Well, you know how to play this song, right? Tonight, you are Guitar Slim.” In those days before there were rock videos or album covers, people didn’t know what people looked like. They just heard the song on the jukebox and knew the name next to it. So, Ray Charles, I guess, went around as Charles Brown for a while. It was not that unusual if you were far enough into the boondocks to pretend to be somebody else and just play their stuff.

Tom: A good part of the soundtrack consists of harmonica and resonator guitar. Is that Arthur Lee Williams playing the harmonica parts?

John: It’s a bunch of different people. Arthur Lee is on the tracks where you see people up on the stage playing. And then there's a harmonica player named Jerry Portnoy, who used to play with Muddy Waters [and Eric Clapton], who is a Jewish guy from Chicago whose dad owned a store on one of the main streets where all the blues guys hung out. He got fascinated with their music and as a young kid went out and started playing harmonica with them. He ended up touring with Muddy for years and years.

The piano that you hear is mostly Sonny Leland, who’s a white British guy and a West Coast musician. He laid down the piano that Danny plays along with. We actually originally cast Ruth Brown in the part of the blues singer [Bertha Mae Spivey], but then she fell ill while we were shooting. Mable John, who is actually a friend of Ruth’s and kind of second on our list, very heroically came in with 10 days notice and learned the music and the part and did a great job with it. Ruth died the last day of shooting.

Tom: What about the resonator guitar parts that are not the scenes where Keb’ Mo’ is playing?

John: It’s mostly Duke Levine, who’s a Boston area musician. He’s going on the road with Mary Chapin Carpenter. If you look him up, he’s got a new album that I’m sure he’s selling himself. Duke has played on most of our movies. He’s an incredible guitar player. He’s played everything from Spanish-style guitar to ‘50s rhythm and blues to country-western stuff. He’s one of those guys who’s conversant in a whole bunch of different styles. He’s a very soulful guitar player.

Tom: When Sonny takes the stage in the climax, there’s a great convergence of generations. You’ve got the older Pinetop, Time and Metalmouth merging with Sonny and the young drummer.

John: You know, Time Trenier, as he says, played with both King Oliver and Buddy Bolden and to me, that’s "The Music Keeps Movin’ On." You’ve got the 15-year-old drummer there who’s the next generation, and at the very end of the movie you’ve got those two kids that are pretending to play instruments and will eventually become musicians, but now the kid who was playing the diddley bow in the opening sequence, he’s not thinking about playing acoustic guitar, he’s thinking about playing electric.

Gary Clark, Jr., who was 21 when we met him, and I think was about 22 when we shot the movie, has played with Hubert Sumlin and James Cotton and Jimmie Vaughan and Freddie Fender. Since he was 14 years old, he’s been gigging with these guys who come through Austin and play at Antone’s. To me, the great thing about music is people passing it on. You get these groups where the drummer is 14 and the sax player is 68 and they can listen to each other, they’ve got a language in common. I know a couple of guys who were in the Dukesmen, which was a group formed from guys who played with Duke Ellington, and some of them are 90 now and some of them are still in their 50s.

Tom: My favorite shots during the first song of the climax, "Good Rockin' Tonight," are when Time’s out on the dance floor playing his sax, he gets back up on stage, and then Sonny takes his guitar and goes outside the club all the while playing a solo, like, “Move over, Time, I’m taking it a few steps further.”

John: Yes. And that’s that tradition of not only playing with each other, but trying to top each other. Jazz really, I think, came out of that, as musicians who were a little bored playing the same stuff over and over entertained each other with, “Okay, if you can do that, here’s what I can do.” In Chicago, literally, the blues bands used to play each other off the stand. They would come in and raid somebody else’s session and start to play, and the audience would say, “We like these guys better.” You’d lose your gig and you’d lose your money if you couldn’t hold the stage. There were some fights over that, too. There is that tradition of burning each other’s solos and trying to top each other.

Tom: You’re going to raise a few eyebrows with the "Good Rockin’ Tonight" song when people find out that it was written and first recorded in the late ‘40s but uses the words “rock” and “rockin'” and sounds like rock ‘n’ roll. Many people probably associate the birth of rock ‘n’ roll with the mid-50s.

John: We also do a kind of almost strip club version of "Blue Light Boogie," the jump song by Louis Jordan. The lyrics of that are about a guy who goes to a party and he wants to swing and all the bobby socks will do is rock. That’s another one from the late ‘40s. There’s music even in the early ‘40s that even though it doesn’t have rock in the title, it’s rock ‘n’ roll.

Rock ‘n’ roll is really just a subset of rhythm and blues. Technically, I would say it’s when the drummer is playing with a backbeat rather than a shuffle, but that’s maybe too technical. It’s kind of a spirit. I think it’s certainly something that, as I said, you hear in the Hank Williams song, "Moving On Over," which is essentially "Rock Around the Clock." So, rockabilly was also happening and that’s like a 1948 recording. Before the DJs labeled it, rock 'n' roll was happening. I think that eventually the musicians just had to accept what the DJs labeled. For most of the players, it was simpler than what they were playing before. It wasn’t like they had to master any new techniques. It was, “Oh, that’s all they want to hear? Sure. We can do that.”

Photo Gallery

Related Links
Luthier Ted Crocker Talks about the Honeydripper Guitar
Honeydripper website
Honeydripper on the Emerging Pictures website
Ted Crocker and the Honeydripper guitar

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