Bright Blue

It's a gray, drizzly afternoon with temps in the upper 40s or low 50s. It's the kind of day that, when I was living in Chicago, would move in sometime in mid-March and not move out until finals. It's the kind of day that would get me out of Seattle faster than an NBA team bought by Clay Bennett.

But it's one fine day indeed -- the Beale Street Caravan show featured the late Son Seals, one of the most innovative bluesmen who ever picked up a guitar from Sears, and Robert Randolph and the Family Band. The latter are a soul/funk/kick your tuckus into high gear band featuring Mr. Randolph on steel guitar, drawing on a Pentecostal musical tradition called "sacred steel."

Seals was best-known for his Grammy-winning album Bad Axe, but one of my favorites of his is "Buzzard Luck." In it, he laments, "Can't kill nothin'/And won't nothin' die." He also notes his longing for his native Arkansas in "Going Home (Where the Women Have Meat on Their Bones)" and just flat tears the roof off any building within a 50-mile radius with the instrumental "Hot Sauce."

Randolph's set includes the gospel number "I Don't Know What You Come to Do" that is really too powerful for any mere radio signal to contain. The 11-plus minute version played on the Caravan could turn Osama bin Laden and Christopher Hitchens into footwashing Baptists, have enough over to clean up Bill Maher's act and even open Hugh Hefner's eyes to how creepy he's been for the last 50 years. Play this on an NPR station in Rush Limbaugh's hometown and he'd donate to their pledge drive. Bill O'Reilly would shut up. Keith Olbermann would get a clue. Rosie O'Donnell would...naahh, it's just a song, after all.

But a darn fine antidote to a gray gloomy day.