G
Guest
Guest
S.F. bluesman needs a little help to make the rest of his gigs
'I'm gonna keep on playing until I can't do it no more' - Joe Garofoli, SF Chronicle Staff Writer, November 25, 2004
On the rare nights that he still jams, Patrick Robertston leaves his 10-by-12-foot room in a Tenderloin single-room-occupancy hotel and takes two buses down to the Biscuits and Blues club. He arrives about 30 minutes before the San Francisco club opens, and the staff lets him hang out with the night's headlining band or just sit at the bar, even though he doesn't have enough cash for even one drink.
Usually around 11 p.m., the band calls him up on stage to sing and blow the harmonica. For the next 10 minutes, the 69-year-old again becomes "The Brown-Eyed Alligator," a working San Francisco musician over five decades, as he rips through a song or two. Lately, he's been partial to the blues standard "The Things (That) I Used To Do."
The things that I used to do,
I ain't gonna do them no more.
Their double meaning is unknown to pretty much everyone in the club. Back in the day, the Gator said, he was all about "wine, women and song." But for the last 1 1/2 years, the Korean War-era veteran has fought prostate cancer. Six months ago, doctors removed half of his cancerous stomach, and his left hand shakes uncontrollably with tremors. Doctors recently removed a tumor from his right leg, and next week they'll remove a baseball-size knot from his back. His neck is so tender that he must try to sleep on his side all night.
After paying his bare-bones expenses, Robertson has $18 left each month from his $790 disability check. Two things would make his life easier, and The Chronicle Season of Sharing fund is buying him both: a comfortable chair so he can sleep upright after his back surgery, and a mini-fridge to properly store the dozen-odd medicines he's taking. The refrigerator also will preserve his Meals-on-Wheels plates, which he can only pick at slowly because of his stomach's limited capacity. "It's like fighting five guys," Robertson said of his cancer. "You knock one down, then another comes at you. You knock him down, and here comes another. I'm not going to let it stop me. I'm not gonna roll up on this bed and say, 'Oooh, I got cancer. Poor me. Poor me.' I'm gonna keep on playing until I can't do it no more. People in the audience don't want to hear about cancer. They want to be entertained. And that's what I'm gonna do," he said.
His stoicism is understandable, as California Blues Festival producer Bobbie "Spider" Webb said, because Robertson "is a bluesman. The real deal. You can tell when some people are trying to be bluesmen, but he's for real."
Born in Opelousas, La., Robertson has never cut an album, toured with a household-name performer or hit it big in the music business. He played in bands that toured the country and others that bopped around Europe and Asia, but mostly Robertson worked a lifetime of day jobs -- cab driver, security guard, janitor at Laguna Honda Hospital -- while playing gigs at night. From a now-defunct Hunters Point club on Evans Street where Webb met him 40 years ago to Jimbo's Bop City, an after-hours joint in the old Fillmore District, the Brown-Eyed Alligator has known three generations of musicians who have played or passed through San Francisco. "He knows a lot of people," Webb said. "And when he's there (in the audience), you know he's in the house."
Along with many other African American families from the South, Robertson's sharecropper family moved to California to work in the shipyards during World War II. He was raised in an era when he and his family would take a bus on Saturdays to pick fruit in what is now called Silicon Valley for 25 cents a crate. It was his mother who used to say to him, "C'mere, you ol' brown-eyed alligator."
He volunteered for the military as a 17-year-old, serving 10 years starting in the early 1950s. During his time in the Army and Air Force, he hooked up with other musicians who taught the young man how to bend his baritone around the blues. "These musicians wanted to keep their chops up while they were away (in the military)," Robertson said, "so they'd ask me to sing with them. I was in awe. I just wanted to play and be good enough to get on the bandstand with them."
Chatting with the Gator is like road-tripping with an American musicologist. Tales spill forth about his encounters -- usually in after- hours joints -- with big-time musicians who made it, from Muddy Waters to Big Mama Thornton to Frank Sinatra. He illustrates each with a musical snippet, twanging a line from Hank Williams here, dropping a smoky Billie Holiday lyric there, then bellowing some gospel.
Precious Looooooord,
Hold my haaaaaand,
Lead me oooooon,
Let me staaaaaaand.
The one indulgence in his sparse Tenderloin room is a karaoke boom-box. The Gator picks up a microphone, struggles to his feet and begins riffing off the blues backbeat. Tugging on his felt cap, he plays to his audience of one as if it were a packed house.
Would you let somebody
Take you and squeeze you
In his arms.
Then, in an aside, Robertson raises an eyebrow and says, "Do you see how my hand isn't shaking right now?" He realizes that the handful of nights he still sits in -- those precious few minutes a month -- are his refuge. "I can go into my own world. I go into another galaxy. This illness I got, I know I'm going to check out soon. But on Friday night, when I'm up on stage, I don't feel like that at all. "
He's not bitter that he never hit the big time. Hardly. "I always just loved playing. You can't explain why some made it." Family, friends and even other musicians like younger bluesman Kenny Neal -- a regular jamming partner -- have offered to take Robertson in. It's a thorny issue for the Gator. He's had "three or four wives" and "four or five" children, not all of whom he is on good terms with. Still, he has declined all offers, because, he said, his doctors and the veterans hospital are close by. And he thinks he'd lose his freedom to come and go to places like Biscuits and Blues if he's living in somebody else's house.
"I know I'm going to have to go some time," he said. "But not yet."
Until he got help from Swords to Plowshares earlier this year, he spent several months homeless. "He's like a lot of artists and musicians in that he's spent a lot of time underemployed," said Johnny Baskerville, a senior case manager at Swords to Plowshares, a veterans support agency in San Francisco. "He is good people. Though you're supposed to remain professionally detached in social service jobs, he's one I've grown close to."
For now, the Gator will continue to jam and inspire others, such as popular San Francisco bluesman Tommy Castro. They met about 10 years ago when Robertson brought an Arkansas blues festival promoter to one of Castro's shows. Robertson has sat in with Castro's band periodically since, the last time a couple of weeks ago.
"He's seemed a little weak lately, but when he gets up there, like any performer, he just snaps into it and people go wild," Castro said. "You know the body is failing, but his spirit is still strong. He and John Lee Hooker, they're my idols; I want to be like them when I grow up." pics
'I'm gonna keep on playing until I can't do it no more' - Joe Garofoli, SF Chronicle Staff Writer, November 25, 2004
On the rare nights that he still jams, Patrick Robertston leaves his 10-by-12-foot room in a Tenderloin single-room-occupancy hotel and takes two buses down to the Biscuits and Blues club. He arrives about 30 minutes before the San Francisco club opens, and the staff lets him hang out with the night's headlining band or just sit at the bar, even though he doesn't have enough cash for even one drink.
Usually around 11 p.m., the band calls him up on stage to sing and blow the harmonica. For the next 10 minutes, the 69-year-old again becomes "The Brown-Eyed Alligator," a working San Francisco musician over five decades, as he rips through a song or two. Lately, he's been partial to the blues standard "The Things (That) I Used To Do."
The things that I used to do,
I ain't gonna do them no more.
Their double meaning is unknown to pretty much everyone in the club. Back in the day, the Gator said, he was all about "wine, women and song." But for the last 1 1/2 years, the Korean War-era veteran has fought prostate cancer. Six months ago, doctors removed half of his cancerous stomach, and his left hand shakes uncontrollably with tremors. Doctors recently removed a tumor from his right leg, and next week they'll remove a baseball-size knot from his back. His neck is so tender that he must try to sleep on his side all night.
After paying his bare-bones expenses, Robertson has $18 left each month from his $790 disability check. Two things would make his life easier, and The Chronicle Season of Sharing fund is buying him both: a comfortable chair so he can sleep upright after his back surgery, and a mini-fridge to properly store the dozen-odd medicines he's taking. The refrigerator also will preserve his Meals-on-Wheels plates, which he can only pick at slowly because of his stomach's limited capacity. "It's like fighting five guys," Robertson said of his cancer. "You knock one down, then another comes at you. You knock him down, and here comes another. I'm not going to let it stop me. I'm not gonna roll up on this bed and say, 'Oooh, I got cancer. Poor me. Poor me.' I'm gonna keep on playing until I can't do it no more. People in the audience don't want to hear about cancer. They want to be entertained. And that's what I'm gonna do," he said.
His stoicism is understandable, as California Blues Festival producer Bobbie "Spider" Webb said, because Robertson "is a bluesman. The real deal. You can tell when some people are trying to be bluesmen, but he's for real."
Born in Opelousas, La., Robertson has never cut an album, toured with a household-name performer or hit it big in the music business. He played in bands that toured the country and others that bopped around Europe and Asia, but mostly Robertson worked a lifetime of day jobs -- cab driver, security guard, janitor at Laguna Honda Hospital -- while playing gigs at night. From a now-defunct Hunters Point club on Evans Street where Webb met him 40 years ago to Jimbo's Bop City, an after-hours joint in the old Fillmore District, the Brown-Eyed Alligator has known three generations of musicians who have played or passed through San Francisco. "He knows a lot of people," Webb said. "And when he's there (in the audience), you know he's in the house."
Along with many other African American families from the South, Robertson's sharecropper family moved to California to work in the shipyards during World War II. He was raised in an era when he and his family would take a bus on Saturdays to pick fruit in what is now called Silicon Valley for 25 cents a crate. It was his mother who used to say to him, "C'mere, you ol' brown-eyed alligator."
He volunteered for the military as a 17-year-old, serving 10 years starting in the early 1950s. During his time in the Army and Air Force, he hooked up with other musicians who taught the young man how to bend his baritone around the blues. "These musicians wanted to keep their chops up while they were away (in the military)," Robertson said, "so they'd ask me to sing with them. I was in awe. I just wanted to play and be good enough to get on the bandstand with them."
Chatting with the Gator is like road-tripping with an American musicologist. Tales spill forth about his encounters -- usually in after- hours joints -- with big-time musicians who made it, from Muddy Waters to Big Mama Thornton to Frank Sinatra. He illustrates each with a musical snippet, twanging a line from Hank Williams here, dropping a smoky Billie Holiday lyric there, then bellowing some gospel.
Precious Looooooord,
Hold my haaaaaand,
Lead me oooooon,
Let me staaaaaaand.
The one indulgence in his sparse Tenderloin room is a karaoke boom-box. The Gator picks up a microphone, struggles to his feet and begins riffing off the blues backbeat. Tugging on his felt cap, he plays to his audience of one as if it were a packed house.
Would you let somebody
Take you and squeeze you
In his arms.
Then, in an aside, Robertson raises an eyebrow and says, "Do you see how my hand isn't shaking right now?" He realizes that the handful of nights he still sits in -- those precious few minutes a month -- are his refuge. "I can go into my own world. I go into another galaxy. This illness I got, I know I'm going to check out soon. But on Friday night, when I'm up on stage, I don't feel like that at all. "
He's not bitter that he never hit the big time. Hardly. "I always just loved playing. You can't explain why some made it." Family, friends and even other musicians like younger bluesman Kenny Neal -- a regular jamming partner -- have offered to take Robertson in. It's a thorny issue for the Gator. He's had "three or four wives" and "four or five" children, not all of whom he is on good terms with. Still, he has declined all offers, because, he said, his doctors and the veterans hospital are close by. And he thinks he'd lose his freedom to come and go to places like Biscuits and Blues if he's living in somebody else's house.
"I know I'm going to have to go some time," he said. "But not yet."
Until he got help from Swords to Plowshares earlier this year, he spent several months homeless. "He's like a lot of artists and musicians in that he's spent a lot of time underemployed," said Johnny Baskerville, a senior case manager at Swords to Plowshares, a veterans support agency in San Francisco. "He is good people. Though you're supposed to remain professionally detached in social service jobs, he's one I've grown close to."
For now, the Gator will continue to jam and inspire others, such as popular San Francisco bluesman Tommy Castro. They met about 10 years ago when Robertson brought an Arkansas blues festival promoter to one of Castro's shows. Robertson has sat in with Castro's band periodically since, the last time a couple of weeks ago.
"He's seemed a little weak lately, but when he gets up there, like any performer, he just snaps into it and people go wild," Castro said. "You know the body is failing, but his spirit is still strong. He and John Lee Hooker, they're my idols; I want to be like them when I grow up." pics