Chris
Beard plays the blues as if his pants were on fire. His fleet fretwork is
deadly, often reducing his guitar to five, four, and sometimes three strings
before the song is through.
His
blues have plenty of soul and sweat and show no signs of letting up. Beard is
equally relentless.
But
this past summer Rochester’s “Prince of the Blues” had to readdress his intensity.
“I do everything as far as my career goes,”
Beard says. “I do most of my own booking and then talk about being on the road,
driving, playing music. It’s crazy. The stress got too much for me.”
On
June 7, Beard had a mild stroke.
“I woke up at 9 o’clock in the morning,” he says. “About two hours later I started
noticing I was feeling drunk. I hadn’t had a drink in 14 years. I didn’t know
what was going on.”
Beard
ignored it and set about his day. He ran errands, including a stop at Fed Ex to
send out tour promo material.
“I went to fill out my name and I couldn’t,”
he says. “That scared the shit out of me.”
Beard spent three days in the hospital. The stroke affected his speech and the use of his
right arm. So he took a month off. One month.
He
had just released Live Wire, his
third release and first for NorthernBlues Music. It was a real lid-blower, with
mostly live cuts recorded in Chicago and Grand
Rapids. Beard and
his band needed to tour and push it, live.
Determined
not to lose any of his hard-earned momentum, Beard hit the road with a second
guitar player to fill in his gaps.
“I was going to therapy and stuff,” he says.
“And my therapist tells me, ‘Look Chris, guitar playing isn’t normal. We can
get you back to doing normal things. The only person that’s going to get you
back to playing guitar like you were is you.'”
So
Beard dropped the second guitar player.
“Finally I said: Look, I gotta do this
myself,” he says.
Today,
the 48-year-old bluesman says he’s recovered 90 percent of his ability while
also rediscovering what’s at the heart of his playing.
“I’ve turned a negative into a positive.” he
says. “When I was growing up, I used to listen to Buddy Guy and the players
that played fast. And I used to tell my father, [Rochester’s King of the Blues Joe Beard] ‘I want to play fast like
so-and-so.’ He said, ‘Just keep playing and the speed will come in time.'”
It
came. And how.
“But somewhere along the line of me speeding,
trying to get fast, and listening to other players,” he says, “I kind of forgot
about the feel of the music and the thing about trying to get as much out of
the note as I possibly can.”
“So me being in a place where my right hand
wouldn’t keep up with my left hand,” he says, “I had to concentrate on getting
as much out of that note. It’s made me a better player.”
Beard
continues to tour. His annual schedule is back to where it was, about 200 dates
across the US.
He
refers to his stroke as a “wake-up call from God” and has taken steps to
alleviate the stress. But he can’t quit.
“When you get to one level, you realize you
can’t stop there ’cause there’s more and there’s better,” he says.
And
he’ll prove it, too. He plans on releasing an all studio album of new material
in the spring.
“My speed is back,” he says, “with that slow
perspective.”
Chris Beard plays local shows periodically throughout the year. For more info on Beard or
future dates: www.chrisbeard.org.
This article appears in Jan 4-10, 2006.
