He bought a halfway decent camera and started taking pictures of the artists at those shows and festivals he attended. But most of the times he’d pop in cassette tapes and eight-tracks that he had been collecting since he was a teen and he would play them over and over again to while away the miles.Īt one point he ran a record store in Ottumwa, Iowa, and he would book bands for concerts. When he started driving trucks in a 10-state area around his native Iowa, Kool would look for blues stations - “Occasionally I’d get by say Grinnell, Iowa, which had a college station and you could hear some blues now and then,” he recalled. “But I know what’s coming out of them ain’t what it’s supposed to,” he recalled with a laugh. He played the drums and bought himself a harmonica and old guitar with the intention of learning to play, maybe fleetingly imagining himself on stage.

Of course my dad said there was a lot of things that never sunk in,” said Kool, who was inducted into the Tucson Musicians Museum in 2008. Kool - that is is his real name - never fancied himself a blues musician even after taking some music lessons from his aunt, who played piano in church and at the Newton movie theater during the silent-movie era.

These guys are getting influences from the old guys, but they’re also doing other things that kind of take blues to a different place.” And Billy Watson calls his stuff madcap blues harmonica. “Junior Watson leans toward older style but he still takes you places you don’t expect. This show we put together for El Casino is going to be a wild one,” said Kool, a 71-year-old KXCI radio host and retired long-haul truck driver. “When you say blues, they think of an old man on the porch, but that’s not really what it’s about.

The “West Coast Blues Explosion” show at El Casino Ballroom also features Troy Sandow and Marty Dodson, with the Bryan Dean Trio. 2, Kool and his longtime blues-loving partner Jeb Schoonover will host the eighth annual House Rockin’ Blues Review with Junior Watson, Billy Watson and Taryn Donath.

But it was the soulful blues that struck a chord with the Iowa farm kid and set him on a path that has taken him from sitting in the audience at blues halls and prestigious blues festivals to become one of the genre’s most fervent champions in his adopted hometown of Tucson and beyond.

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