Published on Feb 5, 2002
One of the joys of this job is to get something in the mail that
you’ve never heard of but blows your socks off. Robert Bradley’s
Blackwater Surprise has, as a fact, knocked my socks into the next
room.
The story’s almost too cliché. A group of younger
musicians discovers a blind musician busking in downtown Detroit
and asks him up to the studio. They form a band in 1991, record two
CDs in ’91 and ’96, and then go their separate ways. Finally in
2001, two members reform a new band for what can only be described
as a triumphant return.
New Ground may, indeed, be new ground, but it’s also pretty
damn fertile ground.
The aforementioned busker is Alabama native Robert Bradley, born
sightless in 1950. His musical career started early, going from
singing gospel and R&B in the mid-sixties South to the urban
blues and Motown sound of Detroit in the late sixties and
seventies. Mix in time in California at the Braille Institute of
America where he sang a cappella by day and rock by night and close
to two decades of travels across the United States by Greyhound bus
and thumb, and you have a man who not only tells stories with his
music, but who has a lot of stories to tell.
After twenty years of busking in Detroit’s Eastern Market,
Bradley joined drummer Jeff Fowlkes and brothers Michael and Andrew
Nehra in Blackwater Surprise. For
New Ground, the Nehras have moved on, replaced by guitarist
Matt Ruffino (who the band had worked with on a video), bassist Tom
Wilber (formerly of Shannon Curfman’s band), and keyboardist Randy
Sly.
And there’s no getting around it: Blackwater Surprise is good. I
mean, really good. The kind of good R&B and roots-rock fans
tell each other about with a surprised catch in their voice.
Bradley’s gravel-and-rust vocals tell perfect vignettes, backed up
by some damn tasty musicianship — and accented by the sheer
fictiveness of the band’s mere existence. If Robert Bradley and
Blackwater Surprise didn’t exist, someone would have to invent
them; either they’re damned liars or there are more funny stories
about this band than most five musical acts. (An example: the
opening single, “Train”, was written because someone gave a band
member an upright piano with broken keys that only played in C. So
they wrote a song on it.)
Tracks of note: “Lindy”, “Feel The Fire”, “See Her”…oh,
heck. There isn’t a bad track on this CD. Stop wasting your time
with people who think they can tell stories; go out and get Robert
Bradley’s Blackwater Surprise and discover a band whose stories are
all their own.