Love Train

Why I'm thinking about bluesman Johnny Copeland and Motown's Funk Brothers on my 30th anniversary.

Over the weekend, The Wall Street Journal published an essay I wrote about Jimmy Carter’s relationship with the Allman Brothers Band. It was adapted from my forthcoming book Brothers and Sisters: The Allman Brothers Band and the Album that Defined the 70s. It was supposed to run in July, just before the book’s 7/25 release, but news that President Carter, 98, has entered hiospice care prompted the decision to run it now. The response has been great and I invite you to click through and read it. I am sending best wishes to President Carter and his family. It was an honor and a lot of fun to really examine this aspect of the Allman Brothers Band’s legacy and to delve into Jimmy Carter’s career and campaign. This published piece of writing is just the tip of the iceberg of what is in the book.

Today is my 30th anniversary and every year on this day, I think not only of my wife Rebecca Blumenstein, who I’m incredibly grateful to have been able to spend my life with, but also of the late bluesman Johnny Clyde Copeland. And if that seems strange, I’ve got a story for you, one I am going to largely re-post from my very first post here two years ago.

"The Texas Twister" was one of my favorites, an underrated singer/songwriter and guitarist who had as much heart, soul and wisdom as anyone ever. I met him in 1988, spring of my senior year at the University of Michigan. For a final project in my photography class, I had to do a photo journalism project, four or five photos that told a story. I decided to feature a musician’s gig. Johnny Copeland was coming to Rick’s American Cafe, the basement bar where I had worked my first two years of school and whre I really fell in love with the blues. It was there I saw, and served, Lonnie Brooks, Buddy Guy, KoKo Taylor, Son Seals, Albert Collins, Robert Cray and many others.

I met Johnny at the bar and took pictures of him and his band loading in and soundchecking. We went out to eat and then back at the club, we hung out for hours, as he smoked weed, sipped coffee and told tales. He also asked me a lot of questions about myself, with special interest focused on my love life. I told him that I had been in love and was in a heavy relationship that ended almost a year ago, partly because she and her family didn’t like the fact that I was Jewish.

“Was she white?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“You’re telling me white people don’t like other white people ‘ cause they Jewish?”

“Yeah, man.”

Johnny Copeland being interviewed at WCBN, April, 1989. This is one of the pictures I took that day. I found the negatives during a pandemic cleanup.

He didn’t believe me and returned to this question several times - but then I told him some happier news: I had just started dating someone who had been a friend for a few years and I really thought she might be the one. She was special. As I escorted him across campus for an interview on WCBN radio, we ran into Rebecca and a friend of ours from  The Michigan Daily, the college newspaper, in the middle of campus, just by the Diag. I introduced him and as we walked away, I told him who she was.

“That’s the one I told you about.”

“What one?”
”The girl I told you about. My new girlfriend.”
”What? You two shook hands!" he exclaimed, with disgust and bewilederment.

I explained that our relationship was a secret because we had both been seeing other people and it was a little messy. He stopped me on the street, held my arm and said, “That’s bullshit, man! If you got a girl you love, pull her close, kiss her and hug her and tell the world, ‘This is my girl!’ Nothing to be ashamed of, no matter what.And if you can’t do that for any reason, move along and find another girl.”

And so I did.  I told the world.

We got married five years later, at the Michigan League in Ann Arbor, just a hop, skip and a jump from where Johnny and I had that conversation. Our wedding band included two members of the Funk Brothers, the Motown house band - drummer Pistol Allen and keyboardist Johnny Griffith. That makes it feel sort of appropriate that I am interviewing the immortal Smokey Robinson this afternoon. They were fantastic, even though Pistol got mad at me during a break when I said it was cool that he doubled all the snare parts, as an r&b historian friend had told me. “I played the whole kit, my man!” he screamed at me. “The whole kit!”

Among the many songs Pistol played on - Marvin Gaye’s “How Sweet It Is.”

And among the many tracks that Johnny played on: Marvin Gaye’s “Heard It Through the Grapevine.” He’s playing that iconic keyboard intro. These guys played at my wedding! As cool as I knew it was, I don’t think I properly appreciated it. Both passed away within five years. I pay tribute today to Johnny and Pistol and all the other great musicians who have brought the world so much joy.

Johnny Copeland died in 1997 after a valiant struggle with cardiac problems. His daughter Shemekia is a great singer and one of the main hosts on Sirius XM’s BB King Blues Channel and in 2020, I did a great two-part interview with her for the Bluegrass Situation, which you can read here.

Thank you for everything you did for me and God knows how many others, Johnny. You were a prince. Amazingly, I found the negatives of the pictures I took that day during an early pandemic basement clean. The photo above is one of them. Here’s another:

Johnny Copeland, Rick’s American Cafe, spring 1988, waiting to go on stage. Photo - Alan Paul

Here’s a clip of Johnny with Stevie Ray Vaughan at the Montreux Jazz Festival. He was one of Stevie’s favorites. >>

Alan Paul’s fourth book, Brothers and Sisters: the Allman Brothers Band and The Album That Defined The 70s, will be published July 25, 2023, by St. Martin’s Press. His last two books – Texas Flood: The Inside Story of Stevie Ray Vaughan and  One Way Out: The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band  – debuted in the New York Times Non-Fiction Hardcover Bestsellers List. His first book was Big in China: My Unlikely Adventures Raising a Family, Playing the Blues and Becoming a Star in Beijing, about his experiences raising a family in Beijing and touring China with a popular original blues band. It was optioned for a movie by Ivan Reitman’s Montecito Productions.  He is also a guitarist and singer who fronts two bands, Big in China and Friends of the Brothers, the premier celebration of the Allman Brothers Band.

Brothers and Sisters: the Allman Brothers Band and The Album That Defined The 70s, will be published July 25, 2023.