Weekend blues host Gary “the Wagman” Wagner, pictured right.
3:00pm | What is a blues festival and why change the name? According to a KKJZ website posting, there will be no Long Beach Blues Festival this year, except there will still be a concert which they’ve renamed a Blues Bash.
“The KJazz Blues Bash will begin at noon [Sept. 4] with a free admission family ‘street party’ held in the plaza area adjacent to the Carpenter Center. Live performances by local musicians and food and beverages will be offered from noon until 6 p.m.”
The evening event will headline one-time blues wunderkind Keb’Mo and blues acrobat Guitar Shorty, who was “discovered” by Sam Cooke in the late 1950s and was part of the emergence of Jimi Hendrix in the 1960s. It will still be a concert and the station will still charge money for it. It simply will go indoors at the Carpenter Center, not outdoors, which I guess is the only criterion needed to call it a festival.
The station’s website stated, “KKJZ management determined to offer the Blues Bash in lieu of the Long Beach Blues Festival this year to avoid economic difficulties that have closed other long standing music festivals over the past year. We will continue to work toward bringing back the festival in all its glory.”
Its modest beginnings were on the back of a flatbed truck at Veteran’s Stadium in 1980 with Big Joe Turner shoutin’ the blues and George Harmonica Smith dazzling the crowd with his gritty sound. Under the early direction of KLON blues host Bernie Pearl and producer Dan Jacobsen, the festival quickly advanced to a CSULB event. “From ’80-84 the fest grew, doubling attendance each year,” said Pearl.
As of the early 2000s, there were at least four or five active blues festivals in Long Beach and environs, all centered around the granddaddy of all local fests, The Long Beach Blues Festival, which, at one time was outdone only by the Long Beach Grand Prix as the city’s premier crowd gatherer.
The Big Time Blues (BTB) Festival, which began in 1987 as a partnership between KLON DJs Bernie Pearl and Bubba Jackson and local attorneys Gene Kinsey and Tim Lashlee was smaller, but more of a purist event held in a park near the police academy.
After KLON became KKJZ, the festival was heavily promoted as a premium for fund drives and the festival eventually moved to Rainbow Harbor a few years ago. During that time, the event was farmed out to outside concert specialists who booked and essentially ran the concert, using KKJZ DJs as emcees.
“BTB’s last hurrah was 2001, the 9th one. In good times, everybody wants to get into the act, so people were festivalizing all over the place,” said Pearl. “Big Time Blues was formed, partially in reaction to the decline of the festival.”
According to a source close to KKJZ, there had been moves to either delay or cancel the festival outright and the latter approach won out, with promises to resume the event in 2011. However, with all this decision-making goin’ on, weekend blues host Gary “the Wagman” Wagner claimed he was not part of this seismic blues planning. “They don’t tell me anything, and I don’t choose to speculate. Got involved in the politics before, that was obviously a bad idea.”
However, in an earlier e-mail, Wagner, who also operates the Into-Blues Network website, indicated some knowledge of the event. “I expect there will be some kind of announcement of the lineup soon and then we will all know more.” How this response can be reconciled with the “didn’t tell me anything” claim is problematic.
Pearl was not surprised at Wagman’s lack of involvement. “It seems completely reasonable that Wagner was out of the loop. Being on air has become detached from the festival. Back in the day, specifically 1985-86, the festival declined, almost to the moribund state.”
“I played the first one and, possibly, the last. I enjoyed playing last year, but saw and felt the decline,” Pearl said. “It’s been a major institution and its demise is noteworthy.”