Oh, I started out young. They handed me a cotton sack when I was about 8 years old. Give me a little small one, tell me to fill it up. I never did like the farm but I was out there with my grandmother, didn't want to get away from around her too far. |
Our little house was way back in the country. We had one house close to us, and hell the next one would've been a mile. If you got sick, you could holler and wouldn't nobody hear you. |
Our location manager sent me photos of different possibilities, and I picked out my favorite, which was this apartment building at Mason and Green, ... I sent it to Leslie, and she said, 'That's my apartment building! That's literally where I lived in San Francisco.' I felt that was a good sign. |
Robert Johnson? No, I didn't know him, personally. |
Saturday night is your big night. Everybody used to fry up fish and have one hell of a time. Find me playing till sunrise for 50 cents and a sandwich. And be glad of it. And they really liked the low-down blues. |
That great big police come down Sunflower with that big cap on, man, just waving that stick. You had to go in the country. |
That Mississippi sound, that Delta sound is in them old records. You can hear it all the way through. |
The blacks have their parties, hustle a little liquor, get some things together, and I used to play for those peoples. They'd come get me on time, but they wouldn't bring me back on time... Done picked cotton all day, play all night long, then pick cotton all day the next day before I could get a chance to sleep. |
The thing about San Francisco is that it has this kind of magical quality, |
Them older people... they didn't think you could make it in no kind of city. They think if you get in the city-starvation. |
There's no way in the world I can feel the same blues the way I used to. When I play in Chicago, I'm playing up-to-date, not the blues I was born with. People should hear the pure blues-the blues we used to have when we had no money. |
When we needed to find a hippie bookstore that sold secondhand books, I thought of Abandoned Planet (518 Valencia St.), which is right across the street from where I used to live, ... When I was a starving writer-director-actor, I'd go to the Muddy Waters Cafe (521 Valencia St.) every day, buy a $3.50 burrito and eat half for lunch, half for dinner. |
You get a heck of a sound from the church. Can't you hear it in my voice? |