Page 8 - BiTS_02_FEBRUARY_2021

AR: Basically, yeah.

BiTS: Did you ever go back to education at all?

AR: No. Just self-education, which is the most expensive kind.

BiTS: Tell me what happened next. You obviously started gigging fairly regularly and I guess
listening to other musicians and learning from them.

AR: Oh, yeah. It's still a learning
process. So the club that we'd been

playing a steady gig in closed down
and we started playing little gigs
around town, and I started working
with another band called the Shirley
Bullock Experience and Butch passed
away a few years later and I was

just starting to branch out on my
own as a freelance musician playing
sessions and things like that when I
got a gig and I needed to put
together a band, and at that point,

somebody suggested I call Paul
Rishell. That was late 1992 and Paul
had a rhythm section, and he had a
PA system, and I had gigs, and I had
a car. When you put all those
together, you have some work.
That's where that started and then

he started calling me for more gigs
and he started calling me more
importantly for duo gigs. The band sounded sort of where I was coming from, listening to Muddy
Waters and trying to emulate the sound of Little Walter and Sonny Boy Williamson and Chicago
blues artists, but with Paul, I got a chance to listen to country blues and learn so much more about

the history and finding ways to work in as a harmonica player in the context of some of these solo
pieces was a real challenge.

BiTS: When did you get together and start working as a duo with Paul Rishell?

AR: Well, pretty much right away after that first gig in late 92, he called me up for some road gigs
with the band but then he was working locally, playing solo gigs and he asked me to join him on

some of these solo shows. Usually, he would start off playing alone and then he'd bring me up for
part of that. We had two steadies every Wednesday. One was a lunchtime show at the House of
Blues, the original House of Blues, which was a small club at the time in Cambridge and then at
night he had a gig opening up for Ronnie Earl and the Broadcasters, at a little club out in the outer
suburbs, called the Sitting Bull Pub and that was a solo thing. So he would play a few solo things and