I saw in the paper an obit for Danny Kalb, best known as guitarist with the Blues Project, but a considerable player before and for many years after that. His political trajectory was also interesting.
I met him early in the millennium at a book party for the urbanist Fred Siegel, whose friend he was. When I mentioned it to my wife, she said she had met him much longer ago — in 1965, the summer after her graduation from high school, on the Aurelia, a ship that carried students cheaply to Europe. Danny was half the entertainment. You could also sing madrigals with a chorus director from Antioch. Madrigals are wonderful, but Danny must have been better.
The Blues Project was a flare of the Greenwich Village folk revival, which I was just young enough to miss. Danny knew Bob Dylan when he was Zimmerman, and took guitar lessons from Dave Van Ronk (who reputedly threw him out one day when he played back a tricky riff after only one hearing). The Blues Project burned brightly for a season. Danny was famous for having tuned his guitar in the middle of a recording session, but making it sound like a bluesy squawk. Heaven was when Muddy Waters himself complimented their version of “Two Trains Running.”
Then it broke up, as many groups did. Danny played in clubs, at reunions, with other musicians. The musicians’ life. Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize.
His parents’ communism was an element in the turbulence of his early days. He moved past it, but kept trying to integrate radicalism somehow with patriotism. He liked recounting how Dylan, whom he worshipped, gave his first post-fame Paris concert in front of an enormous American flag. Let the French lefties make of it what they would. On 9/11, Danny shared the general distress by calling and crying “No pasaran!” as if summoning La Pasionaria to smite Osama bin Laden.
He was demanding and difficult and I had to stop taking his many, many phone calls. But I will never forget the times I heard him play, once at one of his birthday parties, again for Jeanne and me when we visited him at his apartment. His voice was a growl, but he could put a song across. His guitar playing was peerless. He did “The Water Is Wide” at his party, “In My Time of Dying” for us.
Meet me, Jesus, meet me
In the middle of the air
If these wings should fail me
Won’t you meet me with another pair.