2 generations of Hoodoo Rhythm Devils
A son who grew up barely knowing his father and a musician who still misses his partner more than 30 years after his death will team up to bring back to life the music of the Hoodoo Rhythm Devils, a little-remembered band that was one of the great almost-was, hard-luck stories of the ’70s San Francisco rock scene.
“The reason I’m doing this is that I get a lot of old fans e-mailing me,” drummer-vocalist Glenn Walters says. “Of course, I get stuff from people who remember my old band in Kansas City in 1965, too. I couldn’t do a reunion – the guys are all scattered. I figured I could do the songs with the guys I work with now and call it a retrospective. I really love the songs.”
Sitting in for his late partner at the once-only performance Friday at Biscuits Blues will be Joe Crane Jr., 42, who was 10 years old when his father died. His parents were divorced when he was 2 and he grew up in Houston, raised by his mother and stepfather, his musician father a distant figure living in San Francisco.
“I tell people the day I was born, my parents took me home to an apartment on Haight Street, and they say, ‘Well, that clears up a lot,’ ” Crane said over the telephone from Austin, Texas, where he has lived and played music for 20 years.
Walters, 66, sits at the small dining nook of his neat, tiny bachelor pad tucked away down a South of Market alley. Lean and lanky in a tartan plaid Pendleton, he’s fiddling with a pair of drumsticks.
He kept the Hoodoos running for a few ignominious years after the death of his partner, Joe Crane, songwriter and goofy heart of the wonderful band, but hasn’t fielded a team under the name since he joined Zasu Pitts Memorial Orchestra for a four-year run in 1986. He put bread on the table for the last two decades playing music freelance and doing voiceovers on commercials for products such as Hershey’s Kisses and Gallo. He did the voice for the character of the wolf in Tim Burton’s “The Nightmare Before Christmas.”
Walters plays drums in a jazz trio, sings RB in a quartet, and works weddings and parties with longtime associate Pamela Rose in their band, Sidepocket. He spent the previous night behind the kit at the bar in Spenger’s Fresh Fish Grotto in Berkeley. In 2000, he cut a solo album, “King of Retro Cool,” with Tower of Power backing him up, but, for the most part, nothing has interfered with the obscurity in which Walters works.
But those familiar with that work know Walters to be one of the great soul vocalists of San Francisco. At the band’s brief peak, the combination of Walter’s Southern-style soul shouting and Crane’s Texas good ol’ boy hell-raising made the Hoodoo Rhythm Devils one of the most exciting attractions on the thriving San Francisco club scene.
The group recorded five albums. KSAN, the leading San Francisco FM rock radio station at the time, treated the Hoodoos like the house band, blasting out tracks like “Crazy ‘Bout the Ladies,” “Too Hot to Handle” or “Right on Mary.” The Pointer Sisters supplied background vocals on the Hoodoo version of “Sea of Love,” years before Tom Waits covered it.
When the original band broke up and Crane and Walters recorded their next Hoodoos album by themselves, they brought in guest guitarists such as Steve Miller, Ronnie Montrose and Link Wray.
But hard luck stalked the Hoodoos. That 1976 album, a brilliant distillation of the group’s signature wacky sense of barbecue and rhythm and blues, was titled “Safe in Their Homes.” The cover photo was taken in the Haight district home of Hoodoos manager-producer Jack Leahy, the same home where, weeks later, a woman was murdered and Leahy and his wife were attacked as they lay sleeping in their bed by an ax-wielding madman who worked for Leahy as a handyman.
Nobody associated with the Hoodoos will forget the night in 1975 that Arista Records President Clive Davis went to see the band at a seedy Berkeley nightclub called the Longbranch, where the Hoodoos ruled. Before a crazed, packed house, the band stomped its way through a fire-breathing, barn-burning set while Davis fell asleep in the stuffy club’s balcony.
But the ultimate bad luck came when Crane was diagnosed with leukemia and died at age 34 in 1980. His last performance with the Hoodoos was at the band’s 10th anniversary party, the night before he went into the hospital for the last time. Walters keeps a couple of spoonfuls of Crane’s ashes in a jar on his shelf.
“We were born four days apart,” says Walters. “We both liked catfishing, drinking beer and smoking cigars. I was closer to him than I was to my wife – that was probably one of the problems – I spent more time with him than I did with her. We had the Hoodoo Armada – two little fiberglass boats. We would load up with beer, chewing tobacco and stink bait, and stay out in the delta all day.”
He remembered young Joe Crane Jr. as a boy visiting from Texas – Crane recalls all four Pointer Sisters babysitting him during a recording session – and met the grown son of his late partner in Dallas at a Zasu Pitts date 20 years ago. “He was so much like his dad,” Walters says.
“It’s different being born and growing up around these songs,” says the songwriter’s son. “There’s a practice and rehearsal element. The last few months, I have become extremely intimate with the songs. Besides my dad’s tone and natural tendencies, it’s an amazing task to fill in his parts in these songs. No way can I fill his shoes. This isn’t about me. It’s about the music. It’s about the Hoodoos. It’s about Glenn, my dad’s lifelong musical partner and friend.”
Joel Selvin is The San Francisco Chronicle’s senior pop music correspondent. E-mail: datebookletters@sfchronicle.com
