MUSICAL MEMOIR: Playing the Monterey Jazz Festival With Little Willie Littlefield and Albert Collins 1%
By Paul DeMark1%
8/2/2026, 12:00:10 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 15 faulty reasoning types, including Sunk Cost Effect, Self-Serving Bias, and Biased Writer Voice, with Halo Effect as the most egregious example at 0.9% saturation with 19 hits. Analysis detected 133 faulty-reasoning hits from 2,066 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 2.1% and a BS Rank of 1% (25,284 of 25,472 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 99.30% of the article peer group.
No
Damage Yet
Blues
pianist Little Willie Littlefield sat at the edge of my bed holding
his index finger upright and close to my face.
It
was three o’clock in the morning.
We were staying in San Francisco
at Harry Duncan’s apartment.
I’d played drums that night with the
Little Willie Littlefield trio at a nightclub in the city.
Also on
the bill was Albert “the Master of the Telecaster” Collins and
his band, for which I was also the drummer.
Harry
had booked Littlefield and Collins to play at the Monterey Jazz
Festival Blues Afternoon on Saturday, Sept.
16.
Harry scheduled a
week-long tour prior to the festival for the pick-up band to get the
music tight.
Dead
seriously, Willie said, “Paul, don’t ever bend this finger,”
while staring into my eyes.
“I’m a cop.”
He
was starting to scare me.
He was a slight man, about
five-foot-six-inches, dressed in a natty blue sport coat and white
shirt.
He had been full of musical fun on stage earlier that evening,
joking with the crowd and his band — me and my bass player friend,
Kip Maerkelein.
But his intensity and remarkable transformation from
the fun-loving musician with whom I’d performed a few hours earlier
perplexed me.
“What
do you mean Willie?”
I asked.
“I’m a cop,” he repeated.
“You
met my wife, Jenny, tonight.
I own three cars.
They’re parked in my
garage.”
I
had no idea why he had to tell me that.
“Willie, we need to get to
sleep,” I said.
“We start the tour tomorrow.”
He didn’t want
to go to bed, but I gently persuaded him to leave my room.
The
next morning Willie was bright-eyed and friendly, not a trace of the
menacing “don’t ever bend this finger” man of the night before.
I figured he probably had a little too much to drink.
That
day we’d drive four hours to Garberville, Calif. for both artists
to play at the original Mateel Community Center, located in the
town’s old Fireman’s Hall.
The following day only Albert and the
band would play at Vance Log Cabin on Second Street in Eureka.
Our
last show before Monterey with both artists would be Rancho Nicasio,
a historic roadhouse located in the rural ranchlands of western Marin
County.
Littlefield,
born in El Campo, Texas in 1931, was playing boogie woogie, jump
blues and R&B regularly in Houston by the time he was 16.
At 18
he made his first record, “Little Willie’s Boogie,” which was a
hit in Texas.
In 1952 he recorded “K.C.
Lovin,’” written by the
famous songwriting team of Leiber and Stoller.
(Although Willie
claimed he wrote the original.)
It was later recorded by Wilbert
Harrison as “Kansas City,” which became a huge national radio
hit.
Littlefield
performed constantly throughout the country and recorded for a
handful of labels, including Ace and Modern.
In 1977, Harry found him
playing in San Jose nightclubs.
He asked him to perform a set at
the1978 Monterey Jazz Festival Blues Afternoon, which he was booking.
At
the same time, Harry reached out to Collins, the legendary Texas
blues guitarist, about also playing at the festival.
Harry said he
had dubbed Albert the “Master of the Telecaster” and the name
stuck.
Collins
was an electric blues guitarist and singer with a distinctive guitar
style.
He was noted for his powerful playing and his use of altered
tunings and a capo.
His cousin, Lightnin’ Hopkins, introduced him
to the guitar at an early age.
Over
his 40-year career Albert recorded numerous albums including,
“Truckin’ with Albert Collins” and a 1985 collaboration with
Robert Cray and fellow Texas guitarist Johnny Copeland, “Showdown,”
which won a Grammy.
Collins
was an inspiration to a generation of Texas guitar players, including
Stevie Ray Vaughan and his brother Jimmie Vaughan.
At
the time of the tour, I was living in Arcata.
Garberville, the second
stop, was located about an hour south in Southern Humboldt.
That area
had become the epicenter of marijuana growing in the country.
Well-hidden pot farms in the remote mountains near Garberville were
cultivating the nation’s most powerful sinsemilla (which translates
to without seeds) pot in the country.
Money was flowing.
Pounds were
selling for $3,000 to $5,000.
The
Mateel Community Center had risen out of the vibrant counterculture
in Southern Humboldt.
At the Mateel, the Little Willie trio delivered
a mostly smoking set of boogie woogie blues.
But Willie, presumably
because he was playing solo in San Jose nightclubs, also played
schmaltzy versions of songs like “Mona Lisa” and the cha cha
“Never on Sunday.”
Albert
and his band – Harry Duncan on harmonica and vocals, Mike
Henderson, guitar/vocals, Ron Stallings tenor sax, Kip Maerkelein,
bass and me on drums – played a mixture of his driving instrumental
shuffles and slow blues.
At
one point Albert walked into the crowd in Garberville with his
50-foot guitar cord and was lifted onto a big man’s shoulders while
he kept playing.
(Thanks to Gary Glassman for that memory.)
The
excited crowd loved the charismatic Collins.
The
next night the Albert Collins Band played for a full house at
well-known hospitality entrepreneur Chris Smith’s Vance Log Cabin
in Eureka.
Little Willie was given the night off.
After
the show we packed up our equipment.
Our next show was in two days at
Marin’s Rancho Nicasio club.
Little Willie, Harry and I would stay
in Humboldt that night and drive to San Francisco the next day.
Collins, a veteran road warrior, was going to drive his Econoline van
all night to the Bay Area.
He always had it together.
Albert
maintained a cool look, which was his brand.
He wore a tight,
caramel-brown-colored-leather jacket and sported a thin mustache and
a soul patch.
To me, he epitomized cool.
Most of his songs and albums
mentioned something about coolness – “Frosty,” “Don’t Lose
Your Cool,” “Sno Cone” and “Ice Pickin.”
He
was friendly, but a man of few words.
If you asked him how he was
doing, he’d invariably say, “I feel better than a government
check, or a cashier’s check,” with a laugh.
As
the band was standing outside the Vance Log Cabin at 2 a.m., Little
Willie said to Collins, “Albert, I called ahead.
It’s fogged in.
You can’t drive.”
This
was 1978.
No cell phones and no phone booth in sight.
Albert looked
at Willie and shook his head in amazement.
“Harry,” Albert said,
“keep this guy away from me.”
No
Damage
The
Rancho Nicasio nightclub held up to 200 people with tables and
chairs, a stage and sizable dance floor.
On the night we performed, I
played an opening set with the Little Willie trio followed by the
Albert Collins Band.
Before
the first set, Willie re-introduced me to his wife, Jenny, and
stepson, Jerry, who sat at a table in the center of the room.
“Is
Willie a police officer,” I asked Jenny when Willie left.
“He
told me he’s a cop and owns three cars.”
Jenny
laughed.
“No, he’s not a cop and he doesn’t own three cars,”
she said.
“I’m the one who drives.”
Harry
had told Willie to cut out the schmaltzy songs like his take on Nat
King Cole’s ballad “Mona Lisa.”
He told Willie to focus on the
driving barrelhouse boogie woogie blues songs he was famous for.
“That’s
what I booked you to play at Monterey Jazz Festival,” Harry told
him.
When
we were on stage getting ready to play our set, Jenny shouted at
Willie from the audience.
“Don’t take your shoes off, Willie.”
“I’d
like to begin the night by taking my shoes off,” Willie responded
over the microphone.
I saw Jenny frowning and shaking her head.
We
played a swinging version of “One Scotch, One Bourbon and One
Beer,” an Amos Milburn song from 1952.
“We’re
going to play a variety of things,” Willie said.
Speaking to his
wife and stepson, he said, “Jenny, Jerry, no damage yet.”
I
thought the back and forth with his wife from the stage was highly
unusual.
After we played a very slow “Mona Lisa,” I saw Jenny
shaking her head again.
“Jenny,
no damage yet,” Willie told her over the mic.
After the set, Willie
said to Jenny, “The people love the trio.”
She said nothing as
Willie continued talking about the music, ignoring her while
laughing.
This
“no damage” exclamation happened throughout our one-hour set.
After that tour, no damage entered the subculture lingo of my
friendship circle.
“No Damage” became the theme of the Hey Juan
Barnstormers softball team that I was a part of.
It also became the
marketing logo of my son Julian DeMark’s artist website.
In
another nod to Little Willie’s influence, in the mid-’80s I
formed a rhythm and blues/reggae band in Southern Humboldt, No
Damage.
It included Rod Deal, Danny Wymer and Doug Cox and we played
clubs like The Cellar in Garberville and the Old Town Bar and Grill
in Eureka.
The
Albert Collins sextet played a blistering set of his instrumental
blues shuffles, slow blues songs and tunes from his new Alligator
Records album “Ice Pickin.”
A solid warm-up for our Monterey set
we’d play in two days.
The
Monterey County Fairgrounds has hosted the annual Monterey Jazz
Festival continuously since 1958.
It is still going strong.
The venue
was famous as the stage for the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, which
featured Janis Joplin’s breakout performance, Otis Redding, The
Electric Flag and Jimi Hendrix.
It was made into a film, “Monterey
Pop.”
It
holds 7,500 seats and features a 12-foot-high stage.
In addition to
Albert Collins and Little Willie, other acts included Ruth Brown and
Jimmy Witherspoon.
The afternoon was sold out on a beautiful
late-summer day.
Producer
Jimmy Lyons and his stage crew told the musicians backstage that our
sets were to last no longer than 45 minutes.
After that, the curtain
would close and our music would have to stop.
The
Little Willie Littlefield trio played a swinging set of boogie and
barrelhouse blues – no cocktail lounge songs.
The crowd dug it and
so did I.
Willie had delivered a fine set.
He was beaming backstage
and received enthusiastic congratulations.
The
Albert Collins Band played a couple of warm-up blues standards
without Albert before Harry introduced him.
We kicked off with an
uptempo, swinging shuffle.
Albert was a consummate performer, from
his cool look to his ferocious guitar playing.
He inspired me to play
with intensity.
He
sang some slow blues like “Angel of Mercy” and Guitar Slim’s
“Things that I Used to Do.”
We played his driving blues shuffle
instrumental “Don’t Lose Your Cool,” and Jimmy Reed’s “Baby
What You Want me to Do?”
His
last song was “Frosty,” a famous instrumental shuffle from his
debut album.
Albert liked to play an extended solo on it.
He walked
toward the edge of the stage with his 50-foot guitar cord.
Then he
disappeared from the musicians’ view as he descended the 12 feet of
stairs to the audience level.
Meanwhile,
the time limit for our 45-minute set was ending.
The backstage crew
signaled forcefully for us to stop playing.
But we kept going because
we knew if we stopped, Albert would be hung out to dry.
His guitar
solo would simply crash and burn because we couldn’t make eye
contact with him to end the song together.
Producer
Lyons came out to the stage and took the mic as the curtains were
closing.
“Albert,
albert come back,” he said plaintively.
“The set’s over.”
Albert never heard him.
The curtain closed and the crew
surrounded us and demanded we STOP NOW!
We finished the verse and
stopped.
Predictably, Albert fell off the musical cliff and stumbled
to a chaotic crash landing.
Albert
ascended the stairs and Lyons reprimanded him.
“I’m really sorry
Mr.
Lyons,” Albert said.
Collins
needed no apology for his performance until that moment.
He was
incendiary.
The audience loved him.
It
was an honor to perform with Albert Collins and the talented Little
Willie Littlefield, two distinctly different Texas blues musicians,
on that grand stage.
During
that week-long tour, I never did bend Willie’s finger.
I didn’t
dare.
###
Paul DeMark is a graduate of the Humboldt State University journalism program.
Thank you to Pamela Long for editing and Julian DeMark for photo scanning.
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