Ronnie Baker Brooks
Ronnie Baker Brooks began earning money for music before he even started school.
The son of Chicago blues legend Lonnie Brooks, he remembers playing around the house with his father, who would pay him and his siblings a dollar every time they wrote a song.
When he was about 8, he began begging his father to let him play on stage.
“Dad left for Europe for six weeks and I begged him to let me go with him,” Brooks recalled. “He told me that if I learned two songs before he came home, I could play at his next gig when he got back.
“When he came home, he couldn’t even get to the curb before I hit him with those songs.”
The next gig turned out to be a combination welcome home party and a party for young Ronnie’s ninth birthday at Pepper’s Hide-Out. And the kid was nervous.
“I remember I was wearing a mood ring and it was turning all kinds of colors,” he said. “Mom tried to calm me down, she said ‘Just play it like you’re at home.’”
When he and his dad’s band launched into “Messin’ With the Kid,” people began throwing money on stage and Brooks knew that the stage was his home now.
He began to accompany his father to his local gigs. If the club owners wouldn’t let him inside, the elder Brooks would park his car by the front door of the club where the doormen could keep an eye on it, and let Ronnie sit with the windows down so he could hear the music.
He broke his father’s heart a little when he gave up music for sports in high school, but he came to senses soon enough and by the time he was 17, he was a full-fledged member of the band.
“After high school, I had the choice,” he said. “I could either go to college or go out on the road.”
He stayed there for 13 years, and on New Year’s Eve, 1998, he played his last gig as a member of the band. No broken heart for Dad this time. This time, he was striking out to record on his own.
His father, he said, “was the one who told me to go out and give it shot. If he hadn’t told me to leave, I probably never would have.”
Now three albums into his own career, Brooks’ latest set is “The Torch,” where he mixes blues with contemporary urban sounds.
“I’m not saying I’m creating anything new,” he said. “I’m just doing what I hear in my head and feel in my heart.
“I grew up among the best of the best,” Brooks said. “Every time I play, I feel like I’ve got to do it with the authenticity and passion that I saw in guys like Buddy Guy, Muddy Waters, B.B. King and my father. But I also have to put my twist on it. None of those guys repeated what came before them.”
Brooks’ twist involves enlivening blues-rock with deep soul and modern hip-hop vocals and funk rhythms. Working with Minneapolis producer Jellybean Johnson, a veteran collaborator of Prince and Janet Jackson, Brooks takes roots sounds and transforms them into something that spans the ages.
“I like to think of how Muddy Waters took the Mississippi blues he heard in his youth and modernized it for his times by making it electric and harder,” Brooks said. “That’s what I’m trying to do for my generation. I want to take what’s authentic and powerful about the music I grew up loving and bring in other influences without losing the heart and conviction of it.”
He draws on the choppy, hip-shaking rhythms of funk, the emotional truth of soul and the forcefulness of rock to bring a distinctive dimension to his groundbreaking sound. Who else would, or could, record a song featuring classic Chicago artists Lonnie Brooks, Eddy Clearwater, Jimmy Johnson and the late Willie Kent with another highlighting rapper Al Kapone.
“I wanted to do something that would bring young people to the blues, and then give them the real hardcore thing at the same time,” Brooks said. “When I grew up, all my friends listened to rap and funk, and I listened to the blues. So I heard their music and they heard mine. I think we both saw some connection between them. I like that line in the movie “Hustle & Flow” when they say this new rap song ain’t nothing but “Backdoor Man” written for modern streets. It’s a hip-hop world right now, but I want to bring a little blues to the party.”
how to go
WHAT: Legendary Rhythm and Blues Revue featuring Ronnie Baker Brooks, Tommy Castro, Magic Dick and Deanna Bogart.
WHERE: Southgate House, 24 E. Third St., Newport.
WHEN: 8:30 p.m. Wednesday.
COST: $20 advance; $25 day of show.
MORE INFO: (859) 431-2201; southgatehouse.com.
A version of this story originally ran in the Go! section of the JournalNews, Hamilton, Ohio.
