Margaret - The Chris O'Leary Band

Learning to ‘play the song’
The Chris O’Leary Band performs Friday at The Livery in Benton Harbor.

Posted: Thursday, July 4, 2013 6:00 am
By TOM CONWAY -
BENTON HARBOR — After seven years as an infantry squad leader in the U.S. Marine Corps during the Gulf War, Chris O’Leary attended college in upstate New York. He also started playing guitar and harmonica in the blues scene that was happening in the Hudson Valley area.
“I was going to college and started going out and playing a little bit,” O’Leary says by telephone from the backyard of his home in Saratoga, N.Y. “I met up with some guys, and college took a back seat at that point. Music took over.”
That was the beginning of The Chris O’Leary Band, which plays Friday at The Livery.
Chicago and Mississippi come to mind when thinking about blues music, but O’Leary says the Hudson Valley also has a rich blues music scene.
“From right around that area, you have Little Sammy Davis, Murali Coryell and Slam Allen,” he says. “There has been a good amount of acts that have come out of there that have either hooked up with national bands or went on to national recognition.”
O’Leary got a big step up into the music business from one of Woodstock, N.Y.‘s most famous residents. He met Levon Helm — the late drummer and singer for The Band who died from cancer last year — through a mutual friend, George Lembesis, a photographer for The Band.
“I was always a huge Band fan,” O’Leary says. “As a matter of fact, the first concert I ever saw, my dad brought me to see The Band. I was 11 or so. He brought me to the Albany Palace. It was that tour before Richard (Manuel) died and after Robbie (Robertson) had left.”
O’Leary had made demos to shop around to record labels, and Lembesis offered to give them to Helm.
“He brought it over and the next thing you know, Levon is in the studio with us,” O’Leary says. “It was just shortly after he went through radiation and chemo. We started playing with him, going to ‘The Barn,’ jamming and stuff.”
“The Barn” was Helm’s famed home and studio in Woodstock that would host the Midnight Ramble, a series of concerts featuring Helm and a variety of musical guests.
O’Leary and his band were asked to be the house band at Levon Helm’s Classic American Café on Decatur Street in New Orleans.
“We all dropped everything and moved to New Orleans,” O’Leary says. “We spent the better part of a year there playing with Lee every night. Lee was playing drums. He wasn’t singing at all yet. His voice was pretty ravaged by the radiation and the chemo at that point. We would play every night either behind touring acts coming in or doing our own thing. After about a year, he took us out on the road and we were his band, along with Amy, his daughter. We were the Barnburners.”
O’Leary was singer, harmonica player and frontman for Helm’s Barnburners for six years, and he says he learned so much from Helm that he has applied to his own band.
“He is responsible for everything, really, my whole way of looking at things, especially musically.” O’Leary says. “His big thing was ‘play the song.’ Every song has its own life or its own message. Up until I met Levon, it really wasn’t about that. It was an exercise in self-indulgence. I would try to play as much and as fast as possible. Master this technique or that. It was a real eye-opener.”
Touring with the Barnburners also opened O’Leary’s eyes to musical influences that he brings to his singing, playing and songwriting today with his own band.
“I had been around the world with the Marine Corps, but I had never been to New Orleans,” he says. “I had never been to Chicago. I got to see a whole side of the country and people that I never knew existed.”
The Chris O’Leary Band, a six-piece with guitar, bass, drums and two saxophones, plays mostly blues-based roots music, as can be heard on the 2010 debut album “Mr. Used to Be” — winner of Best New Artist Debut CD at the 2011 Blues Blast Music Awards and nominated for the esteemed Blues Music Awards — and last year’s “Waiting for the Phone to Ring.”
“It is eclectic,” O’Leary says. “Our records are all originals. I write all of my songs. The live show, we throw some covers in there, but right in the same vein. We pull from everywhere — from New Orleans, from Chicago, from the West Coast, maybe a little bit from Detroit and Motown, and of course, Stax.”
— WHAT: The Chris O’Leary Band
— WHEN: 9 p.m. Friday
— WHERE: The Livery, 190 Fifth St., Benton Harbor
— HOW MUCH: $10 advance, $15 day of show
— CONTACT: 925‑8760 or www.liverybrew.com
— ARTIST INFO: www.thechrisolearyband.com