The Hollywood Blue Flames began in 1975 as The Hollywood Fats Band, led by guitar phenomenon Michael “Hollywood Fats” Mann. It featured an assemblage of musicians of which dreams are made: bassist Larry Taylor, drummer Richard Innes, pianist Fred Kaplan and singer and harmonica player Al Blake, each bringing with them a long and illustrious blues history. Hollywood Fats would become an international legend whose talents inspired Muddy Waters to say that with Fats, “he could rule the world.”
The Hollywood Fats Band astounded the blues scene with their impassioned and deeply nuanced traditional music, igniting a West Coast blues revival that echoes to this day throughout the world. Blues musician’s musicians, the band was always in high demand to back up blues artists of the highest caliber, such as blues artists living on the West Coast Roy Brown, Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson, Big Joe Turner and Lloyd Glenn, Chicago artists such as Otis Rush, Louis Myers and Johnny Shines, and Texas musicians the likes of Albert Collins and Lightnin' Hopkins.
Tragically, Hollywood Fats passed away in 1986, leaving behind an unsurpassed musical legacy and contribution to blues. The surviving members kept the name The Hollywood Fats Band for a couple of more years. Eventually they changed it to The Hollywood Blue Flames to carry the torch into the new millennium, retaining the name “Hollywood” to honor Fats, and adding the moniker “Blue Flames” because they had something new to say as well. Primarily two excellent guitarists have filled Hollywood Fats’s role over the years: Junior Watson and Kirk “Eli” Fletcher. Watson brings to the mix the highly original style for which he is revered. Fletcher was raised on the sounds pioneered by the original incarnation of the band, doing them justice with taste and power. Other West Coast-based blues guitar sensations Kid Ramos, Rick Holstrom and Rusty Zinn have also worked with the band.
The Hollywood Blue Flames debut recording on Delta Groove, Soul Sanctuary, was welcomed with unanimous praise by fans around the world as blues with both a history and a future. It was nominated for a Blues Music Award for “Comeback Album of the Year.” The band then upped the ante with their second release, Road To Rio, featuring fresh new material and previously unrecorded songs dating back to the original Hollywood Fats Band. It was nominated as “Historical Album of the Year” by the Blues Music Awards along with Freddie King, Junior Wells, Otis Rush and John Lee Hooker. It took the number five place on Living Blues Magazine’s “Top Fifty Blues Recordings of 2006.” Their new release, Deep in America is garnering accolades from the blues world, and proving once again that it doesn’t get any better than The Hollywood Blue Flames.
Says Al Blake of the band’s credo, “For over thirty years integrity, authenticity, humility and perseverance are the bedrock principles on which we have built our best-of-the-best-reputation. For the most part, our aim is not to imitate those who have come before, but to play in such a way that we reveal the profound underlying intelligence found within the widely diverse styles of the blues, something often times so subtle, so deep and mysterious, that far too often its qualities have been overlooked or missed altogether. We are all very blessed to have discovered that wellspring of musical truths many years ago, to have found each other and to have the same common vision for our music. That wellspring is what we draw from in everything we play today.”
Copyright Hollywood Blue Flames 2009 Adform the Netherlands