(July, 28, 2011) Westerly, RI native Johnny Nicholas celebrates a new album along with a yogi birthday party and fundraiser during a well-attended appearance at the Bridge Restaurant downtown.

Nicholas helped raise funds for High Street Yoga’s “HSY Teacher Training Scholarship Fund,” as well as celebrate the local studio owner, Tamsy Markham’s 49th birthday, while also promoting his new album (the first for him since 2005) “Future Blues.”

Cindy Cashdollar on slide complimented Nicholas seamlessly, prodding and stroking an arms-length assortment of guitars that sang like baritone steel.  The flavors of Nicholas’s inspired songwriting and Cashdollar’s almost invisible harmony blended together like a good bowl of soup.
- Mark Urso, Wham Universal
http://www.whamuniversal.com

“Future Blues” album review: Though Texas bluesman Johnny Nicholas has played with the likes of Muddy Waters and Howlin Wolf, Eric Clapton and Bonnie Raitt – not to mention his former group Asleep At The Wheel – in recent years, you’d be more likely to find him at his roadhouse restaurant The Hill Top Café near Fredricksburg, TX. Nicholas, who Texas music legend Stephen Bruton called “one of the best bluesmen ever,” is set to release his first album in six years, ‘Future Blues,’ on July 12 via The People’s Label and tour with an all-star band this spring and summer.

Musicians on the album include Cindy Cashdollar (Van Morrison, Bob Dylan, Paul Butterfield), guitarist “Scrappy” Jud Newcomb (Ian McLagan, The Resentments), drummer John Chipman (Band of Heathens), accordion and keyboardist Joel Guzman (Joe Ely), and guest appearances by Sam Broussard and Jimmie Vaughan. ‘Future Blues’ was produced by Bruce Hughes (The Resentments, Texas Sheiks, Jason Mraz), who also plays bass on the record.

The tone of ‘Future Blues’ is set with lead-off track “Hey Hey,” a jaunty boogie-woogie with stellar harmonica work, Nicholas’ voice smoky and assertive. “Hard Time Livin’” and “Roads On Fire” are two slow-burning stand-outs supported by gritty guitar and Cashdollar’s slide flourishes that melt into the rhythm section, while Nicholas’ re-imagined version of Dylan’s “(It’s All Over Now) Baby Blue” is punctuated by a free-spirited, driving shuffle.

‘Future Blues’ reunites Nicholas, Hughes, and Cashdollar after their successful collaboration with Geoff Muldaur, Bruton and Jim Kweskin on the 2008 acoustic blues Texas Sheiks project.

(Shore Fire Media)
http://shorefire.com/clients/jnicholas/

Press Coverage, The Westerly Sun: One of Westerly’s most loyal native sons, Johnny Nicholas, comes to town July 23 for a CD release party, held appropriately at the Knickerbocker Café. Titled “Future Blues”, this CD is Nicholas’s first collection of new material since 2005′s Living with the Blues. It has 10 Nicholas originals, a cover of Bob Dylan’s “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” and the adaptation of two of Willie Brown’s tunes.

Although Nicholas feels the album is more introspective than previous releases, he admits that many of the cuts “can’t escape a dance feel-it’s gotta be something you can dance to.”

Indeed, the first song, “Hey, Hey,” will get your hips swaying to its classic country jitterbug rhythm. The second picks the tempo up, so that you find yourself boogieing to a gospel-flavored proclamation. But it’s the fourth cut, “Hard Time Livin’,” which lays down a twangy gutbucket blues sound and puts tough-fisted politically-tinged lyrics on top.

Nicholas agreed that the latter is, indeed, a “protest song,” written just last summer. He elaborated in a phone conversation from his Texas home in Fredericksburg, where he and wife Brenda have run the Hill Top Café, a B & B/restaurant /music venue since the late ‘70s.

“A lot of ‘protest songs’ are limited artistically,” Nicholas observed, “and I wanted to use metaphors and make it musical and mysterious and make people think. It’s not about individuals-it’s about huge corporations and government entities that allow it to happen-to rake the people.

“I’ve committed myself to doing more of these kind of songs,” he continued. “I want people to stop blindly following a talking head from the Right or the Left. It doesn’t matter, which side-if you’re listening to that person and not digging through the facts and making a critical judgment, then you’re not thinking. And we’re in trouble.”

The refrain in the song speaks of “toxicity” and “pollution in the air,” not only as environmental poisons but also in people’s minds. Nonetheless, Nicholas doesn’t want to be consumed by those thoughts.

“I mean to be aware and armed with knowledge, but if you lose your ability to laugh and love and to be happy and to have fun, it’s not worth it,” he concluded.

Nicholas emphasized that songwriting is a lot of work. Some of the songs on this album had been kicking around a while and were just never finished, until he made his own writing a priority-”I decided to stop doing covers and do my own stuff and put it out there from my heart and soul.”

One of Nicholas’s favorites, “Roads on Fire”, was written while visiting his mom in Westerly. On his visit he learned that a good friend of his had cancer. “I sat down on the front steps and this came to me,” he recalled. “It’s about loss and friendship and how hard we all try to do the right thing and to be good people, on the road of life. But how are you gonna change that? Do you get out and change a tire when the road’s on fire? It’s difficult to change or to make something that you want to happen.”

Nicholas himself has made a lot of things happen, beginning with his friendship and blues/R & B alliance with Duke Robillard in the early ‘70s; his subsequent tours with Big Walter Horton, Roosevelt Sykes, Johnny Shines, Robert Pete Williams and Robert Lockwood Jr.; his multi-year gig with Asleep at the Wheel; and then his own blues bands.

Yet several of Nicholas’s musical projects pay homage to many kinds of music, and Future Blues is no exception. Toward the end of the album, there’s a New Orleans-style piano backbeat to “That’s the Price You Have to Pay”; a smokin’ swinger, “Pass Your Tender Lips”; and another gospel testimony on “Steadfast.”

Nicholas brings a band called “Hellbent,” including the legendary slide guitarist Cindy Cashdollar and this region’s own Greg Piccolo, to the Knick’s stage. His conviction that people need to experience the arts in their everyday lives in order to be “whole human beings” colors his concern for his audiences.

“I just want them to come out and hear live music,” he stressed. “And I’d like for them to listen really carefully to the stories and to think about them, but also to enjoy the music and get out there and dance!”

(Johnette Rodriguez / Special to The Sun, Westerly Sun, July 21, 2011)

http://www.thewesterlysun.com

Regarding Nicholas’s new album, see “Johnny Nicholas comes down from the Hill Country with a new album of blues,” by Austin360.com at http://www.austin360.com/music/johnny-nicholas-comes-down-from-the-hill-country-1640234.html

High Street Yoga’s website is at http://www.highstreetyoga.com

Johnny Nicholas iTunes Preview:  http://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/johnny-nicholas/id6742128

Liner Notes from the album “Future Blues”:

Track Listing

Hey Hey
Hell Bent
Don’t Say I Never Told You So
Hard Time Livin’
Roads on Fire
Mister Moon
Future Blues
Graveyard Blues
That’s the Price
(It’s All Over Now) Baby Blue
Pass Your Tender Lips
Steadfast

Johnny Nicholas- Vocals, Gibson J50, Kay, Silvertone & Rickenbacker guitars, Gibson Mandolin, Piano, Harmonica
Bruce Hughes- Backup Vocals, Fender P Bass, Guild D30, Wurlitzer, Claps
Scrappy Jud Newcomb- Guild Starfire, Guild D30, Telecaster, Gibson 6 string Banjo
John Chipman- Drums, Percussion
Cindy Cashdollar- Remington Steel Guitar, National Baritone Tricone, Beard Resophonic, Gibson Lapsteel, Pogreba Baritone Weissenborn
Joel Guzman- Button Accordion, Wurlitzer
Ernie Durawa- Drums (That’s the Price, Tender Lips) Red Young- Hammond B3 (Steadfast)
Bobby Sparks- Hammond B3 (Baby Blue)
Sabrina Cummings- Gospel Vocals
Special Guest:
Jimmie Vaughan- Stratocaster (Hey Hey, That’s the Price, Tender Lips)

Produced by Bruce Hughes

All songs written by Johnny Nicholas
Dynaflow Music (BMI) administered by Bug Music
except:
Roads on Fire and Mister Moon by Johnny Nicholas and Bruce Hughes Lonescar Music (ASCAP),
*Future Blues by Willie Brown, Arr. by Johnny Nicholas,
It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue – Bob Dylan Special Rider Music (SESAC)

Recorded and Mastered at Satellite Studio in Austin by Matt Shultz
Mixed by Matt Shultz and Bruce Hughes

Executive Producer: Roger Kasle
Photography by Mary Keating Bruton
*Video Still by Dave Glassco and Curtis Cole
Graphic Layout and Design by Paul Fucik and David Pappenhagen at Arts and Recreation

*Johnny would like to thank: Brenda Sue, Roger Kasle, Bruce Hughes, Mary Keating Bruton, Ken Kushnick, Dave Glassco, Matt Shultz, Scrappy Jud Newcomb, Johnny “Morocco” Chipman, TSB, Robert Jr, Rio, Willie, Alex, Mom and Dad, Uncle Medie , Aunt Alice and my big brother Billy Nicholas, who forced me to listen to great shit at an early age and dragged me around to house parties to play for his friends

Dedicated to Turner Stephen Bruton