When you think of the blues; Fresno, California isn’t usually the first place that comes to mind. But after attending just one soul-stirring, high-energy John Clifton show, I can assure you your perspective will change. Clifton grew up in the San Joaquin Valley, which is sometimes known as the food basket of the world. He spent his formative years working on drill rigs, learning to weld at the age of twelve and as a well-drilling contractor for more than two decades. Hard labor absolutely, but those physical and demanding jobs required both a steady hand and attention to detail. Skill sets Mr. Clifton continues to use to this day, it’s just the tools have changed. Instead of torching metal to metal, he fuses musical genres. Instead of drilling into the earth, his blues plumb the depths of the soul.
On this particular evening just after leaving the stage, a smiling John Clifton sat down briefly for a quick, catch your breath moment. I’m exhausted from just watching his performance, so the question begs, ‘where does the energy come from?’ “You should have seen me when I was younger!” He laughs. “I try as hard as I can all the time…you know? I love what I do. I did a lot of stuff work-wise that I didn’t like. I was a well-driller from the time I was 13 till I was 35 and I hated every minute of it. When you’re drilling wells at its best, Hey this ain’t so bad. All I could think about was blowing the harmonica, all the time. That’s all I could think about. And finally after I kicked my drinking problem I said to myself, I’m not going to do anything I don’t want to do, ever again. I started doing all music stuff, got a job at a music store and sold all my well drilling equipment. I went into the (drilling) business myself, I grew up in it. I could weld when I was twelve years old. I decided one day, I sold all the stuff I’d accumulated and went to work at a music store, part-time for minimum wage when I was 35 years old. This was all in Fresno, California where I lived. From that moment on I started performing, and cleaned up my act as far as drinking goes, so it means a lot to me, playing and entertaining people means a lot to me. Every minute that I’m up there, I try as hard as I can.”
I first saw you perform with your brother in the MOFO Party Band. “My brother and I had the MOFO Party Band. We had been in separate bands but started jamming together and decided to put our own band together. One Sunday afternoon I was out with a couple of friends of mine driving around and I had quite a few beers. I was kicking back in the backseat of this car and I looked out the windshield and I see this old Ford Econoline van and around the license plate frame, this was about 1987, it said MOFO Party van. So I thought to myself, that’s the name of my band. So I came home and told my brother, we’re going to call ourselves the MOFO Party band. But we didn’t have any gigs!” (laughing) “We were just jamming in the garage. Actually I was playing in a country western band at the time, rhythm guitar and singing but I didn’t quite have the guitar chops for country music that I have for blues. I loved country music but I didn’t like playing it and got fired from the country band and my brother and I started playing together full time. We didn’t really have a band it was just me and him and once in a while we’d get people to come over. We used to go to a jam session at a Latin bar, but every Wednesday and Sunday they’d have a blues jam. My brother and I would go every Wednesday and Sunday and it would go from 3PM to whenever it ended. The lady that owned the place thought we were so cool for coming in there, that she gave us free beer, all night. We’d go in there, drinking beer all night and many times when we would finally open the door to leave…it would be daylight!” (laughing) “And we would have to go to work. So here we are hung over, out drilling wells in 110 degree heat in Fresno.”
“So a guy comes over and says, ‘Hey, I’m doing a jam session at this little club and I’ve got to give it up. You want it?’ I said Yeah, yeah I’ll do it. He said, ‘you got a band?’ Yeah, my brother here and there was a guy from Porterville, named Brad Rogers. My brother knew a bass player and the next thing I knew we’re doing a jam session and we didn’t know any songs, just the stuff my brother and I played together and we played this jam session for six months. People started coming out and noticing it and somewhere down the line we needed a name and that was the start of the MOFO Party band in Fresno. The local newspaper wouldn’t print our name, and we quit the jam session, started practicing more and became a real band. We started getting gigs for ourselves and it just took off.”
Let’s talk influences, you hear some Chicago in your harp, a little bit of West Coast… “Everything that comes in here,” John points to the side of his head, and then says. “Goes out…I don’t try to sound like one guy or one style, I have my own way of playing. Do you know Bob Corritore out of Phoenix? He heard me play and comes up to me and says, ‘I can’t figure you out.’ I said what do you mean? ‘I listen to you play and you don’t sound like anybody, but you sound like everybody. And I can’t pinpoint where you get this from.’ And I said, well what you’re hearing is me, it’s what I do.
“So, my first harmonica people I listened to…was like Magic Dick from the J. Geils Band. That was a life-changer right there. When I was about 13, I heard ‘Whammer Jammer’ and I was done for. And then Charlie Musselwhite, that’s my man. He’s my No. #1! When I was about 17, I snuck into a club and I saw Rod Piazza and the Mighty Flyers and that just turned my head upside down, you know? And he still does…and I really admire that so much. Those are the three guys that really first moved me and then I started getting into the old guys. Little Walter and of course, Sonny Boy Williamson and I really liked Junior Wells and Snooky Pryor, Big Walter…those are my harmonica influences.” John just smiles. “Then there was Elvis.”
That’s the thing about a John Clifton show; you are gifted with various degrees of entertainment…high energy, full band ‘locomotive in your living room’ to just John on his knees and that harp…in a spotlight. “When I was 14 I saw Marty Robbins and I told myself right then; that’s how you do it. Marty Robbins was a consummate entertainer. I don’t know if you ever saw Marty Robbins, but he was off the cuff, interactive with the crowd and he was funny. And I noticed all of that when I was 14. Marty Robbins was fun. And you have to be an animated version of yourself. You can’t act like anybody else.”
And the same applies to your blues. “It’s the same think we were talking about with the harp. I don’t have any fences. I’ve got stuff that sounds like it came out of an Elvis movie and I’ve got stuff that sounds like it came out of Maxwell Street. Or stuff out of Stax Records, if I feel something it’s gotta’ come out.” (laughing) “It all comes out the same way, I come up with an idea, and I’m not worried about what it is. When it’s there, it’s there. From all the different influences that I’ve had; I like soul music, I like country music and all the stuff I grew up with…blues and old rock and roll.”
Let’s talk a little more about your road. You toured with Mark Hummel a lot. “I did seven Blowouts with Mark, yeah. Mark had the most legendary people on those shows. I got to play with Charlie Musselwhite, Lazy Lester, Huey Lewis, Carey Bell, Billy Boy Arnold, Kim Wilson, and the late John Mayall. It was just great times.”
How did you get to know Big Bill Morganfield? “I have a friend who used to be a promoter in Modesto, about a hundred miles from Fresno and he calls me and says, ‘Look, I’m putting on a festival and I’ve got Bill Morganfield coming. I’d like him do some more gigs, would you play some gigs with him and I said, Sure! We put it together and did a little tour, and then we ended up recording an album with Bill. It’s called ‘Bloodstains on the Wall.’ He does a version of ‘I Am the Blues’ from Muddy’s ‘After the Rain’ album. I asked if he’d ever heard this song from his dad. He listened to it and said, ‘we’re recordin’ that!’” (laughing) “So we recorded it and I did a few other shows with Bill after that. He calls me every once in a while, a couple of times a year.”
Tell us about your international connections, specifically the Boogie Boys. “They were the first guys I met when I first went to Poland. I used to play there a lot. We got to be friends and we toured together and they are actually on my new album.” The new album ‘Too Much to Pay’ was recorded at the Zle i Tanio Stuidos in Warsaw, Poland. “I produced an album for them that became the Blues Album of the Year in Poland. They came to California and we recorded here. They didn’t have any songs so we threw some songs together, we wrote some songs and put an album together ‘Made In Cali’ and it won an award.”
How many albums now? “I’ve got four albums in print; ‘Let Yourself Go,’ ‘Nightlife,’ ‘In the Middle of Nowhere’ and ‘Too Much To Pay.’ And I have one album on Spotify streaming only and it’s an EP called the Radio Poznan Sessions. We did it at the National Radio station in Poznan and it’s different, it’s real down home with me, a piano, upright bass and a drummer playing brushes.”
“It seems to come back to the energy sources for you because life ‘on the road’ can be pretty tough. “I tell you what, it beats you up.” (laughing) “I’m not getting any younger. I get people all the time saying, ‘when are you coming back?’ And I feel a responsibility you know? They like what I do and that means a lot. To me, I’m just playing music and I love doing it and sometimes I forget how much it means to some people. Sometimes I have to step back, because I love to listen to music too, and when I think how much listening to music means to me, it’s just kind of mind-boggling so I feel a responsibility to be out there.”
Who are you listening to? “I listen to a little bit of everything, really. Right now, I’ve been listening to Muddy and Little Walter, Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland, a country singer called Charley Crockett, James Hunter. There’s a band out of Los Angeles called Thee Sinseers and I’ve been kinda’ into them lately. They’re a little R&B and young guys…so kinda’ little bit of everything.”
Let me ask you about some of your musical friends and influences…Rod and Honey Piazza. “Oh, the best! The best, you know? They’re my friends and they’re fantastic folks, they’re Number #1…I’m telling you.”
John Mayall. “One time I met John Mayall and he was putting his harmonicas in a little cardboard thing he had built. It was a little cardboard harmonica holder with these little tabs on them. And on the tabs he’d written all the keys and he’s putting them in. It’s very proper and he’s English, you know? He’s got his glasses on…A, B flat, C and I go what is that thing? He said, ‘I had another harmonica case that I lost, so I built this one to keep my harmonicas organized.’ He’s placing them in there and I go, Hmm, you ever grab the wrong one? He stops, looks at me over his glasses and says, ‘absolutely not!’” (laughing) “He was quite the Renaissance man!”
Luther Tucker. “Luther Tucker was a prince! He was the sweetest guy and one of the greatest guitar players to ever walk the earth.”
Leadbelly. “Leadbelly was the first blues singer I ever saw, I was in kindergarten and they had a folk music show on closed-circuit television in the school. And they had a film of Leadbelly on there. Leadbelly playing his guitar, dancing and I saw that and said that’s what I want, that’s my sound. I want to sound like that; I want to play like that.” (laughing) “And it never left me and ever since then I’ve looked for something that sounded like that.”
James Harman. “James Harman was one of my dear friends and I spent some time with him. We went to Europe together, just us and a few European musicians. We spent a lot of time talking and hanging out. We played a lot of gigs together, some of Mark Hummel’s blowouts and he played with my band a few times in Fresno. He was an amazing individual.”
A couple of songs you played tonight had some James Cotton rasp on it. “You know, it’s funny you say that because I want the energy when you come out to be like that old 60’s James Cotton band, like Luther Tucker, Francis Clay you know? I’ve been compared to that and that’s exactly what we want to do.”
If you had to describe John Clifton’s blues… “It’s what comes out of Fresno, man. I think that’s what it is; it’s what comes out of Fresno. And I draw from all of that and I knew a lot of the old blues guys who lived in Fresno. You can’t really call it West Coast, but it kind of is, it’s not really Chicago, but it kind of is… It’s just what I do, man.”
