Tenth Anniversary Tribute To Rainer’s Inner Flame – Club Congress (Tucson, AZ)

This tenth-year memorial for renowned blues musician Rainer Ptacek had many wonderful moments — warm, funny, rowdy, transcendent. But the show-stopper, the hands-down heart-warmer, was a cover of a lost Rainer song, “Blackwater Blues”. It’s one of ten just-released tracks on a CD made from tapes Rainer recorded with Das Combo twenty years ago, ten years before he died of brain cancer. The song was performed passionately and compellingly by Gabe Keating and Rudy Ptacek, Rainer’s sons, on lead guitar and vocals and on drums, respectively. Patti Keating’s smile lit up the night.

Keating, Rainer’s widow, helped his best friend Howe Gelb organize the tribute jam, and musicians signed up to play throughout the night. At one point a doorman quipped that there were as many musicians in the house as fans. Musicians’ affection and respect for Rainer seem almost universal, especially in Tucson, where he made his home, despite frequent offers to work in Nashville and Los Angeles. But the club was loaded with old friends and relatives as well, including many who had made the trip from Phoenix and California. And there were new fans, lured by the legend.

Gelb served as Master of Ceremonies and sideman for much of the night, loosely tying things together, letting them happen, keeping them moving, and occasionally soliciting questions from the crowd. “Put you a question on a sheet,” he said, “and we’ll burn it in the traditional format after the show. It’s OK if the question is stupid. We’ll make an ash of it later.”

Rainer’s Das Combo rhythm section, bassist Nick Augustine and drummer Ralph Gilmore, anchored the better part of three hours of uninterrupted music, much of which reprised songs they recorded and performed with Rainer. Local guitarists Mitzi Cowan and Kevin Pakulis took turns plying the slide.

Pakulis’ own set rendered Rainer covers of Willie Nelson and Robert Johnson. Nelson’s “Ain’t It Funny How Time Slips Away” featured a blues-on-the-way-to-show-tune piano break by Gelb, and Pakulis’ riveting interpretation of Johnson’s “If I Had Possession Over Judgment Day” was one of the evening’s highlights.

Phoenician Lonna Kelley contributed a uniquely fragile illumination of Rainer’s “Broken Promises”, imbuing it with almost gothic drama, and family friend Ned Gittings performed a captivating version of “The Mountain”, highlighting Rainer’s all but pervasive optimism: “I have seen the mountain/I have found momentum.” John Convertino sat in with Gelb and keyboardist Nick Luca for a memorable reworking of Rainer’s, “The Farm”. Gelb’s youngest children delighted the crowd with their emphatic delivery of the chorus of “Worried Spirits”. “Whoa my worried spirits/Whoa my troubled mind” took on a new and entirely unexpected meaning.

Californian Kris McKay, formerly of the ’80s Austin band Wild Seeds, performed with soulful clarity “One Man’s Crusade”, the song she recorded for the 1997 Rainer tribute The Inner Flame. When the band stumbled a bit on a chord change, an experienced off-stage guitarist confided, “It’s a tough one. I stayed out of it.”

The tribute was to end at 10 p.m., giving way to the club’s traditional Saturday dance night, and as things drew to a close, Gelb noted, “The disco crowd is angry at the gates and the man is here to tune the mirror ball.” There was still time, though, for another memory or two. Gelb led a stage full of musicians through an arrangement of “Wayfaring Stranger” with keyboard fills that combined psychedelic prog-rock and space music. The song, if not the arrangement, is included in the new Rainer CD The Westwood Sessions Volume I, with proceeds going to Rainer’s family.