Ron Thompson Ron Thompson lives the blues. He scrabbles for low-rent gigs all over the western states, as he has for his entire adult life, bringing his intense, highly wrought personal style to modest crowds at roadhouses and bars at a bend in the road. “That’s what I’ve been doing for the past forty years,” he says. “If you’ve been doing something that long, you better know how to do it.” Over the course of his career, while Thompson has collected more than his share of famous musician admirers, he has only recorded sporadically and remains largely unknown to the music-listening public. Despite the peer recognition, Thompson has essentially labored in relative obscurity for the duration of his career. But he doesn’t care because Ron Thompson is the blues. “I’m having fun,” he says, “just doing what I want to do … like I always do anyway.” But producer Jimmy Pugh had different ideas. Freshly retired from a quarter-century serving in the Robert Cray Band, keyboardist Pugh started his Little Village Foundation, a non-profit record label to expose important unsung talents like Thompson. He has watched Thompson since the two started playing together in North Beach clubs thirty years ago with drummer Kenney Dale Johnson, before he hooked up with Chris Isaak. “You ask any musician who should have become a big deal who didn’t and they all say Ron Thompson,” says Pugh. Kenney Dale Johnson recalls his fellow Texan Stevie Ray Vaughan’s first visit to the San Francisco. “The only guy I want to hear in California is Ron Thompson,” he told Johnson. “Son of Boogie Woogie” captures the raw, unvarnished Thompson on vocals, slide guitar, harmonica and even occasional piano. The album was recorded essentially live with Pugh on organ and drummer D’Mar, who spent twenty-five years with Little Richard, at Greaseland Studios in San Jose, a funky hole-in-the-wall in a suburban row house that Pugh says engineer Christopher “Kid” Andersen can make sound like the Chess Studios in 1958. The material mixes fresh Thompson originals with nuggets from Cleveland Crochet (“Sugar Bee”) or Juke Boy Bonner, a Texas one-man band who Thompson used to follow closely. Thompson grew up white and poor in the East Oakland ghetto. He first emerged on the local blues scene playing with a B.B. King imitator who called himself Little Joe Blue, and played with John Lee Hooker for a few years, but soon formed his own band, the Resistors, and became a hot attraction around the local clubs. These were the relatively high-flying years for Thompson. He landed a record deal and released his debut album in 1983. He won Bammies awards at the annual regional music show, but he soon drifted into the fog of down-market gigs and the life of a modern-day bluesman, without any of the romance or glory. He has lived with more broken promises than an old maid. Mick Fleetwood, who calls Thompson his favorite guitarist, once said he was going to open a Hollywood nightclub just so Thompson could have a place to play. But all these years later, Thompson is still living the blues. He is facing medical issues and the grim reality of growing old and grinding it out on the road night after night. Producer Pugh has coaxed out of Thompson an exposed-nerve performance, electrifying and maniacal – mayhem on the guitar, utterly massive sound, blood on the floor passion. Real deal. “I want to play,” Thompson says. “I’m thoroughly successful at what I want to do. I want to be real about it. I don’t mean to sound facetious, but I am truly lucky to be able to play this kind of music.” -- Joel Selvin Pop Music Critic, San Francisco Chronicle