New blues act brings old-school cool

Say, have you heard of that hot new blues act, GA-20? No? That’s okay, neither had I until a day or so ago.

That’s okay, too, because while I love music, and I try to write about it honestly and sincerely, I am not one of those people who can rattle off the stats of 6,000 different bands up to and including their special, limited edition releases and which ones have been arrested for criminally impersonating the clergy.

My old friend Ray Dowdell (RIP) of Avatar Records could do that, but the man was a musical savant.

Truth to tell, one of the great rewards of doing this for The Pulse is being exposed to a constant influx of bands and music I haven’t heard. At slightly more than a year old, GA-20 is new to me. And unless you’re passionately in tune with a particular genre of music, odds are they are new to you as well.

I’ll tell you who has heard of them, though: Charlie Musselwhite and Luther Dickinson. If you have any love of the blues, you just sat up straight, because those are some big hitters. Both have enough appreciation for GA-20 to have appeared on their latest single, “Naggin’ on My Mind”.

We’ll come back to them shortly.

The point in name-dropping is to establish that this young band has hot enough chops, soul, passion, and gravitas to immediately earn the admiration and respect of some of the biggest names in the industry.

Pat Faherty and Matthew Stubbs are the friends who, through their mutual love of classic blues, R&B and early rock and roll, decided to get together and write their own page in music’s history book. Both are highly experienced guitar players whose dues were paid long before the formation of GA-20.

Faherty has spent more than a decade playing guitar for the aforementioned Charlie Musselwhite, a genuine old-school blues harmonica legend who is said to be the inspiration for Dan Aykroyd’s “Elwood Blues” persona. Stubbs founded and continues to lead the instrumental psychedelic band, The Antiguas.

Their devotion to and intense appreciation for the heavy electric blues of a bygone era led them to observe that there is a lack of this style in the current era of music, an error they mean to rectify through their own contributions.

With the addition of Chris Anzalone on drums, the newly formed trio of guitar and percussion set out to make a name for themselves and in short order, they have.

Nominally forming in fall of 2017, the band landed a deal with Karma Chief Records a year later. Three months later (now) their first single is out and is pure vintage blues gold.

The raw energy of Faherty, Stubbs, and Anzalone is enough to transport you to a Deep South juke joint or the AM radio of an ancient Ford pick-up truck on a dusty Mississippi road.

The special guest star addition of Musselwhite’s liquid fire blues harp and Dickinson’s (North Mississippi Allstars, Southern Soul Assembly, Black Crowes) screaming, crying guitar yanks you right out of the juke joint and sets you down in the heart of early 20th century Chicago.

The single is available now, and for a taste you can find it on YouTube or—along with several other tracks—on GA-20’s webpage. Invest three minutes of your time and there’s no doubt you’ll come away with the realization that this band you hadn’t heard of is poised to be the biggest thing to hit the blues scene in a generation.

If you’re a fan of vintage blues material, you’re already a fan GA-20 whether you know it or not. If the blues is new to you, you’ll scarcely find a better introduction to the granddaddy of rock and roll (and virtually everything musically that has followed since).