Eddie Van Halen drove past a club on Figueroa Street on a Thursday night in 1979 and saw one car in the parking lot. The marquee said, “Willie Dodd.” He had heard that name from his father. He pulled over. He went inside. He was the only person in the room. October 1979, Los Angeles, California.
The Burgundy Room on South Figueroa Street, a blues club that has been open since 1961. On the marquee, one name, Willie Dodd. A Thursday night, one car in the lot. The bartender is wiping down the bar. The stage is lit. The man on the stage is playing anyway. Here’s the story. Willie Dodd is 63 years old.
He’s been playing blues guitar since 1934 when he was 18 years old and living in a two-room house outside Clarksdale, Mississippi, and a man named Robert passed through the county and played a house party at the Simmons place on a Saturday night. And Willie stood in the doorway and listened and understood in the specific way that some people understand some things at 18 that this was the only thing he wanted to do for the rest of his life.
He taught himself from that night forward. He worked the Delta juke joints through the late ’30s, playing for tips and meals and the occasional dollar bill folded into his shirt pocket by a man who had heard something he wanted to acknowledge. He worked through weather and through seasons, through the years when the juke joints were the only room where a black man in the Delta could be the most important present.
He moved to Memphis in 1942, where he found work in the clubs on Beale Street and played beside musicians who’d been working professionally since before he was born, and who taught him by proximity and by example what it meant to play every night regardless of who was listening. He moved to Chicago in 1947, following the current of the Great Migration North, and found the blues scene on the South Side already transformed by electricity and amplification and the specific ambitions of men who had come from the same Delta he had come from and had decided that the music they brought with them deserved bigger rooms and louder volume. He recorded four singles for a small Chicago label in 1952. One of them, a slow blues called Long Road Home, was played on WVON enough times that Willie could walk into certain barber shops on the South Side and hear it on the radio without having put it on. It was the closest thing to famous he had ever been and he measured it
accurately, not as success, but as evidence that what he was making was reaching people he would never meet, which was its own form of completion. He moved to Los Angeles in 1959, following the migration west, and found work playing the clubs on Central Avenue and later Figueroa Street. He had a regular Thursday night at the Burgundy Room since 1963, 16 years without missing a Thursday.
The owner, a man named Curtis Webb, kept the night for him out of loyalty and affection and the specific kind of respect that accumulates between a venue and a musician over 16 years of showing up. The crowds had thinned since the early ’70s. The blues audience in Los Angeles had aged and contracted.
The younger crowds went to the rock clubs on the Strip or the disco rooms in Hollywood. The Burgundy Room on a Thursday night had gone from 40 people to 20 to 10 to on this particular Thursday in October 1979, no one. No one except Curtis behind the bar. Willie Dixon had arrived at 7:30 as he always did.
He had set up his own equipment, a small Fender amplifier and a battered Gibson semi-hollow that he had been playing since 1961 and that had been repaired so many times the repair work had become part of the instrument. He had done his sound check alone. He had eaten a sandwich at the bar that Curtis had made for him without being asked.
He had taken the stage at 8:00. He played to an empty room. Not with the energy of someone performing for an empty room, with the energy of someone performing for a room that happens to be empty, which is a different thing entirely. Willie Dodd had been playing music for 45 years. He had played to rooms with 500 people and rooms with five.
He had played outdoor festivals in the summer heat and corner bars in the winter cold and everything in between. He had learned over those 45 years that the music did not change based on who was listening. The room might be empty. The music was not. He played Long Road Home first as he always did because it was the song that had gotten him the Thursday night in 1963.
And because some loyalties are expressed through the order of songs rather than through words. Curtis wiped the bar. He had learned in 16 years of Willie Dodd Thursdays that looking at an empty room while a man played into it was a form of cruelty even if unintentional. He kept his eyes on the bar and his hands on the rag and let the music fill the room the way it always had whether anyone was there to receive it or not.
At 8:20, the door opened. A man came in from the street. He was 24 years old, lean and dark-haired, wearing jeans and a plain jacket. He stood inside the door for a moment while his eyes adjusted to the light. He looked at the stage. He looked at the empty tables. He looked at Willie Dodd playing to the room. He went to the bar.
“A beer,” he said. Curtis poured it. He set it on the bar. The young man put money down and picked up the glass and turned toward the stage and stood there. He stood there for the rest of the first set, 40 minutes. He did not sit down. He stood at the bar with his beer and listened to Willie Dodd play with the specific quality of attention that Curtis had learned to recognize over 16 years.
Not the polite attention of someone being respectful, but the active attention of someone who is receiving information and processing it. The young man’s head moved slightly with the phrasing, the involuntary response of someone who hears music structurally rather than decoratively. When Willie finished the first set and stepped off the stage, he walked to the bar for water.
Curtis poured it without being asked. Willie looked at the young man. The young man held out his hand. “Willie,” he said. “My name’s Eddie. My father used to play your Long Road Home record. He played it in the house when I was a kid. He said you were the best he’d ever heard.” Willie looked at him.
He had been told things like this before by people who meant them and by people who said them because they thought it was what you said to an old bluesman in an empty room. He was good at telling the difference. He looked at this young man for a long moment. “What does your father play?” Willie said.
“Clarinet? Piano? Saxophone?” He came from Holland. He heard American blues on the radio in the ’40s and learned everything he could. Willie nodded once. A Dutch clarinet player learning American blues from the radio in the ’40s. He could picture it exactly. He had met men like that, the ones who came to the music from the outside and were sometimes more faithful to it than the people who grew up inside it because they had chosen it rather than inherited it.
“You play?” Willie said. “Guitar,” Eddie said. Willie looked at his hands. A musician looks at another musician’s hands the way a carpenter looks at another carpenter’s hands for information, for evidence of what those hands have done and for how long. Willie Dodd looked at Eddie Van Halen’s hands and saw what was there.
“Come back for the second set,” Willie said. “Bring your guitar.” Eddie looked at him. “I don’t have it with me.” “There’s one in the back,” Curtis said from behind the bar. “House guitar. You can use it. Drop your state in the comments. I want to see how far this story goes.” The second set of the evening began at 9:15. Willie Dodd took the stage.
Eddie Van Halen stood to his right with a battered house guitar plugged into a spare amplifier that Curtis had rolled out from the back room. They had not discussed what they were going to play. There was no set list, no key agreed upon, no structure established. Willie had simply nodded and stepped to the microphone and begun to play, and Eddie had listened for four bars to find the key and the feel, and had come in on the fifth bar.
What happened in the Burgundy Room on South Figueroa Street between 9:15 and 11:00 on a Thursday night in October 1979 was heard by three people, Willie Dodd, Eddie Van Halen, and Curtis Webb, who set down his bar rag at 9:16 and did not pick it up again until the set was over. They played for 1 hour and 45 minutes without stopping.
Willie played things he had not played in years, passages he had developed in the Chicago clubs in the early 50s, progressions that his regular Thursday sets had not called for because they required someone responding, someone who could hear where he was going before he got there and be ready at the destination.
Eddie responded. He had learned to play from records and from his father’s ear and from thousands of hours alone in a room working out the internal logic of music by feel rather than by instruction. 45 years of Willie Dodd’s vocabulary arrived in him through the house guitar like a language he had known the grammar of without having the specific words, and he found the words quickly, the way some people find languages quickly by listening for the structure beneath the surface.
Willie went places he had not gone in a long time. The interaction between the two guitars produced something that neither of them had produced alone, not a collision of styles, but a conversation between two people who had arrived at music through completely different paths and found in the Burgundy Room at 9:15 on a Thursday night that the paths led to the same understanding.
At 11:00, he finished the set. He stepped off the stage. He went to the bar and drank the water Curtis had already poured. He looked at Eddie. “That’s your father’s ear,” Willie said, “in your hands. He had good ears, your father.” Eddie set the house guitar carefully against the bar. He looked at Willie for a moment.
“Will you be here next Thursday?” Eddie said. Willie looked at Curtis. Curtis looked at the bar. He looked at the empty room. He looked at Willie. “I’ll be here,” Willie said. Eddie was there the following Thursday. He brought his own guitar, not the house guitar, but his own modified instrument, the one that was becoming known in the industry for the specific sound it produced. He sat in for the second set.
He was there the Thursday after that. He came 11 Thursdays in a row through November and into December, through cold nights when Figueroa Street was quiet and the Burgundy Room was warm with a specific warmth of a room where music is being made. He came sometimes with other musicians from the circuit he was running, players who heard there was something happening on a Thursday night and came to see for themselves. He came sometimes alone.
He always came. The word moved through the community of working musicians in Los Angeles, the way word moves when something worth hearing is happening in a place that most people have stopped looking. Not through advertising or press, but through one musician telling another that there was a Thursday night on Figueroa that was worth the drive even in December.
That Willie Dodd was playing things he hadn’t played in years. That there was a young guitarist sitting in who was something different from what the circuit usually produced. That the room was small and the music was large and that combination didn’t happen often enough to ignore when it did. By the sixth Thursday, there were 20 people in the Burgundy Room.
By the ninth, 40. By the 11th, Curtis had to put chairs in the back hallway and leave the front door open so the people on the sidewalk could hear. ; [snorts] ; Willie Dodd played the Burgundy Room on Thursday nights for four more years after that October evening in 1979. He retired from performing in 1983 at 67 when his left hand began to lose the fine coordination that bending notes required.
A gradual thing, not sudden, the kind of change that a musician notices long before anyone else does in the small imprecisions that accumulate until they can no longer be compensated for. He played his last Thursday night knowing it was his last Thursday night, which is a particular kind of grace that not everyone is given. He gave his final performance on a Thursday night in June of 1983.
The room held 90 people, the most it had ever held. Chairs pressed together, people standing at the walls, the door open to the sidewalk where another 15 or 20 stood in the warm June night listening through the screen. He played for two hours. He played Long Road Home last, which was the first time in 20 years he had not played it first.
Curtis understood why. Some things you save for the end when you know it is the end. Willie Dodd died in 1988 at 72 in Los Angeles. He left behind four singles from 1952, 60 years of playing, 16 years of Thursday nights, and a Polaroid photograph taken in October 1979 by a bartender who had the presence of mind to reach for his camera at 11:15 on a night when one car in the parking lot turned out to be enough.
Curtis Webb closed the Burgundy Room in 1991. Before closing, he gave two items to the Los Angeles Blues Archive on South Central Avenue. The first is the house guitar, the battered instrument that sat in the back room for years and was played that night by a 24-year-old in a plain jacket who had come in from the street because he had seen one car in the parking lot.
The second is a photograph taken by Curtis on his Polaroid camera at 11:15 on that Thursday night in October 1979. It shows Willie Dodd, 63 years old, and Eddie Van Halen, 24 years old, standing at the bar with water glasses. Neither man is looking at the camera. They are looking at each other.
Willie is saying something. Eddie is listening. The archive placard beside the case reads, “Donated by Curtis Webb in memory of Willie Dodd, 1916 to 1988, who played 45 years and never missed a Thursday in a night when one car in the parking lot was enough.”
