RODD BLAND AND THE MEMBERS ONLY BAND

The contemporary blues world is taking notice of Rodd Bland in a big way.

His six-song EP Live on Beale Street: Tribute to Bobby “Blue” Bland on the Nola Blue label won a 2022 Blues Music Award for Best Emerging Artist Album, an honor he wasn’t anticipating when attending the gala ceremonies in his native Memphis. “Complete, utter shock!” says Rodd. “I never expected that I would win Best Emerging Artist album for the EP, and I was really happy for it.

“When it happened, we had just come offstage from performing. I never experienced being pulled in multiple directions at an awards show, and they’re making the announcements and I hear my name for the nomination and everything. I’m like, all right, cool. ‘And the winner is…,’ and then I heard my name. We’re all backstage, and it didn’t register for a couple of seconds,” he says. “It was a good feeling to be acknowledged, and kind of welcomed into the club.”

Rodd had to share his triumph with a special lady. “The first person I was looking for was my mom,” he says. “I finally got away from the backstage, and outside where the concessions were, I found my mom sitting there: ‘Hey, I’ve got something for you!’” Naturally, Rodd flashed back to his illustrious father, the legendary late blues vocalist Bobby “Blue” Bland, and all the musical lessons he learned from him. “It was just all of the emotions flooding, thoughts about my old man,” he says. “I went and sat at his statue for a minute with the award.”

As if that wasn’t enough positive reinforcement for his efforts, Rodd picked up another prestigious honor that same year when Living Blues magazine handed him its annual award for Most Outstanding Musician (Drums). “Again, something that I wasn’t expecting,” admits Rodd. “Just to be featured in their issue about drummers to begin with was great for me, because it’s something that I didn’t see on the horizon for me.”

It’s obviously no exaggeration to say Rodd was born into the blues. Instead of singing the music the way his dad did, he positions himself behind a drum kit, supplying rock-solid grooves for so many different Memphis bands, including Brimstone Jones, Will Tucker, Ashton Riker and the Memphis Royals, and the Blues Players Club, that it’s a challenge just to keep track of them all.

Live on Beale Street: Tribute to Bobby “Blue” Bland was laid down live in 2019 at B.B. King’s Blues Club on Beale Street, utilizing a very special group of musicians that Rodd leads, the Members Only Band. The aggregation was named after Bobby’s 1985 hit. “My full criteria for the musicians is that in some way, shape, or fashion, you had to have played with my dad,” explains Rodd. He called on keyboardist Chris Stephenson, guitarist Harold Smith, and bassist Jackie Clark to join him in the rhythm section at the concert. The tight three-piece horn section consisted of trumpeters Marc Franklin and Scott Thompson and tenor saxist Kirk Smothers.

Rodd invited three talented singers to wrap their pipes around a program of lesser-known gems from Bland’s massive songbook. Organist Stephenson handled the vocals on the swaggering opener “Up And Down World,” from Bobby’s 1973 set His California Album, and an insistent “Sittin’ On A Poor Man’s Throne,” a highlight of Bobby’s ’77 set Reflections in Blue.  Ashton Riker stepped up to the microphone for a steamy redo of “St. James Infirmary,” a 1961 staple of Bland’s Duke Records catalog. Jerome Chism dug into the sleek “I Wouldn’t Treat A Dog (The Way You Treat Me)” (one of the hits on Bobby’s ’74 album Dreamer), the luxuriant blues “Soon As The Weather Breaks” from Bland’s 1979 set I Feel Good, I Feel Fine, and the funk-driven Malaco-era anthem “Get Your Money Where You Spend Your Time.”

The elder Bland didn’t force his son into the blues business. “He didn’t push drums or push music on me,” says Rodd. “I just naturally gravitated towards it.” And he began at an incredibly young age. “I started doing shows with him when I was five,” he says. Rodd had been at it even before he had an actual kit to practice on, improvising with whatever he found lying around his folks’ residence.

“I started—as he called it, ‘destroying pots and pans’—when I was two-and-a-half years old,” he says. “I used to pull all that stuff out, and I was having a field day. I would set it up as a drum set, and I would disturb my dad, obviously, from his nap that he needed at the time. And then there were times I would take the dining room furniture, the chairs—I would set a chair up for me as my throne, And then I would take a couple other chairs, and in my imagination, that was a couple of toms. The wooden arms were like the ride or crash.

“I had a hell of an imagination back then,” he continues. “It drove him nuts. My dad was very attentive when he wasn’t on the road. Even when he was on the road, he was not inaccessible to or for me. That’s always been the big stigma for being an entertainer’s kid. But I used to get a speech, as he called it: ‘Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey—come on, man! Hey, hey, I’ve got to replace that, you know?’” Rodd also had a crucial ally within the extended family. “My grandmother—Granny, I called her—his mother, always said, ‘Leave him alone! One day, you’re gonna need him!’”

As he got older, the Memphis native assumed his rightful place in his father’s mighty orchestra. “It depends on the way you use the word ‘officially joined.’ I was in automatically,” he explains. “I would do shows with my dad, not as a novelty thing, but whenever I wasn’t in school, I had my drums on the road. I had my uniform.” Rodd was initially cast as half of a two-drummer setup that moved and breathed as one. Great drummers were always integral to Bobby’s roaring outfit, the young timekeeper soaking up the rhythmic innovations of three of the best to ever pilot the band: John “Jab’o” Starks, Harold “Peanie” Portier, and George Weaver.

“The three wise men, as I call them,” says Rodd.

The time eventually came when Bobby’s regular drummer George was nowhere to be found and Rodd had to do the job all by his lonesome. “I really stepped up, I like to say, in ‘96. There was one night where George didn’t make the bus. We were going to Kansas City. We were playing, I think it was called the Starlight Festival. The Count Basie Orchestra was there. My mom was like, ‘What are you gonna do? George is not here! Joe, what y’all gonna do?’”

Band director Joe Hardin had a quick response. “He said, ‘We ain’t gonna do nothing. We’ve got a drummer!’      

“My mom said, ‘Who?’

“And both him and my dad pointed at me. And that was the first time I flew the plane by myself, and drove the band.”

As post-pandemic Beale Street—his principal stomping grounds—comes alive once more with its neon-spattered marquees intact and tourists returning in droves to stroll its historic sidewalks, Rodd Bland is ready to get involved with fresh recording projects with his Members Only Band. “We are in the process of working out the follow-up record,” he reports. “There’s more music coming in the not-too-distant future.”

Dad would be mighty proud. 

Image Credit: James Wessels