Lester Butler in Sneek: ‘Blues the way it should be’

Lester Butler’s 13 returned to Europe for a tight week of shows in early 1998.

“We returned again on Jan. 27, 1998, and left on Feb. 2, 1998,” guitarist Alex Schultz had previously told NoFightin.com. “We played Antwerp, Nijmegen, Sneek, Den Haag, and Tilburg, in that order.”

The band’s Jan. 30, 1998, performance at Het Bolwerk, Sneek, The Netherlands, was positively reviewed by Jacob Haagsma in the Leeuwarder Courant (presented here with a fresh translation). Two videos remain from that Sneek performance, as well.

Lester Butler plays blues the way it should be

by Jacob Haagsma, Leeuwarder Courant

SNEEK — From Pinkpop to a club hall for a few hundred people. Lester Butler is not the first to take this opposite path. After all, his previous group Red Devils, was once loudly applauded and held dear by greats such as Mick Jagger and Rick Rubin. But now this singer and harmonica player is on his own again.

Though that’s not entirely true, because he is supported by a first-rate band that plays as loosely as it does fiercely. The key player in 13 is guitarist Alex Schultz, a rough-and-tumble guitarist who approaches his guitar with an intensely vicious attitude but, at the same time, never loses sight of the swing. As it should be, actually.

Because yes, 13 plays the blues as it should be, but in a way that is not heard enough. With the bone-chilling intensity that the original Black practitioners displayed for decades, at least, these pale boys from Los Angeles are coming closer. And with the raw energy of today, as if they traveled to Sneek on skateboards instead of in a narrow tour bus.

The rhythm section also pounds hard, with loosely thundering drums and functional bass playing, i.e. bass work that doesn’t count a note too many. Live, the songs are less pointed than on the extremely elementary produced self-titled debut CD. Butler and Schultz often let themselves go into long solos, but they seem to be less about empty displays of muscle than about pure playing pleasure.

Between the two most important poles of the blues world, the literally dying legion of Black veterans and the inflated show of power of the white blues rockers, more idiosyncratic types emerge who are out to show that those eternal 12 bars of the blues still have a future. Lester Butler is one of them. We will have to wait and see whether he will actually help the blues through the next century, but his music certainly does not look out of place as a “soundtrack” for copious beer consumption. And that has traditionally been an important function of the blues.

Beforehand, Leeuwarden band veteran and new father Bob Schaafsma showed that he is far from finished. What the umpteenth incarnation of the Milwaukee Beefcakes brings to the table may perhaps belong to the old-boy network genre, full of rock and blues clichés. But the men deliver it raw and with full conviction, including the snappy American announcements of Bob, who communicates in a rough whiskey voice. Only we would have liked to hear that banjo more often.

Place: The Bolwerk. Sneek.
Event: Concert of American blues band featuring Lester Butler and 13.
Support act: Milwaukee Beefcakes.
Interest: about 300 people.

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The Leeuwarder Courant story was shared with NoFightin.com by our friend Feelgood. He was in attendance at The Bolwerk in Sneek on Jan. 30, 1998, where he picked up this great T-shirt:

“I bought here the 13 T-shirt, Lester was after the show present on the stand with T-shirts and CDs for a chat and a autograph,” Feelgood told us.

RELATED: Shirts, pins, keychains: The rare and collectible Red Devils

The next day, 13 left Sneek on their way to The Hague, Holland, for a Jan. 31, 1998, gig with Popa Chubby. Photos from the two-hour drive show 13 enjoying their last few hours in The Netherlands.

“We had left Sneek, NL and had to go way north to the Nordzee to get back to Amsterdam,” 13 drummer Eddie Clark wrote to NoFightin.com. “That is a massive dike we are on and the North Sea behind us.”

MORE PHOTOS: 13’s day at the North Sea

Note: A version of this post was originally published on Oct. 28, 2012. Top photo of Lester Butler is undated, photographer unknown.

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