One night of Zinn

“I’m up at 7:30 every morning. I’ve got old man’s disease already. Just happened to me recently.” The red-headed, award-winning blues/soul singer/guitarist Rusty Zinn, now a local resident, is chuckling, explaining by phone from Toledo just one more example of his unusual-for-his-young-age characteristics (he’s 31). Zinn is on the road in a new musical collaboration with the Bay Area-based soul-fixin’ horn band the Dynatones.

“Rick [Estrin, of Little Charlie & the Nightcats] says I am the most decrepit young man he’s ever known,” Zinn confides, like it’s a badge of honor.

Listen to Zinn’s particular brand of deep-blues storytelling, and the quirky comment reveals itself to be quite respectful. He’s a torchbearer, incredibly conscious of his blues elders, men like Jimmy Rogers and Luther Tucker, whose ensemble guitar work in the 1960s made Muddy Waters and James Cotton sound so mesmerizingly good.

“My first mentor/hero was Tucker,” Zinn explains. “I had seen him at Slim’s in San Francisco when I was 17, in 1989. He changed my life. He had this certain right-hand technique, which I call ‘flutter picking.’ It looks like … a butterfly—he’s playing very fast, almost like a mandolin player. Beautiful. He had a way of voicing certain chords that was so elegant.”

Elegant fluttering is not what most teenaged boys naturally gravitate toward; guitar wanking is more like it. But Zinn didn’t have a regular childhood. He grew up in Bonny Doon, an isolated mountainous country crossroads about 30 miles north of Santa Cruz, off picturesque Highway 1. “No grocery store, no gas station, no post office,” he recalls. “Just woods. My folks are country people—hunters and fishers. They wanted us to grow up like they grew up.”

Zinn also grew up lonely, with few friends, save his mom’s 45s of Elvis, Motown, Fats Domino. And, like George Lucas’ visionary film, American Graffiti, Zinn also listened to the radio howl and R&B music of Wolfman Jack. But when his older brother brought home a Muddy Waters record, that sealed Zinn’s fate. “I think these Mexican buddies were the ones that got my brother into blues. So he brought home this record—'Long Distance Call.’ That slide, that was it.” Locked in his bedroom, Zinn lived vicariously in the gruff and sentimental down-home Delta and Chicago haunts of men three times his age. There are a lot of life lessons in those songs, though. Like Willie Dixon said, “Blues is the facts of life.”

At age 17, Zinn got his first guitar and moved shortly thereafter to the East Bay, back to a place he’d never lived but that felt like home. “When I was a kid, we’d drive up to there sometimes. I just felt really warm to it—like I’d been there in a past life or something.” Oakland’s foggy, doomy sounds worked their stuff. His prodigious self-taught guitar talent, gorgeous, plaintive tenor voice and love of gospel, soul and blues were noticed quickly. He’s gigged and recorded with many blues masters, including Rogers, Tucker, Snooky Pryor, James Cotton, Mark Hummel and Fabulous Thunderbirds harp genius Kim Wilson, who in 1996 co-produced Zinn’s auspicious debut, Sittin’ & Waitin’. Zinn’s got three critically lauded albums now, including 2001’s The Chill, which steered clear of too-narrow definitions of blues.

“I’ve always wanted to go in this soul/blues direction from day one!” he enthuses. “Because when I would go to a black club, they wouldn’t just play Muddy … they’d play Tyrone Davis too—the whole package! Some people that come to hear blues nowadays, they are not listening to the stories. They are not moved by this music the way people used to be. It’s all, ‘how many notes can this guy play?’ To me, that has nothing to do with it.

“Blues to me is like a conversation, storytelling,” Zinn concludes. “See, ever since I was a little kid, I always liked the lonesome songs, the weepers. A hopeless romantic—that is me.”