‘An Evening of the Blues’ at Bessie Smith Cultural Center

Drew Sterchi

As a 17-year-old in 1967, Drew Sterchi was playing guitar around town in a local band, powering through songs by The Doors, The Kinks and The Zombies when he heard John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers doing “Hideaway” with Eric Clapton. The song turned Sterchi’s universe upside down.

“I thought, wow, Eric Clapton really wrote a great song there; I think I’ll learn that,” he recalls. “Then I found out later Freddie King did it and then found out it wasn’t really his song either.”

Clapton and Mayall were Sterchi’s introduction to the blues. Like a lot of people, he quickly learned that no matter how you come to the music, there are paths that lead you back to other sources, paths that intersect, some that run parallel to each other and others that loop around in circles like a gyroscope. Just when you think you’ve reached the outer edge, it sends you back to the middle and then out to another edge.

But, at the time, Sterchi didn’t know all that. He just knew he’d found the music he wanted to play. Getting the other guys in Brother John’s Love Colony and later Armageddon to buy into switching over from the edgy new rock they were playing to classic blues was another matter, however.