Sleepy-17

This film came out two years before Clifford Antone died. He was an expansive entrepreneur who ran a famous blues club in Austin for many years. He was a die-hard blues fan who treated aging blues musicians better than family. For me it was fabulous to see performance and interview clips with favorite musicians who have passed on, like Luther Tucker and Albert Collins. The center of the film was a throw-away moment with Pinetop Perkins and Clifford sitting at a piano: Pinetop slowly starts playing the soft, sweet chords of "How Long" with such artistry that it brought tears to my eyes as I sat before the TV, and then I noticed that Clifford, on film, was hiding his eyes with his hand because he was crying too. On the minus side were too-short performance excerpts when you wanted to hear so much more, and not enough of the inside of the club and what it was like to be a patron there. But to counter that was an abundance of coverage of older musicians, without excessive gushing over the Stevie Ray Vaughn legend. A must-see for blues fans.