Show-Biz Extremes: Last time here we told you about my meeting the Rolling Stones and getting caught in their mosh pit, which I wrote about when I was rock critic for the Montreal morning daily. 

But about that same time, I also got to interview several notables whose music heavily influenced the Stones: Elderly African-American bluesmen. 

Among them: Howlin’ Wolf, B.B. King, Lightnin’ Hopkins, and John Lee Hooker. I got a rare, welcome chance to speak with them by doing interviews for the British music weekly  Melody Maker, which was big on coverage of American blues. These old guys were my musical heroes.

I met most of these influential bluesmen at a club in Montreal, the Esquire Show Bar. 

Black musicians loved to play in Montreal. 

Why? Norm Silver, the Esquire’s owner, explained it to this Yank: “Down in the U.S., the cultural divide is black and white. Here in Quebec and Canada, it’s French and English.” This made Montreal appealing for Black musicians.

I enjoyed interviewing these guys because they weren’t self-entitled, spoiled and pretentious white kids with huge egos, like so many of the Brit rockers I interviewed (Led Zeppelin, Jethro Tull, The Who, King Crimson, Pink Floyd).

One night at the Esquire, I remember watching Howlin’ Wolf as he slowly came onstage — on all fours, keys hanging from his belt as his famed piano player, Pinetop Perkins, plinked away above him.

I interviewed the Wolf twice for the British paper, and he recounted his years plugging away in obscurity on the road. Wolf had just collaborated with his admirers, the Stones, on a celebrated “London Sessions” album.

Wolf was getting big, but he didn’t have a big head. 

Another night, I was one happy, cannabinated and longhaired white boy sitting reverently in a Montreal dressing room with two blues legends, John Lee Hooker and B.B. King. I was almost too awed to speak, a rarity for me. 

I really liked Hooker, who had just become known through FM radio airplay. He invited me to his modest hotel room for an interview. He had his lunch, a ham sandwich, in a paper bag, which he opened and munched on as I interviewed him. Nothing pretentious here at all. 

There was also an unexpected interview when I walked through the greenhouse inside Buckminster Fuller’s famed geodesic dome on the Expo 67 World Fair site.

I heard this beautiful blues piano music playing, and sat down to listen. It turned out to be another legendary blues musician, Roosevelt Sykes, who was quite comfortable with only a few passersby recognizing him. 

Then, a few years later, I was doing a radio talk show in the San Francisco Bay area. I interviewed a guy who’d been called “the blackest white man alive” by Rolling Stone: Johnny “Hand Jive” Otis, the first white bandleader of a touring black band. 

“The blues,” Johnny liked to say, “is good news.” It was, and it is.

Here in PT, of course, one doesn’t meet many African-Americans. A reader, Seth Leighton, once joked, “Know what this town needs? A White People For Diversity rally.” 

On to Hawaii, where I’d landed a nice gig — TV critic for the morning Honolulu daily. Getting paid to watch TV in Hawaii…nice!

I wanted my first column to catch readers’ attention, and so it did, because I went after the 50th State’s biggest star, the preternaturally untalented “Hawaii Five-O” star, Jack Lord. 

I wrote that this was a formula cop show with an ill-talented star. And since the “Five-O” soundstage had just burned down (it was located on a shuttered army base where I’d been a kid), I joked that the Jack Lord School of Acting had also burned, and all the mannequins had been destroyed. 

Lord’s people let me know their star, widely revered in Hawaii, didn’t appreciate that. Lord didn’t handle criticism well — he hadn’t had any in his island kingdom, and so, when I later wrote that his celebrated oil paintings were also mediocre, he called me, incensed.

I told him I knew mediocre art when I saw it, and he hung up on me.

San Francisco comic Steven Pearl crafted a typically lame piece of “Five-O” dialogue that always got laughs: 

Steve McGarrett (Lord): “Danno, get me a list of every car with a New Hampshire license plate that's ever been on this Island.” 

Danno (James MacArthur): “I’ll get right on it, Chief!” 

Aloha, oy.

(Mainland-based writer Bill Mann is also da kine Newsmann9@gmail.com).