Bernard Seigal
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Bernard Seigal (December 30, 1957 - April 2, 2006) was a San Diego musician, music critic and writer who performed and often wrote under the name Buddy Blue. He was a founding member of The Beat Farmers a Southern Californian rock band that blended country roots music and rock 'n' roll. As a music critic, he was mostly known for his straight-forward cut-to-the-chase style of critique that often used colorful language and original metaphors to either lambaste or praise musicians whom Seigal liked or disliked.
[edit] Biography
Born in Syracuse, New York, Seigal moved to San Diego in 1973 and played in several unspectacular bands until forming the Rockin' Roulettes in 1981. In 1979 he joined the Grossmont College Newspaper and was later promoted to editor.
In 1983, Seigal quit the Roulettes and was asked to join the Beat Farmers with Jerry Raney and Country Dick Montana taking Rolle Love with him. The Beat Farmers would sign with Rhino records and enjoyed a great deal of regional and national success performing songs such as Happy Boy, Riverside and Gun Sale at the Church.
Seigal left the Beat Farmers in 1986 and started a new band, The Jacks. A year later, he was hired as a music critic for the San Diego Reader. He would later be fired from the paper when his editors suggested he write bad reviews on local San Diego musicians whom Seigal felt didn't deserve the negative press.
By 1990, Seigal's gruff, irreverent style of writing led him to gigs writing for newspapers across Southern California, including The San Diego Union-Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, The OC Weekly and The San Jose Mercury News.
Recording as Buddy Blue, Seigal began making music again in 1991. Releasing Guttersnipes and Zealots, which included vocals from other Southern California rockers Dave Alvin and Mojo Nixon and featured the songs, Duke of J Street, Someone You Knew, and another version of Gun Sale at the Church. The records, Dive Bar Casanovas, Greasy Jazz, Dipsomania, Pretend It's Okay (which included a guest spot from Chris Gaffney), and Sordid Lives followed. All were recorded as either by Buddy Blue or the Buddy Blue Band.
Throughout his music career Seigal performed jump blues, a form of jazzy blues focused on uptempo rhythms and loud, boisterous vocals.
Seigal's impact on the San Diego music scene was diverse. As a critic, he promoted those whom he thought were worthy and viciously degraded musicians who he perceived as faking it or contrived. As a musician, he proliferated different styles of jazz and blues and periods in his bands often gave performers a crash course in tight songs and sets and exposed them to a myriad of musical styles and canvasses. He was very opinionated and could be abrasive to some but nobody could doubt his musical ability as a guitarist and song writer.
In his writing, he preferred originality over reverence and though his musical idols showed-through in his playing, as a writer, he was more comparable to comic book writers such as Harvey Pekar or R. Crumb than other rock journalists.
In March of 2002, The Union-Tribune issued a memo to its staff stating that one of Seigal's articles that had been run in the paper used words unsuitable for the paper, among them "old fart," "crapola," and "pooh-butts."
Shortly before his death, Seigal reunited with the Jerry Raney and Rolle Love of the Beat Farmers (Country Dick Montana died onstage of a heart attack in 1995) playing shows as The Farmers. He has previously played in Raney-Blue (circa 1996) but was left when the band became Powerthud.
Seigal died of a heart attack on April 2, 2006.
