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Guitarist helps make `El Paso' blue Photo by Steve Johnson Michael "Hawkeye" Herman plays the blues in the bed of an old pickup on the stage of the Black Swan Theatre in Ashland. Herman, a touring blues musician for 30 years, composed theme music for the play "El Paso Blue," and plays on stage during each performance, adding a musical element to the production. See it Who : Michael "Hawkeye" Herman, blues guitarist What : "El Paso Blue," now playing at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland Where : The Black Swan Theatre When : Opened Feb. 28, runs through June 27 Tickets : Call 482-4331 Stage music keeps time for festival play By BILL VARBLE On a darkened stage at the beginning of Octavio Solis' "El Paso Blue," a lone guitarist walks in front of the actors, picking out a theme for each. The musician, bluesman Michael "Hawkeye" Herman, spends the play onstage on a stool in the back of an old pickup truck, adding an almost cinematic musical fabric to the play. An actor sings. A song underscores the action. The guitar cues the actors. If all this didn't work it would surely sink the play, but the buzz around "El Paso," an intense drama about personal and cultural conflicts in the drylands of West Texas, is that it's the standout among the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's early offerings this season. "El Paso Blue" is the story of Alejandro, who's done time in the Las Tuna Penitentiary, and his friend, Duane, who are tracking down Alejandro's wife, Sylvie. She's fallen in love with Alejandro's father, Jefe (slang for dad, or chief) while she stayed with him awaiting Alejandro's release. The friends are helped in their quest by the streetwise China. The play is a tragedy that sparkles with hard-won humor and rocks with street rhythms and raspy roadhouse blues. Herman, a friend of Solis, played in earlier productions of the play, which has had runs in San Francisco, San Diego, Seattle, Chicago and Washington, D.C. "This is the best production of it I've seen," he says. Solis approached him about writing music for the play about five years ago in San Francisco. "He's a really fine poet," Herman says. "He handed me the script. He wrote the lyrics. He didn't say much." Herman got a sense of the music the play needed by reading the script. Solis felt he nailed six of the play's seven numbers first-try. The one song that's been rewritten had to do with changes in the play. The original compositions range from funky blues to Mexican corridos, or ballads, to a Tex-Mex rocker in the vein of "La Bamba." Nan Trout of Ashland, a frequent theater-goer who saw the play, describes the songs as "kind of honky-tonk, lorn and lost, soul kind of music." "The music itself has a narrative thread," she says. "His songs are the beat that move the story from vignette to vignette. The music is the structure." Herman plays six-string and 12-string guitars and a variety of percussion instruments, flutes and rattles. He says spending half a year in Ashland is a welcome respite from a bluesman's life of constant touring. Herman, 54, picked up the "Hawkeye" moniker in the blues clubs of Oakland and Berkeley more than 20 years ago. His current CD, ``Blues Alive!" (Topaz), is available at the Tudor Guild, Loveletters and Out of the Blue. The "Hawkeye" tag refers to his native state of Iowa, which he left in the 1960s for San Francisco and the East Bay. "To learn the blues, it was either there or Chicago, and I'd seen Chicago," he says. He grew up in Rock Island, Ill. In the Bay area, he sought out and learned at the feet of blues icons such as Brownie McGhee, Lightnin' Hopkins and Furry Lewis. Last year year the Blues Foundation of Memphis, Tenn., awarded Herman its "Keeping the Blue Alive" award for blues education. He's taken the blues into schools for some 18 years and will talk blues at the drop of a hat. "It's an American art form and should be taught to kids," he says. Herman hasn't played locally yet outside the festival, but allows as how he might do a gig or two. Several musicians have called. "I want this play to get into its routine first," he says. It seems to be doing so. "El Paso" is about cultural dislocation and Oedipal themes in a surreal landscape of contradictions and people trying to carve out a place. Herman says it's a daring choice for the festival. "I think it shocked a few people at first," he says. "But young people love it. They know the language is real." The play is full of both adult language and Spanish terms like "vato" (dude), "frontera" (border) and "el queso grande" (the big cheese). Solis has said the Spanish changes the play, like chili in food. Sometimes the characters mix English and Spanish like Herman mixes blues and Mex and country. He says making the music is challenging and different from performing in concert. Although the music is scripted, it changes subtly. "The actors are in the process of expressing the music of the language," he says. "I have the freedom to accompany that and encourage them to go further. They have the same power to affect the music. It's a living, breathing thing." Like the blues. Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA