Carnival of Soul

The St. Louis blues band has called it quits, likely until spring.

Since the pandemic, the band’s Jeremy Segel-Moss and Kari Liston have “watched this corona-coaster thing, where you have a gig, and then the club closes or the gig is canceled. And we’ve heard people get to gigs after being told it was outside and then being told it’s inside.”

Segel-Moss says Bottoms Up Blues Gang made the decision as a safety precaution. “I really feel like live music is super important now in dealing with the world we’re living in,” he says. “But for the sake of our own health and safety and for others, we decided to just get off the rollercoaster for the rest of the year.”

The band had been getting lots of inquiries about performing lately, especially Segel-Moss and Liston, the core of the band who perform as a duo. But for their own sanity, taking a leave was best.

“On a basic level, we’re both pretty concerned with the mental and physical health of ourselves and others,” he says.

When Bottoms Up Blues Gang needs a larger configuration, it often employs older musicians who sometimes may have preexisting medical conditions.

One of those musicians is harmonica player Eric McSpadden, who is currently ailing. Segel-Moss wants to be able to take him to and from the hospital without worrying about spreading germs picked up at a gig.

“For harmonica players, it’s really iffy,” Segel-Moss says, pointing to the hand-face contact. The air intake and output of wind instruments can be problematic.

“We looked at safety using an invisible scale — is this worth it against that?” he says. “It’s really a hard time for everyone, and it’s so much to carry every day. We just didn’t want to add to that.”

The band members had been feeling a bit burned out lately, “playing for so long often for so little,” Segel-Moss says, which made the decision a bit easier.

“We’ve been doing this for 20 years, maybe 200 gigs a year,” he says. “We were on a treadmill. This gave us a mandatory break to breathe a little. Our fans aren’t going anywhere.”

He’s also taking a cue from one of his mentors, the late Bennie Smith, who he says once took a 10-year break from performing.

“We know we have a lifetime of music ahead of us, and we don’t have to be in a hurry,” Segel-Moss says. “It’s not a race to the top. It we have to take six months or eight months, we will to make sure everyone is safe and healthy. Then we’ll come back with new and fresh ideas. We needed to give ourselves room to breathe.”

Bottoms Up Blues Gang last performed just before the pandemic started, and the band hasn’t given any virtual shows.

“I think it’s a great idea for a lot of musicians, even for us, but the gathering of musicians was worrisome,” Segel-Moss says. “We leaned on the side of safety.”

Instead, he supported other artists who went virtual. He’s the president of the St. Louis Blues Society, which is using its Mission Fund COVID-19 Emergency Relief to help local blues musicians.

The society’s annual compilation album is canceled this year, he says. He doesn’t want to assemble musicians in a recording studio.

He also programs the Big Muddy Blues Festival, which was canceled this year, as is this fall’s Baby Blues Showcase, which was started by the Bottoms Up Blues Gang.

As his main source of income, Segel-Moss is focusing on his ceramics. He’s also writing music, and he’s listening to more music than he has in years. He signed up for Spotify, something he never thought he’d do, and is seeing “there’s all this music out there.”

He’s spending more time with the new music he’s creating, rather than taking it straight to the stage.

“Before, if I had a new song, I brought it to the stage immediately,” he says. “There’s not as much of a hurry to make the album, to get into the studio, to perform it live. It’s about the art form and not about the performances. It’s a special time for artists to turn inward and look at who we are and the songs we’re writing.”