Bruce Maier

When I was fourteen years old I had so much music around me but it was in our little four-piece band where one day an event changed my life during rehearsal. My buddy Clyde, who owned the first  Fender guitar and amp I'd ever seen came in with a stack of LP's from " the big city " and told us we just had to listen to every one of them. They were all Blues records and the first one was John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers - a live album called " John Mayall Plays John Mayall " on Decca records.

We went through BB and Albert King, Howlin' Wolf and many more with excitement as we had never heard anything like this and certainly not on local A.M. radio station.  Now I can't tell you we became a great Blues band at the age of fourteen but I must admit this new music  had a profound effect on every genre of music I would try to learn and, eventually compose.

Over the many decades of  my evolution I could be found in flashy Country show bands to hard rock trios and four-piece acts as well as a long stint in a folk and Bluegrass group in California in the early seventies. I started the Bruce Maier Band in 1978 playing clubs six nights a week and doing usually four and a half sets of a mix of my originals and selected covers. We even sneaked a few classic Blues numbers in  like " Brother Bill " by Cactus and Hoochi Coochi Man, a giant record from Muddy Waters and you know - the dancers loved it!

Life took me on the road playing music and leaving my loved ones for weeks at a time and then one day I landed in  Las Vegas Nevada for five years, returning to my home, the Pacific Northwest in 2007. Within a week I found a Blues jam session being hosted by a really nice and talented Blues guy, JB Bentley.  They let me get up to play and I tried real hard but couldn't find the right " groove " but I loved what they were doing!
 

So I went home with the plan to come back next Wednesday night to sit in again and take a better shot at it. I remembered being that 14 year old kid who just heard the Blues for the first time and I said to myself I wasn't going to be a poser. I would make a serious study of the greatest Blues music of all time, which I did.  I came back week after week and started honing my skills and developing the feel for this amazing music that I could share with others. 

Since 2007 I have played and hosted literally hundreds of Blues jams and shows and I owe my respects to the great artists who have helped shaped me.  I am not a great Blues guy; I am a serious practitioner.  A multi-genre artist and songwriter who has actually made it to two International Blues Challenge regionals to compete, and one semi-final in Seattle Washington with the Sweetbay Blues Band of Olympia. 
 

I have been a member of the Washington Blues Society and am presently with the South Sound Blues Association of which I have also served on their board for a year .
No matter what I do, what song I sing or write, The Blues will always inhabit a major part of my Artistic Soul.  That's why the Blues!
bjm..2025

PS - the handsome guy on my left was my very talented brother Bobby, who  left this world all too soon as his music career was just exploding in 1969