heidi and the el cats

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About me:Acoustic blues band based in Delray Beach, Florida

Formed in 1999, Heidi & The El Cats take a mello, stripped-down approach to smooth blues and roots music that has one foot planted firmly in the Missippi Delta. We were honored to have Jason Ricci, harmonica virtuoso play on this CD.

The trio, including Bobby Freeman on keyboards, has gained popularity throughout South Florida performing at blues clubs such as Blue Note, local coffeehouses and at events such as “Summer Nights On The Avenue” in Delray Beach and Citilink’ Battle Of The Bands and the Blues Diva Showcase at Cheers. Heidi & The El Cats played the Backwoods Acoustic stage at the prestigious “Fort Lauderdale International Blues Festival” and, as finalists, earned a slot at the Sound Advice Blues Festival in November 3 times.

Heidi Jacobsen’ (vocalist) influences include Etta James, Bonnie Raitt and Janis Joplin. Her sultry voice brings audiences back for repeat performances of their favorite blues standards such as “Stormy Monday”,"Sweet Home Chicago", "I Just Want To Make Love To You", “Walkin’ Blues”,"Rock Me Baby" and “The Sky Is Crying”. Heidi also reinterprets songs such as “Ode To Billy Joe”, Led Zeppelin’s “California” and the Beatles’ “Come Together”, making them uniquely her own. Her first CD, “Volume” was engineered and produced by Cliff Guest, who co-wrote five of the original songs on the album. Their latest CD features original songs such as Steady Rollin Woman and Mexico which are both written by Cliff Guest.

Cliff Guest, the El Cats’ guitarist and also a drummer, has played music all his life. As the backbone of the band, he lays down rock solid rhythms on acoustic, electric and slide guitar. On any given night it’s not unusual to see Cliff with three or more guitars onstage, his favorite being an old 1936 National Style O guitar, to help achieve an authentic blues sound. His influences include Muddy Waters and Eric Clapton as well as blues master Robert Johnson. Cliff also has been active on the music video side of the music industry. Cliff won MTV's "Make My Video" contest for Madonna's True Blue and landed a job at Geffen Records in LA. While with Warner Brothers/Geffen Records, he worked with artists such as Cher, Guns & Roses, Peter Gabriel and Madonna.

Heidi and Cliff live at the Pineapple Ranch in Delray Beach Florida with their black cat Patty.
Member Since:April 11, 2008
Last Login:June 24, 2008
Location:Delray Beach, FL
Birthday:August 2
Music means to me:Life!
Schools:Parsons School Of Design, New York, New York.
General Interests:Writing Books and lyrics.....
Other Distractions:Love, gambling and television......

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heidi and the el cat...'s Journal

Country Countdown - Cashbox Magazine
Mon 4/14/2008 9:00PM
Hi Heidi, I usually finish all three hours before uploading them. I do have hour 1 finished and uploaded to the server although the scripts and playlists have yet to be generated and uploaded. Go to either the http://www.cashboxmagazine.com/cbradio.htm page or to my radio station downloading site at http://nashvillecountdown.com and from the player, click on "Country Countdown Hour 1". You can skip over to your song....it's about 14 minutes into the first hour right after the first commercial set....the down arrow will permit downloading the entire hour. Thanks for the great music and let me know of any feed back. Since the show is on radio stations around the world, I hope you get some notice. We are on several stations in New Zealand and Australia as well a several throughout Europe and England
Life With Cliff
Fri 4/11/2008 10:52PM
There’s alot of players here tonight at The Back Room, I know their faces but I don’t know all their names. They seem to know my name though, I guess its easy to remember, not too many Heidi’s around. They are always so nice, they come up and say hi before I sing. Some guy showed up wearing a white undershirt and smoking a cigarette. Nice look bro. The place is a funky place. The walls are red, there’s vintage posters of pin-up girls on the walls and there are red light bulbs illuminating the bar. It looks like the devil’s basement.

I asked Cliff what he is doing the rest of his life and he said,”hanging out”. I asked him if he had anything left to accomplish and he said, “Tarpon Quest”. Tarpon Quest is a film Cliff would like to make about a middle aged guy who has a mid-life crisis and tries to solve it by catching the elusive tarpon in the Florida Keys. We tried to write the script together but Cliff wants a real writer to rewrite it. Good luck.

Cliff is talking to the owner of the joint, John. Cliff is giving him the dissertation on amps. How some sound round and warm, tone, etc etc. Amp talk. It goes in one ear and out the other.

Some bluesy song is playing with a big guitar solo in it. Go figure, it’s a blues club, people are talking. Everyone is getting ready for open mic, a Wedneday night tradition around here. Later we’re going to stop by Elwood’s to hear Donny’s band, see whats going on over there. 

Now JP is singing his infamous song, “It’s great to be rich and a doggone shame to be poor”. He plays it every week and the crowd goes nuts. People are dancing and clapping and he solos like a madman. Pablo, another drummer, walks in the door with his drumsticks. The jam is starting to cook now....Next they have a conga player up, jamming with a saxophone player. We’re next on the list, me and Cliff. I’m going to do the songs I always do: Shopping, Rock Me Baby and I Just Wanna Make Love To You. Cliff can’t wait to play his new snare drum. Cliff says the sax player sucks. He says the conga player blows too. Tough crowd man. Pablo is digging the conga player. We played and the first two songs were killer. Then on the third song the horn player played out of tune through the whole song. Some guy in the audience told me after were were finished that I have to practice getting mad at the mic.

Break time. Some groovy song is playing now, “Disco lady”. Shake it up, shake it down, move it in, move it out, disco lady. Shove it in, shove it out..Yeah! What a horn section. Cliff is talking to Chris Pete about our freind getting fired. He is sensitive, lives right on the edge. He played in the drum off at Guitar Center. I love these guys
Diary Of A Gigging Blues Singer
Fri 4/11/2008 10:15PM
I always wanted to sing. From the time I was very young I always enjoyed music and singing. I was always in choir at school. The I decided to pursue it a little more seriously and take singing lessons.

I went to see a man, I don’t remember his name. I must have gotten his name from the yellow pages. He was sort of a chubby, older man and he had alot of cats and very scratched wooden floors. He had a piano and we practiced breathing techniques and sang a song or two. My father came with me. I had a song I wanted to sing. It was “The Rose”.

I remember that he played the piano and I sang the song, very softly and because I was so shy it was painful to sing but I wanted to. He was very supportive and we had a few lessons together.

Then I had another singing teacher, I don’t remember her name either, but I will call her Gloria. She was this weird, horse like looking woman with a very wide jaw. She made me look in the mirror as I sang my songs. Of course, I hated looking in the mirror. I have always hated looking in the mirror. It was like torture for me. I practised breathing. She was very strange and I don’t think she liked me very much. I should have sensed it long before I did.

She asked me one day if I wanted to come and hear some of her students recitals. I said yes. I showed up at the recital hall and there were a bunch of people there, watching this girl sing. She was an angel looking like thing, had long, straight brown hair. She was singing an Italian aria. She was really good. It was nothing like what I could do or even wanted to do. My dream had always been to sing popular music.

So I went back to my lesson and had my last lesson with the teacher. She told me flat out that I couldn’t sing, and should not bother to pursue it ever. She said, I will never be a singer. I was only twelve years old! My heart froze. I was in shock. I left her apartment and rode the subway back home in torrents of tears. Buckets and buckets of tears came down. I went to my friend Anetta’s house and her mother thought I had been raped or something. It was a bad day for me. After that, I did not pursue my singing again for years and years. It took a long time to gain any kind of self-confidence and get the guts to ride that horse again.

Years later, I started working on my own recordings, going to this cheap rehearsal studio I found down in Miami called Sing-A-Song studios. It was this place in the California Club strip mall that had all these Karioke tapes. You took the tapes and went into a padded sound booth and practised singing to the songs. All my old favorites like Abbas “Fernando” and Gloria Gaynors “I will Survive”. Then I sang Cyrstal Gayles “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue” and so many more. I loved singing in there because no one could hear me and I could make my own recordings and they were bad, oh yes, but I had full instrumental backup. Then I did Christmas tapes for friends and stuff like that. Nothing ever came of my efforts, just goofing around.

Then I started dating Clay and I told him I wanted to go to a club and sing Karioke. He said, no way, if you are going to sing, you have to be the artist and sing live to a live instrument. This was something totally new to me, who had always been backed up by tapes.

I said, okay, and we started. We started at the very bottom. And I mean, the VERY bottom of the barrel. I couldn’t sing a note live and Clay played guitar. We started going to real dives like LT’S in West Palm Beach and to every open mike night we could go to. My knees would shake and I was barely able to get through the song without practically bursting into tears. The people we met at the open mike nights were very sympathetic and encouraging. They all had their own opinions as to how I should sing a particular song and what I could do to improve, I was that bad. Complete strangers would come up to me after I finished a song and say, “That was great, but you have to sing it with a little more feeling”. Complete strangers. Clay resented each one that came up to me and made a comment. But I didn’t mind. That’s something about me and people. Strangers come up to me and tell me the weirdest things about my face or my hair or who I look like. I don’t think I look like anybody else on the planet. There couldn’t be another woman out there who is as fucked up looking as me.

Clay is a man of great patience and we stared doing songs like Sheryl Crows, “If It Makes You Happy” and Janis Joplins “Me and Bobby Mc Gee”. I really struggled with the Joplin song and it is still the hardest song I sing, even today, four years later. I always feel like such an imposter when I sing the song, feeling totally inferior to the queen, Janis. Then people clap and come up to me and say, “You sound just like Janis” or “You remind me of Janis” and I am flattered, but not fooled. I listen to her sing really closely and she had such a way of singing, so much expression, so seemingly effortlessly. Thats genius. Oh yeah! Now she could sing. We listened to her do Summertime tonight because Clay was trying to make a point in the studio, and yeah, she was the shit.

Singing continues to be a struggle, always trying to do better and try something new. When I first started, I was so scared of the audience. Clay told me not to sing for them, but just to sing for me. So now I do sing more for me, although I am very aware of the audience out there. Half the time I just close my eyes and listen to the guitar. 

Yeah, stage fright is scary. Looking out at a bunch of new faces is pretty scary. But you get over it and you can always find one friendly smiling face to look at and sing to. We played the Fort Lauderdale Blues Festivals three times already already and that is an intimidating crowd because they are there to hear the music and they are true blue blues hardcore fans.

It was my birthday the first year we found out that we had been chosen to play the festival. We were in the kitchen of our Lighthouse point house and the phone rang. We were in!!!! What a birthday present. We played on the same acoustic stage as John Mooney. Lucky us.


Our band went through all kinds of configurations. It started out as me, Clay and Elliot. Elliot was Elliot Adcock, our 80 year old harp player. We met Elliot up in Lake Worth at The Coffee Gallery, at the Wednesday night jam. Elliot is a character. He has lived in Lake Worth all his life and knows all the changes the town has been through. His wife died, his mother died and he died last year. We always worried about Elliot, because he was old and had cancer. He weighed about 60 pounds and looks so skinny and bony that he might blow away in a warm breeze.

Elliot stared jamming with us and we became regulars at Audrey’s, the coffee shop joint up the street from The Coffee Gallery. Audrey’s was a cool place, with drawings of Stevie Ray Vaughn and Muddy Waters on the walls. Audrey was a huge blues fan and has pics of all her favorite stars. We became the Thursday night band, me on vocals, Clay on guitar and Elliot on harmonica. We sucked. Oh yes, we did. But we kept at it and were there every week and we had lots of regulars that came to see us. One by one, the town of Lake Worth put money in our bucket.

We had Carl, the reclusive writer who only hung out with his mother. His mother would bring me CD’s of singers to listen to. These were good singers, jazz singers, people I couldn’t sound like in a million years. Carl would always leave a fiver in our bucket. I think he had a crush on me for awhile, but he wouldn’t show it, Clay was too jealous.


Then we had Marty, who also hung around our band. Marty is also very reclusive and just wanted to be part of the bands scene and recording sessions. Marty had a studio and we actually recorded there. We jammed on a song called Utopia and brought in some percussion players.

One week we had a marathon week of five gigs in a row. It was getting too much for old Elliot, even though he loved to play. Plus, me and Elliot were squabbling. He would play over my singing and I would get mad. It became like a battle. We had to find another harp player. The clincher was when Clay wanted to call our band Heidi & The El Cats and Elliot wanted it to be called Dejablue. We had to get rid of Elliot because he had cancer and was too tired from all his chemotherapy to keep with us.

We found Chris R. Chris is a very nice guy. He has problems with his stomach after painting cars from twenty five years. His insides are torn apart. Chris is a very mellow player. He started playing gigs with us. He lasted until his long vacation with his girlfriend, Candy. They went away for a month and we had to replace him. Poor Chris.

Then Mark N. came along. Mark is a much more robust player than Chris and he really picked out band up. Mark is an avid harmonic fan and keeps us updated on all the harp sites around the country. He has a thick sound, he tries to do alot of inventive things on the sounds and like Clay says, he has ideas. He has musical ideas.

Jason R. is the harmonica player we have on our CD’s. Jason R. is a virtuoso. We met Jason when he was jamming around with everyone else on Lake Avenue. Now he's a big star in Nashville
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