ION INDIE MAGAZINE February 2015, Volume 9 | Page 53

about blues guitar music, is that it works whether there are 50 or 50,000 people there. I don’t think you could say the same
for like a KISS tribute band, where you’d have to have enough room on stage to blow stuff up or something like that.
ION: You’ve had the chance to play with some of the all-time greats during tour career. Any that really stand out as memorable?
Ellis: We’ll be at a festival or opening for somebody, and they’ll invite me back up on the stage. I recently did this with The
Allman Brothers in possibly their final lineup--that was a gas. Some of the old blues cats, those are the ones that I never
thought I’d get the chance to sit in with. Otis Rush kept me up there for what seemed like a whole set, same with Albert Collins.
Also, Buddy Guy, Son Seals; anybody working in the blues field, pretty much. What an honor that is, because as a teenage
music fan I would have never imagined that would have happened. That’s been the big payoff, to hold onto those kinds of
feelings.
ION: I forgot to ask about your first band, The Heartfixers. What kind of scene was Atlanta for blues music back when you
began? We know it now for spawning bands like The Black Crowes and Georgia Satellites, but what was your experience in
that scene?
Ellis: It was a great scene--people were going out a lot. The drinking age was 18, and there weren’t a lot of police roadblocks,
for lack of a better way to say it. People were out a lot, where now people want to sit and mess around on the computer--myself
included. The Heartfixers was basically an Atlanta band that would make forays into the Northeast, even overseas, but we
played a lot of times, you know, 25 shows in the Atlanta area. There were clubs you could play a week at a time. The other
nights of the week, like on a Monday, we’d try out and play a punk rock club like The 688, or a country bar that had a
mechanical bull in it left over from “Urban Cowboy”. So, of course, I should point out that we didn’t make any money, but I
don’t think that today, even in a big city like Atlanta, anyone could pull that off right now.
ION: What have you enjoys most about making music for all these years, Tinsley?
Ellis: It’s always an exciting time when I put a new album out, and this is pretty much the first interview I’ve done for this album,
so I don’t really have a shtick for it, but it’s a very exciting time where I’m at putting out a new record. Now, I get to go do a
bunch of gigs. It’s really hard to say. I could tell you almost my favorite part of the creative process is when I’m writing or
recording new music myself in my studio, because at that point of writing songs, I haven’t played them for anybody yet; I’m
falling in love with them--that’s the best part of the creative process. I’m just looking forward to getting over the hump of
putting this album out to where I can get to the point of getting in the studio again and creating some more music.