FEELING GOOD ABOUT THE BLUES
By FAYE RICE

(FORTUNE Magazine) – Comedy clubs were booming as the curtain lifted on the 1990s. But it's no laughing matter on the club scene anymore. Comedy has crashed, and is being routed by blues clubs and a revival of performance poetry--call it R&B, as in rhyming and blues.

A Saatchi & Saatchi study conducted for Thorn EMI's Capitol Records reports that the number of blues clubs has grown 52% since 1990, to 1,360. Living Blues magazine currently lists 225 blues festivals, up from 72 in 1989, and attendance rises every year. At B.B. King's down-home joints in Memphis and Hollywood, where catfish and cornbread are served up with live jams--the blues guitar king is a partner--revenues are jumping 30% to 40% annually. Several shades paler are the House of Blues clubs, in Boston, Los Angeles, New Orleans, and soon New York. These boast Harvard University as a backer and a cottage industry of spinoffs, including radio and TV shows and a record label.

The blues are literally coming back from the dead: when Sony's remastered and lavishly packaged CD box set by long-gone blues legend Robert Johnson went platinum (more than 500,000 sold so far), every record label headed back to its vaults. Capitol is spending big for yet another blues series, mostly featuring late greats like Son House, that hits stores this month. Says Larry Cohn, producer of Sony's Roots 'N Blues series: "It used to be that a blues disk was a hit that sold 8,000 copies. Now many are selling over 80,000 each."

So who is diggin' on this raw music that typically depicts Jim Crow-era oppression and despair? Why, white male boomers and busters who, "dispirited by their own hard times, prefer the gritty realism of blues" over syrupy pop and angry rap, according to Saatchi.

On the word front, not since the 1950s beat movement have so many bards jumped in the spotlight, now more glaring than ever. For this is the era of poetry slams, slightly perverted contests where poets humbly bare their verse to an irreverent audience and a panel of judges. At New York City's Nuyorican Poets Cafe, where bilingual bards are rated on a scale of one to ten, the rowdy crowd often jeers. Similar contests are being waged at pubs and restaurants in some 50 cities.

"The renewed interest in poetry has been influenced by lyricists and rappers," says John Kulka, senior buyer at Barnes & Noble. Poetry sales at the retail book chain are up 100% in 1995.

- FAYE RICE