In the late 1960s, a doctor's wife drove her teenage son from the Los Angeles suburbs to blues clubs in South Central and dropped him off to play guitar with touring legends. That teenager, Michael Leonard Mann, born in 1954, was so convincing on stage that Buddy Guy and Junior Wells gave him the name Hollywood Fats. This episode explains why a nickname from Chicago masters amounted to a baptism into the blues world, and how a suburban kid earned it through timing and feel that could not be faked.

We follow his 1970s work as a sideman for Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Albert King, Jimmy Witherspoon, J.B. Hutto and James Harman, and his decision to trade that prestige for creative control by forming the Hollywood Fats Band in 1974 with Al Blake, Fred Kaplan, Richard Innes and later Larry Taylor of Canned Heat. The conversation then tracks h ...