Curtis Salgado is the great enabler. Hang out with him for a short
while, you're liable to become famous. Salgado himself, though, despite
his immense powers as a soul singer, usually watches from the shadows.

"It's very hard to get noticed these days, especially as a soul
singer," Salgado said in an interview this week from a tour stop in the
R&B hub of Lincoln, Neb. "The only way to do it is to get out there and
bust your butt."

Which is what Salgado has been doing for three decades. His butt is
cold busted. His former bandmates, like Robert Cray, have gone on to
great glory. John Belushi modeled his Blues Brothers character after
Salgado. He even toured with Santana a few years ago. Meanwhile,
Salgado's been in a van rolling from town to town, bar to bar, slamming
down patty melts and croaking out some of the most rockin', exhilarating
soul music America can boast.

Of course, it's that hard living that makes his music authentic, that
and his classic influences. Salgado is old-school, brother. He sings in
a suit, he doesn't pull his punches, and his songs crackle like the
first appearance of the Terminator in the 20th century -- electric,
naked, and they reach in and yank your heart out before you know what
hit you. He's no show-off; he's a shaman. But he's no spring chicken.

"I just believe in myself, that's how I keep going. I think we've got
something that's hot, that's high-level. So far, when people see us,
they say, `(Expletive), I can't believe you guys aren't bigger.' But
it's not a musical world out there right now. Everything's so Tiger
Beat. It's processed, assembly-line, stamped-out stuff that all sounds
exactly the same. I want to hear someone who sings a melody from A to Z
instead of all this curly-Q crap all the way through it," Salgado said.

Salgado has some choice words about what flies under the banner of
rhythm and blues these days, but he's not bitter, just confused.
Somewhere in the last several years, R&B became a contest for
technicians instead of an outlet for heartbreak and catharsis. Salgado
can sing about pain and joy because he's felt both deeply. You hear him
sing "I hang my head and cry" at the opening of his original blues
ballad "I Sleep With the TV On" (from his new CD, "Soul Activated") you
believe he's read that Dear John letter and feels so lonely he can only
get to bed with the TV on.

"I want to hear someone that's believable, and I want to be that
person, too," he said. "Mariah Carey -- I do not believe she's hurting.
But I listen to Aretha Franklin sing `Do Right Woman, Do Right Man' at
age 21 and you know she can feel it. I know a lot of these people today
can sing great, but they're playing like `See what I can do?' instead of
`This is how I feel.' "

Salgado remains a resident of his native Oregon, where he grew up in
the burgeoning Northwest blues scene in the early '70s. Shortly into the
tenure of his second band, the Nighthawks, Salgado ran into a kid named
Robert Cray, who had hitchhiked to Eugene, Ore., from Tacoma, Wash. Cray
saw Salgado's band, Salgado saw Cray's band, and in a few weeks they
were living together.

"Robert couldn't get arrested up around Seattle, so he headed south, he
and Richard Cousins. They found themselves a couple of girlfriends and
decided to stay," Salgado recalled. "We matched perfectly at the time,
and the Nighthawks dissolved. I kind of thought Robert and I would be
the salt-and-pepper Sam and Dave."

Salgado remembers recording the first Robert Cray Band record, "Who's
Been Talking," in a studio for Tomato Records.

"Everything was literally first take," he said. "It was our first time
in the studio, and I've got all these things in my head about how I'm
going to record things and what overdubs to do in order to get it
perfect. So we played the tune through once, and the engineer goes, `OK,
next song.' We all looked at each other. `Like, you mean move on?' He
said, `Yeah, that sounded fine, fellas.' Now I listen to it and they
were right. It's good."

Salgado's early days with Cray notwithstanding, his biggest claim to
fame involves very little actual work. The late comedian John Belushi
caught Salgado's shows while filming "Animal House" in Eugene in 1977,
and he was starstruck. A couple of years later, Belushi and partner Dan
Aykroyd created the Blues Brothers on "Saturday Night Live" and
eventually in a hit movie, and Belushi's bit was modeled largely after
Salgado's performances.

"Someone came up to me at a show one night and said, `John Belushi
wants to meet you.' OK, fine, I didn't know who that was, had never seen
the show, and I think that's really why we hit it off so well. I mean,
I'm a musician; I'm not watching TV on Saturday nights. I'm working. ...
I realized while we were talking that Cray was in this movie he was
doing (the Knights behind Otis Day are Cray on bass and the rest of his
bandmates), so we kept talking. He says Ray Charles is going to be on
his show, and I asked him if he knew that Ray played the hell out of the
alto sax. I mean, I just started telling him all this history, and he
just absorbed it. The next day I'm at his house bringing him a bunch of
records, then the next weekend people are saying, `Did you see "Saturday
Night Live"? Ray Charles played the alto sax for the first time in 15
years!" And sure enough, Belushi had asked him about it and gotten him
to play."

A friendship struck up between Salgado and Belushi, and Belushi -- a
sponge of other people's styles and mannerisms -- learned Salgado's
soulful moves, not to mention his record collection. Belushi even got up
one night and performed with the Nighthawks.

"We were having dinner at his house there one night, and he says, `Dan
and I are going to do a skit called the Blues Brothers.' Then he wanted
to jam `Johnny B. Goode' or `Jailhouse Rock' with the band. I didn't
want to do that. `Johnny B. Goode' is like `Louis Louis.' I didn't want
to be seen doing it. So I turned him onto `Hey Bartender' by Floyd
Dixon. He got up there to do that one night, and of course the place is
packed with that `Animal House' gang, and everybody just went nuts."

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Thomas Conner, World entertainment writer, can be reached at 581-8473 or via e-mail at thomas.conner@tulsaworld.com.