Notes to a son

Fathers tend to leave notes of encouragement and hope for their sons when they are going through a tough time. One local father, however, is taking a different spin on this approach and is stringing together musical notes of hope for his 19-year-old son who has a brain tumor.
Kerry Bourgeois, who lives in Andrepont, is the band leader and songwriter of the band Blue Mushroom. He said that everything about the band is dedicated to his son Stephen. “He has part of a brain tumor still in his head, and he has a shunt,” Bourgeois said. “We do this to make him feel special. He usually hangs around before we start because he doesn’t have too many friends. He feels like he’s different because his coordination and his speech are bad.”
“Since the operation he’s back into liking the 60s and 70s music,” Bourgeois continued about his son. “Before that it was hip-hop. It’s like he went backwards. He walked into the house one time and said he wanted me to learn a song called ‘The Letter’ by The Box Tops, so we learned it for him.”
The band’s genesis came around the time that Stephen had his operation on his brain tumor. “I had anxiety and stress at the time,” Bourgeois said. “We started getting together to release the anxiety. That’s how we started, and that’s why I still do this today.”
Bourgeois is no stranger to the music industry. He got out of the business for 10 years when he got custody of his children. He then saved up money for a homemade studio at his house. “I started off with me and David Sylvester,” he said. “We didn’t have a bass player, and finally Danny Guillory came give us a hand. Then after that it was Dean Sylvester and Sonny Chapman who came along.”
The other band members all have musical backgrounds as well. For Guillory, his days were spent playing in the house band for different Swamp Pop musicians such as Tommy McClain, Johnny Allen, and Elwood Charles. “I gave up music because I’d been playing since I was 15-years-old,” Guillory said, “and I’ll be 59 in October. I quit for a while. Kerry had trouble with his son and with the tumor and never got any relief, so I chose to come meet him and to play music. We write and record to give him some peace time. I enjoy it too because it’s fun now.”
Peter Sylvester also has Swamp Pop roots. “I played with Tommy McClain and his band,” he said. “We played somewhere in St. Martinville on New Year’s Eve. It was Johnny Allen and his band and us. At the end of the night, there was a big finale where both bands got up on stage. That was really cool.”
One of the lead singers is Ville Platte’s own Alex “Sonny” Chapman. “My first band was the Our Lady Queen of All Saints Choir with Bill Baquet,” he said. “I sang with them and enjoyed all that, but I never played in a Rock and Roll band until I met these guys. It inspired me to finally learn to play guitar.”
“I met them on Facebook when I was running for city judge,” Chapman continued. “I knew David’s wife and a couple of the other ones. I kept seeing this crazy guy named Kerry Bourgeois pop up on Facebook, and we started doing some chatting. He said to come meet him at his studio. I came over here, and we sat down and talked. He put on a song that he wrote called “I Believe in You.” He let me sing, and Danny said that I sounded like Peter Noone of Herman’s Hermits.”
Aside from using Facebook to find new talent, the band primarily uses the social medium to distribute its content. The content consists of mainly cover songs from the 1960s and 70s. Other songs are original content written by Bourgeois. “The stuff he writes is as good as anything I’ve listened to on the radio,” Chapman said. “I’ve been listening to the radio since I’m 10-years-old, and the stuff he writes is as good as that. This guy is a talented song writer, and these guys are talented musicians. It’s fun to get together with these band members to make music.”
Bourgeois cannot afford the time to record his music in a studio in Nashville or Los Angeles because he spends most of his time seeing about his son, and the band does not play at any nightclubs. It is for those reasons he and his band mates perform online on Facebook from his studio.
The band has a Facebook page called Blue Mushroom and currently has over 1,550 members. As Guillory said, “One thing I want to accomplish is to have more members on the page where they can hear the songs and maybe later can pick the songs that we record.”
The band can also be found on Internet radio, Google, YouTube, and other online music sites. “We get recognized on the Internet because Kerry sends our music all over the place,” Dean said. “A London newspaper even did an article on us.”
Every time someone likes one of Blue Mushroom’s songs on the Internet, the site records where the person is from. With that Bourgeois can see that there are people from Canada, Israel, Japan, Australia, and other countries who like the band’s music.
Bourgeois admitted that he wants somebody in the music industry to listen to the band’s music and to pick up its songs, but the main reason to have the band together goes back to his son Stephen. “He wants us to make it big so we can buy him a mansion,” Bourgeous said, “and he wants a Lamborghini. We call him Mr. Drysdale. If he passes out , he’s going to wake up if you put some money under his nose. We’re too old for all that, so that’s why we want somebody to pick up our songs.”
The camaraderie is also important for the band. “We have fun when we get together,” Bourgeois said. “We cook a supper, and nobody argues or anything like that. It reminds me of the old days with no stress.”
Peter Sylvester agreed. “It’s always a good evening when we get together because we are able to just enjoy playing music,” concluded Sylvester.