One of the most swaggering tracks on Van Halen’s 1978 debut was not written in a California studio. It was composed 25 years earlier by John Charles Brim, a self-taught guitarist born April 10, 1922 in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, who learned by ear from scratchy shellac records of Big Bill Broonzy and Tampa Red. This deep dive follows Brim and his wife Grace, a drummer and harmonica player, from Indianapolis in 1941 to Chicago in 1947, where the Great Migration forced acoustic country blues to plug in and become the electric Chicago sound.

The episode explains why Chess Records recorded Ice Cream Man on May 4, 1953 and shelved it until 1968, how Brim survived by running a dry cleaning business and a record store, and how the late-1960s blues revival led Eddie Van Halen to a song that generated stadium-level royalties and later covers by David Lee Roth, Martin Sexton, and the Swedish band FJK. Instead of retiring, Brim used the money to open a Chicago nightclub, recorded for the German Wolf label in 1989, played the 1991 Chicago Blues Festival backed by a band coincidentally called the Ice Cream Men, and released The Ice Cream Man on Tone-Cool in 1994, earning a W.C. Handy Award nomination for Best Traditional Blues Album. He toured through Belgium and San Francisco, released Jake’s Blues in 2000, and died October 1, 2003 in Gary, Indiana at 81.

• How learning guitar from noisy, pitch-warbling phonograph records forged a deep feel for the blues
• Why amplification changed the physics of the guitar with overdrive and sustain
• How material scarcity and hyper-competition at Chess left great records in the vault
• Why the Ice Cream Men band name came from Otis Big Smokey Smothers’ actual ice cream truck
• What buying a nightclub meant for a musician who once begged for studio time