How does a kid banging drums in the burning 1970s Bronx, who later played guitar behind punk pioneer Richard Hell, become a blues titan whose battered 1966 Stratocaster gets replicated by a guitar manufacturer? This deep dive traces the life of Theodore Joseph Horowitz, born March 31, 1960, known to the world as Popa Chubby. Starting on drums at 13 and moving to guitar after discovering the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, and Cream, he brought a percussive attack to the instrument and a punk ethic to a schedule of more than 200 club dates a year throughout the 1990s.

The episode follows his win in a KLON public radio talent search that landed him an opening slot at the 1992 Long Beach Blues Festival, the founding of his Laughing Bear label in 1994 to release It’s Chubby Time and Gas Money, his Sony OKeh contract and 1995 debut Booty and the Beast produced by the legendary Tom Dowd, and his fearless genre-mixing on How’d a White Boy Get the Blues, The Good, the Bad and the Chubby with its 9/11 song Somebody Let the Devil Out, and the country-tinged Vicious Country with Galea. It covers his massive European following, the 2015 double live album Big Bad and Beautiful, the 2018 Popa Chubby tribute Stratocaster from Eagletone Custom, and the 2025 album I Heart Freddie King featuring Joe Bonamassa, Eric Gales, and Christone Kingfish Ingram.

• Why starting as a drummer gives a guitarist a structural advantage in groove and attack
• How punk and blues share the same DNA of raw, working-class emotional truth
• What Tom Dowd taught him about dynamics and restraint in the studio
• Why mixing hip hop beats into blues was authentic for a musician from the borough where hip hop was born
• What a mass-produced replica of a player’s worn guitar signifies within blues lore