Through the shadows:

Stacy Block uses blindness to his advantage as he takes the stage in Newcastle
Jen Kocher
NLJ Correspondent
 
Since losing his vision nearly three decades ago, Stacy Block has had to relearn many of the basics of his everyday life. 
Music is not one of them. 
And even though he can no longer drive himself to gigs and has to tap his way through the maze of speakers and microphones with the tip of his orange cane on stage, once the guitar is in his hands, Block’s instinct and passion take over.
“I never look down at my guitar,” he said, as he and band members set up to play at the Fountain Inn Bar last Friday. “I can just feel it.”
It’s been this way his entire life, he said, even back in the days when he could see before losing his vision in 1992 to a degenerative eye disease, retinitis pigmentosa. Block was only 23 when he began to see shadows and developed terrible night vision after being in a car accident. Though the disease is genetic, his doctor told him, the blow to his head no doubt sped up his eventual blindness, which Block described as happening almost overnight.
Before his sight problems, Block had gone to Black Hills State University at age 17 to study psychology and sociology, and later, received his master’s degree in counseling, which led to his eventual career. During this time – and before – music was a constant in his life and he played whenever he could. After retiring from a career in counseling in 1999, he began playing full-time.
Block’s long music career began at around age 17, when he first played in a band with his brothers and musician father, Nicky Block, who also bought his first bass guitar when he was in high school. Block remembers falling asleep on a pile of coats in his living room as his dad played accordion, bass guitar and piano. When his dad started playing with him in the late ’70s, he even teased his hair up into an Afro to join his sons in the disco era.
Block laughed.
“We didn’t play any disco music, but we looked the part,” Block said. “I guess it was just the style at the time.”
Back then, just as now, Block focused on bluegrass, classic rock and country music, following his South Dakota roots. Over the years, Block has written original music and played solo and with a number of bands throughout the Dakotas and Wyoming. Along with winning the 2002 Colgate Country Showdown, the longest running country music talent showcase for undiscovered country music singers across the United States, he’s also opened with legendary greats Mark Wills, Sawyer Brown and The Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band and is a local favorite at many festivals and events. He does a lot of solo shows and also plays with his daughter, singer and guitarist Lindsey Anne. 
Currently, he’s joined forces with Newcastle bassist Tim Lorenz and drummer Nathan Williamson under the Stacy Block Band. Block’s wife, Deb, is a Newcastle native, and the couple lives outside of Edgemont, South Dakota. 
Block had been looking for some local players, and ran into Lorenz and Williamson at the VFW one night. Around two years ago, they assembled the band.
While Block has a long career on stage, Lorenz considers himself a “newbie” who only recently picked up a guitar. Like Block, Lorenz grew up around music with his father, who ran a karaoke business, which Lorenz has since co-opted in his spare time around his full-time job as a mechanic. 
Although he’s picked up a microphone his fair share of the time, being on stage took a bit of time for the 39-year-old to get used to, starting with playing country music. Until then, he’d been more of hard rock guy with a penchant for the Foo Fighters, he said. Now, since he’s started learning how to play the bass guitar, he listens to jazz, blues and country music as he continues to develop his skills.
“I’m pretty obsessive,” Lorenz said. “Once I start to do something, I get really into it.”
Stepping onto center stage took a bit of doing on his part, but Lorenz sees it as just another role. All of his life, he said, he’s impersonated his favorite actors and comics and finds it easy to slip into the role of Johnny Cash or Elvis underneath the lights and in the haze of a fog machine.
“Normally, I’m really shy off stage,” he said, “but on stage, I just get into character. It’s my time to become Mr. Hyde.”’
The best part of being in this band, Lorenz added, is playing alongside talented musicians like Williamson and Block.
“There’s really no one else like him,” he said of Block. “He’s been playing for over 40 years and is in no position to stop.”
Lorenz said he’s been impressed by Block’s talent and ability to play guitar without being able to see, and the way in which he can play just by instinct and feeling.
For Block, this is just what he’s always done, and he doesn’t consider it anything too spectacular. Being blind hasn’t really gotten in his way, musically speaking. 
Block laughed. He can’t read music anyway, he said, and has always just played by ear. Learning a new song takes some doing, however, because he has to repeatedly hit the replay button because he can’t read the lyrics.
And don’t get him started on any of the new, high-fangled equipment and technology. He sticks to the old-school cassettes and recorders because it’s easier for him to feel the buttons. Like everything else, the laid-back Block takes his lack of vision in stride.
“For starters, it was never that good begin with,” he said, laughing in his trademark machine-gun fire, staccato style. “I’ve always been night blind, and have never seen the stars. Heck, I just thought everybody saw this bad.”
Instead, Block finds his way through music and songs where he’s most at home.
 
The Stacy Block Band will return to the Fountain Inn on Dec. 8. For more information and concert dates, check out Stacy Block’s page on Facebook.