Walter Trout Interview

by Brian D. Holland.

The blues shouldn’t be a museum; the music ought to constantly expand and be alive.
--Walter Trout

Walter Trout has been playing passionate music for nearly thirty-five years now. Once a member of John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers and Canned Heat, the New Jersey born and bred blues-rock guitarist also played alongside legends such as Lowell Fulsom, John Lee Hooker, Big Mama Thornton, and Hammond B3 wizard Deacon Jones. His guitar playing is known for its fiery passion and raw power. Though his style is connected to the blues, he’s known to expand and penetrate the boundaries that enclose the genre categorically. However, don’t let that fool you; Walter’s knowledge and love of the blues is extensive. He merely does his own thing with it, as a desire to rock it up exists in his heart as well.

With his trusted 73 Strat in hand, Trout has been putting out solo records for close to seventeen years. His 1990 debut release, Life In The Jungle, was a well-balanced assortment of live and studio material, displaying to blues-rock listeners everywhere that he was comfortable in both atmospheres. Also, the new kid on the block immediately got to demonstrate his explosive and entertaining live shows to those unaware.

Here it is 2006, a dozen or so releases later, and one can easily see that Walter Trout has come Full Circle. That title more than suits his latest CD, as he joins forces not only with his own band, The Radicals, but he sings and plays scorching guitar alongside friends and associates, and some of the most influential musicians in blues and blues-rock history. One of those friends is the legendary John Mayall, a musician and bandleader Walter has adored since he was a young boy learning to play the guitar. As he states in the interview, not only was it a dream come true to become a member of The Bluesbreakers and play alongside the man he idolized, but to have him come and play on his own record was truly Full Circle. Also on the CD are Joe Bonamassa, Guitar Shorty, Jeff Healy, Eric Sardinas, Coco Montoya, and many others.

Both instrumentally and vocally, Walter Trout stirs the soul with a sound that’s wholesome, honest, and passionate. Below is my interview with the amazing guitarist and blues-rock icon.

Let me start by congratulating you on the success of your most recent CD, ‘Full Circle’.

Walter Trout: Thank you, Brian.

How’s the tour going?

WT: It’s going good. It’s long. We work really hard. If you look at the schedule, you’ll see it’s a hard working band I have. I keep them on their toes. I’m finding sometimes, though, as I get older, that the schedule I follow takes a little more out of me.

Are you playing much of the new album on the tour? I’m curious because each song is a collaboration of sorts.

WT: Yeah. We’re doing about four or five tunes off of it. The one problem I’ve had is that my band was on the album for only two tunes, you know. I finished mixing the album at 5am on the day I left for a tour of Europe. I left the studio at 5 and got home at 6. I then packed a suitcase and left for Europe two hours later. I’ve never played a lot of those songs with the band, and we haven’t had a chance to really rehearse them. So, we’ve kind of been learning them while on tour, and when we play in a little club with a small crowd we may listen to one before we go on and then try it. That way, if we mess it up it doesn’t matter as much. [Laughing] We’re not doing the whole album, though. But if we’re in a club, and a great player is in the crowd, I’d love to have them come up and play, or sit in. That’s part of the whole spirit of it, you know.

Well, you certainly have a huge repertoire of great material to call upon everywhere you go anyway. Let’s talk about your influences. It was Michael Bloomfield who got you going at first?

WT: Well, let me tell you. I’m 55 years old. Most people near or at my age will tell you that they remember exactly where they were the moment President John F. Kennedy was killed. I remember where I was for that, and I also remember exactly where I was the first time I heard Mike Bloomfield. That’s the kind of affect he had on me. Hearing him play for the first time was as intense an experience for me as hearing about Kennedy or 9/11. I mean, it was profound. I had to sit down, and go, "Holy shit! What is that?" There are certain cuts of his that still have the same affect when I listen to them today. It blows my mind with the beauty, the passion, the fire and technique. It’s an incredible blending of all of that.

In being an ex-Bluesbreaker, is it like being part of an alumni of something special, like graduating from the best of schools with a wealth of knowledge?

WT: You know, I learned a lot from being in John’s (Mayall) band about music. To me John is one of the great band leaders, and that’s a whole other talent. Duke Ellington is known as a bandleader, Count Basie as well. John Mayall is in that same school. I observed his techniques at leading a band. He’s very subtle, but if you watched him you could figure out certain things.

First of all, he was very good at getting a good band together, people who compliment each other. That’s a big part of it. Also, he was very good at keeping the atmosphere on the road lighthearted and fun. That’s a big part of it, too, because when you’re out there doing nine or ten weeks of shows, with maybe one or two days off the whole time, it can get tense. People get stressed and tired, and they run out of steam. It’s up to the band leader to keep a sense of humor, to keep it light, and to say, "Hey man, we’re all in this together. Let’s go out there and kick some ass." He was awesome at that.

I watched him, and I try to do that now with my own band. It’s kind of fun. Some of it is subtle technique and part of it is psychological, in keeping people in a good mood with a positive frame of mind to go out to give their best every night. I had all those Bluesbreaker albums with Clapton, Peter Green, and Mick Taylor when I was growing up. I loved those records, and I knew them well. When I first got with John I kind of felt pressured. I felt like I should have been trying to play like Eric Clapton when we did those songs. One day John came to me and said, "Walter, I hear what you’re trying to do, but I didn’t hire you to be Eric Clapton or Mick Taylor. Go out there and play that song like Walter Trout would play it." He freed me. I felt like I was stepping into an incredible tradition, one I wanted to respect and be part of. But he gave me the freedom to explore on my own and be myself. I loved him for that.

Though a few albums were released before 1998's ‘Walter Trout’, do you consider that one to be your actual debut release?

WT: In the States it was my debut. I did an album earlier that came out in America on Silvertone Records, which was John and Buddy Guy’s label. It was called Telling Stories. That came out in, I don’t know, maybe ’93. But it was a disaster. I didn’t get along with them and they didn’t get along with me. It was something that was better left forgotten. Even though the album had some really good songs and some really good playing on it, the mix on it was horrendous.

Well, ‘Deep Trout’ is a good CD for fans who want to hear some of the previous material released on Provogue anyway.

WT: Yeah, it is, because I did three or four albums for Provogue that I thought were good records. I went back, picked what I thought was the best off of those records, and put them on Deep Trout, mainly because those records aren’t available in the United States. So for the U.S., Deep Trout was actually a new record. A lot of those songs are deserving of a good listen in the good ol’ USA. That was actually the thought behind it.

I read somewhere that some blues purists have accused you of playing too many notes when you play lead. Do some blues purists have too many hang-ups?

WT: I think some of the blues purists are borderline racists. If I play a lot of notes they say, "Well, that’s not real." But if Buddy Guy plays a lot of notes, they go, "Oh, well, that’s the real thing." To be truthful, Buddy Guy will play me under the table with a lot of notes. There’s nobody around in blues music who’s any faster or wilder than Buddy Guy. Listen to a song called "Man Of Many Words". He did that on an album called Buddy Guy and Jr. Wells Play The Blues. Listen to the guitar solo on that, as far as being over the top, wild, not worried about tradition, and just getting’ off and letting it all go.

I can understand where the blues purists are coming from, but you just brought it from a different angle. You can stretch the roots of music all you want as far as I’m concerned and if it sounds good then it sounds good.

WT: One thing that always cracks me up about the purists is that they say they want the music to be honest and to be genuine. You want to know something? I can try as hard as I want, but I’m never going to be an old black guy from Mississippi. There’s no way I’m going to be that. I’m a white guy from New Jersey and my music is as honest and genuine as I can be. I can guarantee you that I never played one note that I didn’t mean.

I told this to my kids last night. A twelve-year-old kid came in and his dad told me that the boy could really shred. In front of the kid he said, "But I tell him he’s got to slow down if he wants to play the blues." I then said to the kid, "You know what? I don’t want to come between you and your dad, but no, you don’t have to slow down." If you can play ten thousand notes, and if you mean every one of them, and every one of them comes from your heart, and it’s honest, who is anybody to say that that’s not valid? What about John Coltrane? Talk about a million notes. That whole statement blows my mind; I find it absurd. I’m 55 and I’m not going to change the way I play to please some critic or some purist. I’ve been out here for thirty-five years, on a stage, almost every night of my life. And if someone wants to tell me what I’m doing isn’t valid or genuine, they can go fuck themselves.

I love it. It’s good ol’ "Fred"! [Laughing] (Referring to a previous quote from Walter: "People ask me if they should call my music blues or rock. I tell them they can call it ‘Fred’ if they must have a label.")

WT: There you go. [Laughing] And you can quote me on that as much as you want. You can write that verbatim; I don’t care. That’s how I feel.

I think it’s great, because I’m not only a big blues fan, but I’m a big rock fan as well. And I love hearing some good, loud, blues-rock, played with a lot of style, passion, and power. I guess I’m a blues-rock purist sometimes.

WT: Yeah, me too, man. Call me a music purist. I just want it to be real. I want it to have heart. If it has heart then it’s fine with me. Just as long as it has heart and soul, and the person means it. Get off of the categories and the labels.

When I was a kid I got to hang out with Duke Ellington. I’m going to give you a quote of Mr. Ellington’s. He hated categories. He hated labels, and he fought against them all his life. You’ll have to think about it ... Now, let me see if I can get this right. He said, "Categories exist to give the work of the artistic cripple an attractive gloss." In other words, some guy gets up and plays Albert King licks all night. He becomes a snob and acts like he’s the real deal because he plays Albert King licks, when, in reality, that’s all he’s capable of playing. He gets this attitude, you know, and he’s just an artistic cripple with an attractive gloss. You’ve got to think about that; it’s an incredible quote.

Let’s talk about ‘Full Circle - Walter Trout And Friends’. Like I said earlier, based on your own humorous description, it’s a lot of good ‘Fred’. [Laughing] Supposedly it was a dream come true for you to play with many of the guest musicians on the CD. Was it intimidating?

WT: You know what, man? It was incredibly fun and incredibly loose. There wasn’t a lot of pressure. I told my wife, well, I’ve got John Mayall coming in today, or Joe Bonamassa. She’d ask me what we’d be playing, and I’d say, "Well, I don’t know. We’ll think of something." And with every one of these guys, they’d come in and set up; we’d look at each other and get the sounds, and then we’d say, "Well, what are we going to play?" I’d say, "Let’s just figure something out." It was all very spontaneous and a lot of fun.

There were a couple of tunes that I wrote in advance for certain people. When I went up to Toronto to record with Jeff Healy he told me he was really busy but that he also really wanted to do this. He said he’d get the studio together, the engineer, and bring his band. But he said he’d only have about three hours. So I wrote a song. I sat down and listened to a bunch of his music, kind of immersed myself in it, and then tried to write a song that would fit his style. I went there with that song already written. I did the same thing for Guitar Shorty.

Everything else was done spontaneously in the studio. For the Mayall cut "She Takes More Than She Gives", I was leaving to go up there when my wife said, "Walter, when you play a slow blues, you can make the guitar sing. Why don’t you do a slow blues with John where you make the guitar sing?" That’s what she said. I was driving to the studio when I thought, "Okay, we’ll do a minor blues in C and I’ll come up with some lyrics." By the time I arrived to the studio I had the song. I showed it to John and we did it. Then John and I sat down and wrote another song together ("Highway Song"). I had a great time, and felt that this, in many ways, was one of the most creative CDs I ever did. It was a true group effort.

Did playing with John Mayall and Coco Montoya feel like the Bluesbreakers all over again?

WT: You know, it was fun. They were there on different days, but it was really a blast. I’ll have to say that there was one or two times on the Mayall cut, when we were doing the slow blues, that brought back some memories of when I was a little kid. I’d be sitting in my room listening to this guy’s records. Not only did I spend five years in his band, but here he is now, playing on my CD. That’s full circle.

Is that one of the defining points for ‘Full Circle’?

WT: Full Circle had a myriad of meanings for me. It meant getting back to my roots and playing the blues. I think it was a bluesier record than anything I’ve done. It meant getting back and playing with a lot of the people I’ve played with over the years, guys I haven’t seen in a long time. It also meant getting young players on there like Joe Bonamassa, the future of all this. It meant playing spontaneously and jamming. When you start off with all of this stuff you’re fifteen-years-old and jamming in a garage. That’s what we did.

The band was originally The Walter Trout Band and then it became The Free Radicals. Why is that?

WT: The Walter Trout Band sounded kind of generic. I wanted the band to have an identity of their own. You know, John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, Albert Collins and the Icebreakers; even B.B. King’s band back in the Sixties was known as Sonny and the Romantics. It was Sonny Freeman, the drummer. Someone would say, "Please welcome Sonny and the Romantics." They’d come out and play and then B.B would come out. So, it became The Free Radicals, which I thought would be kind of funny because they were like poison in your blood, which we’ve all been through in this band. But then we got sued by a garage band in Texas, called ‘The Free Radicals’, who had patented the name. They don’t really do gigs or CDs, but they copyrighted the name and sued me. So we had to become The Radicals. I actually wrote a song about it, called "No Longer Free", which I haven’t recorded yet. [Both laughing] Now we’re just radicals and no longer free.

In reference to poison in the blood, if you don’t mind talking about it, supposedly you’re clean and sober these days.

WT: Eighteen years, yes.

Was that a difficult transition?

WT: It was difficult in the beginning. Of course, it is for anybody, because you have to go through that period of self-examination. You have to look at yourself in the mirror, and go, I don’t like what I see; I don’t like who I’ve become. You have to make a commitment to change. It’s not hard anymore. It has been so long, so it no longer crosses my mind to go out and get loaded. We joke about it in the band. We’ll be driving up to a gig and think, this’d be an interesting gig if we pulled over here and got a bottle Jack Daniels and passed it around. We’d then go in completely obliterated and play like shit. We all laugh.

I was a heroin addict for three years. I quit that in '77. I was on that from '74 through '77, and I was a Los Angeles homeless street junkie. I’ve been through some shit in my life and that’s what I put into my music.

Isn’t it sad that intoxication and drug addiction is often seen as a prerequisite to living the life of a professional jazz, blues, or rock musician?

WT: You know, I think it is sad, and I think it’s a myth that you have to be loaded in order to play the blues well. I think it’s sad that a lot of people grow up thinking that’s a cool part of it. Certain guys out there, people like Joe Bonamassa ... first off, when I was Joe’s age I was living on the street shooting heroin. He is completely focused on his music, his guitar, and on his career. I think to myself, if I’d have had that focus when I was his age I may have gone a lot further with it. I love seeing young people who are so together because I had to go down a completely different road. But you know what? I have no regrets because I learned from it. Now I can talk to my kids and talk from experience.

I remember reading something, I think it was about Ronnie Earl and Stevie Ray Vaughan, that they had to go through a transition when getting used to playing sober. It’s no secret that early in his career Stevie Ray was often high when he played. As we mentioned, playing high was considered parallel with artistic aptitude at one time.

WT: I’ll tell you, I was in the middle of a tour with Mayall when I quit. The first night I went onstage and played sober, every chord I played ripped the heart from my chest. I had been used to playing numb. When I went out and played clean I could feel the emotion from every note. It was such an intense, emotional experience that just standing behind John and playing chords made me weep like a baby. I had a very unpleasant and violent childhood. I had a lot of deep emotions about it; I kept them down for years because I didn’t want to feel it. So when I stopped playing high, and then went out and played, it was pure expression. To me, that’s the way it still is.

Supposedly, you have a strong relationship with Carlos Santana.

WT: Well, actually, I haven’t seen him since our meeting in Germany, in '87. But we do have mutual friends. My producer, Jim Gaines, whom I just did some records with, also produces Santana records. We extend greetings back and forth. We’ve just not run into each other over the years. But he was the catalyst of my sobering up. That’s the truth.

You’re now a family man. Does life on the road get hard?

WT: Before I had kids I was content to stay on tour. I really like touring. I find it adventurous; there’s always something going on. Every gig had the surprise of being the best gig you’ve ever done or even the worst. It’s never boring out here. But since I had kids, it’s a thing of trying to balance the life of a touring musician and a family man. My kids and my wife are on their way out to meet me now. They’ll be touring a bit with me; we do this every summer. My kids actually open the shows for me; they have their own band.

Wow, that’s interesting, and such a cool thing.

WT: Yeah. Sometimes she’ll take them off to a museum or something, or if we’re close, to visit the sights in New York City. However, they do open a lot of shows.

Which do you prefer with your own music, live or in the studio?

WT: Well, they’re different. When playing live you have a bit more freedom to experiment. You can play anything and take it far out. You can experiment on the guitar and if it doesn’t work it doesn’t matter because it’s here and then it’s gone. When recording, you know it’s going to stay there, for posterity. You’ve got to focus more. You can let yourself go when playing live.

Let’s talk about gear. Do you still have that '73 Strat, the one with the volume knob that says tone and whatever?

WT: That’s my main guitar, man. I play that every night. I’ve got it sitting in the van right now, on the back seat next to where I ride. I bought that thing new in '73, right off the shelf in California. It was white. You can take a look at it now and see what thirty-three years on the road will do. It’s stock. The only thing that has been changed is the saddles on the bridge. I’ve gone through a couple of nuts at the top of the neck. I’ve gone through a set of tuners. They were changed about fifteen years ago. And it has been refretted about fifteen times. I get the biggest frets made, and pretty much every two years I have to have it refretted. I play the shit out of that thing.

I actually thought it was a natural finish.

WT: No. It was white when I bought it. You can actually see a white patch where my arm has kept the smoke off of the guitar.

What about your amps?

WT: I’m endorsed by Mesa Boogie. I’ve used the same Boogie Mark IV since it came out. I have one of the first made. I still use it. It’s on every cut on the Full Circle record. I use no effects. I have a guitar and an amp and that’s it. I do tour with a Mesa Boogie guitar Leslie. They made about a hundred of them. I have two and Santana has two. But that’s it, nothing else, man.

I’m endorsed by Rotosound strings. They’re awesome, and they stay in tune. They’ve got great tone. I use .9 thru .42. I use my own extra heavy picks.

Is there anything you want to add, Walter, or say to the fans?

WT: You know, I’m happy just to still be here doing what I do. The beauty of music is that there’s room for everybody. Not everybody has to like the same thing. I’m not trying to please everyone; I’m just trying to create an honest work of art. If you like it I’m very pleased.

Related Links
Walter Trout
Review: Full Circle by Walter Trout and Friends
Purchase Full Circle on Amazon.com

---