Walter Trout is just about one of the coolest and nicest people I have met. Even before the interviews began he and I were sitting in the lobby of the ITC Grand and we were talking music. The PR folks came and told him that the papers were ready for him and we headed to the interview area. He gave a couple of interviews to some papers, answering them very patiently as I waited on for my turn. I was okay with waiting because I was hoping to spend a while with the man talking about a whole lot of things about his music and his experiences.
Finally, it was my turn. He and I were sitting at this table and right behind us Guitar Shorty was being interviewed by some TV channel. He started off answering me and after the first question he said “Let’s move over to some other place so that the TV guys don’t have me talking in the background.” Incredibly thoughtful of him and so very humble. I can’t think of any other “stars” who would do that.
In any case, lets get down to the interview. It was incredible talking to him and there is so much, I realize that there is to know about the world of music.

Mihir: I’ve got a lot to talk about Fred…
Walter Trout: Eh?!

M: Oh you know, you once said in an interview “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.” So yeah, I’d like to talk to you about “Fred”.
WT: Hahaha! Ahh yes! Did you know, a Mumbai paper from Thursday said I am popularly known as Fred. (we both burst out laughing). And they’re calling me Fred so now my whole band is calling me Fred. My sound man has the article. He was on a plane flying here from London and he found it and kept it. It has a picture of me that says “Fred returns to play the blues!” (I was really cracking up by now because he was narrating this with a fairly serious tone.) The journalist got the whole quote wrong and thought that I’m called Fred. (Now he joined in and we were laughing like a couple of fools)

M: Heh. Just wish people would read stuff right.
WT: I’m telling you, till the day I die my band is going to call me Fred.

M: That’s just crazy man!!
Well, it is interesting why you made the quote though in the first place. People feel this incessant need to classify music that they hear. They want to call it blues or rock or whatever and your music, it can’t really be slotted can it?
WT: No and I don’t want it to be. I feel that as an artist I don’t want to be stuck in a corner. I love the blues and I’ve played it with the greatest blues musicians on the face of the earth and I’ve been accepted by them as an equal and a partner but that doesn’t mean that that’s all I do. I feel that one of the reasons I made my last CD where I brought a lot of guests in (and we played spontaneously), was that I brought in more traditional players and I brought in people that the critics call rockers and we all got together and made music and said “Okay now what do you call that?”
Because here is this very traditional drummer and bass player backing me up and I’m playing and we’re having a great time. Among the musicians those categories don’t exist. Its among the critics and the people who don’t play that this exists. They have this need to stick you in a corner and it drives me nuts.
When I was a kid I got to know and be a friend of Duke Ellington and he has a quote that sticks in my head. I will tell you that quote and you will have to think about it for a while because its rather complicated. Duke, he hated categories and his quote is “Categories exist to give the work of the artistic cripple an attractive gloss”
(After a slight pause he chose to elaborate and this is what he said)
In other words there may be a guitar player and all he can play is say Albert King licks all night…so he gets a sharkskin suit and an old amp and calls himself “Hey! I’m the real blues” when in reality he can’t play anything else. He is an artistic cripple and he is able to play only in one genre. So he puts this attractive gloss on it and tries to cover up his weaknesses. I like to play everything and I demand the right to do it. If people don’t want to hear to it, they don’t have to listen to be honest. I don’t give a fuck, you know.
M: Yeah man, good music is good music. Why label it at all.
WT: Yeah! Its either honest and heart felt or its not.
You know she’s interviewing him for television and I don’t really want them to hear me say “I don’t give a fuck” on TV…so lets move someplace else.

(And so we did. A small break ensued and we finally found some seats far away from the reporter lady and her TV crew and we started once again.)

M: Okay I want to talk about the early days to begin with. What was the first instrument you picked up? How did you get into your kind of music to begin with?
WT: When I was about 6 years old I began studying the trumpet. I played the trumpet in high school orchestras and bands. Then I was in what is called in America, as the Drum & Bugle Corps where you march in parades and you compete against each other and I was eleven years old when I was in the New Jersey State Champion Drum & Bugle Corps and I was a bugle soloist. We would play in stadiums in competitions sometimes to thirty thousand people and we would spend the summer driving around the country in a bus. So it really prepared me for what I do now. It got me in front of crowds and it showed me a bit of the gypsy life.
I took up the guitar when I was about ten but I would just play folk songs back then…songs of Bob Dylan, “Peter, Paul & Mary,” and bands like that. I played it at parties and sang around campfires and stuff and I didn’t really take the guitar seriously till I was about thirteen or fourteen.

M: What brought about that change?
WT: Two things: I can even tell you the date. February the 9th 1964, channel 2 in New Jersey on a Sunday night, the Ed Sullivan Show had The Beatles. Anybody of my generation who grew up in America who was about thirteen or fourteen when The Beatles hit America, it fucked us up. The impact cannot be overstated. They changed the entire society and social structure in America. It wasn’t just music, it was a social movement. And when I saw those guys on Ed Sullivan I said, okay, I’ve got to get an electric guitar and I gotta get into a band. I wanna do that. And that was it!

M: Amazing how events like that change people eh?
WT: Yeah, even people like David Crosby of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and Roger McGuinn of The Byrds, they’ll tell you the same story I just did about that TV Show. The Beatles just changed my life. There are a great many in the United States of my generation for whom that night was a major event. There was their life before that TV show and there was their life after that TV show. That TV show was the breaking point from your youth to your adulthood, you know.
 

M: Wow! That’s incredible. But you know you said, there were two things that influenced you in a big way. What was the other thing?
WT: When I discovered the blues, it was through a band called the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and they had a guitar player called Michael Bloomfield and that album came out about a year after The Beatles played Ed Sullivan. I was already into playing the electric guitar and I had a cheap little electric guitar but then I heard Michael Bloomfield and then my road was set. It wasn’t just to play in a rock and roll band, it was to play lead guitar in a blues act. And that was in 1965. Michael Bloomfield’s playing that that time was revolutionary. There’re a whole lot of other guys I know like Robben Ford and other great guitar players who will tell you the same thing. They heard that album and they knew what they were gonna play then. Up till then they were musicians and after that album they wanted to be lead guitarists in a blues band.

M: How did you go about getting into the music business to begin with? Was it very easy?
WT: Well, you start off in high school and you meet friends with similar interests and you go into their garage and jam and you play in the garage and you go out and you try to get a gig somewhere. I remember I was in a band called “The Fertile Soil” and we were trying to be like an original Beatles, Byrds kind of a band in high school. We would play in the bass player’s garage. He had a little brother who’d keep coming and wanting to hang around. We’d ask him to get out of there, but well his little brother is now the drummer for Garth Brooks, who is the biggest country star in the States. So you never know who is hanging around in those garages.
Well we got some gigs in a local club. It’s a combination of persistence, it’s a combination of ambition and it’s a combination of timing and luck and meeting the right guys somewhere. Some guy will come and hear you and say, hey, I can get you in a bigger club and things like that. One thing I always knew was that the guys who would end up making it would be the guys who stuck with it. I’ve watched a lot of guys over the years get discouraged and go get day jobs. Go out and do something else, go to college and become a teacher or something. That’s great for them, but I knew that if I stuck with it in the face of whatever adversity, I could do something with it.
 

M: So you started off with these small bands. But when did you get your big break?
WT: Probably, the first big that happened was, I was playing in a club band in California in the early 70s and it was a bar band; we played in a bar and people danced. A friend of mine said that “there’s a jam session on the Redondo Beach Pier every Sunday afternoon. And there are these old black guys and they’re up there jamming. And if we go up there on Sunday maybe they’ll let you play.”
I went there with him that Sunday and said “Can I get up there and play a song” and they said “Well, we’ll let you play one song.” I got up and played and they said “Why don’t you stay up here” and I ended up playing all night!
At the end of the night they said “Why don’t you join our band” and these guys were John Lee Hooker’s back up band and they were up there jamming on Sunday!!! So I went all the way from playing in a bar band and to playing with John Lee Hooker, overnight. And that was really the turning point for me.

M: How did Canned Heat come along?
WT: Canned Heat came along when I was playing with John Lee Hooker. From him I would go and play with Big Mama Thorton, Percy Mayfield, Joe Tex and Bo Diddley and all these different people because I started meeting all these big musicians.
Canned Heat, I got to know them through the John Lee Hooker connection as well.
They invited me to do one tour of Australia with them and that turned into five years!

M: And then you played along with John Mayall And The Bluesbreakers. How long did that last?
WT: That was another five years. So between Canned Heat and Mayall I spent ten years of my life.

M: So did John Mayall come along right after Canned Heat?
WT: We did a gig with Canned Heat opening for John Mayall. I met him and he heard me play and the next thing I knew, he says “Hey you wanna join my band?” and I say “SURE! Why not!?”
 

M: At that point of time, it must have pretty much been a dream for a guitar player to be playing with John Mayall right?
WT: That’s as high as you can go in the blues world. Where else are you gonna go? You could say well a bigger act would be that you could play with B.B.King but you wouldn’t be featured.

M: Yeah you wouldn’t be the lead guitar…
WT: Exactly. You wouldn’t be the lead guitar. You could play with Buddy Guy, but you wouldn’t be the lead guitarist. With John Mayall you are the lead player and you get featured in one of the top four blues acts in the world. I mean that is something you dream about when you’re in high school. I used to listen to his records and think “My God!! This is great!” And then to be in his band…for many years I’d look in the mirror and go “How the fuck did I end up here?! From a little town in New Jersey, here I am on stage with John Mayall in London, England. What the hell happened! How did I end up here?”

M: Well, then how did you know, or actually when did you know that it was time to move on from John Mayall? I mean when you’re with a band like that it’s a very comfortable feeling…I guess you feel like you’re on the top of the world…so to leave that…
WT: It was very comfortable. I was making great money. I was staying in Hilton Hotels and playing big shows but I always had a dream, all my life, of having my own band, being a frontman and of making my name as a singer and as a songwriter, not just playing lead guitar but writing music and singing it, presenting it and performing.
Well on my 38th birthday…umm…well I’ll start off with one night in Denmark. John Mayall got sick that night and we went on without him. He stayed at the hotel and we had to get up and say “Mr.Mayall is sick. We’re gonna play and those of you who don’t like the show, they’ll give you your their money back. But you might as well stick around and we’ll see a show”.
We played for about three hours and I fronted the band. I came off the band and in the audience was a representative of a Scandinavian record company and he said, “I’m ready to sign you right now to make your own album.” And there was a promoter there, Mayall’s promoter and he “If you sign with him I’ll book your band. I’ll get you on tour.”
So, for about a week I had this in my head and then I had my 38th Birthday. I stood on stage that day thinking that I have to do this now. The chance has been handed to me to make a record and do a tour and take the gamble of having my own career. I was 38 and I asked myself if I wanted to spend the rest of my life as a side man or do I want to take that step. So on my 38th birthday after the show I went to John’s room and I quit!
And I called up the record company and told them that I was ready. A couple of weeks later we were in Stockholm making a record. I called up my friends back in Huntington Beach, guys I used to jam with in a little bar and I said “I’m gonna fly you guys to Sweden and we’re gonna make a record and you’re now the Walter Trout Band” and that’s how it started!

M: So how was the first album for you? Was it satisfying? I mean apart from the musical element, was it commercially good too?
WT: Commercially it was a huge success. My band was an immediate sensation in Scandinavia and Europe. But on my first two albums all the money was stolen from me.

M: Oh gosh! How come?
WT: Oh it’s just one of those music business stories. Its not even worth going into but the thing is I was new in the business and I dealt with some bad people. My second album, I still have the charts. My second album in Europe sold more than Bon Jovi, sold more than Madonna and Bryan Adams. I had the number one record and I have the charts at home. Walter Trout, Bryan Adams, Bon Jovi and Madonna. I’m at number one!
And the record company, when my record was such a huge success they ceased to exist. They took all the money from that record and they disappeared. I’ve not seen or heard from them since then.

M: Wow! That is incredible.
WT: Yeah they had the money and they disappeared!

M: Man! I mean you hear about these things happening and you don’t think its real but I guess it is huh?
WT: Yeah (laughs). But you know what, I look at it like this. The first album was completely ripped off but if I hadn’t made the first one I couldn’t have made the second one which was a huge hit and if I hadn’t made that one I wouldn’t have been such a major star in Europe as I’ve been for fifteen years now. So you have to start somewhere and now there are a lot of young musicians who come with me and say “I don’t want to sign with this guy because I might get ripped off” and I go like “You’ve gotta start, you know. You’ve got to sign with somebody and you’ve got to make a record and you have to take the gamble and do the tour. Start! Don’t be so afraid of the risk that you don’t do anything.”

M: So thirteen more albums after the second one eh?
WT: Yeah I think I’ve done fifteen albums.

M: Before we go into the last one and there’s a LOT to talk about that. The album you released before the fifteenth one, “Deep Trout” was that a greatest hits kind of an album?
WT: That was a compilation because I think I did eight albums that are only available in Europe. And I thought there was some good music on those albums that should be heard by people, especially in America. I made a compilation and I picked what I thought were the best songs. And it was basically a release for America so that they could hear what I did before because I didn’t put out an album in America till 1998. So I had already made eight records that they had not heard there.

M: Okay, so this was a best of the early years.
WT: Yes.

M: Now your last album “Full Circle” was one of those “someone and friends” album…I mean this was “Walter Trout and Friends” but this was different because I believe this was not the kind of album that was overdubbed right…
WT: No, no overdubs. Wait, not really. There were some that had to be done. The song “Can’t Help Falling Apart” with Finis Tasby we played it live but I went back and dubbed the harmonica. There was no way to play the guitar and the harmonica at the same time.

M: But what I meant was, every body came in…
WT: Yeah. Everybody was there. We were looking at each other in all the songs. A lot of records now are done where you go in and the track is done and you play your part. A lot of records now are even done by email.
I just had an offer to play on a Jeff Beck tribute and the guy said, “We’ll do the track and we’ll email it to your house and you put the guitar track down and you email it back.”
I said that’s okay but I don’t want to do that. I want to communicate with the players…I want to feel that connection when we create. Not have it be sterile…I want it to be real!

M: Well, the friends on this album are incredible! Some of the best musicians in the world! I believe you had 25 musicians right?
WT: Uh huh.

M: So that’s 25 people including John Mayall. How was it to play with him again after all these years?
WT: It was incredible. That was to me the high point of my musical life. Cause that was the man who my teacher and my mentor giving me his stamp of approval on what I’ve done.
 
M: So that where the “Full Circle” comes into picture?

WT: Yeah. Absolutely.

M: I wanted to ask you about Jeff Healey who has also played on this album. How was it playing with him?
WT: It was great. I’ve known him for years. When I was with Mayall in the 80s we used to tour Canada and Jeff used to open for us. He was unknown, he was a teenager. But one year we went to Canada and he opened for us and a year later we were opening for him!
So it shows you how the music business is. But he’s just an incredible gentleman and an incredible, almost unbelievable musician to me. I mean, he is very original and very unique and my respect for him is endless.

M: Of the musicians in the present generation, the younger guys, do you see anybody who is keeping the flame alive for the blues?
WT: I think there are a lot of them out there. There’s Joe Bonamassa who is on my record, who is making quite a name for himself in America and Europe. There’re some young fellas in England who I think are incredible. There’s a young man in England called Danny Bryant who came to a show of mine when he was twelve. He wrote me a letter and said that it made him want to be a guitar player. So I called him up and whenever I was in England I gave him guitar lessons and now he is just an incredible artists and he is on Rounder Records in England and he is just going to do his first American tour this summer and I’m very proud of him. He is really out there keeping this flame going.
(By about this time the people from the PR agency were getting a little edgy. It was already over twenty minutes that I was talking to Walter so I was given the signal to wind up.
I think I could have gone on for a bit. The man is simply incredible to talk to. Well now since the time was limited I thought I’d go in for a slightly awkward question for me to ask.)

M: If I may ask you, there was a very difficult time in your past with a lot of addictions but you managed to kick that off. You hear all these incredibly tragic stories about brilliant musicians falling prey to their addictions. You, fortunately didn’t go down that path. What made the transition happen?
WT: I did go down the path of every addiction I could have and I was blessed enough by God to not have died in the process. He kinda kept me alive and gave me a second chance. I think I was given a second chance of course, to play music and to try and make the world just a little bit of a better place through the music and also to meet my wife and have our three sons. When I look at them, you know, I see hope for the world.

M: Are you a deeply spiritual person?
WT: Yeah…

M: From everything you say…the way you feel about your music and your family it seems that, that is something that is very important to you.
WT: Yeah. It is very important to me. I’m a very religious person. I don’t go out and preach it to people. I keep it quietly in myself but it is something I feel deeply. I feel like I was given a second chance. In the early 70s I spent three years, you know, living on the streets of Los Angeles as a heroin addict. I should be dead!
I didn’t even play the guitar. I just chased heroin and ran around and lived on the street. Umm…I’ve been through all of that shit but I was kept alive and guided on my path and I feel I have a responsibility now to raise my kids well and to get up and make the most of my gift of music.

M: Well clichéd as it may sound, does India have any spiritual connection to you? Do you feel that? Because everyone who comes here says that they feel the whole spirituality of our country. There is such a big history…
WT: There is an incredible history of spirituality here. And I felt it last year when I played here. When I play the guitar I strive to have the experience of it being a spiritual and a religious one. And having the music inspired from above. And I felt that the people were open to that. I know that great Indian musicians do the same thing. Ravi Shankar is the one that I know the most. I know that he considers his music to be a religious experience when he plays and I try to do that with my guitar. I don’t always achieve it. You can’t always have inspiration but I certainly try every night.

M: How does it feel to be back in India?
WT: It feels incredible! I’m very excited.

M: So finally, any message for your fans?
WT: Well, I’m happy to be back here and I’m incredibly grateful to this country that they have accepted me like they have and I hope I get to keep coming back on a regular basis.

M: Yeah man! I’m looking forward to seeing you play tonight!
WT: I’m looking forward to playing.

And with that a long long conversation came to an end. It was fantastic. I always believed that there’s something to learn from everyone and I come out of this interview with some thoughts that I’m going to cherish all my life. Hope you’ve found something after reading this too.

Mihir

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