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Review from the CD Now web site July 1999
Trout Crosses the Water
By Philip Van Vleck
Bluesman Walter Trout and his band, the Free Radicals,
have finally embarked on a major U.S. tour – the guitarist's first legitimate stab at
the American blues scene. Trout and company recently blasted through North Carolina like a
chainsaw, knocking 'em dead at the Double Door in Charlotte and Tony's Bourbon Street
Oyster Bar in Cary before heading into Virginia and beyond.
To hear Trout working his Stratocaster live and in person is to
fully comprehend the irony of his current situation. A near-legend to European blues fans,
he's barely a footnote to most U.S. blues fans. Anyone who sits through a couple Trout
sets in a blues club realizes that his relative anonymity on this side of the Atlantic is
ridiculous. When Walter fires up his axe, what follows is nothing short of a revelation.
He flies like Stevie Ray Vaughan did. He's got Buddy Guy's inventiveness and flash, Eric
Clapton's technique and savvy, Roy Buchanan's fire, and, most importantly, Walter Trout's
heart.
During his second set at Tony's, Trout told the crowd that Bob
Dylan is the musician who inspired him to take up the guitar. Backstage after the gig,
however, he added that hearing Mike Bloomfield on the first Paul
Butterfield Blues Band album was the epiphany that led him to take up electric guitar.
"I heard Bloomfield, and I was gone, man. That was it. I said to myself, 'that's what
I want to do with my life.'
"When I was a teenager, people were always saying, 'Yeah,
you're really good on that guitar. But what if it doesn't work out?' I always told them
that I guess that would mean I'd be playing the guitar in some corner bar when I was 50
years old. So what? I knew that this was what I was meant to do, and I was gonna do it no
matter what."
"I'm an American. I want to be
recognized by my own people."
Trout's determination led him to California, where he still
makes his home with his Danish wife, Marie, and their two sons. He worked as a sideman for
such artists as Big Mama Thornton, John Lee Hooker, and Percy Mayfield. A John Mayall gig
got him to Europe, where he landed a record deal with Elektra Denmark.
Today, Trout can't walk down the street in any major city in
western Europe without people dogging him for his autograph. Then he flies home to
America, where nobody knows his music. Ruf Records, which has released Trout's two most
recent albums in the U.S. (including his new album, Livin' Every Day), means to
wise-up the American blues audience. The label has Trout on a 42-city summer tour. It's
Trout time in bluesland U.S.A. "I'm an American," Trout said. "I want to be
recognized by my own people. I've thought about moving to Europe, but my wife says if I
can't sit on the beach under a palm tree reading the L.A. Times every day I'll go crazy in
two months. I know she's right. Besides, I won't give up on my own country."
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