Part One

 By Art Tipaldi

 

Walter Trout

 His t-shirt for his current Ruf Records release, Deep Trout, a collection of songs from his European albums from 1989 to 1997 that were previously not available in America, identifies Walter Trout. It reads "Too Many Notes Too Loud!" 

 "I don't think you'll see a more harder rocking band than my band live," said Trout. Pure understatement.  

At this year's Notodden Blues Festival, Trout, keyboard player Sammy Avila, drummer Joey Pafumi, and new bass player Rick Knapp [Walter's long-time friend and bass player since 1978, Jimmy Trapp, passed away on August 24, 2005, after being in poor health for some months], sat backstage drinking coffee and swapping road stories with friends like Junior Watson, Bernard Allison, Beth Hart, and members of Hart's band until tour manager Andrew Elt called them to the stage. And then it happened again.

 The crashing, frantic solo guitar that opens every performance may sound part Jimi Hendrix, part Jimmy Page, part Stevie Ray Vaughan, part Eddie Van Halen, but it's all Walter Trout. His steel blue eyes cut through the crowd, while worn and peeling blond Fender Strat plays to his emotional life, wisps of his pony-tailed hair stick to the sweat on his forehead at the most intense times of the night, his two hands are inches apart and his eyes are intently studying every finger's subtle move. Round after round of machine-gunned notes are fired off from the hip at a rate that makes the speed of light seem slow; blink and you'll miss some outrageous wizardry. Blues purists be damned, this guy attacks the electric guitar the way it was always meant to be played!

The world-class guitar dynamics in the first two songs are solid indication that Trout knows how to build riff after riff that tugs at every listener. Just when you sense he's ready to stop the guitar and take a breath, the Radical band kicks the opening song up a notch with a full-speed shuffle that lifts Trout to the next series of climaxes. With no pause for breath Trout immediately slides into a pace that would put most guitarists on oxygen.

 For the next hour, there is a delirious ebb and flow built throughout every solo. Flailing up and down the fret board with the speed of a comet, Trout makes his guitar beg, plead, moan, yell, laugh, cry, coo, and whisper. He's every guitar head's dream come true. At times, trebly guitar runs mimic his voice note for note; other times there is a call and response where his guitar speaks in tandem with his voice. Within a single song, he delivers expert discourses on guitar styles from the most influential players of the past 50 years, all with Trout's distinctively original touches.

 Then, just when you think you have heard Trout and his guitar say every Blues or Rock phrase possible, he throws in a Beethoven riff during the minor Blues "The Reason I'm Gone." At mid-song, Trout surrealistically connects his Beethoven solo with the style of Stevie.

 "I like to think I'm tryin' to do on the guitar what Martin Luther King does with an oratory," said Trout. "What I try to do is start off at one place and make some sort of coherent statement that can build up. Like a Southern Gospel preacher, you start off and get more and more exciting and you speak faster and faster and your voice gets higher and higher and you take it to this climax where you can't go any higher and get everybody screamin' hallelujah and amen and then you sit down. Sometimes I watch a tape of King's 'I Have A Dream' speech and I think that if I could do with a guitar solo what he does with an oratory, I'd be very happy."

 To completely understand what drives his solos, one must get inside. "My songs start as a format or foundation for us to jam on. There's a constant build-up with little pull back as everything constantly moves ahead. I want to start at one point and end on a much higher point. I want to make everything coherently build to that climax. That's what I always strive for. It's always spontaneous and you'll never hear the solo the same way twice on any song. It will always be right off the top of my head."

 Where does this energy come from night after night? "Normally, when I go on, I'm almost blowing up with energy. I practice for a half hour before I go on to get myself mentally ready. I like to be alone with my guitar and get myself into a space where I'm open to receive the music. I really think it comes from somewhere else and I have to open the receiver to receive the signals. It's a 20-minute meditative time to prepare. I pray and ask for help and inspiration periodically before I go on stage."

 He admits that he taught himself and within six months could play close to how he attacks the strings today. "I didn't have as much maturity in my playing and I definitely went way overboard at the time. I remember I had learned chords because of the Folk music I was playing. I had a friend who showed me my first leads on an electric guitar. In one day, from the things he showed me, it opened the whole guitar to me, and it suddenly made sense to me. From late into my fifteenth year, I could pretty much do what I'm doing today on the guitar. I have some old tapes of myself from those early days and can hear stuff I was playing then that I cannot play today.

 "I had so many different influences growing up. I started off on the trumpet, wanting to play big band Jazz. Then my focus shifted to Folk music and Bob Dylan. I wanted to be in the Chad Mitchell Trio. I was a freak for Josh White and the show Hootenanny. Then I wanted to be in the Beatles. Then I wanted to play lead guitar with Paul Butterfield. Then it became sitting and listening to Muddy Waters and Jimi Hendrix and understanding how one lead directly to the other. I could hear that Hendrix was playing Muddy's style and taking it a step further. 'Voodoo Chile's really just Muddy Waters."

 He grew up in New Jersey and played many of the same shore bars a kid named Springsteen was playing. "My band in South Jersey was a hot band. We had a horn line and did the Sam and Dave Soul thing and worked the whole Jersey shore. I was the hot guy. Then I got into this club band that played all over the Jersey shore. In those days, a lot of the clubs had two stages with continuous music. We did many shows with a band called Steel Mill, Bruce Springsteen's band. I remember that he was sorta playing lead back then. I remember thinking, 'Man, I'm blowing this guy away. I'll be going places and this guy'll be going nowhere.'"

 Once he relocated in Southern California, Trout began playing behind Blues legends like Big Mama Thornton, John Lee Hooker, Lowell Fulson, Pee Wee Crayton, Joe Tex, and Percy Mayfield. Trout's career has three separate stages, Canned Heat, John Mayall, and, since 1989, leading his own band.

 First, Trout spent five years with Canned Heat. "I call those the Lost Years," he says. When Canned Heat toured with John Mayall in 1985, Mayall hired Trout.

 Once he joined John Mayall, where two epiphanies happened. For years, Trout, like a great many other musicians, turned to drinking and drugs as therapy. Trout's substance abuse wake-up call positions him as a voice of sobriety in an often-overdosed music world. Touring East Berlin in April of 1987 as the guitarist in John Mayall's Blues Breakers, Trout was approached by Carlos Santana. "He basically came up to me and he said in no uncertain terms, 'You have this gift to play the guitar, and you're also in this famous band, that a hundred guitar players in the world would give anything to be in, and you're up there so drunk on the stage. God gave you a gift, and by being that drunk, you're giving the finger to God.' That shook me. Then he said, 'I have a book for you to read.' And he gave me a book, The Discovery of Possibilities, by Reverend Robert Schuller," said Trout.

 The philosophy in the book came at the right time for Trout. "I read that book and I went to John and I said, 'You'll never see me drunk on stage again.' That was it for me with the drinking and drugs."

 Not only did Trout discover an inner strength capable of resisting temptations, he also rediscovered the purity of the music that had been lacking for years. Over years, the numbness from drugs and alcohol abuse blocked the passionate intensity necessary in playing the Blues. After almost 20 years of playing numb, Trout vividly recalls the first sober experience.

 "The first time I got up on stage with John sober I couldn't even play a chord without crying. It would rip my heart out of my chest. And suddenly my involvement, my emotion, my investment in the music became one hundred fold to what it had been. People who think they are feeling it more when they are high, are kidding themselves. I got up on stage and every note was pure expression." 

Walter Trout's Deep Trout

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 Today he proudly boasts 18 years of sobriety.

 "I'm always willing to discuss any part of the doping, drugging, drinking era because I hope if there's a 15-year-old kid out there who likes my playing, that he might read that and he's not gonna have to go through what I went through. It would be great if in 15 years some guy was to come up to me and tells me he stayed away from heroin because he's read my interview. That would mean almost more to me than if somebody says I like your music because that saves a human being's life."

 From that point, Trout began to wonder if there was a career for him as a bandleader. In those years, he and Coco Montoya were the guitar twins behind Mayall. One night in Alborg, Denmark, in 1989, with Mayall too sick to go on, Montoya and Trout rocked the house for four solid hours. After that, a promoter approached Trout about recording and touring Denmark. "We were playing in Sweden on my birthday and I was thinking that at 38 my chance to make a record and tour was put right in front of me. I played the show with John and at the end of the night went to his room and said, 'I love you. You've been great to me, but I'm gonna quit.' I was sittin in his room cryin' because I didn't want to leave his band. He was and still is a surrogate dad to me. He put up with all the years of drugging and drinking and continued to believe in me. He is a dear, dear friend. I have nothing but great things to say about Mr. Mayall."

 To be continued... 

Art Tipaldi is a contributing editor at BluesWax. Art may be contacted at blueswax@visnat.com.