Walter Trout -- Beach Boy Blues

Guitarist Walter Trout has earned his blues degree the hard way: burning up the fretboard night after night, year after year, decade after decade, in dimly lit, smoky little bars and nightclubs. That and backing some of the legends of the blues, such as Big Mama Thornton, and Percy Mayfield. Along the way, Trout also did five-year stints in Canned Heat and with John Mayall.

A mainstay - and in fact a driving factor - of the Southern California blues scene, Trout put in many a long year playing in his adopted hometown of Huntington Beach, California, (long live Perqs!) before finally hitting the road on the strength of his own recordings. His recent releases for Ruf Records, and regular U.S. and European festival jaunts, have since introduced him to thousands more blues fans on both sides of the pond.

Trout lands squarely on the rock side of the blues world, and his stinging guitar solos easily satisfy the appetites of those fans who came to the blues through such rock-based proponents as Led Zeppelin, Eric Clapton, and Stevie Ray Vaughan. His latest recordings, Go The Distance (Ruf, 2001), and Life in the Jungle (a 2002 Ruf reissue of the 1990 Provogue release), simply rip.

[Editor's note: Since this interview, Walter Trout has also released Deep Trout(2005) and Relentless (2003) on the Provogue/Ruf label.]

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Walter talked to us about the long road he's traveled, and the blustery blue notes he's left behind, ringing in ardent fans' ears worldwide.

BluesQuest.com: Walter, tell us a little bit about your style of playing. What influenced you? How did you become the rockin' kind of blues player that you are?

Walter Trout: Well, I think the guy who initially really opened my ears to blues guitar and its possibilities was Michael Bloomfield, on the very first Butterfield Blues Band album. And in the house I grew up in, my parents had played records by John Lee Hooker and B.B. King and Muddy Waters. I came from a family that was musically very hip, very cool. I had an older brother who was bringing home records anywhere from bluegrass records to John Coltrane records, all in the same week.

But when I heard Bloomfield - who by the way that was another album that my older brother brought home and said, 'You gotta hear this guy play the guitar,' - I was opened up to the possibility of playing it a little wilder, with a little more fire, and a little rock 'n' roll aggression thrown in. I love the tradition of the blues and I really immersed myself in it, but I didn't want it to be chains on me.

The purists accuse me of playing too many notes. I just play from my heart and I play what God puts in my head to play and I don't argue with it. Whatever impulse I have to play at the moment, I don't argue with it and say to myself, 'No, I don't think that Robert Hilburn of the L.A. Times would like this lick, so I better not play it.' I'm probably a little over the top for some people, but other people they like that. They like to see somebody push themselves, and maybe not always achieve what they're reaching for, but at least trying.

BluesQuest.com: Do you remember any particular Bloomfield songs or licks in particular that really influenced the first things you learned?

Walter: Man, the way he played on that first Butterfield album was so fast and so wild and if you read interviews with him later, he slowed down later in life and he told interviewers that on that first album he thought he was not playing with much soul. So he had really slowed down quite a bit. But I found both approaches kind of equally beautiful when he did it. It didn't bother me at all when he was playing a million notes. I thought it was awesome.

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BluesQuest.com: You've been playing all your life?

Walter: Well, I started when I was 10 and I'm 50, so…

BluesQuest.com: And when did you start playing professionally?

Walter: About '68. I was like 17, 18. By professionally, I mean playing in club bands up and down the Jersey shore. I grew up in New Jersey and there's quite a nightclub circuit there along the coast. I lived in a coastal town named Ocean City. It's actually a little island right on the coast of New Jersey, so there was quite a circuit there for club bands, especially in the summer. And I was doing that by 17, 18.

BluesQuest.com: Cool. And you eventually played with John Lee Hooker…

Walter: Yeah.

BluesQuest.com: Big Mama Thornton…

Walter: Big Mama Thornton, Percy Mayfield, Joe Tex, Opie Wright, Bobby Hatfield of the Righteous Brothers. One of my most fun gigs was playing with a guy named J.D. Nicholson, who was not all that famous but he was an elderly, black piano player who in his youth had played with Little Walter and he had also done a lot of playing with Freddie King and with John Lee Hooker. And he had his own band called J.D. and the Soul Benders. I played with them quite a lot, too. That was a blast.

BluesQuest.com: What did you learn from all those people, all those legends especially?

Walter: It's not something I could just show you on the guitar. It was more of like - also of course, I played five years with Canned Heat and five years with John Mayall - and with each of those sideman gigs I always believed that the important thing was to really get to know the music and the style of the person you're backing up and try to play something that is true to what their music needs.

You can't come out with Big Mama Thornton and do a Jimi Hendrix feedback solo. It didn't fit. It didn't work. And I tried to play in the spirit of the music of those people and not just go out there and be kind of self-indulgent with myself. I'm not going to come out with Percy Mayfield and just start ripping. You couldn't do it like that. You had to tap into their feeling and their spirit and try to blend with it. And that's really I think why I sort was of in demand as a sideman, because I was willing to do that. When I'd get a gig with some of those people, I'd get their old records and sit down and study their music.

BluesQuest.com: What kind of gear are you using these days?

Walter: I play through a Mesa Boogie and I leave it on the lead channel. And with the suggested settings that come with the Boogie, I have it set for "death metal," but I control the amount of overdrive with the volume knob on the guitar. If you want to play clean, put the guitar up to about two and you'll get a big, fat, beefy clean sound. And anywhere between two and 10 you can actually control the amount of overdrive you're getting, just using that one channel. So what I'm doing with my baby finger [adjusting the guitar's volume control] is almost as important as what I'm playing. My baby finger is moving all the time. I go through a lot of volume pots.

BluesQuest.com: That knob - on the guitar you've been using for years - actually says "Tone" on it, but it's your volume knob?

Walter: The reason being the volume knob is right here where the tone knob should be. That's the original volume knob that came on the guitar when I bought it 27 years ago, new, when the guitar was pure white. It's worn out. It got used so much that you can turn it and it doesn't affect what's happening. And somebody said to me, 'Well, just get a new volume knob,' And I said, 'That's the volume knob that this finger has been wrapped around for 27 years and I'm not getting a new one.' So we just shifted them around that's all.

BluesQuest.com: Did you shift the knobs or rewire them?

Walter: We just shifted the knobs. I mean this tone knob works fine. It'll go down over the pot and actually make it turn, but this volume knob is loose on there. It's about ready to fall off, and it has fallen off on numerous occasions. I'd be on a big stage and I'd be doing my thing and the knob would fly off and bounce across the stage.

BluesQuest.com: But you'd run after it to pick it up?

Walter: I wasn't letting anybody get it man! It came on the guitar when I bought it and this guitar has my spirit in it. I mean it was pure white when I bought it.

BluesQuest.com: What year is it?

Walter: It's a '73. It's one of the ones you're supposed to hate. That's what I love about it.

BluesQuest.com: A notorious post-CBS guitar.

Walter: Yeah, you know: a three-bolt neck and all the stuff that the non-players say you're supposed to hate. The real players realize that guitars are like people. You have to take them on their merit. You know there's some good '54s and there's some pretty crappy '54s. And there's some good post-CBS guitars and there's some pretty crappy post-CBS guitars. It depends on the guitar and it's own individual quality.

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BluesQuest.com: You're the only person playing it as well.

Walter: Yeah, sure. But I mean this one, I haven't played a '54. I've played a lot of vintage guitars, but I haven't played a '54 or '55 Strat that I would ever trade for this - either for feel or for sound or anything else.

BluesQuest.com: Did you study music in any way? Can you read or do you know music theory?

Walter: I studied the trumpet for a long time. I was an aspiring trumpet player as a kid. I studied the trumpet and could read. I was in the high school orchestra and all that stuff, and was first chair trumpet player. When I was 10 years old, I got to meet and hang out with Duke Ellington and his orchestra for an afternoon. They sort of took me in as a young aspiring trumpet player, spent the day with me, talked to me, showed me stuff on the trumpet, and told me what I could expect if I went into being a professional musician for my career.

It was an incredible afternoon I spent with those guys. But when I got into guitar, I just taught myself. And the only band that I was ever in playing the guitar that I even had to read charts was Bobby Hatfield from the Righteous Brothers. And even then I found myself not paying much attention to the charts. The charts would say "You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling," and I just played the song, you know. So over the course of the years I've lost a lot of that reading ability because I never had to do it playing in blues or rock 'n' roll bands. It's all been fairly simple music and if I had to do it, I could. There are some times I've been at home and sat down and decided to write some music. Or maybe I'd be in the van riding with the band and I'll get a melody in my head and I'll write it out on a piece of paper in notation.

BluesQuest.com: Do you practice scales or arpeggios or any of that kind of thing? Do you think about that stuff when you're playing or is it just flowing?

Walter: I do not try to think at all when I'm playing. If I think anything when I'm playing, I think melody. I never wanted to think scales. I always thought that was the wrong approach for this kind of music. You need to think melody and you need to just play something that you feel. Don't use your head; use your heart and your instinct.

So I never really just sat down and practiced scales. I would just sit down from the time I started the guitar - I found it to be so much fun that I would just sit down and play and mess around and see what I could come up with. I know when I was a kid and we'd go out and do club gigs where you play five hours a night, I would get back home at three in the morning and I would sit down and think about everything I had played and would sit in my living room without an amp and play for another eight hours.

BluesQuest.com: A lot of times when I do these interviews I'm hoping that somebody like yourself can take people who play blues and are stuck in one position - let's say they're playing in A, and they're stuck in that fifth-fret pentatonic position - and maybe you can explain a couple other areas on the neck to explore.

Walter: If you had to talk scales, it is possible in the middle of a blues solo to mix a major scale in with your blues scale. B.B. King, especially, plays a lot of major scaled runs in blues. You're going from your basic flatted thirds into your major thirds, which I even hate talking that technical because it shouldn't be a head thing. It should be a feel thing and a melody thing you know, but if I had to sit back and analyze some of the stuff that's what I would say. You can play a flatted third over a major chord or you can play a major third over a major chord and its still going to sound bluesy.

BluesQuest.com: Cool. I'm not gonna ask you those any more of those mind melt questions before you gotta go play, so I'll let you off the hook. Thanks for spending some time with us.

Walter: Yeah. I'm gonna be up on stage going, 'OK, I'm now in a demented scale and I'm about to enter the perverted scale and I'm about to enter the dunno-lydian mode here. I mean I used to know all that stuff!'