Walter Trout plays the blues with the spirit of the masters mixed with the distortion of Jimi Hendrix. Like Gary Moore, Trout likes to put a lot more into his blues leads than a simple, easy pentatonic scale run. He is not just a flash, electric player either. He writes, and plays, some heartfelt tunes on his acoustic guitar as well. To top it off, lyrically, Trout is a wordsmith, as proven by the prayer he wrote for the song “Common Ground.”

Walter remembers the day he knew he had to become a guitarist and shares it with the readers of Classic Rock Revisited in the interview that follows. Trout, now 60 years old, reflects back on his career, the good, the bad and the ugly. He is grateful to be where he is, as by all odds his legendary drinking and drugging should have put him in an early grave.

Read on to learn more about the album Common Ground, his plans for his next release, how Carlos Santana sobered him up, how to piss off the purists and how farting can save a tour.

Walter: That is the last one I put out. I’m going to do another one in October and it will be out around March of next year and then I will be out promoting that one. It is going to be a blues CD but it’s going to be my version, and my take on the blues. I am just putting that one together in my head right now.

Walter: Thank God, I hope so. If I ain’t pissing off the purists then I am not fulfilling my purpose in life. They need to get their heads out of their asses.

I am all for tradition. I played with John Lee Hooker, Big Mama Thornton, Percy Mayfield and Bo Diddley and all these guys. Obviously, when I played with Big Mama Thornton I couldn’t come out and do a Hendrix feedback solo, I had to play her music the way it deserved to be played. I had to be respectful of that tradition.

I’m a white kid from New Jersey, I’m not an old black guy, and I’ve got to be honest with myself and play the music that’s inside of me, and that means there is going to be some rock n’ roll involved.

Walter: Me too. I don’t want tradition to be a chain around my neck; I don’t need a ball and chain.

Walter: I have actually been known to have a lead belly myself. I could lose a little weight [laughter].

Walter: [laughter] I am surprised that I am still alive and semi-lucid enough to stand on stage and play when I look back at my past and my drug usage. I do love to play and I have done twenty albums in twenty-one years. When I see some of these fake bands that do an album and then don’t do another one for five years I just say, “What the fuck?”

I’ve got to say that a lot of it comes down to my wife. She will schedule a CD, I call it an album because I’m old, and two months before that, I will be sitting there and she will say, “Your in a studio in a month and a half.” I will go, “What about it?” She will say, “What are you going to record?” I get depressed and I think, “I can’t do this again. I don’t have anymore to say.” All of a sudden, I hear the voice of my mom and she very sternly says, “Walter, you wanted to be a musician. You are a musician. Quit bitching and moaning and make some music, for God sakes.” At that point, it all becomes clear to me. If you really want to be a musician, and that is all you really want to do, then play some music. If you want to be a racecar driver then go out and drive your car fast because there is nothing stopping you.

After I have that moment, it sort of comes easy. With Common Ground, I wrote all of the songs on that album in about two weeks. I got up every morning – my wife knows when I get up I am not on the planet, so she gives me a cup of coffee and some breakfast and says, “See you later” and I just am off in space, sitting in the living room with an acoustic guitar. Two or three weeks later, I have a CD.

I am actually starting to think about this next one. I want to do a blues CD but I don’t want to just do blues covers. I want to write blues songs but I want to have something to say in the songs. I want there to be little interesting aspects to the music. I don’t want to just come out and do a 12-Bar shuffle. Things are starting to take shape in my mind. Back to your original question of whether I go “Wow, I’m still going,” yeah, I do that a lot.

Walter: I try.

Walter: The phrase ‘common ground’ was bouncing around in my head for many years. Over the last decade, I have seen this country get polarized. When you turn on the TV, you see a right-winger and a left-winger and they are screaming at each other and nobody is making any sense. No one is going to convince the other side of anything; it is just a shouting match.

I think everybody wants the same thing; they want a good life. People want health, happiness, and some peace in their life. As to how they get there, they have different roads that they see in front of them, and instead of just screaming at each other, and treating the other person so disrespectfully, maybe they could try to find some common ground.

I tried to write the song for at least ten years as a political song. It never came out; it just never worked. One day, I just realized that we were in severe need of help from a higher power. I just see the world getting more and more like we are careening over the edge of a cliff. It is time mankind asked for some help. As soon as I came up with that then I knew the song really had to be a prayer. As soon as I realized that then the lyrics only took about ten minutes. I still have the original paper where I sat down and wrote the lyrics and hardly anything is crossed out. There are additional lyrics that I just couldn’t fit into the song but it pretty much came out the way it is.

Walter: The funny thing is that of the twenty albums I’ve done, it got the best reviews of my career, but it really hasn’t sold that much. I’ve had other albums that have out sold it by five or six times. They were albums that didn’t get the critical reviews. My second album, in 1990, was only out in Europe, and was picked as the Album of Year by an LA band and it was not even out in America. I have gotten these different critical things but sometimes the critical things don’t always equate with success from the people. I’ve gotten a lot of emails from people who tell me that the title track means a lot to them. For me, that is what its really about. I have been told that people have played that song at their dad’s funeral. 　

Walter: I used them in the studio. They are all really good friends and they like recording with me. They seem to really enjoy it. I don’t really give them any kind of direction, either. When they record with Bonnie then she says, “Play it like this” or “Play it like that” but I don’t do that. These are all great players and I love their playing. I tell them to play it the way they want to play it. I give them lots of freedom and I think they enjoy that. I have Hutch Hutchinson, who has been with Bonnie Raitt for 28 years and he has also recorded with Joe Cocker, Mick Jagger, Vince Gill, Elton John and George Harrison. I have Jon Cleary on the keyboards from Bonnie’s band and he is also in Eric Clapton’s band. Kenny Aronoff plays drums for everybody. They came in and they were basically my band for four days in the studio.

I would come in and they would sit down. I would have an acoustic guitar and I would play and sing the song. We would then have a little discussion about it and maybe go over it once, or twice, and, boom, away we would go.

Walter: We are physically in the same room, playing together. I’m a big fan of what I call The Bob Dylan School of Recording. It is not about audio perfection, it’s about capturing a moment and a feeling. The actual audio quality is not the important thing. You can take those three guys and me, put us in a room, and have us play, and only have one microphone in the room – you might not get the most beautiful audio sound but the music would be kick ass. That is how guys recorded in the old days. It’s the capturing of a moment and the guys playing together. There was no mailing in your parts on that record – I’ve never done a record like that. They have freedom to play it how they think it should be played. If you think a drum fill should go there then play it. If you think a certain bass line would sound cool then play it. I am all about having fun with it. I think that comes across in the music.

Walter: I’m a big pain in the ass. Half of the songs on both The Outsider and Common Ground are first takes; we didn’t even really rehearse half of them; we just talked about it. They roll the tape and we play.

On The Outsider there is a song called “Gone Too Long” and that is literally the rehearsal. I said, “The songs goes like this” and I played it on the acoustic. We went into rehearse it and at the end of the song I said, “That’s it.” They said, “We’re just rehearsing.” I said, “Yeah, but it ain’t gonna get any better. If we do it again it will just make it more sterile.” If you listen to that song then you are hearing our rehearsal. There are a couple of ballads that I layered some guitars and background vocals on but a lot of it is just us jamming.

Walter: I haven’t liked the flavor of the month since 1968 [laughter].

Walter: You’re asking me to say if they are true blues. I’m the guy that pisses off the traditionalists! If you asked me what my definition of the blues is then I would tell you that I don’t’ have any fucking idea. As long as it is emotional, that’s what is important.

I think those guys are great players. I think they are bringing this music to a younger group of people, which is a beautiful thing. They are doing what guys like Mike Bloomfield and Eric Clapton did to my generation. I was just a regular middle class white kid who was listening to the Beatles and the Stones and then guys like Bloomfield and Clapton opened up the blues for me. The idea of lead guitar came from there. That is what Joe and Kenny Wayne are doing. They’re the link to the younger guys out there; I’m an old guy now.

Joe is a really good friend of mine. I recorded with him on an album he did. I just saw him about three weeks ago in Holland. I hung out with him for a long time. He told me that he’s been saying lately in interviews that he wouldn’t have a career without guys like Walter Trout and Gary Moore. I think it is very cool that we opened a door for him and I thanked him profusely. Those guys are players; they are the real deal.

Walter: When people ask me my influences, he’s the first guy I mention. Without Michael Bloomfield then I don’t think I would have been a guitar player. There are certain parts of his music that are not as influential. Near the end of his life, he got so doped out that his playing became a shadow of what it once was.

The moment that changed my life, the moment I knew what I was going to do with my life, was when I was 14. My older brother was always bringing home records because he loved music and he knew that I loved music. He was five years older than me. He was always going, “Listen to this…” He came in one day and he said, “I’m going to play this album because you’ve got to hear this guy play the guitar.” It was the first album by The Paul Butterfield Blues Band. He put it on and on the back of the record it said, “Play this record loud.” We put it on and we cranked it up and we sat there and listened with our jaws on the floor. By the end of that record I knew what I was going to do with my life.

I remember that moment as vividly as I remember hearing about the assignation of JFK or hearing about 9/11 for the first time. That sound of Michael Bloomfield playing on that record was very important to me. His early stuff was it for me.

I have these old recordings of me back in 1969, when I was 18 and I was just starting to play in clubs. I am a direct copy of the guy; I just ripped him off. Eventually, I found my own way. I’m a self-taught guitar player and the way that I learned to play was that I sat down with those records and I learned his solos, note for note. A friend of mine found these recordings and he called me up and said that I had to listen to them. I was just a mimic of Michael Bloomfield back then. Thank God I got past it. I was playing his music note for note, and tone for tone. He was it for me.

Walter: Oh yeah. There is one album that I did with Canned Heat called The Heat Brothers ’84. I got sober in 1987. I’m not sober on this album. As a matter of fact, it wasn’t just booze, it was the glass pipe and the blowtorch. It is horrible. I cannot stand it. Sometimes people will come up to me after a show and they have that album and they ask me to sign it. I tell them, “Do me a favor…take that home and burn it.” It is really embarrassing. Thank God it is not more well known. The reason it is not more well known is because the entire band was vibrating so much, to the point that we were giving off radio signals out of bodies because we were so high. It is horrific. That one is the worst. I made quite a few records where I was pretty drunk and they’re kind of okay.

The first album I made sober was with John Mayall and it was called Chicago Line. If you look up the song I did with Mayall called “One Life to Live” then that is the best solo I ever played on a record with John Mayall or Canned Heat. I had just gotten sober and I was reveling on playing sober on that album. John gave me a really long solo. To this day, I listen to it and just go ‘wow.’ I can tell I am so happy playing it. I’m not dull and I’m not numb. If you can find it then check it out. I’m really proud of that solo because it was the first time I had recorded sober.

Walter: Carlos Santana got me sober. I was playing in East Berlin, Germany. He came up to me after the show and said, “You know what man, you’re just being an asshole. You’re in a famous band and you’re in one of the top slots for blues guitar players. There are 100,000 guitar players out there who would basically give their right ball to be in your slot and you’re so high and drunk on stage that you’re flipping the bird to the one who gave you you’re gift. You’ve got to get serous.”

He gave me a book to read and he spent two more days with me and we had long talks and I got sober and I have been sober ever since, which was 1987.

I had never met Carlos before. He was there with his band and they decided to check out Mayall. I still have that book he gave me. One of the things that was really interesting about that book was that he had written lots of things that were personally interesting to him and he had underlined things and made notations. He wrote a lot of stuff in the back of the book. One of the things that I remember that he wrote is, “My biggest desire is to please God. My biggest obstacle is my ignorance.” He is a neat guy. He changed my life. 　

Walter: That would have been nice to have had happen. It is like asking me if the glass is half empty or half full. It depends on what day you ask me.

I don’t really want to spend time asking “What if?” or “Why not?” I would rather say, “Look what you’ve got.” I’m 60 years old and I’m happy. I have had a long career and I’m still making records and playing for people. I am doing what I love. I try to look at it like that. You mentioned Kenny Wayne Shepherd earlier. He came out really young and he had this great big career but then it kind of went down a bit. Now he has got to spend the rest of his life sort of trying to recapture that. He went from stadiums to theaters and clubs. I don’t want to spend my life being bitter, pissed off or frustrated as that is just too much bullshit for me. I would rather be happy.

I should have been dead. I spent three years in the early ‘70’s living on the streets. I didn’t even play music. I was a heroin addict. I should be dead, let alone having a career and a family. I have a beautiful wife and kids and a nice house. I would rather look at that side of it.

Walter: I observed the way he is a bandleader. He has a very subtle, but very calculated approach to being a bandleader. After five years, I pretty much figured it out. It was very important to him to keep things lighthearted and fun because it can get really tense out there. It was also very important to him for the band to have great chemistry and communication.

We used to play these huge festivals over in Europe in front of 100,000 people. We would have a set list but halfway through the set list, all of a sudden, he forgets the set list and he turns around, calls out a key and he counts to four and you play. You follow him through his movements and through his eyes. I learned from him to get onstage and play spontaneously. I still do that with my band; we don’t even use a set list. I am liable to just turn around and go, “Slow blues in A” and off we go.

He really taught me how to keep the attitude good while you’re on tour. You get tired on the road and there are personality clashes and you may get bad food while you’re on tour. The way of keeping that under the surface, and keeping it from becoming part of the show, is what he taught me. He has an unbelievable sense of humor. I will tell you a story that will sum the man up – I’ve never told this story to anybody outside of the band. He’s known as The Father of British Blues. When I left his band, I told him that I was going to do a tour of Europe with my own band. I told him this when I was out on tour with him and we had a couple of weeks left before I was going to leave. Two weeks later, John comes to me and says, “Walter, when you’re on tour with your own band, by about the second or third week, it is going to start getting tense and people are going to start getting pissed off with each other. When it really gets intense in the van, then I want you to take this out and play it.” He then gives me this package. Sure enough, on the second week of the tour, things are getting tense, and by the third week, everybody wants to kill each other, even though we’re friends. I knew it was time. I unwrapped this tape and I told the band, “John told me that when things got tense we needed to listen to this tape.” I throw in the cassette and it is forty-five minutes of John farting. He carried this little cassette recorder around for a month and every time he had to fart, he recorded it. He had labeled the tape, The Farter of British Blues. I told him later, “Thank you for that tape because by ten minutes into the tape we had tears running down our faces. Every time, after that, when things got tense, we would put on that tape and we ended up having a wonderful tour.

He is like a surrogate father to me. I still talk with him quite a bit. Last year, at the Portland Blues Festival I got up with him and did a whole set. He is a dear, dear friend and I respect him more than just about anybody that I know in this business.

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