Joe Louis Walker

Issue #218 LIVING BLUES #218 • APRIL 2012 Vol. 43, #2 ® © JOE LOUIS WA JOE LOUIS L KER - LEE GATES - KER - LEE GATES WALKER K IRK F L ETCHER - R LEE GATES OSCOE C HENIER - PAU KIRK L RISHE FLETCHER LL - 2012 B L UES FESTIVA ROSCOE L GUIDE CHENIER $6.95 US $6.95 CAN www.livingblues.com 2012 Festival Guide Inside! Joseph A. Rosen Rhythm andBluesCruise,Rhythm October 2007. onthe Legendary Joe LouisWalker In 1985, after a decade of playing and singing nothing but gospel music with a quartet called the Spiritual Corinthians, 35-year-old Joe Louis Walker decided to get back to the blues. The San Francisco–born singer-guitarist had begun playing blues when he was 14, at first with a band of relatives and then with blues-singing pimp Fillmore Slim before becoming a fixture at the Matrix, the city’s preeminent rock club during the psychedelic Summer of Love, backing such visiting artists as Earl Hooker and Magic Sam. Michael Bloomfield became a close friend and mentor. The two musicians lived together for a period, and the famous guitarist even produced a Walker demo for Buddah Records, though nothing came of it. Then, in 1975, Walker walked away from the blues completely in order to escape the fast life and the drugs and alcohol associated with it that he saw negatively affecting Bloomfield and other musician friends. Walker knew nothing about the blues business when he started doing blues gigs again around the Bay Area with a band he’d put together, as a member of Oakland blues singer-guitarist Haskell “Cool Papa” Sadler’s band, and (for a tour of Europe) with the ad hoc Mississippi Delta Blues Band. Nancy Wright, the tenor saxophonist in his band at the time, did have a connection in the business, however. She was friends with Alligator Records founder Bruce Iglauer, who’d met her several years earlier when she was playing with Lonnie Mack at Coco’s in Covington, Kentucky. Unbeknownst to Walker, Wright had mailed Iglauer a cassette tape of a set she’d played with him at the Saloon, a blues dive on Grant Avenue in San Francisco’s North Beach district. The producer was impressed enough to, while passing through the Bay Area, attend a gig Walker was doing with Cool Papa’s band up the street at the Grant and Green club. Wright went with him. “I remember him being essentially a featured sideman,” Iglauer says 26 years later. “I could tell there was talent there, but I think part of my hesitation was that I was looking for somebody who had moved to being a bandleader himself and was out on his own.” After returning from Europe with the Mississippi Delta Blues Band, Walker used his savings from the trip to cut a professional demo at the end of a Troyce Key session at harmonica blower Dave Wellhausen’s San Francisco studio. Walker mailed one to Iglauer, but again, the producer was impressed but not enough to sign him. He suggested that Walker contact HighTone Records, a three-year-old Oakland label that was on the verge of finding huge success with the Robert Cray Band. Walker signed with HighTone, which issued his album Cold Is the Night in September 1986. Produced by Bruce Bromberg and Dennis Walker, it was the first recording to appear under his own name. He had earlier played lead guitar on 1972’s Nurse Your Nerves, the funk B-side of Lady in Red, a local R&B hit on the Fish label by the Richmond, California, soft-soul vocal quintet Chain Reaction. He also played guitar and did harmony vocals on the ultra-obscure, self-released 1985 LP God Will Provide by the Spiritual Corinthians. Cold Is the Night, the first of his five HighTone albums, marked the beginning of Walker’s prolific career as one of the most important blues stylists of his generation. by Lee Hildebrand “I come out of the church,” Walker says now. “I was looking for my own sound, and when I talked to Bruce Bromberg and Dennis, they had guys like me in mind. I’d never heard of Robert Cray in my life. They didn’t mention Robert Cray, but they said, ‘We’ve got a guy sort of like you who does some subtle things, some rockin’ things, and some soul things.’ We hit it off right away. Bruce Bromberg was the real conduit for me. He let me be who I was gonna be. He was gonna take a chance on me. I always say that HighTone Records took me from nobody to become somebody.” Fast-forwarding 25 years and 20 albums later, Walker found himself without a recording contract after making two Duke Robillard–produced CDs for Stony Plain Music in Canada. Pooling their money, Walker, his wife, Robin Poritzky Walker, and his manager, David L. Jones, pooled their money and hired Tom Ham- bridge, a Nashville producer and songwriter ker noted for his work with Buddy Guy, Susan L a W ouis L oe J courtesy (above) The West Coast Corinthians in Oakland , California, 1977, TOP ROW - Lloyd Batton, Gary Walker, Wig, Charles Williams, Joe Louis Walker,Danny Boone. BOTTOM ker L ROW - Kenny Armstrong, Melvyn Booker Micheal Robinson, Willie Myers, Shorty. a W (left) Joe Louis Walker and band at Leon Haywood’s studio 1986, during The Gift ouis L recording sessions. L-R Jimi Stewart, Kelvin Dixon, Joe Louis Walker, and Henry Oden. oe J courtesy Ike Turner and Joe Louis Walker at the Great Guitars recording session, 1997. ker ker L L a a W W ouis ouis L L oe oe J J B.B. King and Joe Louis Walker, c. 1988. courtesy courtesy 10 • LIVING BLUES • April 2012 Tedeschi, and George Thorogood, to record an Joe Louis Walker playing at the lone Star Café in New York, album that Jones would shop around. April 24, 1988. “We put up quite a bit of money to make a record with Tom Hambridge,” Walker explains. “He’d asked me three times to make a record, and the third time I acquiesced, but we had to come up with the money.” A copy of the master landed on Iglauer’s desk at Alligator in Chicago. “I put it on, and I was just floored,” Iglauer says. “It was such an energetic, tough, and soulful record. I’ve always considered Joe to be an astoundingly good and deeply soulful singer, and the vocals just kill me on this record. His playing is right on the edge of blues and rock because, of course, his roots are as much in rock as they are in blues guitar-wise. I’ve got a lot of Joe’s records, and I was immediately struck by the energy level of this one. It just seemed like he’d gone into another gear. I immediately expressed very strong interest in picking up the master for Alligator.” Released January 31, Hellfire looks like it’s going to be Walker’s biggest album to date based on early sales and airplay. It onelli t reached No. 38 on Billboard’s Heatseekers chart, as well as No. 11 on the magazine’s enato r Blues chart, for the week ending February 5. It’s also his rockinest album to date, rife and a blues shuffle, I’m on to You, on which “Peter came to my 50th birthday party, and with hard-socking bass-and-drum grooves, Walker plays high-pitched Jimmy Reed–style I played on his comeback album, the second pounding piano, blistering guitar, and impas- harmonica as well as guitar. one,” Walker says. “He has always played, for sioned vocals. Two songs—the rocking title track and my taste, a very emotional style. He’s like the “This isn’t a blues record,” Walker the loping What’s It Worth—find Walker play- English version of Otis Rush. Peter will admit claims. “I’ve never been a pure-d 12-bar blues ing feedback-fueled psychedelic guitar. He’d that he listened to Otis Rush because he’s got guy.” The 11-song disc does, however, include played that way only once before on record, that same sort of anguish in real life.” a slow minor-key blues titled I Won’t Do That on Highview, an instrumental from his 2008 Walker’s use of controlled feedback on Stony Plain CD Witness to the Blues. The the two tunes from Hellfire is more radical J acques song, he says, was a homage to his friend Pe- than on Highview, however. He did it that D ter Green of John Mayall and early Fleetwood way, he says, in order better to fit the lyrics of epoorter Mac renown. the songs. Joe Louis Walker with Henry Oden performing at the Richmond, Brighton, England, November 18, 1987. Joe Louis Walker playing at the Banana Peel, Ruiselede, Belgium, arris H October 30, 1985. aul p April 2012 • LIVING BLUES • 11 Joe Louis Walker performing at Central Park SummerStage, New York City, July 26, 1997. hotos P W o r ront -F artoogian V ack J “I come up learning guitar from Claude sounds like rock and roll. I been wondering High and the Hightones, where you had to what in the world happened to all that soul. play Honky Tonk right,” Walker says, referring We got to have those black girls to put the to a popular Bay Area guitarist and band from soul back up in your song,” Walker wails in the 1960s.

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