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Home , Ernie Watts, Gary Walker (musician), Joe Louis Walker, Jon Tiven, Leon Haywood, Lonnie Mack

Issue #218 LIVING #218 • APRIL 2012 Vol. 43, #2 ® ©

Joe Louis Wa L ker - Lee Gates - k irk F L etcher r oscoe c henier Pau L rishe LL - 2012 B ues Festiva L Guide

Lee Gates roscoe chenier

$6.95 US $6.95 CAN www.livingblues.com 2012 Festival Guide Inside! Joseph A. Rosen Cruise, October 2007. October Rhythm andBluesCruise, Joe LouisWalker Legendary onthe In 1985, after a decade of playing and singing nothing but 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 and . Michael Bloomfield became a close friend and mentor. The two 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 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 founder Bruce Iglauer, who’d met her several years earlier when she was playing with Lonnie Mack at Coco’s in Covington, . 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 ,” 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 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 on 1972’s Nurse Your Nerves, the 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 –pro- duced 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 noted for his work with , Susan a L ker 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 ROW - Kenny Armstrong, Melvyn Booker Micheal Robinson, Willie Myers, Shorty. a L ker

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 recording session, 1997. a L ker a L ker 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 , 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 ,” 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 . “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 reached No. 38 on Billboard’s Heatseekers t 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 –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 . 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 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 . 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. “But then, I was younger than they intense Little Richard–like tones over the studio was, so I spent a lot of time at the Fillmore band’s throbbing rock beat. An Ikettes-style Auditorium seeing all the English groups and female group—actually Wendy Moten’s over- seeing [saxophonist] Rahsaan Roland Kirk and dubbed voices—chimes in with “black girls” seeing all those motherfuckers stretch out. behind Walker before he rips into a ringing Ike “When Tom wrote What’s It Worth and Turner–inspired . He concludes the I wrote Hellfire and Richard [Fleming] and Tom tune singing, “She be rollin’ on the river.” “Rol-

helped me finish it, I wanted the guitar to be a L ker lin’, rollin’, rollin’,” the multiple Motens answer. like hellfire. For What’s It Worth, I wanted to W “I did an interview with one of the show the despair, ’cause it’s like a Shakespeare ouis big, big writers on a radio station, who said, L oe

thing to me: ‘What is it worth to gain the J ‘Don’t you think Black Girls might be a little world and lose your soul?’ Well, this is what bit too controversial?’” Walker says. “I said,

you sound like; you sound half-assed crazy, courtesy “Where Jo and I were coming from was I but everybody’s been there and done that.” Joe Louis Walker performing at the San grew up listening to the Ike and Tina Turner Other than I’m Moving On, the 1950 Francisco Blues Festival, 1985. Revue live, Mad Dogs and Englishmen live, country hit that Mick [Jagger] with Merry Clayton live. There revamped nine years later, all songs on was a sound that went with all that, and the Hellfire come from the pens of Walker and California, wrote most of the lyrics to the al- black girls were a big part of that sound. You his frequent songwriter partner JoJo Russo and bum’s two most humorous tunes: Too Drunk don’t have that now. Beyoncé is not part of Hambridge and his writing partner Fleming. to Drive Drunk and Black Girls. that sound to me, even though she’s black. Russo, who owns an auto shop in Pittsburg, “The blues I’ve been hearing lately, it Joss Stone is not part of that sound, even

12 • LIVING BLUES • April 2012 Joe Louis Walker playing Month Club, 1997’s Great Guitars (featur- 12-string acoustic ing with Little Charlie Baty, Clarence at the Bruno Walter “Gatemouth” Brown, , Buddy Guy, Auditorium, Library for Robert Jr. Lockwood, , , the Performing Arts, Matt Murphy, , Otis Rush, Ike Lincoln Center, New York Turner, and Cropper), and 1998’s made-in- City, November 9, 1989. Muscle Shoals Preacher and the President. “If I’m gonna hire a producer and work with a producer like I worked with Cropper and Tony Visconti and Jon Tiven, I’m gonna let ’em do what they do,” the guitarist says. “Every time I made a suggestion to Cropper, hotos P

W he said, ‘Go home and listen to it.’ He was o r always right. When it came to Cropper’s ront judgment about mixing stuff, he was always -F right. He just was never wrong. He was really humble and low-key about it. He coulda said, artoogian “Hey, I mixed . I mixed Wilson V

ack Pickett.’ He never came off like that. It’s real J though she’s white but sounds black. It’s like Joe Louis Walker laughing it up with Ray [Charles] with Margie Hendricks. You very , December 2011. rarely find that sound anymore. I can’t name anybody who does it. “I give a disclaimer at the beginning of the song at every show,” he adds, “so nobody get to thinking it’s a racial thing. It’s not a racial thing; it’s a sound thing.” Hambridge, the guitarist feels, proved to be an ideal drummer. “It’s always great to have a singin’ drummer,” Walker explains. “Like Percy Mayfield use to say, ‘If you don’t know my lyrics, you don’t know where the punch line at.’ A lot of guys figure, ‘I got seven drums. I gotta hit every one of ’em.’ Well, you really don’t. Tom’s a singin’ drummer, so he doesn’t overplay and he leaves room for the punch lines, the pickups. A lot of guys don’t even know about the pickup, man. The pickup is where there’s a space and in that space, who’s gonna take that space? Is it gonna be a drum roll? Is it gonna be a paradiddle? Is it gonna be a guitar lick? Is it gonna be “I can’t get no” [as in ’ Satisfaction]. If that was a space, the average drummer woulda played through it, but had sense enough to know by not playin’. “On Hellfire, you heard that foot goin’,” Walker adds, referring to Hambridge’s bass drum pattern. “That’s the kinda shit I like. Reminds me of the way [Oakland drummer David] Boyette used to play. When he played Don’t Cry No More with my cousin [bassist] Ted Wysinger, that used to knock me out. You know that part where it’s just the drums and the singer? Frankie Lee used to sing the shit out of that.” Walker also was impressed with Ham- bridge’s rock-like mixes of the songs on the a L ker CD. The guitarist says he learned to trust his W ouis producers’ judgments in such matters from L oe having worked with on three J Verve/Gitanes albums: 1995’s Blues of the courtesy

April 2012 • LIVING BLUES • 13 refreshing when you find that your heroes are Joe Louis Walker at the Vermont Blues people that are really down to earth. Festival, August 2010. “With Hambridge, it’s the same way. He knows how to mix for radio. He’s got his finger on it. I think that’s why he’s doing now and that’s why Thoro- good’s record went up the charts. And that’s why he mixed B.B. and Buddy a little bit hot. He didn’t mix it like a blues record.” About his earlier work with Cropper, Walker also says, “He’s in a world of his own because of working with everybody from Pops Staples and to and Rod Stewart to me. He can put himself in so many different categories and know how to get the best out of you. Crop is the one who got me, if I was singing in the key of E, to sing it in F to get a little strain on your voice. He got me doing that. That’s why I’m hitting all those high notes. He’d say, ‘Okay, I know you can sing it in G. Now sing it in A.’ I’d say, ‘I can’t sing it in A,’ and he’d say, ‘Well, try A flat.’ Crop’s got all those sorts of tricks and things from being in the music with so many great people.” Walker’s intense, raspy vocals on Black Girls and some of the other songs on Hell- fire, as well as his preaching introduction to Soldier for Jesus, bring Little Richard to mind, although he says that Richard was not an influence on his singing style. The guitarist cites , , and Otis Redding as his main vocal influences. (Red- ding, of course, was strongly influenced by Richard, which would make Walker an indirect Little Richard disciple.) “I wouldn’t even go try to be like Sam,” the guitarist says. “Otis early, when he was hitting all them high notes, but more Bobby, that preaching and singing at the same time. That record More Than I Can Stand always affected me because he’s basically preaching. My grandmother used to tell me, ‘Joe, we wanted you to be a preacher.’ Then, before my grandmother died, she said, ‘Joe, you are a preacher. You just don’t know it.’” On earlier recordings, Walker sometimes used African American gospel quartets—the Spiritual Corinthians and the Gospel Hum- mingbirds—for backup vocals. On two tracks on Hellfire—Soldier for Jesus and Don’t Cry— he hired , the studio singing group known for their work with , Tennessee Ernie Ford, , and countless other pop and country artists. Soldier for Jesus is perhaps the first gospel recording on which a black singer has been backed by a white quartet since Doris Akers made an album for RCA Victor with the Statesmen Quartet in 1964. Walker met the Jordanaires, who had osen begun their career singing gospel music, through original Presley guitarist Scotty A. R oseph J

14 • LIVING BLUES • April 2012 Moore. “I played at the Lincoln Monument on church,” Walker says. “My first opening-up and a half years frequently performed there the Fourth of July about 17 or 18 years ago,” gig at the Matrix, when I left home, was with a band featuring himself, Algerian blues Walker recalls. “Some genius—I don’t know for Mississippi Fred McDowell, who had the singer-guitarist Amar Sundy, and American who this motherfucker was—put me on as the dichotomy of playing church music and play- guitarist Murali Coryell, who also plays in his headliner above with D.J. Fontana ing secular music. Same with Son House. A U.S. band. and Scotty Moore backing him. lot of people gravitate toward . “Murali,” Walker says, “plays like his “I developed a close relationship with Scot- Well, I gravitate toward Son House because pop [ guitarist Larry Coryell], and he can ty and D.J. Fontana. who is one of the greatest of what he went through. All his life was that play like Freddy King. And Amar is from the drummers I’ve ever heard. When it came time dichotomy, and it’s sort of been a dichotomy Tuareg tribe. He does Saharan blues. When I to induct them into the Memphis Music Hall of for me in a way, too. met Amar, he was playing with Albert King. Fame, along with Gatemouth Moore and Alex “I came out of church, and both of my We took it all and mixed it together. The Chilton, Scotty called me and said, ‘Would you grandmothers were Bible-thumpers. My father people all over Europe really like it. come and sing ?’ sent me to Catholic school for six years, and “It put us in a different category. Not only “When I warm up, I don’t warm up with that affected me. And I was with the Corinthi- are we able to mix those three styles, but we scales,” he adds. “I go back and start singing ans for ten years, and that affected me. But in also speak several languages. We would do one gospel songs. I might sing Hem of His Gar- the grand scheme of things, there’s that saying, song—Amar might sing it in Tuareg or in French ment or I’m on the Right Track Now—things ‘While we’re making plans, God’s laughing.’ and Murali might sing that same song in Span- I did with the Corinthians. Ray Walker and “Some people believe that you won’t pay ish and a little bit of Russian and I would sing them from the Jordanaires heard me. I was anything for your actions here. Some people the same song in Wolof, which is a dialect of working on a song called Soldier for Jesus and believe that you will pay for your actions here. Senegalese. I lived in France for two years, and he heard me. He said, ‘Joe, I never met you I’m sort of in the middle.” most of my partners were from Algeria or Sen- before, but we gotta do that song.’ This was Between 1992 and ’99, Walker made egal, so I just learned certain Arabic phrases. years ago, but the opportunity never arose.” six CDs for Gitanes Blues Productions, a People in Spain would go crazy when Murali Walker and the Jordanaires finally got to division of Polydor/PolyGram France. The would sing a verse in Spanish or Amir would do Soldier for Jesus on Hellfire, but the two first five were issued in the U.S. on Verve, sing a verse in French or African. He speaks Walkers’ original idea had been to do a whole the last on Blue Thumb. In addition to the Spanish also. If we were doing something in album with the Jordanaires and the Blind Boys aforementioned pickers on Great Guitars, Paris, we’d do it in all languages. of Alabama featuring Clarence Fountain. “We Walker’s guests on those recordings included “That’s what I believe music is sort of wanted to bring so-called white gospel and Terry Adams, , Angela Strehli, coming to, like a global village. Look at Mick black gospel together,” the guitarist explains. , Alvin Youngblood Hart, and Jagger’s new group, New Super Heavies. He’s “Ray turned to me and said, ‘You know, Joe, Kenny “Blues Boss” Wayne. got the guy from Slumdog Millionaire, A.R. I’ve been talking to Clarence about us doing a The first decade of the present century Rahman. He’s got Damian Marley. He’s got record with them. I called Clarence and found found Walker bouncing from label to label. He Joss Stone. Mick’s not even the lead singer, out that he was on kidney dialysis and had made one CD for Telarc with producer Randy but it’s a smart move because that makes the diabetes and that the Blind Boys were suing Labbe and a rhythm section that included world. It used to be all about English. Now each other. I still want to do that record. onetime Saturday Night Live guitarist G.E. it ain’t all about English. You can ingratiate “It’s sort of like a microcosm of Ameri- Smith, another for Evidence with produc- yourself, you know, by speaking a little bit of can music. You take Booker T. and the MG’s— ers and Brian Brinkerhoff and a somebody’s language. I can speak a little Ger- two white, two black—or any of those groups; band that included trumpeter , man. I can speak a little Norwegian. It really they were all mixed and everybody brought saxophonist Ernie Watts, organist Barry helps show the people that you’re putting a something to the table. To me, that’s the real Goldberg, guitarist , bassist foot forward.” good thing about American music. It’s just , drummer Leon Ngudu Chancler, For the time being, however, Walker has not one thing. It’s a lot of things that go into and percussionist Master Henry , three put his multicultural project with Amir and it. All of it ain’t white. All of it ain’t black. All self-produced albums for the English JSP label Coryell on hold in order to promote the music of it ain’t Chicano. It’s American music. (one co-billed with Otis Grand), another self- from Hellfire. He seems elated to have found “Always had to serve two masters—good produced disc for Blues Bureau International, a home at Alligator, where he’s signed for and bad, left and right. Devil’s sittin’ on my and two for Stony Plain with Duke Robillard. three albums. shoulder, and the angels cry with all their That decade was a rough one for Walker. “The real star of this record, if there are might,” Walker wails on Hellfire’s title track. “I went through a pretty bad divorce,” he any stars, is Tom Hambridge. He let me do He ends the song, however, with “Holy Ghost says. He eventually won a bitter custody what to do. Me and him wrote 13 songs in is on my shoulder. I know it,” as if to say God battle over their two daughters and managed two days, and we didn’t even use half of ’em. has triumphed over Satan in his life. It’s the to block his ex-wife from attaching his record- “The other star of it was Bruce Iglauer— latest in a series of Walker songs about good ing and songwriting royalties. He moved from I’m not suckin’ up; I’m not that type of and evil and heaven and hell, including I’ll Pittsburg, California, in 2004, spent two and a guy—for pulling out all the stops to make Get to Heaven on My Own from 1979’s Blue half years in three different French cities, lived everybody get it like he’s got it, to make sure Soul on HighTone and If There’s a Heaven in San Leandro, California, for a year, and four everybody knows that this is what Joe can from 2009’s Between a Rock and the Blues years ago settled with his new wife and his do, this is what he’s capable of doing. You’re on Stony Plain. (Billy Branch, with Walker on daughters Berneice and Lena in Westchester, heard him do a little bit of this and a little bit guitar, does a version of I’ll Get to Heaven on New York. Berneice, now 21, recently moved of that, but, hey, this is what he really can do. My Own on his new The Devil Ain’t Got into her own apartment. Lena, 17, is currently “Since I’ve been signed to Alligator, No Music CD.) one of two backup vocalists in his band. I’m concentrating on doing justice by “I’ve had the experience of playing in The guitarist has long spent much of his Alligator like they’re doing justice by church and the experience of not playing in time in Europe and for the past three years me.”

April 2012 • LIVING BLUES • 15