Rory Gallagher: The 1991 Interview

Rory Gallagher threw every fibre of his being into his music. Scrappy, unabashed, and bluesy to the core, he was a sublime guitarist and compelling singer. His live and studio recordings, especially during the 1970s, deliver strength, wisdom, and inspiration. Personally, I count him among my favorite guitarists. I seldom travel without his music and sometimes listen to him for weeks on end.

During my decades as an editor for Guitar Player magazine, Rory was high on my wish-list for interviews. The trouble was, after the 1970s, he only played the San Francisco Bay area three times. I was on the road during his 1982 and 1985 appearances. Then, after a six-year hiatus, it was announced that Rory was coming back to the United States to promote a new album, Fresh Evidence. His brother and manager, Donal Gallagher, sent word that Rory would be happy to speak with me.

We met backstage at the Catalyst Club in Santa Cruz, California, on the afternoon of March 15, 1991. I quickly discovered that Rory was charming and enthusiastic and highly intelligent. Here, for the first time, is a complete transcript of that interview.

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You’ve stayed true to the music that inspired you in the beginning.

Yeah, I think that you have to recognize the kind of source point that you have. Even though you develop as a player over the years and you get influenced by different things, you have to keep to the heart of what you started with, that kind of initial vision of music, you know? Obviously, it’s taken me this amount of time to learn a lot of different things about music and playing and so on, but I think I’m getting there slowly. [Laughs.]

You seem to gravitate toward roots American music.

Yeah. Even though I grew up in Ireland, where there’s a lot of folk music and traditional music is very close at hand, it didn’t initially appeal to me, even though I can see traces of it creeping in over the years in my songwriting and some chord patterns and some kinds of solos I do. But I wasn’t really turned on until I heard American music via Lonnie Donegan. You know, I heard him doing Woody Guthrie songs, Lead Belly songs. And of course, I heard Elvis Presley and Eddie Cochrane, the early rockers, Chuck Berry. So it was a mixture of folk, blues, and rock from America. I was only six, seven, eight, nine, at that age, and then I just followed it through and learned about all these artists. And I’m still discovering undiscovered people and learning. But it took me about a good ten or fifteen years to find out who was who in the whole spectrum of things – who were the originators or the prime movers, and who were the followers and copyists.

Are there records you'd recommend for young players who aren’t acquainted with Son House and other early bluesmen?

Well, I mean, everyone is stating the obvious Robert Johnson connection. He seems to be the virtuoso of that era, of that point, but Son House would be very important inasmuch as he gave lessons, I believe, to Robert Johnson. He probably wrote “Walkin’ Blues,” for instance. And Muddy Waters also claims that Son House was important at the time.

It depends. You see, it’s very hard to dictate to some youngster who might listen to Albert King and immediately see themselves in that lineage. I think all young rock and blues players should dig deeper, back beyond the obvious big blues stars like B.B. King and Buddy Guy, who are all great. I’m very interested also in the country blues and the “electrified country blues,” as I would call it – Big Joe Williams and things like that. I also like all the slide players from Earl Hooker through Muddy Waters, obviously. Robert Nighthawk is a favorite of mine, and I eventually discovered Tampa Red kind of late on, and he’s very smooth-playing. Like that lick that Muddy Waters is known for – we all thought that was an original Muddy Waters thing, but he got it from Tampa Red. So this folk music tradition of passing on and picking up and stealing goes on like mad, you know.

But in my own style, being a European very influenced by American music and so on, I try to find a way that if I’m doing a blues number, I can do it very traditional if I want to. I can also add my own element or my own twists to it and have it be a rock song with a blues thing in it. I try to be adventurous and progressive in some material, in others I try to be as downhome and ethnic as possible.

We hear that on your performance of Son House’s “Empire State Express.”

Yeah. That was as close to . . . I did that in one take, on purpose. I did that on St. Patrick’s night, oddly enough, just last year. It was the last track on the album [Fresh Evidence], and I loved the song. I’d lost the [Son House] album that I had, so I had to remember it. Luckily I had written the lyrics down. I do it close enough to Son House’s style. To sing it in the tempo I was doing, I had to slightly adjust the rhythm a bit, but I thought it was great song. I thought it was a very overlooked song, you know? Al Wilson of Canned Heat played a National guitar on one or two tracks of that particular album.

That’s Son House’s Death Letter album?

That’s right – with “Pearline” and “John the Revelator”— that’s another great song on that. And then “Ghost Blues” [on Fresh Evidence] – that’s quite traditional in its approach with the National. The mood also on – what do you call it? “Middle Name” – the guitar on that is more like a Slim Harpo record. So it happens, all kinds of references all over the place. There are a couple of rock tracks alright – “Kid Gloves, “Slumming Angel,” and “Walking Wounded.” The rest are very much in the blues field, I think. “The King of Zydeco,” even though it’s about Clifton Chenier, it’s almost countryish more than zydeco in the feel, but by the time the accordion comes in and the maracas, it is . . . . We did try the washboard on it to see if it gets it – you know, his brother’s “rub board,” as they call it – but it didn’t work in that song. We laid down another track, called “Never Asked You for Nothin’,” which nearly made it to the album, but it’s one of those fifteenth songs that could crop up again, you know. And we were lucky enough to find this guy, Geraint Watkins, who’s an enthusiast of Cajun music and zydeco music and plays great boogie-woogie piano and rock and roll piano. He’s played a lot with Dave Edmunds and he’s played piano with the Stray Cats and so on, and he has his own group called the Balham Alligators. Balham is an area in South London, so it’s a bit of a funny name, really, just a ludicrous name. That’s the way he is.

Also, production-wise, I was very keen on the album before, which was called Defender, which had a lot of blues elements in it as well, but it’s more of a rock production, whereas this [Fresh Evidence] is kind of – not mellow, but we didn’t overdo the compression and we didn’t overdo the cleaning up and the noise gates and things like that. We left it fairly wooly and casual, which is the way I think suits the songs, you know? I hope people catch up on Defender, because that’s an album that’s still quite current in the set, even though we move the repertoire around every night.

What year was Defender?

Two years ago.

It was released in England?

Released in England and all over Europe. It will be released here in two weeks’ time, in fact, so it will be running concurrently with this new album. But obviously the emphasis is on Fresh Evidence. Defender has some rock songs, some tough songs like “Kickback City” and “Road to Hell,” but there are some blues songs. Like, one of the numbers we do is called “Continental Op,” which was influenced by Dashiell Hammett – that’s one of his characters. Even though it’s a rock boogie feel, it’s very much a John Lee Hooker chording, with suspended fourths and things like that. It also had a song called “Loanshark Blues,” which was there again a bit like a Slim Harpo “Shake Your Hips” type of feel, but it had some nice lyrics about a down-and-out guy in debt to the loan shark – very fast, alliteration-type lyrics. There’s a song called “Ain’t No Saint,” which is very much an Albert Collins-Albert King feel. I’d like to get to the point where it will be a Rory Gallagher feel rather than . . . . But you have to refer to all these inspirers or influences, you know.

Although there is definitely a Rory Gallagher feel. For example, there's a continuum between songs like “Slumming Angel” and “Living Like a Trucker.”

“Living Like a Trucker” – I remember that one quite well because we had the clavinet with the wah-wah. I was so straight-laced then, I wouldn’t play a wah-wah pedal myself. It’s like somebody joked to me the other night – they were disappointed to hear certain equipment I was using. They didn’t even want me to use electricity. Some people have this image of you as so purist that you wouldn’t even use . . . you know [laughs].

They’ve obviously never heard Taste at the Isle of Wight.

Right. But this is the way it goes. But “Living Like a Trucker,” I like that track myself. All those albums will come out in the next year or two on IRS on CD, with lyric sheets. And some will be slightly remixed and EQ’d for CD. With this absence behind me, it’ll be great to have all my old material out again and people can look at it and see if it’s held up in court or if it’s not. I think it hasn’t dated too badly.

When you’re recording solos, what do you expect from yourself? What should a Rory Gallagher solo be about?

I try to split the difference between being fairly clever and technical, and still primitive. Because I think if it’s just a technical exercise, that’s all very well. Even if a solo has to lean towards the primitive, so be it. It depends on the song, if you have to play very calculated or if you’re overdubbing the solo sometimes. You know, I used to always go for live leads, mistakes and all, just for feel. But now if a certain song needs a very sort of melodic type of solo, I’m prepared to work on it over and over. But I try not to get in the habit of dropping in [punching in notes] because it’s very tempting to get the perfect solo. I have been guilty of it once or twice, but only just to save it if you’re on a great direction. But as a rule I try to keep a grip on technology, so it doesn’t take the human factor out of it and you get too lazy about things, you know.

Has technology impacted the way you make records? Was recording the new album different than, say, recording Blueprint or Tattoo?

A little bit different, yeah. Of course, we’ve got the 24-track. Both of these albums were 8-track. When we went 16-track, I thought that was the year 2000! In fact, on this album we brought in tape echoes, spring reverb. We tried to use more vintage equipment. We did use, obviously, certain modern EQ’s. I’m not that mad about digital equipment, and obviously if you had to clean up something, you would use a noise gate – you know, very subtly. But performance-wise, I don’t think there’s that much difference, except that we probably were a bit more rigid in those days about getting it. We still try to get it in the first take. I would repair something now if I thought it was a great performance, whereas in the early days, just because of a repair we could have saved some tracks, but we were very keen with getting it as-was, even with the Telecaster whistling and everything. It was ridiculous, that kind of attitude, but that’s the way I thought. We needn’t have been so strict with ourselves, but that’s the way we were. I had the same attitude to echo, as well. I was very conservative in that area, which probably was a mistake. But you learn as you go along. It also depends on the engineer that you’re working with and the confidence you have in him and the whole sound and feel. I still think the approach for performance isn’t that different from the early records, but we’re probably a little more aware of what’s sonically possible now and what we can do. And also all those early albums were done in three to six weeks, whereas albums now take six months, nearly, like with this album, between remixes and retakes and what have you.

Did you try to avoid layering tracks and go for live as much as possible?

Yes, in general. I also went for a strong rhythm guitar part in tracks like “Middle Name” and “King of Zydeco” and “Walkin’ Wounded.” Instead of the Strat, for instance, I’ve got this small Chet Atkins Gretsch which is great for rhythm with fairly heavy strings – not the Eddie Cochrane model, the Les Paul-shaped one, the little orange one. That was great for rhythm. And I used a Les Paul Junior on the rhythm part of “Kid Gloves” and also the rhythm part of “Walkin’ Wounded.” Even though I’m identified with the Strat and I like the Strat, I think if you have Strat rhythm and Strat lead, except in a Hendrix situation, it can be a little bit one-dimensional. So it’s nice to have an alternative guitar to broaden the sounds. Even a Telecaster sounds good for rhythm and then Strat for lead, depending on the track.

Do you still have the old Stratocaster that you used on the early records?

Yes. It’s super-glued together.

Like Albert King’s Flying V guitar – it recently fell into a river and had to be super-glued back together.

I always like the out-of-phase sound Albert had, but he would never give you any information about his tuning or anything. Also, he was one of the few bluesmen that I know that was using Acoustic transistor amps, solid state, which had a distortion control on them. Steve Winwood used to use one alright when he was with Blind Faith. And I think on the Gary Moore album, when Albert was working on it, he was actually playing through a Roland JC-120, which is a transistor. So obviously he’s at home with them. But then the pickups on the Flying V’s are very full and warm, and they can take the match-up with the solid state.

When Albert sent the guitar back to the guy who built it, Dan Erlewine, he put it in a burlap sack without a case, wrapped some rope around it, and shipped it by Greyhound bus.

God almighty!

Dan asked Albert why he did it, and Albert told him it was too good a case to risk having anything happen to it.

[Laughs.] That’s funny. That’s strange.

That’s Albert.

It’s like the story of Mike Bloomfield showing up to record with Bob Dylan with the Telecaster without a case, in a zipper bag. That casual thing is great, you know. Everything’s gone into flight cases now. But we still have a few funky areas left in terms of cases. But the more you travel around the world, you really have to be cautious of your instruments, because it’s only when they stolen or get broken that you really miss them at that particular show.

Have you lost instruments?

I did actually have the Stratocaster stolen in Dublin in the ’60s, and I got it back after two weeks because they had a police program on TV and they put it on there. I lost a Telecaster at the same time – somebody broke into the van and stole the Strat and a Telecaster, which was only on loan to me. That never came back. I got the Strat back, though. It was found over a ditch, with a few extra scratches from the brambles and things. It had been out in the rain, as well. So I swore I’d never sell it or paint it after that. I had to borrow a guitar to get me through that fortnight. I had given of hope in getting it back, and I really couldn’t afford another Strat at that time. I was playing a Burns which a roadie had leant me. But that’s the way it goes. But the Strat is playing well. Obviously, machine heads, frets, pots, and things have been changed over the years, but it’s still the same.

Do you know the year it was made?

It’s November ’61, and I got it in August of ’63. So it was second-hand. It was the first Stratocaster in Ireland, apparently, but the guy who ordered it wanted a red one, like Hank Marvin, and they sent him a sunburst one instead. So he had to wait for a year-and-a-half or whatever to get the red one, and then he sold this one through the shop. So I got it. Prior to that, I had loan of a guitar. I had one electric Solid 7, which was an Italian, very flimsy guitar, which used to distort and everything through this four-watt Little Giant amplifier I had. I wish I had it now as a tune-up amp, because it was like a Pignose type of sound. In those days, you were trying to get the clean sound of Hank Marvin and the Ventures, or whatever. Buddy Holly. But when I got the Strat, I was set.

It must have been a happy day for you.

Oh, it was. I mean, for weeks, every morning I would wake up, I’d go over and look at the guitar in the case, and treat it like a living being or some kind of magical thing. Even the smell of the case – I mean, I was really standing on my head at that time.

Do you still travel with it?

Oh, I do, yeah. I don’t necessarily carry it myself on the plane, but we’ve got it taken care of. We watch it. Luckily, I have a ’57 as well, which is in great condition. I got that from a guitar player named Robert Johnson, of all people, who was based in Memphis at the time and worked with John Entwistle. And it’s a great guitar. I use that on the albums when I don’t use the old Strat. It’s more a Fifties sound – it’s more of a clean, rockabilly, Buddy Holly sound. It has a maple neck, and it’s good if you want a really zingy sound. Because my old Strat is a classic Strat, I suppose. Because of the age and sweat in it and everything else, the tone is a lot dirtier, raunchier, than your standard Strat. It borders on the sound of an SG almost, sometimes, or a real raw Tele, which suits me. But the ’57 is nice. All I’ve done to that was put the big frets on – I like the jumbo frets. And I also disconnect the middle control, which is the tone pot for the rhythm pickup. So on both Strats I have the lower tone pot as a master tone. I like that on a Telecaster you can adjust the tone on the lead pickup. But I think the idea that Fender had was that in those days you played rhythm on the rhythm pickup and then you clicked into the “Peggy Sue” position and went for it. In the early days, you see, some bands didn’t have bass or bass guitar, as you know. The same with the Telecasters – in the rhythm position, that big capacitor creates big, boomy bass lines. In fact, Muddy Waters, up until a couple of years before he died, he left his guitar in that style, so he could great that real boomy rhythm thing, you know.

Muddy played that Tele to the very end, as far as I know.

The red Tele. Apparently the neck was a replacement neck. The guitar was originally blonde, and Fender of Chicago – there must have been a branch there – gave him a neck with an extra-thick back to it, so that’s what happened there. But Muddy had a great feel. Even when he wasn’t playing slide, the figures he would play – particularly with Jimmy Rogers and, of course, Sam Lawhorn, who just passed away fairly lately.

You were lucky to have worked on The London Muddy Waters Sessions.

Yeah, I was. Haunted. Originally Al Kooper was going to produce that album, and he made the call. They changed producers then, and the project was back on. But I was obviously delighted. It was three nights. I was playing every night, gigs, at the same time, and they would hold up the session till midnight till I got there. And he was sitting there tuning his guitar, a glass of sparkling wine in his hand. He handed it to me, treating a 23-year-old youngster. But, I mean, it was serious business, because he had half his own band there, and then he had Mitch Mitchell on drums, Steve Winwood on piano. So we had a good time. They remixed it back in Chicago, I think. They brought a few spare tracks from it out on some of these compilations or best-of series.

What was it like working with Albert King on his Live LP?

The situation was, he showed up in Montreal and it was all arranged to be recorded. His second guitarist left him on the day, so he asked me himself, would I stand in? I said no, because his material is quite arranged – it’s not loose like Muddy’s, you know? He’s a more intense guy than Muddy, I thought, not as friendly. I hate to say it, but I was forced to sit in and just fill out as best I could. There was no rehearsing, no nothing. You just had to guess what chord, what key he was in. Any time I’d ask him what key it was, he’d say “B natural,” and he’s playing in minors. His tuning is like Em6 or Em7, as far as I know, back to front, so I just had to busk it. But it was an experience! [Laughs.] I got over it.

Mike Bloomfield once mentioned being onstage in a cutting contest with Hendrix, and he said Jimi just pulled out all the stops. He said something like, “All I could think was, I wish to God that I were Albert King!”

Yeah. If Albert wants to nail you to the wall, he’s got that amazing attack. He just hits that one-single-note-type syndrome. I was a Hendrix fan and a Bloomfield fan. I met Mike once – we did a TV show, Midnight Special, when the Electric Flag reformed. And he was a very nice, modest guy, and a beautiful player. A really soulful player. I could see him in a situation with Hendrix where he wouldn’t go into that trickery, really. But it’s a compliment to Mike if Jimi was that scared, because normally Hendrix was quite prepared to lay back and even play bass on these jam sessions.

Had you met Jimi?

I never met him. I saw him playing two times, but three shows. I was in the Speakeasy Club in London once, and he was sitting a couple of tables away, talking to someone. I hadn’t the guts to go over and annoy him. That’s happened to me a few times. And you regret it later – I mean, all you got to do is shake their hand and make contact. Because these people pass through this world and you don’t get to say hello to them, you know.

If you could transcend time to see any musicians play, who would be tops on your list?

Oh, there’s a whole glut. I’d like to have seen Django Reinhart live – I believe that was scary. Obviously I’d like to see Robert Johnson – who wouldn’t? I’d like to have seen the first Sonny Boy Williamson. There are so many people. I’d like to have seen Buddy Holly live, for that matter. I didn’t see Son House live, but I was lucky enough in the ’60s to have seen a lot of the main people. I saw Muddy, I saw John Lee Hooker, Big Joe Williams. I saw T-Bone Walker. And we were lucky enough touring the States we played with Freddie King, we played with Juke Boy Bonner. I’d like to have seen Blind Boy Fuller live, mind you, although he was in the line of Blind Boy Blake. And I saw Gary Davis. I’m pretty lucky, really. But certainly some of the early people I’d like to have seen.

Blind Boy Fuller is a fairly obscure figure, even today. How did you happen to come across his music?

The Blues Classics record with Bull City Red and Sonny Terry on it.

With “Step It Up and Go” on it?

Yes, and “Three Ball Blues.” Oh, he was great. And Scrapper Blackwell I liked a lot, particularly when he recorded when he was about 71 or something like that. And he was in great form. In fact, when I went back and listened to the original recordings with Leroy Carr, I was slightly disappointed because he had actually improved, to my ears, as a player. But then the early records were recorded very dull – you couldn’t hear the guitar that well. That was a surprising thing about that blues revival, that Furry Lewis, John Hurt – a lot of them – had improved as opposed to going the other way. It was fantastic. There a lot of people still alive. I hope now that John Lee Hooker has this big hit and that Albert Collins and Albert King are doing well, and B.B. King, that it will draw in some of the more less-known guys, like John Littlejohn and Johnny Shines, Johnny Young. They’re not the classic players, but they all have nice rough sounds, you know.

Do you use open tunings?

Yeah. I use the DADGAD tuning on “Out on the Western Plain,” the Lead Belly song. That’s one of my favorite tunings. That was supposed to be discovered by Davy Graham, a Scottish guitarist, and then it was used a lot by Bert Jansch and Martin Carthy, all great players in their different ways. I’ve been messing around with dropped D lately, which is taking down the bottom E and the top E. It’s quite nice. Open A is related to open G, and I use that a lot as well, putting on the capo.

What tunings did you use on the record for the slide tunes?

Let me see. Open G. Even though “Ghost Blues” is in A, the guitar was tuned to G. The slide on “Walkin’ Wounded” is just in standard tuning, which I can do. “Empire State Express” is open G. I think any other slide parts are in standard tuning, in the same way in which Earl Hooker could play chords and then go into the solo.

Muddy once said that Earl Hooker was the best slide player.

He used to play great single-string guitar too, particularly on the early Junior Wells records. On the original “Messing with the Kid,” he plays great snerfy Stratocaster sounds, before he went off to the Danelectro. And then he went off to that Gibson.

His slide on songs like “Anna Lee” is just out of this world.

“Anna Lee” and “Sweet Black Angel” are both, as you know, Robert Nighthawk songs. But he was the first guy, aside from Hendrix, that I could accept the wah-wah pedal from [laughs].

I had trouble with Earl’s wah-wah – sometimes he went overboard.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I think what turned a lot of people was the Howlin’ Wolf record where they added so much wah-wah pedal – remember that one that came out around the time as Electric Mud? [The Howlin’ Wolf Album, on Chess]

The one with Pete Cosey on it.

Yeah. I can’t remember who else was on the album. The liner notes were funny. They even put on the front “Howlin’ Wolf doesn’t like this record, but then he didn’t like his electric guitar …”

Howlin’ Wolf’s main guitarist, Hubert Sumlin, was seriously underrated.

Absolutely, yeah. It’s a shame. How is his health? Is he okay?

I’ve heard he’s feeling good lately.

He’s made some records that I’ve got since the Wolf days, but he’s either produced the wrong way or the material’s not there or he misses Wolf or all the chemistry that went on.

Instead of cutting with house bands provided by labels, he’d probably be better off if he could pick his own band and material and do it his own way.

It’s important. Well, a lot of people think they know best, once they get this producer mentality. I know it’s an important job, but some people can be extremely unsympathetic to what’s right, you know what I mean? But then as the years move on and on, everything becomes tighter in terms of budgets, P.R., pressure, and all these other factors. Hubert’s a guy who deserves his hour in the sun, really, because he played some amazing stuff, both on the Les Paul and on the Strat. You never knew which guitar he was playing on the records – he’s got a great sound. And then he showed up in England with this tigerskin-type Strat. I saw a photograph of it on one of those Kent albums of Memphis blues – all that Joe Hill Louis type era. But there’s a photograph of the guitar, and I have a vague idea it’s an African guitar. Somebody told me it’s a Zanzibar or something like that. If you ever see him, ask him. Particularly with all this interest in pawnshop specials, this one has never cropped up – unless he painted it himself or something.

When you’re playing slide, do you use a guitar pick?

Yeah, pick and fingers, you know. I also vary the slide. Sometimes I use a Coricidin bottle on my ring finger, sometimes on my small finger. Then sometimes I use a brass slide if I’m playing the National. But if I’m playing the straight electric, I use a steel bottleneck.

Do you hear a difference in tones between the various materials?

I do, actually, yeah. The glass is obviously more – I won’t say Hawaiian – but more smooth and sweet. The brass or copper is very harsh, if you want to get that Son House sort of attack. It’s almost too harsh all the time. Steel is a good compromise. It depends on the guitar you are playing.

Do you use a socket wrench like Muddy, or a steel slide?

A steel slide. I have a socket wrench because John Hammond told me he was using a socket wrench, and then Lowell George, who we played with, had one as well. They’re fantastic, but you really need very heavy strings for them. I don’t know which one I have – a 5/8th or 7/8th or whatever it is. They’re fantastic, but if you’re playing more than a couple of numbers, they do wear your small finger down. They’re very heavy, but they’re ideal for slide. That’s my one complaint – not that I like light slides, but you don’t want them to be tiring your hand.

Do you set up your action different if you’re going to play slide, or do you have a special guitar for it?

I have a Gretsch Corvette which is in open G or open A, depending on the song, and that’s got strings from like .013 to .050, something like that – medium. My regular strings would be like .010 to .044, something like that, and the action is quite high. So it’s okay for slide. But to play real open-tuning slide, you need the heavier strings. But I can cope with both, you know. I try to, anyway.

What is your favorite amp?

Good question! It’s a battle between the Vox AC30, which is my first amp, and the 4x10 Bassman Fender, although I love the little Deluxe Fender, which is nice as well. But I have played Ampeg VT-44s, which are very nice. Over the years I’ve used Marshall 50-watt combos in conjunction with a Fender or a Vox, and they’re very good for volume and bite. But the warmth of the Fenders and the character of the Vox are pretty hard to beat, so it’s somewhere in there.

What do we hear on the new album?

On the rhythm tracks it would be a combination of Vox and Marshall. Nearly all the lead parts were done with the Fender 1955 Bassman. We took the back off it and put mikes in the back as well as the front, so we got all kinds of variations. That was pretty much the way – I mean, not every track was laid down as a rhythm track, but I’d say 80% of the tracks were like that – Vox and Marshall for rhythm, left and right, and then the Fender Bassman for leads.

Your fans in America have been waiting a long time for you to tour. What’s been the delay?

I don’t know. We just went back to Europe after the last American tour, in ’85, and we just got stuck in Europe, recording and touring. We played Yugoslavia and Hungary, and so on. And then we were trying to sort out the right record deal in America. I don’t know where the years went.

We’d see ads in N.M.E. that you were playing over there.

We just got irritated too. We were on a couple of big nationwide tours with these big, stadium-type rock bands. We’d do that in order to get to America, to pay for the flights and also to give us some free time to play clubs and colleges. But doing these others gigs, you’d go home feeling dissatisfied, because you’d be badly treated in some cases with monitors and amount of stage room, lights and stuff.

Time onstage.

Time, indeed.

American audiences aren’t always kind to opening acts, especially if it’s a different genre.

Indeed! And that was the problem. It wasn’t so bad when we were on the same bill with, say, ZZ Top or somebody in that line. But then we happened to be on a couple of bills that were totally alien to our kind of stuff. We weren’t booed or anything, but you felt you’d wasted a couple of weeks of your life when you could be playing clubs or small theaters. I regret we didn’t come back in the meantime, but it gave us a chance to reassess what we were doing and we got very busy in Europe and so on. And then I developed a flying problem, to make matters worse.

Fear of flying?

Yeah. I had a couple of bad flights and I got my Buddy Holly complex. It got so bad, I couldn’t even fly to Ireland, which is only an hour away [from London]. Then to play on the Continent, I would have to fly out the night before so I’d be okay on the date. It was not so much a fear of death thing, but a mixture of claustrophobia and a few other things.

This is a miracle – I flew from London to Tokyo, Japan to Australia, Australia to L.A., L.A. to San Francisco, and so on. We’d have to make our way cross country and then back to London. So far, so good. My prayers have been answered, then. To beat that flying phobia was quite an ordeal for me, I can tell you, because it’s the last thing I needed after all those years of touring and flying two times a day. So that compounded my problems of not being able to get to the States.

Do you have advice for keeping your sanity or staying centered while on tour? It’s such an unusual life.

It is, indeed. There’s also a terrible danger – between travel and other things and getting to the gigs and so on, you get little time to play on your own in the hotel, and you can get lazy about playing. So I make a point of playing every day in the hotel room and bring a little cassette player and record what I’m doing, and try and write songs as well, just as a by-product of that. But to keep your sanity, I don’t know, it takes you about twenty years to find out. You know what all the ABC’s are to begin with, but there’s an awful lot of time to wear down the nerves of a musician. It’s just your attitude, really, in terms of traveling and flying, for hotels, for remembering where you are, and trying to keep all that group feeling every night to try to put on a good show. I mean, every musician has to go through that. You just have to develop a sense of humor and patience and just keep it cool, you know. I think the old cliché of deal with tonight’s gig and not worry about the one next Tuesday or the end of the tour. It’s a classic, but it’s true.

If people who knew you from your records heard what you play in the hotel room, would they be surprised?

[Laughs.]

Are you a closet country player or a bluegrass guy or a flamenco player?

Flamenco, definitely. No, I do actually do some country licks. I’m quite keen on the playing of Roy Nichols, who used to be on Merle Haggard’s records, and some of the players that have worked with Waylon Jennings and Johnny Paycheck. I don’t like this commercial country. I can’t really play flamenco that well – I can fake it, but just for my own ears. I do a little bits of jazz things and ragtime – anything that will loosen you up. Also it’s good for your mental health – not necessarily to do what you play onstage. And also even if you’re playing cassettes in your room. I play a lot of folk things, like Martin Carthy and some Irish music and some Django and things. Particularly if you’re doing a very long tour, it’s quite hard to listen to similar kind of music in your room then, I find. So it’s good to play something slightly different. And country and folk is quite a departure. That’s not to say I don’t play blues in the hotel room – I do. It depends what phase you’re going through and what year it is and what mood you’re in and all those other things.

I am continually re-amazed at what a universal language the blues is, how it speaks across borders to so many divergent people.

Particularly this recent interest in it. I was despondent in the late ’70s up until the mid ’80s – I thought we’d gone right into the age of technology, and that was the end of it. Drum machines, techno pop. So there’s this interest in the blues now in the early ’90s, thanks to Stevie Ray and all the people who kept playing it, like Albert Collins and Thorogood and all those people, to this peak that’s happening at the moment with this interest in Robert Johnson and John Lee Hooker and so on. And Bonnie Raitt’s come back, if you like. Who would have predicted that? So that makes me very optimistic for the ’90s. I mean, if it gets better and better. Maybe it’ll fade away again, but I don’t think so. I think there’s going to be a nice, serious interest in the years to come, which would be great, you know?

A lot of people are interested in zydeco as well, and African music. And of course the whole world music thing is fresh for the ears, because people have had enough of mainstream pop. A lot of teenagers will surprise you. They say, “Oh, we love real drums. We love real bass guitars.” They get fed up with all that space-invaders machine music. That’s all it was, to my ears anyway. Because all that metronomic heartbeat stuff – I have a theory that’s bad for you. It’s like ticker tape, it’s like tele text. Because the heartbeat and the mind and everything doesn’t work digitally.

It’s more like reggae.

[Laughs.] Something like that, yeah. That’s a good way to put it, yeah. Somebody ought to check that out and see. It’s like some people have that theory about digital echoes – even though it’s in time, it’s different. You get tape echo that’s not entirely to the second. I don’t know – somebody had a ridiculous theory, but I kind of believe it.

I believe the time is coming when music will be used more to physically heal.

That it can do. Music can heal. It can cool down the savage breast, as they say. It does have that power. All kinds of power. By the time you subtract the music business and all of the good and bad things that go with it, you’re left with a piece of music and the player, and it’s important that that should remain fairly – not precious, but organic and true.

What do you like to hear at the end of a show?

Our shows tend to become very rocky some nights – people jump around the place and all that. I can accept that, as long as they’ve listened to the slow blues and the acoustic and the blend. I like it to be fairly up at the end. You can’t pick and choose, but I don’t want it to be a recital where people politely clap. You have to create an atmosphere. But at any one show, I like, if I can, to hit about two or three different bases, in terms of reaction and performance. We try and create dynamics in the set, so it’s not just too predictable. “Oh, that’s going to be another number like that.”

You change the set around from night to night?

Oh, we do, yes. We rarely use a set list – only if it’s gone to the airtime on a TV program, where they have to have cameras ready for whatever. We never use a set list. Occasionally, at a big festival where your time is limited, it doesn’t hurt to have a list just to guide you a bit. But nine times out of ten, I just work off of the top of my head, and we move from album to album. Particularly on this tour, because we’ve been away so long, we’re not just only playing the new songs, we’re doing some old ones as well, just to refresh people’s memories.

You’ve been using the same musicians for a long time.

Yeah. The bass player since ’71 – Gerry McAvoy. Drummer since about 1980 – that’s Brendan O’Neil. The harmonica player for about six or seven years, Mark Feltham.

Not to make you self-conscious, but if someone were to put together a compact disc collection called “The Essential Rory Gallagher,” are there tracks you feel should be included?

I suppose so. If I were to do a best-of from the old days, things like “Cradle Rock,” “Million Miles Away,” “Tattoo’d Lady.” There’s lots of songs that I’d like to re-do and remix, things like “Race the Breeze” I was very fond of myself. I’d like to re-record that, and try to get a Staples Singers-type gospel feel to it.

Pops Staples is another underrated guitar player.

Indeed! Particularly on the early records, with that tremolo on that Jazzmaster, you know. To record a guitar like that, there’s so much room for it to breathe, you know.

Back to the record.

“Loanshark Blues” is a song I like a lot – that’s a track from the new one. It’s very hard for me. I mean, if we’re going to do a box set or something like that later this year or if not early next year, that will be the real testing point of going back and seeing what’s there and what wasn’t released. So that will be interesting.

What’s the scope of your current tour?

In America, we started in the West Coast. We worked all around San Diego, two or three dates, and we played the Roxy in L.A. And then we’re playing in this area, Santa Cruz. We played Oakland last night, we’re playing San Francisco tomorrow night. We’re playing San Jose. And then we’re moving across to Minneanapolis – I can never pronounce that name!

Prince’s home town.

Yeah. We’ll do “Purple Rain” for him there. Actually, he plays good guitar, I think. He’s a very underrated player. And he’s clever to have that old Hofner Tele copy – they were good, and no one spotted them except one guitarist in Nashville who uses one. I think it was the guy who played on Dobie Gray’s “Drift Away.”

Was it Reggie Young?

I think it was Reggie Young. They have reissued these copies, but they’re not as good. But I must keep my eye out for one.

We’re doing, obviously, New York, Boston, Detroit, Chicago. We’re going into Canada to do Toronto. We’re missing out on Washington, Dallas, and all the Southern area, but we’re hoping to come back in two or three months and cover that. We have commitments in Europe after Easter, so we have to go back. Ideally, we should stay here for two or three months, but given that we were in Australia and Japan before this – and this is a fairly hard month’s work – we’ll be glad to get back and get a week off.

Where’s your home?

Well, I’m based in London at the moment.

Do you get back to Cork?

Oh, I do. Because of the flying, I haven’t been there for a while, but if that’s over, I’ll go back as it was for a while. I’d go back every third weekend or every second month. At one stage I was nearly commuting, which was great, because I like to keep my Irish connection. London’s a good town to work out of, but naturally it’s not home, you know what I mean? But all the musicians live there and the studios and so on. But now since the Irish rock thing has boomed, it’s quite feasible to record and do things in Dublin. It’s become quite a rock and roll city.

Is that because of U2?

Well, U2 ultimately, yeah, but it was building up before they because of Thin Lizzy and the Boomtown rats and so on. The music industry took Irish musicians more seriously, whereas in the early days of Van Morrison and when we came out, it was quite hard to cut through the image. Everyone thought you were like the Clancy Brothers or just a dance band. There were very few serious rhythm and blues or rock people from Ireland at that stage. So it was hard to cut through, initially, but it’s great now. I’m half tempted to record the next album in Dublin, just to see. I did three tracks on a Davy Spillane album – he’s a uilleann pipe player – and I enjoyed working in the Dublin studios. But for an Irishman, with the exception of the Irish Tour Live album, I’ve never recorded in Ireland. It might be the X-factor, you know. Whatever that is.

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Epilog

Rory’s long, stellar set that evening at the Catalyst included many of the songs and artists we’d talked about during the interview – his own “Continental Op,” “Tattoo’d Lady,” “Kid Gloves,” and “Million Miles Away,” as well as covers of Robert Nighthawk’s “Going Down to Eli’s,” Lead Belly’s “Out on the Western Plain,” Son House and Robert Johnson’s “Walkin’ Blues,” Blind Boy Fuller’s “Pistol Slapper Blues,” and Junior Wells’ “Messin’ with the Kid.”

Fresh Evidence was the last album Rory completed, and 1991 marked his final tour of America. On June 14, 1995, he died of complications following a liver transplant. He is buried in Saint Oliver’s Cemetery on Model Farm Road in Cork, Ireland. I gave the master tape of our interview to his brother, Donal Gallagher, who featured portions of it in the BBC’s 2005 radio documentary on Rory’s life.

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Ry Cooder – Talking Country Blues and Gospel

Sometimes the most memorable interviews happen unexpectedly. Researching Blind Willie Johnson, the sublime prewar gospel-blues slide guitarist from Texas, I was struck by how magnificently Ry Cooder had used Johnson’s “Dark Was the Night – Cold Was the Ground” in his Paris, Texas soundtrack. I sent Cooder a note asking if he’d give me a quote. A few days later, on February 25, 1990, the phone rang and it was the man himself. After talking about Blind Willie Johnson, Ry suddenly moved on to another Johnson – Robert – and unraveled one of the great myths surrounding the legendary Mississippi Delta bluesman. Read on.


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You come closer to sounding like Blind Willie Johnson than anyone I’ve ever heard.
God almighty!

How do you think he physically played the instrument?
Well, I’m playing his music the way I know how to play bottleneck, which is to hold the guitar upright, wear a bottleneck on your finger, and fingerpick the thing, and play in the tuning that I’m certain that he used. But I have no idea how he played what he played. I mean, who knows? It’s so far back into the distant past that anything is possible. I’ve seen this guy, Rev. Leon Pinson – he’s a blind preacher from Mississippi – play holding a bar in his finger and thumb on his left hand, reaching around underneath like you would, and fingering the thing that way. And getting a very similar vibrato to Blind Willie Johnson. He has the quality of never quite coming up to the note and hitting it. In other words, that’s a very inexact technique that I just described, but it does give you the quarter tones and all of the strange nuances. When I’m playing, I’m so used to playing the very note. Look, it’s sad that no one ever thought to take a picture of the guy while he was playing, because he played in two styles. He played normal guitar, just strumming and rhythm, which you can hear him doing with his thumb. I don’t have any idea how he played, and I don’t know what he looked like when he played. You know, two seconds of observation would answer every question you could ever have.

People who saw him playing on the streets of Beaumont in the 1940s said that he played with the guitar on his lap and used a pocketknife.
Played flat?

Like a Hawaiian guitarist.
I can’t imagine how he could have played what he played doing that. There is one thing about when you play that way – the same with this guy Pinson, who’s playing not flat, but holding the thing, rather than wearing it – there’s something that happens when you wear it, and there’s something else that happens when you hold it. Now, Blind Willie Johnson had great dexterity. He could play all of these sparking little melody lines. There’s fabulous syncopation. He’d keep his thumb going real strong. But when I saw this guy Pinson down South last summer – even though he’s nowhere near the guitar player Johnson was – I had an ear to what he was doing that sounded like Johnson. I don’t know, it’s just a different sound, and I can’t quite say why. But I have a feeling when you play bottleneck and you’re wearing the thing, your hand is there on the strings, either damping them or not damping them. It’s more of a controlling sound when you hold the guitar and nothing but the bar or the knife blade, maybe, touches the string. The guitar tends to ring more. It tends to keep the strings released and open, see. And more sound is happening. Because Johnson’s sound is very active.

I never could figure out how in the world he got such a busy sound playing so little. I used to think, why are all the strings going all the time? Because the recording is so horrible – the quality of the recording is the worst in the world, on one of those horrendous little machines which is eliminating all but the most spikey sound that the guy is producing. You’re not hearing any of the real aural ambient effect at all. I’m sure that in person, this guy sounds a thousand percent different. All the recording is showing us is the lowest-common-denominator type of sound, the most direct thing. The struck notes are all that you’re hearing. But even through that, you can hear that the strings are moving all the time. And I used to think that he’s making a lot of work to move all these strings around. And I know that old, primitive players, street guys and blues players, do nothing to work too hard. It seems like, to me, when I met these guys, the few that I’ve met, they’re very efficient in the style. If it takes too much effort and physical work, then you’re doing something wrong. So when I was young, I didn’t know. I used to go to tremendous efforts to try to do this stuff, only to realize later that I was probably barking up the wrong tree.

Are you suggesting that he didn’t damp behind the slide?

Oh, I know he didn’t. Now, he could have used his picking hand. Because if you’re playing flat, you can, with the side of your hand in the manner of steel players, stop resonance just by approaching the strings, barely touching them. But you can do a lot that way. But I personally cannot see how . . . Of course, I don’t play flat.

Another account says he held his guitar normally and used a jackknife for his slide.
I don’t know, because I haven’t researched or read – I’m sure you’ve looked into this way further than I have – but I have a feeling that all of the primitive players who were not in Mississippi and who played slide played flat. Lead Belly played flat. Guys from Texas did play flat. Because when the Hawaiians came through in an early World’s Fair [1893’s Columbia Exposition], everybody saw these guys and everybody was influenced. There was tremendous impact. And they all played flat. So most people would have said, “Right, I play flat.” Now we know Blind Willie played regular, because there’s that one picture of him. And you know that that’s the way that the guitar was used. But then when you go to play the sliding style, why, then you’re playing flat. It’s just natural that everybody would have done what the Hawaiians did. It’s just human nature – except in Mississippi, where for some crazy reason they didn’t. In Mississippi they seemed to play regular, but with bottlenecks and bones and things. Some people held a jackknife between the fingers, as though it were another finger. But outside of Mississippi – and I don’t know about any scholarship or historical investigation that bears this out – but you can hear the difference. And you can hear when people are playing flat. It’s probably true that Blind Willie Johnson played all that stuff flat, and it is quite amazing, but it would account for how he gets around on the strings.

Of course, I’ve tried all my life -- worked very hard and every day of my life, practically – to play in that style. Not consciously saying, “Today is Tuesday, I will again try to play like Blind Willie Johnson,” but that sound is in my head. And really when you come right down to it, you can sit down and play some of his tunes, and the single-string melody thing that he did, which is so great. He’s so good – I mean, he’s just so good! Beyond a guitar player. I think the guy is one of these interplanetary world musicians, the kind of person they talk about in that Nada Brahma book, where the world is sound and everything is resonating. He’s one of those guys. There’s only a few. Being blind and all, maybe he asked what’s going on, maybe somebody described it to him.

I wish we had some notion what people thought of these Hawaiians – they must have looked like Martians coming through with their grass skirts and things. And God knows they’re good players. Because they were so good at what they were doing, why, Mexicans picked it up, and the South Americans picked it up. We know that they sold steel guitar from then on, and the stuff was made to be done that way. And along comes a guy like, say, Robert Johnson, whom I hope didn’t play flat!

Johnny Shines told me recently that he did not.
It’s just unthinkable, because there’s too much going on. When you play flat, you can’t do so much. Well, that accounts for some of the simplicity and purity of Blind Willie’s thing, and I cannot do it. I cannot play flat to save my life. I can’t coordinate my body that way. It’s fine with me that he did. When I saw this guy Leon Pinson down in Mississippi, I went home and I found me a metal bar like he had and started trying to do it. It was awkward for me, but after a couple of days I started to see where you could play all this Blind Willie stuff that way. It didn’t occur to me to think, “Therefore he must have played flat.” It’s just what Pinson has gone and done. But if you did, you’d even be closer to that sound. I can see that it’s probably the case.

Was Pinson’s hand coming around the neck of the guitar the way you normally would?

Yes, because he plays regular too, like they all do. They all make a clear distinction between slide playing and regular playing. They don’t mix them together. Very few people did in those days, or do now. So he says, “I’m now gonna play slide,” and he takes out his bar, tunes the guitar down to a chord – same one as Johnson, same D tuning – and goes on doing this thing, not fretting at all. If you wear the slide, you can fret, but he’s not. He’s just playing the note and very few chords. Now, Blind Willie played hardly any chords. It was years before I realized that my brain was imagining the chords – he wasn’t playing them. He was just playing two or three notes and getting a suggestion of a chord once in a while. He was playing in that modal feel, not wanting to disturb that tonic drone. He didn’t need to. He was doing a different thing. And when you hear this old guy Pinson, you hear him strictly playing quarter notes and not playing the notes straight up and not wanting to create these stacked-up triads and regular harmonic intervals. It’s dissonant all the time. Now, that’s what these old recordings of Blind Willie Johnson don’t show us because you can’t hear anything. You don’t know to what extent this was dissonant or polytonal in that way.

Didn’t Johnson have a remarkable left-hand vibrato?

Oh, the best! The absolute best. Very light touch – real light and really fast. It’s just a thing that you can’t talk about, almost, because it’s just so perfect. But that vibrato, you can go and do it by wiggling that bar just right. I’m trying to do it these days. I hate doing it – it feels terrible – but I can see that you get a different sound, and that’s the only explanation that I can think of. I’d also like to know what kind of damn guitar he had. He probably used a little guitar. They didn’t have big guitars in those days. Hillbillies did, later in the ’30s when Gibson started making those big jumbos, but back in those days, all those players had smaller instruments.

What’s your attraction to “Dark Was the Ground – Cold Was the Night”?
That’s the most transcendent piece in all American music, the way he used his voice and the guitar. This other tune that I love so much is “God Moves on the Water.” Oh, that thing is like a roller coaster, man. He’s got an energy wave in there that he’s surfing across the face of that tune so mighty! He hits the chorus, and to me it’s like ice skating or downhill racing – it’s an awesome physical thing that happens. But “Dark Was the Night” is the cut – everybody knows that lick. You can throw that lick at anybody nowadays. I threw it up inside Paris, Texas, you know, and everybody relates. And now you play that lick, and everybody knows what it is. It’s like an unspoken word. It’s really amazing. [Legally download these tracks at http://www.archive.org/.]

I’ll really tell you, Blind Willie Johnson is in the ether somewhere. He’s up there in the zone somewhere. But if he played flat . . . And at this point, after talking with you, I’m starting to feel that really would account for it. Because I know that if it was regular, I could be doing it. I can do what he did – I can play those notes now. I mean, I have learned. My co-ordination and understanding have developed to the point where I am capable of executing those passages, but it sounds really different when you play flat.

Which of the first-generation bluesmen did you observe first hand?

Skip James I barely got to see, because he was sick all of a sudden. But I saw him, and I didn’t know what to make of him because his records really impressed me. When I saw him, he was having such physical trouble and he was so strange as a person that I recoiled from him. I didn’t know what to do. I was pretty young, and the vibe really killed me. But his records I listened to quite a lot. We used to see John Hurt, of course. And then, for me, the big deal was to see Sleepy John [Estes] because I liked his records so much. When I got mobile, I got a little older, I went down South to see him, and we used to sit with him. I’d go see him in his house up in Brownsville, Tennessee. Take him money and things. By that time I was kind of doing things. But as a teenager, I used to see him come through here.

Well, the whole thing about guys like that was you weren’t ready for them as citizens of the world. You know, for middle-class white kids in Santa Monica, sad to say, you don’t really know any people like that. Or Rev. Gary Davis – you just don’t know what’s going on. I had these records, although they weren’t easy to get in those days, but people had given me tapes or some 78s. I used to listen to these things and think, “Well, what could this all be about? Who are these people? What are they saying?” It’s a mysterious journey here, like Alice in Wonderland. And then, not understanding anything about the historical, social, economic conditions that produces music – there again, being pretty young and all – all of a sudden, in the folk boom, on the scene in Hollywood, in this folk music club, appears these guys. And they walk to the stage, walk through the audience. I was thunderstruck! I couldn’t breathe, you know. They got up onstage, sat down, and commenced to do whatever it was they were able to do. And of course that really killed me, because I thought, “This is beyond my understanding.”

After a while I began to gather up courage and go up and talk once in a while. You could sit down and say, “Can I understand this?” or “Can you show me this or that?” It was hard for me, but I did. And then I found out it was good, because they didn’t mind. They liked talking; it was not unpleasant for them. I didn’t bother anybody or badger them, like people do these days. But I was always curious and always trying to understand. Then it became obvious that it wasn’t so much the music as it was the people. If you could figure out where the people were and how they were as beings, why when the music was very clarified. Because what’s totally mysterious on record and inexplicable, why, in five minutes of watching a guy play, you got it. You understand body rhythm and how the instrument is approached, which is entirely different than how I’d seen it done. It was not linear, it was not patterns – they’d play out of patterns. They don’t play the horrible boom-chicka-boom thumb-finger, thumb-finger thing, you know. Everybody I knew did. That mad adherence to a mechanical thing that you set yourself up like a robot and play and think that’s what it is. I don’t know how that ever got started – banjo, maybe. But these guys didn’t play patterns, they didn’t play tuned. They were probably mostly out of tune. The whole thing was a revelation in what the instrument really could do in terms of personal expression. It’s a great gift to be able to have seen those people. Poor people today can’t see anybody.

Back in the earlier days, there wasn’t the attention to Western musical traditions of timing and tuning.
Not at all.

This is evident on the Bristol Sessions and other early country recordings – no studio sync-up here.
Oh, forget it. They’re coming from an entirely different way of life, an entirely different background. It’s just so radically different. If you go to Mississippi today, even, it’s a different place. You feel it’s a Third World country, a whole other scene. And back then, think of what it must have been like.

What impressed you about Sleepy John Estes on record?

Well, he had a great group – that piano player and the jug and the harmonica and him, all playing in different rhythmic emphasis. Everybody has a different take on what the rhythm is. Some of it’s half-time, some of it’s double-time. But the jug band idea, I think, is the greatest idea in terms of ensemble, applied in whatever way you want to apply it. In other words, primitive guys playing what they think is right and what they probably heard on somebody’s uptown record and trying to do it themselves. Or just what they hear music as sounding like, see, because they all listen to records too. Robert Johnson trying to sound like Lonnie Johnson makes perfect sense. And then saying, “Well, this is my version of Lonnie Johnson. This is what I think’s going on.”

Sleepy John Estes, of course, was a natural. He just put his hands on the instrument and opened his mouth. And then somebody would play piano and make it up out of nothing. I mean, out of nothing at all. Having no education, musically. It’s not like New Orleans, where everybody was schooled and there was a standard of reference. God almighty, down in the country, there is not standard of reference. You just did whatever your body would do. That’s the beauty of it. And Yank Rachel on mandolin – the whole thing is just fabulously interesting to me. From the sound point of view, I just used to bathe in those records. It’s like sit down and let it wash all through you. Pretty fascinating. Jesse Fuller – same thing with him. He used to come in, set that stuff up, and then sit down and play it and just wind it up. It would just unspool at you. It would take you away from your environment, that’s for sure.

Did Rev. Gary Davis ever give you playing tips?
Oh, I used to sit with him. He was a guy who gave lessons, actually. Now, how he got started and what made him turn to doing that in his age, I don’t know. But it was known that if you wanted to pick up from him, why, all you had to do was give him five or six dollars and go sit with him. So I used to go to where they put him up in some little house down here in L.A., someplace near Hollywood, when he’d come into town. And I’d sit there and say “I like this song” and name one of his tunes – because he had songs. He wasn’t just playing 12-bar blues, he was playing songs, and they had structure and all. Of course, he had this bizarre chordal sense and crazy right hand, and that was interesting. So we’d sit there for an hour or however long he wanted to stay – because when you’re in the company of a master, time is not a thing of the clock. The clock is not ticking, necessarily. If you want to stay all day, that’s okay. If you get tired, you leave. It’s kind of that sort of a thing. So we used to sit there. I never could play it back to him. A month later, it would come to me, what he had shown me or what he had done. He would just play, and then you would try to remember. I’d stare at his hands and try to figure it out. But I couldn’t make anything sound like that, and I never could play his way. I found that it was beyond my ability to do the thing that he was doing.

From a physical standpoint, what made it so difficult?

I don’t know. I mean, he had a bizarre technique. And you had to commit to it. It’s not a technique that flows into another person’s technique. In other words, Gary Davis is all by himself, in my experience, and if you committed to learning and being a student of his and a follower of his guitar mannerisms, you had to do that regardless, and everything else was secondary. I didn’t want to do that. I was really interested in something else at the time, and I felt that this was out of my range. I used to love to play his tunes, but I didn’t play them with any deep satisfaction because I realized it wasn’t working. This is not doing what he is doing. This is turning out like something else, and I’m not really crazy about it. Although he had some nice chord changes that used to thrill me, and I used to like to play the tunes just to hear those chord changes go down. But it was impossible.

In the prewar blues genre, do any other people stand out as being transcendental?

Gosh, sure. I mean, so many people. Blind Blake is a great player, a great musical figure. He’s another mysterious figure. In the years where he was on top of his thing, I think he was fabulous.

I think Lonnie Johnson has never been recognized as one of the transcendental people who influenced everybody. You can recognize Lonnie Johnson in just about anybody, with his voice and his elegant style. The stuff he did with Louis Armstrong was just incredible. So there he was. And he recorded with guys like Eddie Lang and all that. What he must have sounded like to country black people – they must have thought, “Well, this is somebody else!” You know, he’s up in town, getting this fabulous tone, and he’s real elegant and real top-hatted. It’s a whole other thing. It’s pop music, really. You can see people copying him right and left. Oh, it’s amazing. When I was very young, I heard some of that stuff, and it came through and really killed me. I used to sit and try to do that all the time. Still do. If I want to warm up, get my hands working and discipline my body, I will try to play some of his instrumentals. I can’t imagine what the hell he was doing, but I’m trying for it all the time. It’s just a way of using the instrument, right?

Did you hear many influences in the music of John Hurt?

That he had heard? Well, who knows? There’s a guy from Mississippi who’s playing in an un-Mississippi style. Very linear, melodic style. What did he hear? He must have heard Geechie music, maybe. Maybe he heard stuff from the Piedmont area. Maybe he thought it up all by himself.

Explain what you mean by Geechie music.
You know, the way the Sea Island people sound. That island thing all in the Piedmont area where Gary Davis, Sonny Terry, and a lot of those people sort of are from. It’s a very melodic style, syncopated in a different way. They play major chords and things, unlike a guy like Skip James, who plays crazy polymodal things and it’s a more open sound. Then Furry Lewis and John Hurt are far apart – maybe that’s Memphis. I don’t know what that is.

Now, Furry Lewis was in medicine shows. Medicine shows were interesting because they took music all around. They would leave regional areas, which were so distinct in those days. The musicians in the minstrel shows would travel to other areas and influence and be influenced. They were like a rock and roll tour is today, you might say. I mean, the fact that Joseph Spence travelled through the South in ’20s in medicine shows is mind boggling! I mean, that’s just absolutely amazing to me. And God knows what people thought of him, and yet if he went in the Piedmont area, there must have been places where he recognized music like his own. That’s a real interesting thing to think about, because guys like Furry Lewis were on medicine shows most of their early life. Jesse Fuller was travelling in medicine shows. That’s one of the things you could do to make money.

Were these shows designed to sell snake oil liniment?

Oh, yeah. You know, they would come into town on a truck, depending on how prosperous and how big they were. We’re talking about a countrified version of a minstrel show when minstrelsy had already either died out or was unknown in the countryside where there wasn’t a theater. Out in the countryside, in these little bitty towns – which was most of the Deep South – these damn guys, these quack doctors, would come in with a show and go ahead and do it. They would have a musical interlude, like Blind Peg Leg so-and-so would do his thing. Can you imagine what some of those shows must have been like?

Have you ever seen this film called Louis Bluie? There’s a little piece of footage about the jug band that’s in there, from like about 1910. That’s your medicine show. That’s hotter than fire. That one guy with the hat plays so much jug, he looks like he’s about ready to blow up! It’s awesome looking. That kind of thing just kills me, because I know they were out there and they were doing this, and it was hot. We think of the old men who could barely do it, but this was not so back in the ’20s and before. This stuff must have been cosmic! All we know is what we’ve got on records and a few still photographs. It’s really a shame. But I think to myself, “Well, that guy [director Terry Zwigoff] found that piece of film footage. I wonder what else is out there?” We’ll never know what it’s like. Or in the alleys off Beale Street. And just everywhere. I mean, music was all over the place. Country suppers and parties and picnics, and then there’s all that piano music, and then these guys get together. Blind Blake played all over the place with all kinds of people, including Johnny Dodds. It’s just really something. Or the zither player who played with Lead Belly.

But as far as old Blind Willie Johnson is concerned, he just missed the media, even when he died. If somebody would have been paying attention, but nobody thought about it much in those days, I guess.

It’s just like nobody thought about Robert Johnson. What happened was the engineer who made those records died, and no one ever asked him what kind of guitar did he play. And I’ll tell you something else about this. You know how they talk about how he was nervous and wouldn’t face the room [during his recording sessions]? I don’t believe that. You think that man is nervous? I’ll tell you what he was doing. They say he sat in the corner.

Well, find yourself a plaster corner sometime – all those hotel rooms [where early blues sessions were recorded] were plaster. And I don’t mean wallpaper or curtains. But you go and sit in a corner, with your guitar tight up against a corner. Face the corner and play, and see what it sounds like. Now, what you get there is a thing they call “corner loading.” This is an acoustic principal. What that does is it eliminates most of the top end and most of the bottom end and amplifies the middle. The same thing that a metal guitar does or an electric guitar – it mostly amplifies the midrange, which is where that metallic, kind of piercing sound is what’s left. Now, you take and record that way, and you’ll sound different. Because Robert Johnson sounds funny – let’s face it. It doesn’t sound like anybody playing an acoustic wooden guitar. But it’s not a metal guitar. But if you sit in a corner and stick your face up into the corner and listen, you’ll hear that sound. It ties the notes together. It compresses the sound too, and his sound is very compressed. See?

Look at Robert Johnson’s picture and listen to his singing and his forceful personality. This is a guy who was afraid of the audience?! Hell, no! This is chew-them-up-and-spit-them-out kind of a guy. I think he was sitting in the corner to achieve a certain sound that he liked. In other words, if you’d have said, “Robert, I’m gonna boost the midrange, take off . . .” – because it’s a dry sound, the acoustic guitar, finally. It’s a boring sound for Robert. He wants to hear wang! He wants to hear the electric. He wants to hear that boosted midrange. And I’ll bet you that if you could have done that for him with equalizing and headphones in the modern era, he’d have been very glad. I’ll bet you if you’d have given him a Marshall amp to play it through, he’d have been extremely glad! But sitting in the corner, he could achieve something like that.

And with the sound on those records, the voice and guitar is being mooshed together. It sounds like it’s being compressed – and early field recording did compress a lot. If you look at some of that primitive equipment, being tube and having a lot of headroom, it does tend to compress. I’ve never fiddled with that. I wanted to try it for the movie. We found the machine that they were gonna use to shoot the scene with – they got it out of a museum. I said, “Alright, let me take the machine into the room and load up the corner and see if we get that sound.” As interested as Walter Hill, the director, was in that idea historically, he didn’t have time to mess around. Someday I’m gonna try it, because I just know in my heart it will work. Because I have done it – I have sat in the corner, with earphones, and listened to the sound, and it sounds like that. And it’s a great thing, because all of a sudden the whole projection of the instrument is changed radically by a simple thing like that. [See the Epilogue at the end of this blog.]

I mean, these are the things that Don Law or whoever made those damn records could have answered in two seconds, for Christ’s sake. But nobody asked him. And if you weren’t there, you don’t know. How big was Robert Johnson’s guitar? Somebody said it was big, a Kalamazoo or Gibson – I’ve heard that said. Those are large-bodied guitars. They push some air around. And his hands look funny, bending at the top joint like that. I’m starting to believe that’s him in the photo.

Were you a fan of Tampa Red?
Oh, yeah! Love Tampa Red, of course. Now, if you were to say, “Do you think you sound like any of these people?” I would say it’s easier for me to sound like Tampa Red. I think I’ve got that wired. I don’t think I’m so good at these earlier guys, because they’re so idiosyncratic, but Tampa Red ironed out all the kinks and made it a little more accessible. He played it with a little more of a modern, big-band feeling, like a soloist, almost. Very linear and really, really good. He put it all together, as far as I’m concerned. He got the songs, he had the vocal styling, he had the beat. I really think that it’s a straight line from Tampa Red to Louis Jordan to Check Berry, without a shadow of a doubt – a straight line through those three guys. You really can feel it. And he wrote some songs – or assembled them in the manner of traditional music, where you don’t write so much as you assemble or reassemble – like “It’s Tight Like That” and “Sittin’ on Top of the World.” That’s a mind who sees how to refine and flesh-out, drawing from all sources. He’s drawing from sources like the Chatmon brothers and the Mississippi Sheiks, Papa Charley Jackson.

Tampa Red put it all together, he really did. He changed it from rural music to commercial music, and he was very popular as a result. Look how successful the guy was – he made hundreds of records, and they’re all good. Some of them are incredibly good, with Washboard Sam and whoever was on piano – that stuff is fabulous! You gotta say, “Okay, that’s where it starts to become almost pop.” It’s a very straight line – him, Louis Jordan, Chuck Berry. The development is clear in my mind when I listen to that stuff. It’s good. And he had a great guitar technique too, for sure. Ooh! Non-threatening. I mean, everything about him was fun-sounding. He wasn’t scaring anybody. He didn’t sound like he was gonna eat you alive. He just sounded like we’re all having fun here, like Jim Jackson’s Jamboree and all that stuff. I really love all that.

What did you think of Robert Wilkins?

Well, he’s a great player, a songwriter. That “Prodigal Son” song is a hell of a song. [In 1929, Wilkins recorded his first version as “That’s No Way to Get Along” and later renamed the song “Prodigal Son.” It's at http://www.archive.org/ under its original title.] When you get these guys who write from a spiritual reference or point of view, it’s really interesting – like Washington Phillips and all that. Washington Phillips played Doceola [a small keyboard instrument] – different bag, but he had some pretty scary tunes too. Oh, there’s so much. The list goes on and on – it’s amazing, isn’t it? It’s a one- or two-generational thing, coming from almost nowhere. There’s no background for the blues to even exist.

There’s no reference to real blues before 1900.

Yeah. And where would it have come from, unless it’s that cane-fife stuff, wherever that came from. You know, fife-and-drum bands down in Mississippi, like that guy Napoleon Strickland. That stuff seems pre-blues to me. And that seems to be the only thing that I can think of that is.

In parts of antebellum Mississippi, Black Codes forbade the playing of drums after they had been used to spread messages among slaves during a revolt. Maybe this helps account for the differences between the development of black music in New Orleans and Mississippi.

Sure. They had a whole schooled musical tradition in New Orleans. Up until a certain point, the kids all learned regular serious music. They learned how to read music. They also had country bands, like in the South Carolina area, those jump bands playing on broken Confederate horns they found in the field, playing hymns and things. That’s a whole other bag. Do you know The Music from the South series that Frederick Ramsey put together on Folkways? One of the volumes was called Country Brass Bands. He went down there and he recorded two country brass bands, which were kind of loose organizations of guys who knew each other and would play on the weekends or for dances.

Apparently, this started after the Civil War. The Confederate armies all had brass bands and marching bands as part of the morale building. And when they lost, these guys just laid their instruments down in the field and left them. Then after the war goes by and the black people return to the field or their homes, and they actually found these horns in the dirt or left in sheds or I don’t where. In time, they became handed down in families, broken, full of holes, tied together with tape. And they didn’t learn to play like the guys in New Orleans, with proper fingering. They knew only the bugle mouth and a little fingering, all wrong, but they liked these things and so they started playing in bands. You gotta get that record. He found two of these bands – there are about ten guys in each group, and they play some kind of hymns that they know in this style, on broken instruments. They have no chops, they’ve got no mouth embouchure at all. But they play this so it’s strictly from the guts. It’s the life vibration that they live in, a pure expression through a horn rather than, say, a guitar.

Also, in those days when Ramsey was doing this work, in the ’50s, he did an early news magazine show on CBS called Omnibus. You must see this – it’s strictly important. Ramsey did one called something like, “They Took a Blue Note.” It was an hour show of jazz. They came to Ramsey, being the expert at the time, and he put it together for them. It shows him going down into Alabama. You see a little of New Orleans – that’s a really nice funeral there. Then you’re out there and there’s Horace Sprott, who was one of his discoveries, playing the harmonica and plowing the field – that’s kind of stagey and dumb. But all of a sudden, around the corner come five guys behind a barn, and they have these beat-up horns. They stand up and play this stuff, and you just fall on your knees. I’m telling you, you will have a transcendent experience, because it’s right in front of your face. It’s a thing that you can barely believe, but it’s one of the great documents of pure soul. These guys are field hands in the 1950s, they’re all middle-aged men, hard-working guys, and they play these horns in some crazy way. The sound that comes out is utterly mind-boggling. It’s just too good.

I had given up all hope of ever seeing this – I figured, well, that’s gone – but there are still some of these jump bands, as they’re now called, down in the South. I heard one at the Atlanta Blues Festival, called the Old Morrisville Brass Band, from South Carolina, and they play this way. They can’t finger these horns and they can’t change keys, but they’ll blow you right out of your seat. It is good.

Try to make the effort to get a hold of the CBS footage – you won’t be sorry. It belongs in everybody’s collection. It is something else to see. You’re talking deep country here, where some of these scenes were filmed – now it’s probably a mall. Man, that thing with the brass players is hot! It’s riveting. You need to see that, because that’s a pre-blues instrumental expression from the countryside, and that’s Civil War-vintage type of understanding on your instruments. [If any readers find or post this footage, please send a link.]

Besides the fife-and-drum tradition, do other pre-blues forms still survive in the country?

I think that the marching band music is one, because it’s all based on 19th-century music. I think the cane-fife thing is a voice there. And then, of course, we have Joseph Spence, who was a voice from the 19th century – he’s dead now. He was in medicine shows, and he was playing hymns. And have you heard this [1920s] group called the Norfolk Jubilee Quartette with Jimmy Bryant on bass? [Sample track: www.archive.org/details/RideOnKingJesus.] Well, I believe they are Geechie, Piedmont-area guys. If they don’t sound like Joseph Spence, then I’ll eat my hat. He does the same thing with his voice. And I know in my heart he heard that group, because that group was hugely popular. And Jimmy Bryant on lead bass was a unique expression [Cooder sings one of Bryant’s deep bass parts] – that’s what Spence is doing all the time. He’s singing that part.

Apparently Jimmy Bryant used to make women fall out and they’d throw their handbags at him and the rest. And he got out in the audience and did the number. So I have a feeling that that minstrel-type gospel shout thing, which we now refer to as quartet style, is a 19th-century style as well. And it sort of survives in pockets down there. There are a few people who still relate to that, but it’s hard to hear anymore. It’s really died out since the era of the soloist kind of wiped it out. But that was a thing that you found in minstrel and church styles way early – I mean, some of those gospel quartet records are way, way early records. So I figure that sort of survives, because church things tend to change slower. People keep their church traditions. And if you went down in the Sea Islands today, where a lot of that music came from, and down around the Norfolk area, you’d hear some of that stuff. I just know you would. It isn’t blues, but there’s blues in it.

And the blues singers listened to church music too, because almost every black was raised up in church. I don’t care if they end up the meanest, nastiest blues singer, they were raised in church. So they were hearing this stuff as a youth, and it’s got to mean something, especially to country people. What else do they have to do but go to church? There’s a strong musical voice in all black music that comes from their experience in church, whatever that may have been. In the case of country people it’s the singing – they didn’t have anything else. That’s why a lot of early records were of preachers.

Around 1902, the Dinwiddie Colored Quartette made some of the first recordings of African-American spiritual music. Have you heard these?
Yes, I have. They sound like a quartet – it’s quartet style. It’s typical church music. [Sample track: www.archive.org/details/DinwiddieColoredQuartet-StealAway1902.] Look, it was the simplest thing for the recording scouts to say, “Well, we know there’s music in the church. We’ll go down the road to find the church, and we’ll ask who’s good and have them come in and sing.” They did that all the time.

Why do you think it took so long for record companies to seriously focus on black musicians?

Nobody thought of them as a market, because they didn’t have any money. They’re poor. You don’t count them. This is a technological thing, and technology is linked to affluence. And then somebody was smart. Ralph Peer was one smart guy who went into the hillbilly hills and figured that these people will but their own music. That’s really a leap of genius. First, you had to sell them the record player. What’s the point of having the records unless you’ve got the record player? So it became a product that furniture stores sold – that’s a known fact. And they actually used to make the records in the back of furniture stores. It was a very concentrated idea. Later on, you had centers of recording, and that’s a whole other story. But I don’t think it was until they began to realize if you can sell something to somebody, go and make it, go and do it. But naturally, technology on any level is linked to where they think they can make money off of it.

Do you think liquor was commonly supplied at country blues sessions?

Yeah, because first of all, you do take people into strange, problem-ridden situations, which is to say, “Mr. Charley says sing, I guess I better sing.” And there’s plenty of that that went on. I can only imagine that these records, on up into modern blues, were made under the most nervous, uncomfortable circumstances imaginable. Because these damn guys weren’t psychologists, they were businessmen. They said, “Boy, you sing.” “Oh, well, alright, sir.” And unless the guy was drunk, maybe he couldn’t. Maybe he was too god-damned scared of white people. Who wouldn’t be? “If I don’t sing, they’ll cut my hands off.” I could believe that, so I figure booze was a way of dealing with a primitive person – get him drunk. Not so much in the case of the church people, who have their religion to kind of shield them, but with blues singers it apparently was true. It’s a thing that’s puzzled me – you know, why liquor was such a deal. Is it because their life is oppressing and hard and they’re unhappy and they drink? I just don’t know why people drink like they do, because I don’t like it myself. So I have a hard time understanding that. But on the other hand, they sing about it and talk about it so much of the time that it must have been about the only fun thing that you could do. That’s why in the modern scene, when you go down to the ghetto, what do you got? You got liquor stores. So that’s obvious. So yeah, they probably used it freely, said “Here, drink this and play.”

I heard that they frequently put pillows under blues guitarists’ feet . . .
To have them stop stomping their foot, because that pushed so much air around. I’m sure they did. They went to lengths to kind of balance it out – that must have been hard too. But the genius of some of those records is beautiful. Some of them are terrible. It’s a question of the engineering capability – where they were, what kind of room.

Plus what kind of 78s survive.
Yeah, man. The 78 is a high-fidelity medium, in a way. It’s going around so fast that it does sound good, except that when they get scratched, they don’t sound not so good!

This interview has been a great help, Ry.
Well, good. Do what you want with it.

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Epilogue: We ran the Blind Willie Johnson and Robert Johnson parts of this interview in the July 1990 issue of Guitar Player magazine. Then, in its April 1991 issue, Progressive Architecture magazine responded to Cooder’s theory about why Robert Johnson recorded facing a corner. After four full pages of charts, diagrams, and technological analysis, Technics Editor Kenneth Labs concluded: “Cooder is probably right.” The article’s lead graphic featured the cover of Robert Johnson: King of the Delta Blues Singers, Vol. 2, with its artist’s rendering of Johnson in the hotel room. I’ve also tried recording acoustic guitarists and spoken word artists this way, and it works.
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