Interview: Walter Trout

Blues guitarist WALTER TROUT has just released his second album entitled Prisoner of a Dream, hot on the heels of his debut Life in the Jungle, which brought him widespread critical acclaim. Both albums attest to the fact that blues, which has, through all the changes in music, marked the time and stayed as pure to its roots as it's always been.

"And I think it always will," opines Walter. "It goes up and down in popularity, but there's always an audience for it because I believe it's emotional music."

Walter used to be the guitarist with the JOHN MAYALL BLUES BREAKERS, a position he held from 1984 to 1989, but he always had an inner yearning to take his own small club band back home in LA, on the road.

"When I decided to quit John and go on my own, it was sort of a gamble and John told me: 'Good luck and I support you in your endeavour, but if a year from now it doesn't work out, don't come back looking for a job'."

Walter assures me that no malice was intended by that statement.

"We're still very good friends, but as a matter of business it was; 'You can't just leave my band and try something and then come back.'"

The final push that set Walter well and truly on course for his goal, came one night in Denmark when John was taken ill and he decided he wanted the show they were booked to do cancelled, only to have the promoter come up with the idea of letting Walter take over the role of singing instead of John - an idea, basically designed to prevent the promoter losing some serious green backs.

"l went on that night and I led the Blue Breakers and I did a whole lot of stuff that I never got to do in John's band, and we went over really well."

So well in fact that he impressed a representative of the Danish record company whom the Blues Breakers are signed to, as well as John's promoter.

"That one night, everything changed for me cos the record company said, 'Look why don't you make your own album and the promoter said why don't you bring your own band over'. That was when I made the final decision. So I went for it."

A fairy tale of a break huh? With the advent of such a break, you'd think the guy would be jabbering away to me like a kid at Christmas, but he's very calm and very together and he works constantly. He does on average, six tours of Europe a year.

"We've actually been concentrating on Europe because we really started in Denmark as a serious group."

A recent tour of England saw him playing to sold out venues everywhere, but as far as taking the music to the states side public is concerned:

"We sort of haven't paid much attention to America. When we're home, it's nice to be with the family. So what we do, is we play in a club near to where we live - we're the house band there - for me it's three blocks from my home, so I can spend the days with my family and still get to play at night."

But negotiations are under way at the moment with an American record label for Walter to record an album. But for some strange reason the American record companies have shown no interest in releasing the two albums that we have been treated to.

"In a way, it's a shame," he says "because I think there's some good stuff on those albums."

Too right! As well as penning his own sweet n' soulful numbers, Walter throws in a few cover tunes like HENDRIX's passionately executed "Red House" and BOB DYLAN's rueful "Girl From The North Country." The reason being, he sees it as an important thing to bring to the attention of a younger audience, music that they might otherwise pass by.

"Definitely."

A point that arouses a feeling of passion in him.

"l think that there's a whole new generation out there who are looking for guitar players and role models for their own playing. When I was young, I looked to Jimi Hendrix, I looked to MICHAEL BLOOMFIELD and ERIC CLAPTON. The young kids today need to know what went before SLASH and YNGWIE MALMSTEEN. They need to know the guitar was not invented a year ago. I think doing covers like that will lead them back to the source."

Walter would be the first to admit that he's out of touch with the modern rock scene and puts this down to the fact that he's working most of the time, so to draw him on his views of a lot of the modern day axe wielding heroes kind of puts him between a rock and a hard place.

"I know that there's guys like ROBERT CRAY that play very soulfully. Jeez, it's a hard one for me to answer without sounding stuffy and old because maybe what's emotional to one person isn't to the next."

As far as critics pointing there poisoned pens at his style of playing, he too has come under fire.

"There are critics out there who will tell you that my playing is pure technique, it has no soul. I read that a lot and I think that they have shit in their ears."

On this point, I would tend to agree with him, cos the only thing that is apparent when listening to his albums is that playing is his catharsis.

"All I try to do is, I try to play from my heart and when I'm singing a song and playing a solo, I'm really thinking about a girl that I used to love, or I'm thinking about that my mother passed away. I'm trying to get emotionally involved and I'm trying to say something to that person in the audience, I want to create an emotion in them. I'm not trying to stick my dick in their face and I'm not trying to make them go 'Wow'!Il'm trying to make them, like, weep maybe. But people don't always hear it the way you intend it. Music really is a matter of opinion."

Another matter of opinion that seems to crop up time and again, is musicians feelings towards the impact of video, and more especially the power of MTV.

"I think MTV and video was an incredible set back for music," he says "I've done a video and it doesn't mean that I won't do them in the future, because I am on a record label, and I do want people to get the records, but I think that video, in a lot of ways is a set back for the art of just music that you listen to. You know when I used to go and see HENDRIX, it was an incredible show to watch. But the main thing was what was coming out of the amplifiers, not the look. l think now, maybe it's a lot different. Video gives you a certain set of images that are stuck before you, and I think it's kind of limiting to the experience of the music. It's turned music into a kind of going to the movies and I'm not out to be a movie star, I'm out to be a musician."

If you want to check out some cool blues, the WALTER TROUT BAND - also comprising the incredible talents of Jim Trapp on bass, Daniel "Mongo" Abrams on keyboards and Klas Anderhell on drums - will be over here about mid November to do some dates so if it's your thang, I suggest you check it out.

Peter Grant
Riff Raff

November 1991

Revenge...?

Riff Raff was a legendary rock magazine based in London in the late 1980s and 1990s. Edited by the ultimate music biz insider, Mark Crampton, and employing such talents as Mark Blake, Jerry Ewing, Mike Harris, Paul Smith, Chris Collingwood, Alan McCrorie, Simon Robinson, Lyn Guy, Anna Marx, Nick Douglas, Marion Garden, Peter "Grunty" Grant, Joe "The Crow" Mackett, Billy "The Kluck" Kulke, and, lastest and mostest, the incredible Liddell Brothers, Mark (a.k.a. "El Perro") and Colin (a.k.a. "Der Fly"). Unfortunately, Riff Raff was just too R n' R for its own good. A genuine working class rock mag, written, edited, and translated into 16 European languages in a drug-N-Jack-D-fuelled haze, often on the back of motorbikes, with spell checking by our staff of attentive rock bimbos (chosen purely for their blondeness and big knockers), it soon fell behind more trainspotterly, nerdish, and politically correct publications like Q, Kerrang, Mojo, Metal Hammer, and Horse & Hound. This website is an archive and kind of shrine dedicated to the writing of its greatest writers, some of whom, luckily for the Rock Kosmos, still continue to write about music. This is the REVENGE of Riff Raff...Rock on!