In Conversation With Colin: Walter Trout

Walter Trout, an American blues guitarist and singer songwriter whose career began on the New Jersey shore scene of the late 60’s and 70’s chats with Colin Palmer for Newport City Radio’s ‘The Rock Vault’ about his forthcoming tour of the UK, taking in Cardiff’s Tramshed on May 7th. 

Walter Trout is a veritable rock and blues god in Europe, where he routinely headlines major tours and releases albums to great critical acclaim. A slashing, intense guitarist, his work echoes the experimental freedom of Jimi Hendrix, the jammy sting of Stevie Ray Vaughan, and the speedy phrasing of Eddie Van Halen. An impassioned singer who handles both hard rockers and slow blues, he is one of the last great purveyors of blues rock showmanship. 

Speaking from his home in California, Walter remembers fondly a show several decades ago in these here parts. “I’m really looking forward to getting back to Wales, I’ve always had a great time there and one of my big memories is playing in Newport maybe thirty years ago at The Kings Hotel, and Van Morrison came to see us and I got to meet him that night and I was very honoured that he came to see my band.”  

The obvious admiration that Walter has for Van continues. “I can seriously say that I backed up Van Morrison at Carnegie Hall, I played in his band and one great memory of that gig is we were in the middle of a song and he turned around and pointed at me and I played a solo and he gave me a big smile and I felt great.” 

Walter Trout has played shows all around the world and at countless venues but still retains an impressive memory for detail. “I also remember playing in Swansea with Bernie Marsden and Mickie Moody, they had the Moody Marsden Band and at the end of the gig we all came out and jammed, and it was an awesome evening, I think the name of the place was Patti Pavilion. Bernie remained a dear friend of mine until he passed on.” 

Trout has great things to say about Aberdare born singer and songwriter Laura Evans, she toured with Walter as the support act on his most recent UK tour. “I love Laura Evans, she’s great” he says. “She’s a wonderful person and an incredible talent, we had a great time and I think she’s got great things ahead of her. We got her up with our band and we sang some blues together.” 

Another up-and-coming artist Walter admires is Will Wilde. “Best harmonica player on the planet,” says Walter. “I was playing on a pier, I think it was Worthing some years ago when Will was very young, and we had an opening act that was a guy with an acoustic guitar and a harmonica player. I was in the dressing room and off in the distance I could hear this harmonica and I kept stopping the guys in the band from talking to me because I wanted to hear this harmonica. I went out and watched him and I was just floored and I asked him to get up and play with me and my band. Every time I’ve come to the UK I’ve always invited him to come play the band, and when I made my last album I did this boogie like a Canned Heat boogie and I’m a harmonica player also and my thought was that this song needed somebody to elevate it and I asked Will and he was kind enough to play on the track and he just took it into the stratosphere.” 

At the other extreme of the blues spectrum, I ask Walter about his memories of working with John Lee Hooker. “Well it was an education playing with him and getting to hang out with him,” he tells me. “I was in a bar band in Orange County, we were popular but we were a cover band we did Beatles and Stones and Crosby, Stills & Nash and a lot of Eagles stuff, and I went to this jam session in LA and there were a lot of older black guys there and they said ‘hey, why don’t you join our band’ and it happened to be john Lee Hooker’s back-up band. So overnight I went from playing Eagles songs to playing with John Lee Hooker, so it was a really quick education in the blues. 

“I ended up staying with those guys for two years, and I backed up John Lee Hooker and Big Mama Thornton and Lowell Fulson and Bo Diddley and Joe Tex and that all happened because I went to that jam session. It was a lot of fun but it was kind of rough, it didn’t pay much the bar band was paying me a lot we had a residency at the big night club at Newport Beach, so all the rich people were there. So I had a day job to support myself through that where I was painting little black lines into micrometer knobs and I was making five cents per knob and that helped me pay the rent.” 

Back in 1979 the blues wasn’t doing very well and legends such as John Lee Hooker were playing to audiences of less than one hundred and were struggling, as Walter explains. “It wasn’t like go and play with this blues icon and it’s going to be a piece of cake, no it was the real blues. You go to a hotel with the whole band and you’re sleeping on the floor, but it didn’t matter, I was young and I was playing with an icon. I have to say that of all the ones that I’ve played in my years as a sideman before I got with Canned Heat and John Mayall and those guys, Big Mama Thornton was probably the most fun.” 

Big Mama Thornton is one of the most influential figures in the whole of rock, even if you’ve never heard of her. Born Willie Mae Thornton in Ariton, Alabama, in 1926, Thornton would rank amongst the very first women in music to stick it to the men and show them how to do it. In addition to being a woman, she was also African-American, and what she achieved in the time of Jim Crow, even if it was dwarfed by what she could have achieved, was monumental.  

Walter continues with his story, “I show up to the gig after I get a phone call telling me ‘hey, we’re backing up Big Mama Thornton tonight’, so I drive to the club and I walk in and there I am with those guys and I’m the only person under eighty five in the room and I’m the only vanilla fella in the room and so I went up to her and said ‘hello Mama, my name is Walter and I’ll be playing guitar and since we’re not rehearsing and I don’t know what we’re going to do can you tell me what are we going to play, and this is the honest to God truth, she stood up and she got in my face and she said ‘Walter, all you got to do is play like BB King, I do not want to hear no rock & roll’. So we’re out on the stage playing a slow blues and she goes ‘ladies and gentlemen this is Walter over here and right now he’s going to try and play like BB King’, and I did my very best BB King impression and she gave me this big smile and she had brought tears to my eyes. She loved me and I loved her, I had a great time with her.” 

Another legendary band that features heavily in Walter’s musical odyssey is Canned Heat. Back in the day, they were one of the biggest and best American bands around; an electrifying, boogiefied update of the blues dressed in filthy dungarees and biker boots. As the 60s neared its close and the Age Of Aquarius was in full swing, Canned Heat were singing about Going Up The Country or being On The Road Again.  

When Canned Heat was formed by blues enthusiasts Alan Wilson and Bob Hite, the pair borrowed their name from the 1928 blues standard Canned Heat Blues by Tommy Johnson. His spectral falsetto warbles out a tale of a desperate alcoholic who turns to drinking Sterno to get by. Sterno, a brand of ‘canned heat’ is a jellied form of denatured alcohol sold in a can and used as cooking fuel. During Prohibition, the consumption of Sterno became popular as it was a substitute for alcohol at a time when the production and sale of hooch were illegal.  

“I was playing in a legendary club in Hermosa Beach called the Lighthouse,” remembers Walter. “Miles Davis had recorded a live album there and it had been going since the forties and that’s when some guys came in and heard me playing and it was Canned Heat and they invited me to join. So my life changed then and I’m out doing one-nighters, and then we get three shows opening for John Mayall, I become friends with John over those three nights and he invites me to join his band and it all goes back to that jam session I went to. If I hadn’t have gone that night I might still be playing in a bar in Newport Beach.” 

John Mayall was one of the key originators of the British blues movement, a reliable and generous guide to a new generation whose members were devoted to learning the music that had emerged from the juke joints of the Mississippi Delta and the clubs of Chicago’s South Side. He wasn’t content to churn out Delta blues covers – Mayall originals would fill entire albums, such as 1968’s ‘Bare Wires’ which reached the UK Top 3. From his new base in southern California, he continued to recruit interesting musicians for tours, festivals and recording sessions. From Canned Heat, one of the American blues bands following in his footsteps, he took bassist Larry Taylor and guitarist Harvey Mandel for a line-up that also featured the violinist Don ‘Sugarcane’ Harris. Guitarists Sonny Landreth and Walter Trout were other collaborators at an early stage of their careers. 

“John Mayall was beyond a mentor he was like a musical father to me.” Walter explains, “The first time I went out and played with him when I was in Canned Heat and we did those three shows opening I think it was in ’81 or ’82 he had John McVie, Colin Allen on drums and Mick Taylor on guitar and we all hung out for three days and then John said to me ‘well what are you doing now?’ and I said to him “Canned Heat’s going to take a couple of months off, they’re not doing anything’ and he told me that he would love to hear me play guitar with Mick Taylor and to come out on the road with him. So the first tour I did with John Mayall was up and down California from San Diego up to San Francisco and back but I was playing with the original Bluesbreakers. This is like a dream, I learned to play guitar in high school and I went out and bought the ‘Beano’ album. But then he disbanded that group and hired Canned Heat and we went out on tour as Canned Heat and John Mayall, and we did a television concert in America that’s still on YouTube and we toured all over America and Canada for like a year with that.” 

Walter remained with John Mayall for seven years up until 1989 when he left to form his own band. “John believed in me”, declares Walter. “I was a raging drug addict and alcoholic in that band and even guys in the band were saying to John ‘what are you doing with this guy? He’s a lunatic’. But John nurtured me and supported me and when I decided I wanted to get sober he helped me. I’ve been clean and sober now coming up on thirty eight years.” 

John Mayall died at his home in California on 22nd July, 2024 surrounded by his family. Mick Jagger led the tributes hailing him as a great pioneer of British blues. Eric Clapton posted a video thanking Mayall for rescuing him from oblivion when he wanted to quit music as a teenager before joining his band. 

Walter remembers the last time he saw John Mayall, “My wife and I went to his 90th birthday in LA, it was November 2023, and he sat with us in his backyard there was like a hundred people and he sat with Marie and I and we just talked the whole time. He had severe memory issues at the end, but the last time I saw him I played in Los Angeles with my band at a beautiful club called The Canyon Club in Agoura Hills, and one of his sons called me and said ‘we want to bring Dad to see you and please don’t invite him up to play because he can’t play anymore and he gets tired really easy so he may only come and listen to two songs and leave but he really wants to come and hear you’. So we played the gig, he was out in the back sitting at a table with two of his sons and a couple of other friends of his and he stayed all night, at the end he came into the dressing room and he hugged me and he said ‘that was fantastic’ and then he sat with us and hung out and he was in his element. He was in a dressing room at a club with a bunch of blues musicians, and he laughed and we told jokes and we had a great time. So it was very fitting the last time I saw him we were in a dressing room at a night club and he passed on not long after that.” 

I ask Walter if he has any words of advice for aspiring blues players just starting out on their musical career, he offers this, “Well I can tell you some of the things Duke Ellington said to me when I sat on his couch when I was ten years old. Let me preface this by saying I started studying the trumpet when I was five and took lessons and became a very good trumpet player and I played it all through high school in the orchestra. When I was ten years old I still was going to be a jazz trumpet player, I was listening to John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy and Miles Davis and my mother said one day Duke Ellington and Tony Bennett are playing at the theatre in Cherry Hill tonight do you want to go and get some tickets. So we go to the box office at about two in the afternoon and she’s getting the tickets and all these cars drive up and all these very well dressed black men get out of these cars and they’re carrying horn cases and she goes ‘that’s the orchestra, there they are’ and they go around to the stage entrance and she says ‘Walter come with me’. She knocks on the door and says ‘my son plays the trumpet, is there any way he could meet anyone’. At that point Paul Gonsalves who was a sax player comes out and I’m a little kid and I said ‘I love the solo you do on Diminuendo And Crescendo In Blue and he’s like ‘WHAT, come with me dude’ and he takes me and my mother in the dressing room and says to everyone ‘this kid knows our music’. Then I go ‘Johnny Hodges, I love the way you do Moon Indigo’ and then the trumpet player ‘Cat Anderson, you’re my favourite trumpet player’. They say come on in kid, sit down. 

“Cat Anderson was the guy who played everything like two octaves higher and I asked him how do you do that? And he goes well here’s my trumpet and he shows me the embouchure and he hands me the trumpet. So I try the note, and all the musician’s laugh and I laugh ‘cos I can’t do it. So Duke Ellington talks to me about music and he told me things like if you’re thinking of going into this as your career then number one: realise that the public is very fickle, you might have success one year and the next year they’re going to put you down, and you’re going to have to listen to music critics and you’re going to put yourself in front of the public to be judged. Then he told me that at a certain point get to where the important thing is to just be a true artist and take your creative drive seriously and be the best artist you can be and make the most honest work you can do, and if you’ve done that and somebody writes a critical thing about it then you know you’ve done the best you can do. Don’t go into this for fame and fortune, go into it for the art of it.” 

One of the most exciting aspects of a Walter Trout gig is not only an impeccable exhibition of blues rock guitar but also the insightful rock anecdotes from one of the finest musicians still treading the boards. 

It’s easy to take Walter Trout for granted. He’s constantly touring, releasing studio albums and playing on others recordings, but nothing in his resume matches the ferocity of his live shows, expanding his blues rock boundaries, creating intensity and integrity that are demonstrative and spectacular. 

Excerpts of this interview will be broadcast on ‘The Rock Vault’ May 6th. Available on ‘listen again’ for the following two weeks.  

Colin Palmer