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Issue #218Vol. 43, #2 ® ©

Joe Louis WaLker

2012 Festival Guide Inside!

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n Joe Louis Walker on the Legendary Rhythm and Blues Cruise, October 2007.

In 1985, after a decade of playing and singing nothing but gospel music with a quartet called the Spiritual Corinthians, 35-year-old Joe Louis Walker decided to get back to the blues. The San Francisco–born singer-guitarist had begun playing blues when he was 14, at first with a band of relatives and then with blues-singing pimp Fillmore Slim before becoming a fixture at the Matrix, the city’s preeminent rock club during the psychedelic Summer of Love, backing such visiting artists as Earl Hooker and Magic Sam. Michael Bloomfield became a close friend and mentor. The two musicians lived together for a period, and the famous guitarist even produced a Walker demo for Buddah Records, though nothing came of it. Then, in 1975, Walker walked away from the blues completely in order to escape the fast life and the drugs and alcohol associated with it that he saw negatively affecting Bloomfield and other musician friends.

Walker knew nothing about the blues business when he started doing blues gigs again around the Bay Area with a band he’d put together, as a member of Oakland blues singer-guitarist Haskell “Cool Papa” Sadler’s band, and (for a tour of Europe) with the ad hoc Mississippi Delta Blues Band. Nancy Wright, the tenor saxophonist in his band at the time, did have a connection in the business, however. She was friends with Alligator Records founder Bruce Iglauer, who’d met her several years earlier when she was playing with Lonnie Mack at Coco’s in Covington, Kentucky.

Unbeknownst to Walker, Wright had mailed Iglauer a cassette tape of a set she’d played with him at the Saloon, a blues dive on Grant Avenue in San Francisco’s North Beach district. The producer was impressed enough to, while passing through the Bay Area, attend a gig Walker was doing with Cool Papa’s band up the street at the Grant and Green club. Wright went with him.

“I remember him being essentially a featured sideman,” Iglauer says 26 years later. “I could tell there was talent there, but I think part of my hesitation was that I was looking for somebody who had moved to being a bandleader himself and was out on his own.”

After returning from Europe with the Mississippi Delta Blues Band, Walker used his savings from the trip to cut a professional demo at the end of a Troyce Key session at harmonica blower Dave Wellhausen’s San Francisco studio. Walker mailed one to Iglauer, but again, the producer was impressed but not enough to sign him. He suggested that Walker contact HighTone Records, a three-year-old Oakland label that was on the verge of finding huge success with the Robert Cray Band.

Walker signed with HighTone, which issued his album Cold Is the Night in September 1986. Produced by Bruce Bromberg and Dennis Walker, it was the first recording to appear under his own name. He had earlier played lead guitar on 1972’s Nurse Your Nerves, the funk B-side of Lady in Red, a local R&B hit on the Fish label by the Richmond, California, soft-soul vocal quintet Chain Reaction. He also played guitar and did harmony vocals on the ultra-obscure, self-released 1985 LP God Will Provide by the Spiritual Corinthians. Cold Is the Night, the first of his five HighTone albums, marked the beginning of Walker’s prolific career as one of the most important blues stylists of his generation.

by Lee Hildebrand

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“I come out of the church,” Walker says now. “I was looking for my own sound, and when I talked to Bruce Bromberg and Dennis, they had guys like me in mind. I’d never heard of Robert Cray in my life. They didn’t mention Robert Cray, but they said, ‘We’ve got a guy sort of like you who does some subtle things, some rockin’ things, and some soul things.’ We hit it off right away. Bruce Bromberg was the real conduit for me. He let me be who I was gonna be. He was gonna take a chance on me. I always say that HighTone Records took me from nobody to become somebody.”

Fast-forwarding 25 years and 20 albums later, Walker found himself without a recording contract after making two Duke Robillard–pro-duced CDs for Stony Plain Music in Canada. Pooling their money, Walker, his wife, Robin Poritzky Walker, and his manager, David L. Jones, pooled their money and hired Tom Ham-bridge, a Nashville producer and songwriter noted for his work with Buddy Guy, Susan

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(above) The West Coast Corinthians in Oakland , California, 1977, TOP ROW - Lloyd Batton, Gary Walker, Wig, Charles Williams, Joe Louis Walker,Danny Boone. BOTTOM ROW - Kenny Armstrong, Melvyn Booker Micheal Robinson, Willie Myers, Shorty.

(left) Joe Louis Walker and band at Leon Haywood’s studio 1986, during The Gift recording sessions. L-R Jimi Stewart, Kelvin Dixon, Joe Louis Walker, and Henry Oden.

Ike Turner and Joe Louis Walker at the Great Guitars recording session, 1997.

B.B. King and Joe Louis Walker, c. 1988.

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Tedeschi, and George Thorogood, to record an album that Jones would shop around.

“We put up quite a bit of money to make a record with Tom Hambridge,” Walker explains. “He’d asked me three times to make a record, and the third time I acquiesced, but we had to come up with the money.”

A copy of the master landed on Iglauer’s desk at Alligator in Chicago. “I put it on, and I was just floored,” Iglauer says. “It was such an energetic, tough, and soulful record. I’ve always considered Joe to be an astoundingly good and deeply soulful singer, and the vocals just kill me on this record. His playing is right on the edge of blues and rock because, of course, his roots are as much in rock as they are in blues guitar-wise. I’ve got a lot of Joe’s records, and I was immediately struck by the energy level of this one. It just seemed like he’d gone into another gear. I immediately expressed very strong interest in picking up the master for Alligator.”

Released January 31, Hellfire looks like it’s going to be Walker’s biggest album to date based on early sales and airplay. It reached No. 38 on Billboard’s Heatseekers chart, as well as No. 11 on the magazine’s Blues chart, for the week ending February 5.

It’s also his rockinest album to date, rife with hard-socking bass-and-drum grooves, pounding piano, blistering guitar, and impas-sioned vocals.

“This isn’t a blues record,” Walker claims. “I’ve never been a pure-d 12-bar blues guy.” The 11-song disc does, however, include a slow minor-key blues titled I Won’t Do That

and a blues shuffle, I’m on to You, on which Walker plays high-pitched Jimmy Reed–style harmonica as well as guitar.

Two songs—the rocking title track and the loping What’s It Worth—find Walker play-ing feedback-fueled psychedelic guitar. He’d played that way only once before on record, on Highview, an instrumental from his 2008 Stony Plain CD Witness to the Blues. The song, he says, was a homage to his friend Pe-ter Green of John Mayall and early Fleetwood Mac renown.

“Peter came to my 50th birthday party, and I played on his comeback album, the second one,” Walker says. “He has always played, for my taste, a very emotional style. He’s like the English version of Otis Rush. Peter will admit that he listened to Otis Rush because he’s got that same sort of anguish in real life.”

Walker’s use of controlled feedback on the two tunes from Hellfire is more radical than on Highview, however. He did it that way, he says, in order better to fit the lyrics of the songs.

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Joe Louis Walker with Henry Oden performing at the Richmond, Brighton, England, November 18, 1987.

Joe Louis Walker playing at the lone Star Café in New York, April 24, 1988.

Joe Louis Walker playing at the Banana Peel, Ruiselede, Belgium, October 30, 1985.

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“I come up learning guitar from Claude High and the Hightones, where you had to play Honky Tonk right,” Walker says, referring to a popular Bay Area guitarist and band from the 1960s. “But then, I was younger than they was, so I spent a lot of time at the Fillmore Auditorium seeing all the English groups and seeing [saxophonist] Rahsaan Roland Kirk and seeing all those motherfuckers stretch out.

“When Tom wrote What’s It Worth and I wrote Hellfire and Richard [Fleming] and Tom helped me finish it, I wanted the guitar to be like hellfire. For What’s It Worth, I wanted to show the despair, ’cause it’s like a Shakespeare thing to me: ‘What is it worth to gain the world and lose your soul?’ Well, this is what you sound like; you sound half-assed crazy, but everybody’s been there and done that.”

Other than I’m Moving On, the 1950 Hank Snow country hit that Ray Charles revamped nine years later, all songs on Hellfire come from the pens of Walker and his frequent songwriter partner JoJo Russo and Hambridge and his writing partner Fleming. Russo, who owns an auto shop in Pittsburg,

California, wrote most of the lyrics to the al-bum’s two most humorous tunes: Too Drunk to Drive Drunk and Black Girls.

“The blues I’ve been hearing lately, it

sounds like rock and roll. I been wondering what in the world happened to all that soul. We got to have those black girls to put the soul back up in your song,” Walker wails in intense Little Richard–like tones over the studio band’s throbbing rock beat. An Ikettes-style female group—actually Wendy Moten’s over-dubbed voices—chimes in with “black girls” behind Walker before he rips into a ringing Ike Turner–inspired guitar solo. He concludes the tune singing, “She be rollin’ on the river.” “Rol-lin’, rollin’, rollin’,” the multiple Motens answer.

“I did an interview with one of the big, big writers on a radio station, who said, ‘Don’t you think Black Girls might be a little bit too controversial?’” Walker says. “I said, “Where Jo and I were coming from was I grew up listening to the Ike and Tina Turner Revue live, Mad Dogs and Englishmen live, Mick [Jagger] with Merry Clayton live. There was a sound that went with all that, and the black girls were a big part of that sound. You don’t have that now. Beyoncé is not part of that sound to me, even though she’s black. Joss Stone is not part of that sound, even

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Joe Louis Walker performing at Central Park SummerStage, New York City, July 26, 1997.

Joe Louis Walker performing at the San Francisco Blues Festival, 1985.

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though she’s white but sounds black. It’s like Ray [Charles] with Margie Hendricks. You very rarely find that sound anymore. I can’t name anybody who does it.

“I give a disclaimer at the beginning of the song at every show,” he adds, “so nobody get to thinking it’s a racial thing. It’s not a racial thing; it’s a sound thing.”

Hambridge, the guitarist feels, proved to be an ideal drummer. “It’s always great to have a singin’ drummer,” Walker explains. “Like Percy Mayfield use to say, ‘If you don’t know my lyrics, you don’t know where the punch line at.’ A lot of guys figure, ‘I got seven drums. I gotta hit every one of ’em.’ Well, you really don’t. Tom’s a singin’ drummer, so he doesn’t overplay and he leaves room for the punch lines, the pickups. A lot of guys don’t even know about the pickup, man. The pickup is where there’s a space and in that space, who’s gonna take that space? Is it gonna be a drum roll? Is it gonna be a paradiddle? Is it gonna be a guitar lick? Is it gonna be “I can’t get no” [as in the Rolling Stones’ Satisfaction]. If that was a space, the average drummer woulda played through it, but Charlie Watts had sense enough to know by not playin’.

“On Hellfire, you heard that foot goin’,” Walker adds, referring to Hambridge’s bass drum pattern. “That’s the kinda shit I like. Reminds me of the way [Oakland drummer David] Boyette used to play. When he played Don’t Cry No More with my cousin [bassist] Ted Wysinger, that used to knock me out. You know that part where it’s just the drums and the singer? Frankie Lee used to sing the shit out of that.”

Walker also was impressed with Ham-bridge’s rock-like mixes of the songs on the CD. The guitarist says he learned to trust his producers’ judgments in such matters from having worked with Steve Cropper on three Verve/Gitanes albums: 1995’s Blues of the

Month Club, 1997’s Great Guitars (featur-ing duets with Little Charlie Baty, Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, Otis Grand, Buddy Guy, Robert Jr. Lockwood, Taj Mahal, Scotty Moore, Matt Murphy, Bonnie Raitt, Otis Rush, Ike Turner, and Cropper), and 1998’s made-in-Muscle Shoals Preacher and the President.

“If I’m gonna hire a producer and work with a producer like I worked with Cropper and Tony Visconti and Jon Tiven, I’m gonna let ’em do what they do,” the guitarist says. “Every time I made a suggestion to Cropper, he said, ‘Go home and listen to it.’ He was always right. When it came to Cropper’s judgment about mixing stuff, he was always right. He just was never wrong. He was really humble and low-key about it. He coulda said, “Hey, I mixed Otis Redding. I mixed Wilson Pickett.’ He never came off like that. It’s real

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Joe Louis Walker playing 12-string acoustic at the Bruno Walter Auditorium, Library for the Performing Arts, Lincoln Center, New York City, November 9, 1989.

Joe Louis Walker laughing it up with Mick Jagger, December 2011.

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refreshing when you find that your heroes are people that are really down to earth.

“With Hambridge, it’s the same way. He knows how to mix for radio. He’s got his finger on it. I think that’s why he’s doing Lynyrd Skynyrd now and that’s why Thoro-good’s record went up the charts. And that’s why he mixed B.B. and Buddy a little bit hot. He didn’t mix it like a blues record.”

About his earlier work with Cropper, Walker also says, “He’s in a world of his own because of working with everybody from Pops Staples and Albert King to Tower of Power and Rod Stewart to me. He can put himself in so many different categories and know how to get the best out of you. Crop is the one who got me, if I was singing in the key of E, to sing it in F to get a little strain on your voice. He got me doing that. That’s why I’m hitting all those high notes. He’d say, ‘Okay, I know you can sing it in G. Now sing it in A.’ I’d say, ‘I can’t sing it in A,’ and he’d say, ‘Well, try A flat.’ Crop’s got all those sorts of tricks and things from being in the music with so many great people.”

Walker’s intense, raspy vocals on Black Girls and some of the other songs on Hell-fire, as well as his preaching introduction to Soldier for Jesus, bring Little Richard to mind, although he says that Richard was not an influence on his singing style. The guitarist cites Bobby Womack, Sam Cooke, and Otis Redding as his main vocal influences. (Red-ding, of course, was strongly influenced by Richard, which would make Walker an indirect Little Richard disciple.)

“I wouldn’t even go try to be like Sam,” the guitarist says. “Otis early, when he was hitting all them high notes, but more Bobby, that preaching and singing at the same time. That record More Than I Can Stand always affected me because he’s basically preaching. My grandmother used to tell me, ‘Joe, we wanted you to be a preacher.’ Then, before my grandmother died, she said, ‘Joe, you are a preacher. You just don’t know it.’”

On earlier recordings, Walker sometimes used African American gospel quartets—the Spiritual Corinthians and the Gospel Hum-mingbirds—for backup vocals. On two tracks on Hellfire—Soldier for Jesus and Don’t Cry—he hired the Jordanaires, the studio singing group known for their work with Elvis Presley, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Patsy Cline, Willie Nelson and countless other pop and country artists. Soldier for Jesus is perhaps the first gospel recording on which a black singer has been backed by a white quartet since Doris Akers made an album for RCA Victor with the Statesmen Quartet in 1964.

Walker met the Jordanaires, who had begun their career singing gospel music, through original Presley guitarist Scotty

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Joe Louis Walker at the Vermont Blues Festival, August 2010.

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Moore. “I played at the Lincoln Monument on the Fourth of July about 17 or 18 years ago,” Walker recalls. “Some genius—I don’t know who this motherfucker was—put me on as the headliner above Carl Perkins with D.J. Fontana and Scotty Moore backing him.

“I developed a close relationship with Scot-ty and D.J. Fontana. who is one of the greatest drummers I’ve ever heard. When it came time to induct them into the Memphis Music Hall of Fame, along with Gatemouth Moore and Alex Chilton, Scotty called me and said, ‘Would you come and sing Mystery Train?’

“When I warm up, I don’t warm up with scales,” he adds. “I go back and start singing gospel songs. I might sing Hem of His Gar-ment or I’m on the Right Track Now—things I did with the Corinthians. Ray Walker and them from the Jordanaires heard me. I was working on a song called Soldier for Jesus and he heard me. He said, ‘Joe, I never met you before, but we gotta do that song.’ This was years ago, but the opportunity never arose.”

Walker and the Jordanaires finally got to do Soldier for Jesus on Hellfire, but the two Walkers’ original idea had been to do a whole album with the Jordanaires and the Blind Boys of Alabama featuring Clarence Fountain. “We wanted to bring so-called white gospel and black gospel together,” the guitarist explains. “Ray turned to me and said, ‘You know, Joe, I’ve been talking to Clarence about us doing a record with them. I called Clarence and found out that he was on kidney dialysis and had diabetes and that the Blind Boys were suing each other. I still want to do that record.

“It’s sort of like a microcosm of Ameri-can music. You take Booker T. and the MG’s—two white, two black—or any of those groups; they were all mixed and everybody brought something to the table. To me, that’s the real good thing about American music. It’s just not one thing. It’s a lot of things that go into it. All of it ain’t white. All of it ain’t black. All of it ain’t Chicano. It’s American music.

“Always had to serve two masters—good and bad, left and right. Devil’s sittin’ on my shoulder, and the angels cry with all their might,” Walker wails on Hellfire’s title track. He ends the song, however, with “Holy Ghost is on my shoulder. I know it,” as if to say God has triumphed over Satan in his life. It’s the latest in a series of Walker songs about good and evil and heaven and hell, including I’ll Get to Heaven on My Own from 1979’s Blue Soul on HighTone and If There’s a Heaven from 2009’s Between a Rock and the Blues on Stony Plain. (Billy Branch, with Walker on guitar, does a version of I’ll Get to Heaven on My Own on his new The Devil Ain’t Got No Music CD.)

“I’ve had the experience of playing in church and the experience of not playing in

church,” Walker says. “My first opening-up gig at the Matrix, when I left home, was for Mississippi Fred McDowell, who had the dichotomy of playing church music and play-ing secular music. Same with Son House. A lot of people gravitate toward Robert Johnson. Well, I gravitate toward Son House because of what he went through. All his life was that dichotomy, and it’s sort of been a dichotomy for me in a way, too.

“I came out of church, and both of my grandmothers were Bible-thumpers. My father sent me to Catholic school for six years, and that affected me. And I was with the Corinthi-ans for ten years, and that affected me. But in the grand scheme of things, there’s that saying, ‘While we’re making plans, God’s laughing.’

“Some people believe that you won’t pay anything for your actions here. Some people believe that you will pay for your actions here. I’m sort of in the middle.”

Between 1992 and ’99, Walker made six CDs for Gitanes Blues Productions, a division of Polydor/PolyGram France. The first five were issued in the U.S. on Verve, the last on Blue Thumb. In addition to the aforementioned pickers on Great Guitars, Walker’s guests on those recordings included Terry Adams, James Cotton, Angela Strehli, Branford Marsalis, Alvin Youngblood Hart, and Kenny “Blues Boss” Wayne.

The first decade of the present century found Walker bouncing from label to label. He made one CD for Telarc with producer Randy Labbe and a rhythm section that included onetime Saturday Night Live guitarist G.E. Smith, another for Evidence with produc-ers Carla Olson and Brian Brinkerhoff and a band that included trumpeter Wallace Roney, saxophonist Ernie Watts, organist Barry Goldberg, guitarist Phil Upchurch, bassist Robert Hurst, drummer Leon Ngudu Chancler, and percussionist Master Henry Gibson, three self-produced albums for the English JSP label (one co-billed with Otis Grand), another self-produced disc for Blues Bureau International, and two for Stony Plain with Duke Robillard.

That decade was a rough one for Walker. “I went through a pretty bad divorce,” he says. He eventually won a bitter custody battle over their two daughters and managed to block his ex-wife from attaching his record-ing and songwriting royalties. He moved from Pittsburg, California, in 2004, spent two and a half years in three different French cities, lived in San Leandro, California, for a year, and four years ago settled with his new wife and his daughters Berneice and Lena in Westchester, New York. Berneice, now 21, recently moved into her own apartment. Lena, 17, is currently one of two backup vocalists in his band.

The guitarist has long spent much of his time in Europe and for the past three years

and a half years frequently performed there with a band featuring himself, Algerian blues singer-guitarist Amar Sundy, and American guitarist Murali Coryell, who also plays in his U.S. band.

“Murali,” Walker says, “plays like his pop [jazz guitarist Larry Coryell], and he can play like Freddy King. And Amar is from the Tuareg tribe. He does Saharan blues. When I met Amar, he was playing with Albert King. We took it all and mixed it together. The people all over Europe really like it.

“It put us in a different category. Not only are we able to mix those three styles, but we also speak several languages. We would do one song—Amar might sing it in Tuareg or in French and Murali might sing that same song in Span-ish and a little bit of Russian and I would sing the same song in Wolof, which is a dialect of Senegalese. I lived in France for two years, and most of my partners were from Algeria or Sen-egal, so I just learned certain Arabic phrases. People in Spain would go crazy when Murali would sing a verse in Spanish or Amir would sing a verse in French or African. He speaks Spanish also. If we were doing something in Paris, we’d do it in all languages.

“That’s what I believe music is sort of coming to, like a global village. Look at Mick Jagger’s new group, New Super Heavies. He’s got the guy from Slumdog Millionaire, A.R. Rahman. He’s got Damian Marley. He’s got Joss Stone. Mick’s not even the lead singer, but it’s a smart move because that makes the world. It used to be all about English. Now it ain’t all about English. You can ingratiate yourself, you know, by speaking a little bit of somebody’s language. I can speak a little Ger-man. I can speak a little Norwegian. It really helps show the people that you’re putting a foot forward.”

For the time being, however, Walker has put his multicultural project with Amir and Coryell on hold in order to promote the music from Hellfire. He seems elated to have found a home at Alligator, where he’s signed for three albums.

“The real star of this record, if there are any stars, is Tom Hambridge. He let me do what to do. Me and him wrote 13 songs in two days, and we didn’t even use half of ’em.

“The other star of it was Bruce Iglauer—I’m not suckin’ up; I’m not that type of guy—for pulling out all the stops to make everybody get it like he’s got it, to make sure everybody knows that this is what Joe can do, this is what he’s capable of doing. You’re heard him do a little bit of this and a little bit of that, but, hey, this is what he really can do.

“Since I’ve been signed to Alligator, I’m concentrating on doing justice by Alligator like they’re doing justice by me.”