Gary Hoey has to be one of the most ebullient, interesting interviewees with whom I’ve had the pleasure to speak. He positively radiates energy as he discusses his latest (and, it must be said, fantastic) album, Neon Highway Blues (released last month via Mascot). The album, which features guest spots from the likes of Eric Gales and, in a particularly special moment, Gary’s son, is a typically effusive mix of blues and rock and it stands tall in an already packed back catalogue. Throughout the interview, Gary speaks lovingly of the blues, both as a genre and as a community and, to my delight, the piece is punctuated with his guitar playing as he grabs various instruments to demonstrate his point. Read on and meet Gary Hoey.
How are you?
I’m very good, how are you doing?
Good!
Thank you very much for agreeing to talk to me…
Oh my pleasure man. I just got off the road – I played New York last night and I just drove off the road five hours and I just came home and I’ve got a cup of coffee and I’m happy to hang with you for a bit…
Well it’s a pleasure – I’ve had the chance to listen to the record the last couple of days and I particularly like the title track… [At this point Gary waves the LP close to the camera]
I’ve got the vinyl!
That’s not fair!!
I Know! But you know what’s funny? The last album, I did an interview and I didn’t have a CD and the interviewer was holding up my album and I was like: “my god, I haven’t even seen it yet!” and they had it before I did! It was really sad!
But yeah, this is the vinyl and I’m kinda excited. I like the bigger cover and stuff, then it’s got all the back info and it’s nice because it comes with a download card so you can download all the files if you want; if you’re into the high-tech and low-tech, you know… but anyway, we’re very excited and I’m glad you’re liking the album – I appreciate it so much.
I’m a huge physical music junkie, so vinyl and CD are my go-to formats… not the digital if I can possibly avoid it!
I just like the convenience of the digital. You know, I actually bought my album for my phone! I paid like nine bucks for it ‘cause I couldn’t figure out how to get the files into my phone from my laptop, so I had to buy it for nine bucks! I guess I got six cents back, I don’t know.
Yeah, streaming etc. is not so good…
Well, it’s crazy! My son, who played on the record with me, he likes Apple music. It’s ten bucks a month and he can listen to fifty million songs. I like it for him, but for me as an artist, I’m like “come on man! We’re not like cable TV!”
But, I think it’s OK. We’re in a world with streaming and all that and it all adds up to something – I’m not complaining.
The thing for me with streaming, and I think this is particularly relevant for records such as yours, is that you lose the ebb, the flow and the thought that goes into making an album ‘an album’, you know? As I said, with your record I love the title track and the way it brings the curtain down on the record, I like the way that the album takes us through peaks and troughs and you don’t get that with streaming so much… So yeah, my first question really is that the album took a while, so can you tell us how it all came together?
Well, you know the album took a while for various reasons. You know, you’re on tour, you’re trying to get things done and you stop and start and I’ve got other things going and it’s a different time for us as musicians. It’s not like the old days where you could take some time and go sit in the studio for six months and spend a week on a kick drum tone… those were the ways!
Now, you not only have to make a record, but you have to go on tour and do all the projects while you’re making a record. So, for me, I’m a producer, I’ve produced Peter Floyd… I’m an educator and mentor – I teach; I do clinics at a university and music stores; I do gigs; I have two kids… so, yeah, I have all this stuff going on and it does get in the way a bit.
The other side is that when I have time off (and I’m off the road) and I do get in the studio – sometimes, what I’m looking for, it isn’t always there. So, whether it was the lyric or the music or the melody or the solos – I feel I have to keep working on it because it doesn’t sound quite right and if I try to rush it, I’m not happy with it.
So, I always figure I should keep working on it because it’s better to show up late with something that’s decent, than rush something out and it all ends real quick. I’ve learned that lesson. I’ve learnt to trust my instinct, to stick to my guns and tell my manager and everybody over here that we’re not building sheds, we’re making music!
There are a couple of songs that really stand out for me and “I felt alive” is a cracking, Led Zeppelin kind of heavy rock song…
Thank you! That one was kind of a funny song. I grew up on Black Sabbath and I grew up on a lot of heavy music when I was a teenager and it carried into me auditioning for Ozzy at one point. And a lot of that heavy groove and loving Led Zeppelin… so as I was putting the songs together for the record, I just kept going with whatever came out and at one point, I kept saying “no, it’s a blues record, stick to blues…”
So, I kept bringing myself back to the blues and then, once I felt I had enough blues, I went back to find the best song from those fifteen or seventeen songs that I wrote… and I tried to figure out what would be the best songs to make the best record; the best journey so it doesn’t get boring with too much [imitates twelve bar blues].
I just didn’t want to do too much of that and I didn’t want to let go of my heavy roots and my fan base, who have stuck with me for twenty albums… And I also love guitar instrumental music, because for fifteen years I didn’t sing, I just didn’t sing at all. So, I figured I had this great instrumental, I had this little riff, this little, you know: [picks up guitar and plays the prelude to “I felt alive”] and I had this chord progression and it was like “wow, that’s an arrangement”… it’s like an old-school Gary Moore… And the melody’s kinda simple, it’s like [plays the lead] and I figured I’d just put it on the record and all my friends were texting me going “that’s my favourite song!”
And I was so happy – it almost didn’t make the record – and “I felt alive” was another one where I said to the band “let’s just do this, and make it rock!” and when I tried to sing it, the vocal was a little high for my vocal range, and my wife said “don’t sing it! You’re going to have to sing it on tour every night!” and I said: “you know what? To hell with it, I’m going for it!”
And so, we’re really proud of it and when we play it live, it really sounds good and it feels… the new music is feeling so good live! Last night in New York, we played the other Zeppelin-y kinda song [plays it] because, you know, it’s just simple riff-y stuff, but we can take it out and we can jam and it just felt like we were keeping the blues and the rock kind of merging in the middle, and that’s the test to me – when you go to play it live.
It’s a very dynamic record and you can feel the way it rises and falls, and, as I said earlier, another highlight is the title track, which has that liquid, almost Gilmour-y kinda slide guitar. I really like that song.
That song… You know I enjoy that song because, when we wrote it, the band and I were in the studio and my bass player said to me “hey man, you know that song is a six bar blues, right?” and I thought “hold on a second….”
So, I always love playing the resonator, so I was playing around this little riff and… I don’t know if it’s in tune… [Picks up the resonator and plays the slide riff from Neon Highway Blues] And when I was playing it, it reminded me of a David Lynch kind of movie – eerie and very kind of ethereal and I really took my time. So, what it does is [plays the song and counts off the bars]. Anyway, it turns out it’s a six bar blues, which is very odd!
I love the sound of that guitar – the combination of slide guitar and a resonator, even with my horrible lap top speakers; it’s such a lyrical way of playing…
Oh, I love it man. Last night, we did another song that really came off good, which is the song when we go [launches into a hard-rocking slide riff] and then it goes into [singing] now I know, all the time, when you tell me, you’ll be mine, and I see that it ain’t what it was gonna be, it’s time for me to go baby, I don’t need that kinda love…” And that one just has the place going man. By the end of song, people were singing along and it’s called ‘Your Kind of Love’ and it’s one of the ones off the new record.
That’s the thing with the slide – you can get that liquid sound but you can also get that cool, blues grind which has a real groove to it…
Yes, and I run this through a half stack, and it’s got a little Lace Sensor pick up, so I can plug it in and it gives it a real grind when I run it through the amp, and then I actually had a volume knob put on, which is really cool (it’s a little skull face) and it turns the guitar down, so I can kick on the tube screamer and get that Elmore James kind of distortion, but then I can control it a little bit with the volume control and if it’s right on the verge of feedback, I can make it howl and live, it’s just a rock machine! Then, I can shut off the distortion and it’s just a beautiful instrument, because it is acoustic, and you can go [start playing relaxed arpeggio] and it’s just so full.
It’s a really nice sounding guitar…
I love it. It’s worth dragging around. It breaks my back. It’s heavy! It’s all steel – it’s just a backbreaker, you know…
I’ve never played a resonator…
You really should man, this one is by Republic Guitars, out of Texas. It’s called the Highway ’61 and I have it tuned to open D, so it’s awesome. It’s just one D chord, so you can’t mess up that, and [plays shimmering slide up the neck] and the cool thing is if you get it down here [plays by the nut] it’s dirty… and what happens is a lot of the notes aren’t in the right place because it’s a different tuning, but once you learn the five or six or riffs, you can just keep recycling it, you know [plays some Allman Brothers]. I like to do down here [plays dusty riff] and that kind of stuff.
When you play low down, you get that throaty roar and it sounds really cool.
I love it, I just love it. I go on stage and I do like a western dual. I joke around like: “hey boy, are you ready to get outta town?” We have a little comedy with it.
One of the really cool things on this record is that you’ve got your son on this record, which must have been really special, because I think is the first time you’ve been able to do that?
Yes! First time. He’s been playing with me for years, he’s been jamming since he was five. I’ve showed him a little bit on the guitar, just to get him going. I never wanted to force it on him, but just give him some things to play, like Peter Gunn, Smoke on the water… then he took a liking to the blues when he became a teenager and he started playing with me more and more, coming on stage with me, and now he’s like a full-blown musician.
He was sixteen when he recorded with me (he’s seventeen now) and I couldn’t be more proud and I couldn’t be more happy because he’s my son and it keeps us connected on an emotional level and just connected as a family. To see him carry on the legacy is just amazing, because he’s already learned like my whole catalogue and he sits there studying it and he’s got vibrato and my feel, so you know what, if I stop touring someday, I can see him carrying it on and I think that’s a good legacy. I’ve got to show you a picture, this is one of his pictures and I don’t know if it’s this year or last year, and he’s not too bad looking either. He’s also a football player, so he might get lucky with the girls, I don’t know!
One of the things that has always attracted me to the blues is that community spirit – and bringing family into it seems to really follow up on that blues legacy of involving the younger generation and I think that’s so cool… You don’t see that so much in other genres.
Yeah, exactly. Not as much. You might see people in the pop world or the rock world where their kids go down the road of music, but it might not be so neck-a-neck. I love to see musicians’ sons and daughters because I love seeing the legacy. I saw Zappa Play Zappa – you know Dweezil playing his father’s music and you know I’m a friend of Dweezil, I’ve known him forever, and I love seeing that. I’m friends with Dwayne Allman and (Devin?) Allman – I mean Devin, seeing him playing his father’s music and now Dwayne Betts playing Dicky Betts’ music and they’re all super-talented. I love seeing that, because you see the next generation carrying it on. Even Neil Schon from journey, one of my favourite guitar players – his son is a fantastic guitar player, so he’s coming down the road, and that’s really good to see.
I think it’s really cool and it’s something that helps to keep the genre, not only alive, but creative and sparking…
Not only that, but in my opinion, you’re carrying on the family business. You’re carrying on the twenty or thirty years that I’ve had as a professional musician and the fifteen years or so before I got a break and I said to my son Ian, if he’s half as good as I am, you know, with the way he looks, I said that doors might open for him because I’ve played for a long time and I try to be nice to people and maybe some doors will open for him because people will say “hey, that’s Gary Hoey’s son, let’s give him a break…” On top of that, if he’s pretty good, I told him, he’s got to put out good stuff and you know, maybe it won’t be as hard for our kids and other people’s kids.
Another thing I noted with this record is that you self-produced. Can you tell me a little bit about that process? I’m super-geeky, so I love the production side of recording – is that something you enjoy doing? I know you said you were involved in teaching as well…
Yes, I love producing. I’m kind of a geek too, I’m a closet geek. I’m an idea geek and I love super-detailed stuff like how you get a kick drum sound and how you get tones and so, yeah.
Over my career, I’ve been very lucky to work with some great producers. You know, early on, when I signed with Warner Bros. Records, I got signed by the sister of Ted Templeman who produced Van Halen and the Doobie Brothers, so I got to hang around Warner Bros. Records and see what was going on there and I got to work with Richey Zito who produced the Cult and Cheap Trick and these big, great records. Then I got to work with Jumbo Barton who produced Queensryche and so many big bands, and then Thompson-Barbiero, who did Guns ‘n’ Roses and then they did all these seventies disco records and then, one of the biggest ones, was Roy Thomas Baker who did Queen and Foreigner and Journey… so all of these people I worked with, Phil, I would always hang out at the studio and hang over their shoulders and either make them coffee, you know, or roll them joints – whatever they wanted! And I kept the party going, but I wanted to learn how they did it. So, I don’t want to take all the credit – I learned from so many great people about how to produce.
And now, fast forward to twenty years later – and I’ve produced a ton of garage bands for no money or a record company gives me ten grand and tell me that here’s the money to make a record and whatever is left over is mine… and there’s never anything left over! But you learn about how to make a good record and what you learn is that there are a few things that are important: Make sure you get good tones going in because we’re working in a digital world now. If you over-compress it going in, it’s too late! Sorry! If you over-EQ it going in – too late! You can maybe EQ it a little bit and try to fix it, but after you EQ it, the guy mixes it and then masters it and he keeps adding more stuff to it and it gets squashed for the radio, and it might not sound so great. So, leave a little room for dynamics and spend a few minutes moving the microphone and maybe getting a better tone going in.
A couple of key things I’ll tell you about my recording process. I use the Avalon 737 mic pre-amp. It’s a class A tube mic pre- and that’s my core sound. It’s a mic pre-amp; EQ and compressor all in one. And I basically love that because it’s all tube, it warms everything up before it hits pro-tools. I run a Neumann Microphone into that for my vocals. I put a little bit of compression on – just a little bit; I like a little bit but not too much – but then I don’t EQ anything going in except I roll off the bass. I do a little bass roll off, but I don’t add mids or highs – I don’t add anything, because if you come back two weeks later and you want to fix a vocal, it’s hard to match the EQ that you did, so I advise people to not EQ vocals going in. There is plenty of time to EQ it later with all the best EQs in the world.
And then, when I do guitars, a lot of the guitars on this album were done with the Eddie Van Halen, EVH amp. That’s been my choice of amp for a long time. I happen to use the 5153, which is the one that Fender manufactures, so it has that warmth. It’s a super… it’s almost like a Fender twin but you can add a little more gain if you want, so it’s got a great clean tone for blues, and then the second channel is the blue channel, which is kind of an Eddie Brown sound, and he was one of my big influences, and that sound ironically works for the blues. And I don’t use the third channel too much.
But, to answer the question about producing myself, you know being on both sides of the glass, where you’re producing someone and you’re an album producer, what I learned is to just make sure you get the right performance going in. Really get a heartfelt performance, whether it’s singing or playing and making sure you live with it enough to really think that everything is good enough and that it’s going to sound good in ten years. That’s my thing: “will this sound good in ten years?” and having a home studio… that enables me to come over here and wake up the next day and think “yeah, I can do a better vocal – let me try it again.” Or, sometimes I chase my tail and re-record it ten times and then come back to the first one and realise it was the best. So, it’s all about finding balance.
I have an engineer named Pete Peloquin, who mixed this record and he mixed the last couple of records for me; the last several records actually; and he’s a good guy, he’s a good engineer that you can bounce ideas off of. I learned years ago, Phil, I’m a pretty good engineer – I can mix things pretty good, but my best talent is getting great guitar tones going on; great vocal tones going in; great sounds going in… and then I love to pick it up and go “here you’re a mixer, you’re a class A guy, that’s all you do all day! You mix it, and I’ll give you comments!”
And I love doing that. Artists have to realise that, man, you have to pass it on to someone else. Even if they do something you weren’t thinking about it. Let it go! Let it come to another creative place. Don’t get too controlling. Like, on the song, living the highlife, Pete put this really cool… it’s called an early reflection reverb on my vocal, so, in the chorus, when it goes into [starts playing the riff and singing the chorus] he put this cool reverb [imitates reverberating vocal line] and that reverb came in sounding really cool and that was his effect and his idea and it’s so cool, I love it when he surprises me with things that I wouldn’t think of, or cool delay on the guitar. Another thing is that when I record my guitar, I don’t put any reverb and I don’t put any delay. It’s completely clean and dry unless it’s a flanger or chorus effect that really needs to be done with the pedals. What I do is I run the reverb and delay in the studio off the monitor board so it sounds like I’m in an arena and I love the delay and reverb going back and forth and it just sounds exciting, but if you print that, it’s really tricky later to find where you want the guitar to sit in the mix, so don’t over-saturate it in the mix. In the printing, unless you’re going to do an old school reverb sound where you want a twin with the reverb on it, then print it for sure. That’s your sound. But me, I prefer to go dry and then add to it later. That was probably too much information…!
No, not at all, I really love the art of recording… hearing some of the things that you do, particularly about being prepared to hand it off a little bit during the production… that can be very challenging, I think, to let go of something you’ve potentially worked on for a year…
It’s painful! You let it go and it’s like someone taking your baby. And I’ll be honest with you Phil, and I think I’ve said this in a couple of interviews already, I didn’t love my record when I first finished it. I didn’t love it, when I first finished it, because I gave it to Pete to mix it and then my mastering guy, Jay Frigoletto… I don’t go to the mastering sessions either. I don’t show up and sit over the guy’s shoulder and say “hey, can you add a little more bass?” He’s the mastering guy, and he knows. The only thing I asked him to do… Pete loves big balls! He loves big low end, he loves big, giant bass; so, if you have a nice car with a great sound system, or if you have a sub-woofer in your house, you put on this record, man, and it’ll shake the dust off your speakers. I gave it to Jay and I said “do this… don’t scoop out all that bass man! I love that big bottom end, please don’t take too much of it out!” ‘cause a lot of mastering guys want to clean up the low end and pull off the rumble. But I tell them to take out what they need to, but to be sure to leave it big and not over-compress it and over-master it. Sometimes you can slam it and get a lot more level, but you lose some of the dynamics at the top range, so I tell people not to over-compress it in the mastering. But I didn’t love the record when it was first finished, but then a couple of weeks later, I listened to it and I was really happy.
Mastering is tough, especially to get that dynamic, and if you’re going for vinyl, you have to have that open soundstage, otherwise it just sounds horrible.
Yes, we had to do a separate mix for vinyl; um, a separate master; so we could make sure we had the lows right and everything and then we did a separate master for iTunes too. I just spent the extra money; I told Jay that I didn’t care what it cost but to make it sound right. Because, if you’re making a record, you have one shot to make it and my big thing is that my last two records were mixed on an SSL board. And I’m not saying this against anyone doing it in the box, people do great stuff that way, but three records ago, I mixed it in a computer by myself – an album called Deja Blues – and, if you listen to it… none of my fans are complaining, I mixed it myself, I did a pretty good job, but when I hear that compared to the last two mixes done on a giant SSL board, you know, with that big… oh my god, you’ve got all that audio going through there, so it made my record sound more open and warm. You know, and I say spend that money man! In the mixing and the mastering! Spend that money then, because honestly, you’ve got a better chance of making more money down the line if people love your record and want to listen to it more and they want to tell people about it. I think that’s an investment in your art. I think it pays off more, so don’t cheap out on the mixing, people!
It’s really important and there’s nothing better than putting a record on and you get that warm, analogue sound. You can crank it up and it sounds really deep… that’s something I really like.
Funny story, Phil, a funny mixing story. I think I’m a pretty good mixer and I was mixing one of the songs, I think it might have been I felt alive – see, I always do my mix because I sort of build my songs up pretty big before I even put the drums – I just use loops and beats. Then, when I bring it in the studio, my drummer Matt, plays to stereo guitar and background vocals and, you know, he and AJ sing with me sometimes – so, I do a mix that I think is a pretty good mix. Then, Pete is up on the mountain, mixing in his studio and I’m down on the mountain doing my mix and I’ll send him a mix of mine and I’ll say “you’ve got to hear my mix, man! Don’t lose what I have in my mix” and then I’ll go to his studio and ask him how it’s coming on and he’ll play me my mix, which I thought was amazing when I was at home, and he’ll play it for me and I’ll listen to it and I’ll go “O…K… Oh, wow! And then he plays me his mix and it’s like I’m going from a little AM radio with little tiny, drive-in theatre speakers and then his mix is this big thing and my mix is all guitars, in your face! All mid-range. There’s no… the drums are like “where are the drums?” the bass is lost and the guitars are everywhere and then I hear his mix and I just… I bow down to the master! And that’s when I go “I am not a mixer!” I’m a producer. I’m a good producer, but he’s a great mixer.
I’ve just got one last question, you’ve got a couple of guests on here – how do you get those people involved? Are you recording them remotely? Do they send in their stuff? How does that work out?
Yeah man! I’ve known most of those guys for years – they’re friends of mine. I’ve known Eric for many years. We were both kinda coming up in the 90s, actually, as guitar players. Lance, I met many times in Texas – a good guy – we toured in Europe together and then Josh, I met, doing the Joe Bonamassa cruise. He’s one of Joe’s favourite players and he was hosting an all-star jam and I got to play with him and I was like “oh man, who’s this guy?” So, I said to him that he needed to play on my new record and he was like “yeah, OK, sure, you’ll never call!” So, he gave me his number and I called him one day and I said that I had this song, Mercy of love, it’s six and a half minutes and we’ve got to throw down on it. So, I sent him the track, he destroys it… kills it and it made me go back and re-record my guitars and it made me think because I loved what he did so much and my sound was a little too fuzzed out, so I had to pick up my tone a little.
Eric Gales is like one of my favourite guitar players, living or dead, and he’s one of my favourites in every way and so, having those guys was a thrill, but basically how it worked was… you know, if they couldn’t be in the studio, I’d send them a track – just a scratch track and tell them where I’d play and where they could go…and then, I’d also send them a version with just me, nowhere on there, because sometimes it’s annoying because you’re in the groove and you hear some guy come in, so I’d send them the whole track and just get them to jam all over it karaoke style. And they’d send me a couple of takes of that, and then I’d cut and paste what I wanted. So, some people do that and I kind of find what I like, or they’ll tell me specifically to take the second take as that’s their favourite take. I find it inspiring, even when we’re doing it over the internet. You know, Eric sent his solo and then he texted me saying “dude, dude, dude! Wow, Wow, wow! Wait until you hear this!” and then I freaked out when I heard it. You know, it’s the same when I send someone a track, I hope they’re going to like it! Even the best guitar players in this world, Phil, I swear, we’re all insecure, we’re all nervous, so we’re asking if they liked it… you know, because we want to make sure they’re happy, you know. We’re our own worst critics, sometimes – and having my son on the record, was the ultimate thrill for me because it makes me so proud and hearing him going back and forth with me, it literally bought tears to my eyes when I listened to the mixes coming home. I was crying because I couldn’t remember where he played and where I did and it wasn’t that obvious. So, you know, it’s that camaraderie. I can’t see having a blues records without having some special guests. It just makes it more special for me, and the fans to hear the interaction. I get to play solos all day long man! That’s what I do – I get paid money to solo. I don’t mind giving it up a little bit, you know.
