I have been fortunate to interview a number of musicians for SonicAbuse, but there are relatively few with whom I feel that strange sense of personal connection (despite never having met) that can only come from the artist putting every ounce of themselves into their music. From the first moment I discovered Walter’s music (relatively late in the day, with Blues For Luther), I had a sense of a vibrant, passionate player, devoted to a life on the road. Shortly after, the news broke that Walter was terribly ill and I, like so many fans, felt a genuine sense of helplessness as the life of this vibrant, vital guitarist slowly ebbed away. It was heart breaking to see, but Walter (and Marie, his remarkable wife) did not shy away from involving the fans, for whom his music meant so much, and I still remember a tangible sense of relief when he took his first faltering steps on what would be a long road to recovery.
To this day, I wonder what amazing internal strength kept Walter alive during those dark days. Recovery meant learning to walk, talk and play guitar all over again, and yet, within two years, he was back with a string of increasingly brilliant albums, playing with a newfound appreciation for both life and his art that was nothing short of inspiring… and then the pandemic hit.
Doubly cursed, as the liver transplant requires an extra degree of caution, Walter found himself unable to exercise his gift, and spent a frustrating year on the bench, while the world stopped turning. Yet, that set back pushed Walter to produce one of his most impressive and emotionally powerful works to date. Drawing on memories of the past, the challenges of the present and hopes for the future, Walter crafted Ride, a stunning album that encapsulates the guitarists myriad strengths. It is, then, with some anticipation that I waited for Walter to come online, as there much to discuss.
Hello!
Hi Walter, nice to meet you sir, how are you?
Good, what’s your name?
My name’s Phil
Hi Phil, how are you doing?
I’m fine thank you. It’s a real pleasure to have this chance to sit down with you. Thank you for making time for me.
Well, it’s my pleasure to talk to you, so here we go. I’m ready to wax philosophical.
The first thing, and I know that this is a very anticipated question, but as an artist, as a musician and as a human being, you went through the pandemic and it was a very traumatic experience for a lot of people in a lot of ways, but particularly for you (having had the liver transplant) I assume it isolated you more than most – is that where The Ride started – being caught in that isolation?
Well, you know, it was rough. Because I did go through all that with the liver transplant. I didn’t do a gig for two years and then I had to relearn how to play. I had to start over again and relearn the guitar from scratch because I had brain damage and the whole thing… I had to relearn how to speak and walk. I went through two years of that shit and then I came back, and my career started going great and I started making records again and I was just going and, I have to say, I have a whole new appreciation for what I do. Even though I’ve been at it since 1969, I had certain realisations like, I realised, for instance, that in the past I had taken it for granted. I had done so many gigs and been on so many stages since I was seventeen years old that I looked back and there were a lot of times when I’d be up there and I’d be looking up my watch and wondering how long I’d still have to play before I could get to the hotel and watch a movie or some shit. Then I looked back on that, and I’d go (sighs) don’t take this for granted. It was taken away from me – my calling that I’d done my whole life. I devoted myself to this when I was fourteen and I realised that I had a whole new love and joy in playing and suddenly it’s taken – here’s the pandemic. I had a whole year of work that was going to be my best year ever. And it was all gone – cancelled. I ended up cancelling a whole year and it was… I tried to keep everything in perspective. We came to our vacation home that we have here in Denmark, which is right by a big national park. We’d walk every day and I’d try to get into enjoying nature and all this, but in the back of my mind I was aware time was passing, I’m getting older, I don’t know how long I have. I want to play. I want to create. I want to contribute whatever talent I have – I want to contribute that to the world. That was rough. So, yeah, that was a rather long answer to your question.
One of the things that’s interesting about being creative is that, when it’s taken away from you (especially when you’re both physically and mentally able), it leads to a muddy thinking because there are so many ideas rattling through your mind but you can’t get to a place where you can actually do something with that – I found it very difficult, and I wondered if it was similar for you?
Sure, yes. One thing I was determined to do was to not lose my playing ability, so I was playing every day. I would sit on the couch for a while, and I would play the guitar and there were even times when I would go online and find these guitar lessons – things like Learn to Sweep Pack like Yngwie Malmsteen(!) and I’d sit there and work on this shit until one day, one of my sons came in and said: “why are you doing this?” [Laughs] “Play like Walter Trout!” You know? But I was doing it just to keep my interest going. But then I would find, as soon as I started playing, all of a sudden, I’d have a song idea, so I’d record it on my phone, or I’d record it on my computer. I had an American phone, a Danish phone, and a computer and between the three of them I recorded, and I’m not exaggerating, 1400 song ideas. You know, lyrics – music… it’s all there! Then, when I went home to California to write Ride, I didn’t use any of it. I came up with new shit. I found that I was overwhelmed with creative ideas and nowhere to take them.
I really like that idea of learning something – wherever you are in your guitar playing, you should always try to learn something new because it’s amazing how many happy accidents come from learning something and then adapting it into your playing style – It can be a really interesting process.
Yeah, exactly, like you’re sitting around and you’re just playing and then a lick comes out that makes you go “wow!” I like that. You do it again and suddenly, you realise that if you put a drum beat behind that, and then you put this chord progression behind it, you’ve got something pretty fucking cool. And that was happening every day, like fifteen, twenty times a day. So, I was going nuts. It was happening – I’d be laying there trying to sleep and the shit would be rattling around my brain, so I’d grab the phone – I’d be laying in bed singing shit into the phone and it was great to finally get back out there and just get up and play as long as I want to play and get that shit out.
So, moving into Ride… you’ve never pulled any punches lyrically – especially thinking about albums like Battle Scars, they’re incredibly emotionally honest. But here, you’ve looked at your whole life and, again, that lyrical honesty is a really important thing, I think, for the fans and the artist – but it’s something that’s difficult, and even traumatic, to do – so how did you tackle finding a way to make these stories both cathartic for you and also relatable?
Well, I have to be able… if I’m going to sing a song, I have to be able to believe the lyrics. I have to be able to live them. Bob Dylan has a line in one of his songs on his latest album, which says, “I can’t sing a song I don’t believe” and my god, can I relate to that. I know that there are some people who think maybe some of my lyrics are a little too personal or a little too… my ex; my first love, who we’re still friends with. She’s friends with Marie, she’s a dear friend, but she heard the record and the third song on the record; the ballad, Follow You Back Home; she said “that one was a little too much for me. You put a little too much of yourself in there, Walter.” [Laughs] I don’t know what to tell you! You know, I sat down in that house in California, and I thought about different aspects of things that I’d been through in my life, and I just started writing. To me, writing those songs is therapeutic. It’s therapy, I do it for myself. I hope people like it, but I’m really playing that shit for myself. You know. When I wrote Ride, I mean, I was literally thinking about 602 East Atlantic Avenue in Laurel Springs, New Jersey. This house with the tracks across the street. There’s my stepfather, the tormented World War II veteran, who gets drunk and chops the fucking bedroom door down with an axe – it’s right out of… “here’s Johnny!” It’s that scene from The Shining. That was happening man, and I was a little kid and my brother was holding him off with a shotgun and I was thinking “all I’ve got to do, in the middle of the night, all I’ve got to do is get up out of bed, put my clothes on, walk across the street, jump on that freight train and I can get the hell out of here. I never did it, but I dreamed about it all the time. So, that’s what I thought about.
Everything on there, even songs that don’t seem that personal, like The Fertile Soil. The first band I got to play with, when was fifteen, was called The Fertile Soil. And the drummer and the bass player were my best friends of my childhood, and they’re both dead. It’s about them. It’s about their memory. It’s about missing them. You know. So, I mean, it’s all… I have to write this shit for myself, not for anybody else [at this point, Walter gets quite emotional]
[Uncertain] I’m sorry to have brought this up for you
Well, no man! [Laughs] As the song says on I Wanna Dance, from Ordinary Madness, “I revel in emotions that overwhelm me so.” I like emotions. I don’t want to be a robot, you know.
I think that, for me, you sum up everything that has meant a lot to me about your music, really since I first heard you, with a line in Ghosts, which is “sometimes I hear a familiar song, and it brings back memories” and, for me, music is… it’s like a time machine, more than any other art form. Io can’t think of anything else that can conjure up the exact moment when I first heard a song. It can be painful, and it can be heart breaking and it can be joyful. It’s such a powerful thin, and you nailed it with that one line and on that song – it’s really important and I know you said you write it for yourself, but it means a lot to your listeners.
Yeah – that first line – that was sort of written as a poem and, if I look back, I think I was driving and had the radio on and on came something like All My Lovin’ by The Beatles and when The Beatles came out, I was thirteen, right? I had a memory of hearing that, it was the house where the record player was, what the room looked like, how I felt being thirteen, what was happening. There was also some bad shit that went on, with that song in the background, and immediately – as you called it – it’s a time machine. Whenever I hear that song, or whenever I hear anything off Meet the Beatles, or anything off the Stones’ first album, I’m suddenly thirteen years old and I’m in that house in Laurel Springs and in that room, and there’s the stereo and there’re the windows and… how it felt. You’re exactly right, time machine is a perfect metaphor for what I was feeling when I wrote that line.
The album, obviously it doesn’t just deal with the past, there’s also a sense of you looking to the future; as with so many of your records, there’s a sense of awareness of the past, dealing with the present and hope for the future, so the title of “Ride” is perfectly apt for the album.
Well, to me, it’s been an amazing ride. And when I look at the whole thing, that line “now my life appears before me and I see it all so clear, and I think I’m starting to understand the reason I am here,” I’ve been through a lot. I’ve been through alcoholism and heroin addiction and homelessness and divorce, you know, and that illness and facing death and coming out of it and I think “god, what a fucking awesome, great ride I’ve had”. I might have gone through a lot of shit. I might have had a lot of emotional turmoil and terror and this and that, but my god, I have never fucking been bored! When I was a little kid, I was like: “I refuse – I don’t want to be bored in my life. I want to experience stuff. I want to take a ride here. I don’t want to be in a car travelling twenty miles an hour, I want to be on a fucking rollercoaster man!” That’s how I approached my life and now I look back and I could… I could go tomorrow, and I would think to myself: “this has been great!” this has been more than I could have hoped for when I went to my mother and said, “I want to be a blues guitar player and I don’t give a fuck about school!” And I knew what I was going to do for the rest of my life at age fourteen. I saw it and it was there in front of me. And, my god, she said; “I hear you playing in your bedroom, and I think you can do it!” She never said, “oh no, that’s a pipe dream, you’ve got to have a real job.” She always said: “I think you’ve got talent, kid, you can do it.” That was it – it’s been great man!
That’s amazing – that belief at an early age, it can make a difference between someone going out and playing music and someone shelving their guitar and never playing again. That’s amazing.
Yeah, that was it. I never thought about “oh, you’ve got to have something to fall back on, I’ve got to have a Plan B.” I’ve got Plan A and if that hadn’t worked, then I would have been fucked!
The thing about the blues, I think, as a genre, and particularly the way that you approach it is that it’s cathartic, and I guess the consensus is that the blues can be depressing, but I’ve never seen it that way. It has honest lyrics, and it has tough lyrics, and it has things that you have to deal with. It can go into the minor key, and it can make you feel sad, and it can make you feel nostalgic, but most importantly, you can take all of that emotion and make something really positive with it, and I think that’s something I found in The Ride.
Yeah! And it’s also… what attracted me to it when I was a kid, because I was going to be a jazz trumpet played before I discovered other forms of music. I was going to be a jazz trumpeter and I studied the trumpet and I played it all the way through school. But what really got me with the blues, and rock ‘n’ roll, I love fifties rock ‘n’ roll; I mean, the blues is the basis of what I do, but I love… I don’t know how to put this, I like James Taylor as much as I like B. B. King, and I like Crosby, Stills and Nash and AC/DC as much as I like, you know, Muddy Waters. I don’t see all that much difference between Muddy Waters and AC/DC. And now, blues purists will tell me I’m an asshole for saying that, but they can fuck off [laughs]. I love all that shit, but what it comes down to is the possibility of expressing any emotion over a single basis. A simple foundation. Those three chords, man. It’s limitless what you can do over them. I play in a side band with Billy Gibbons, called The Supersonic Blues Machine, and he was being interviewed. We were in Norway, and we were sitting there, and we were interviewing, and the interviewer said “Billy, do you have a fear in your life?” And Billy said: “yes, my great fear is learning the fourth chord!” [Laughs]
I love the fact that you mention AC/DC – they always have some really heavy blues song on it… there’s a lot of cross over.
It’s the… the essence, you know, Back in Black, the essence of that, basically, underneath it all is the same essence as I Can’t Be Satisfied by Muddy Waters. It’s the same shit, and it’s that simple, simple foundation, with all this stuff on top of it; all this feeling, all this expression. There’s joy and happiness and rage and sadness and wonder and frustration… everything you can imagine piled on that very simple base/ And that is just magnificent.
It’s something that can get very easily lost when there’s a focus on technicality. I prefer something that’s very raw and simple and honest – there’s so much power in that – that attracted me to punk rock and grunge and alt – it’s that same idea, simplicity and emotional honesty and it’s a powerful thing.
Yeah, and you know, I love all sorts of music. I truly do. I love Aaron Copeland and Ludwig Van Beethoven the same way I love Lightnin’ Hopkins. I see the same motivation underneath it, which is expressing emotion. Now stuff that I find to be very clever, and it’s just about “here, look at my technique,” it doesn’t do anything for me.
In the old Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, not the new one, but the old one that was much smaller, when you walked in, they had a big phrase on the wall. Van Gogh’s brother had written him a letter asking him why he wanted to be an artist – Van Gogh was studying to be a clergyman, right? He dropped out to become an artist and his brother wrote to him, asking him why and this is the quote they had on the wall: “to express an honest human emotion.” That was his motivation, and when I see any art that has that as the motivation underneath it, I’m moved by it.
When it comes to… sometimes it can be very hard to translate music that is so emotional into a visual form, and you produced a video for Ride that was very powerful, and which interpolated scenes of you playing with scenes from your childhood and I was wondering how you approached making that video and how challenging it was to see those kind of memories play out in a video format.
OK, I’ve got to give credit where this is due, and that video is a direct result of the vision that my wife had. She knows what the lyrics are better than anybody, she knows what happened in that house, she knows what I went through with my stepfather and the violence and the terror and the horror that was happening in that house and fearing for my life as a kid. She came up with… she said: “we need to show it. We need to find a kid who can portray you at age twelve and we need to find some parents…” That is completely her vision, she came up with eh idea. She worked with the videographers. We were very lucky in that there’s a little kid who lives down the street from us in Huntington Beach and I had gotten together with him and his dad someday to play some guitar, and he and his father would come over to the house and we asked them if they wanted to be in the video. So, that’s him and that‘s his parents in the background, and we filmed that in their house. But that entire video was the vision of my wife. She came up with that entire idea of showing the lyrics and presenting them. She worked with the videographer, and they wrote out how the scenes would be. She’s an incredibly creative woman.
It’s very subtle but really harrowing how it’s done. It leaves a lot to the imagination, but I think that really works.
And then it was her idea, also, to have the kid… me as age twelve playing with me as I am now and us looking at each other and playing back and forth, that was her idea. The scene where the kid morphs into me, that was her idea.
That’s a really special moment, because that’s where it becomes cathartic, and you can see the survival.
Yeah, the line is “now that I’m a man, I can still recall he way it moved me so.” During that line, the kid becomes a man. The whole thing, man, it was her. She even… we had one videographer who she said the idea to – “we want the kid to morph into Walter.” And he said: “I don’t think I can do that.” So, she said, “well, then, we’ve got to find somebody else.” And we went to somebody else. It was all her. I’ve got to give her the credit.
For you, how was it, when you saw it for the first time?
It was very moving. Very moving. You know, some of these tunes on there are hard for me to listen to, but it’s… I do enjoy getting overwhelmed by feelings and crying like a baby and just feeling life and feeling alive, man, I fucking dig it! I don’t want to sit around and just be [imitates zombie]. I want every nerve to wide open.
Thank you so much for spending this time with me.
Walter Trout: Ride is available now.
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