bozscaggs - 429 Records

BOZSCAGGS
The blue-eyed soul doyen
on Silk Degrees, dynamic
performance and making
wine,spo-dee-o-dee.
H
e'd left home in Texas after
graduating from university in
Wisconsin, and arrived in
London in the '60s to study film. But
music had claimed him in high school,
along with friend Steve Miller, and in
Europe it pulled him in again and
changed his path forever. He returned
to San Francisco, hitched up with
Miller to record 1968's Children OfThe
Future and Sailor, and then quit The
Steve Miller Band to make his own
music. 1969's BOl Scaggs, with a
stunning 12-minute Loan Me A Dime
crowned by an extraordinary Duane
Allman guitar solo, began a solo career
that's consistently delivered strong
R&B/soul-rooted sounds, commercially
peaking with 1976's big-selling Silk
Degrees. Absent from music in the '80s,
he's now fully re-engaged and touring
regularly in the States, with latest
album A Fool To Care arriving just two
years after Memphis.
Fool runnings:
William Royce
'80%' Scaggs,
exhibiting star
quality in the
'70s.
The song Hell To Pay has a political
and environmental weight.
I have this voice that lives inside of me
that sounds like a cantankerous
Southern old man that I used before in
an album I did a dozen years ago called
Dig on the song On The Natch. I called
on that voice again ... or that voice
appeared to me. The lyric comes from
SCAGGS'
GROOVES
Boz opens his
musical bag.
IJlmmy Reed I'm
JlmmyRlld VlI·~Y.I",
2M,.vin Gaye
Whor~ Going On
IIAM.. 11111
3Mile. Davi.KindOI
BlU.l(G!.U.I"
4JimBeard
""I
AdI'OCOll t(l)"IY 1'1991
II Shirley Hom
Hm~ TOU(l~'IIA'Il.lm,
24 MOJO
Unusually, you also covered a song
by a British writer, Richard Hawley.
My son turned me on to Richard
Hawley's music and Ijust went deeply
into his work. I had six or seven Richard
Hawley songs in hand to record. When
we got into the sessions we called Paul
Franklin, a remarkable steel guitar
player, and I thought his style might
really give another great reading on
Storm A Comin'.
On A Fool To Care you've crossed
Tennessee, Memphis to Nashville.
The take-away from the Memphis
album was we had a really great
rhythm section. If we were going to
stay in the States we were probably
going to want to work in New York,
Nashville or Los Angeles. We had the
option of using some terrific players in
Nashville, and [producer Steve] Jordan
had worked in that studio.
bits of jottings I've made over time
around the Hell To Pay theme.
Atourfirst interview, back in 1976,
you said you'd wanted to record
Silk Degrees in London with David
Bowie's producer, Ken Scott.
I had forgotten about that. His sounds
fascinated me. I had visited that studio,
saw that console, I was really into that
sound. I'd had experience working with ~
Glyn Johns in London [on the Miller
~
Band LPs and two solo albums]. There's ~
this approach I take when I'm in London. ~
It's an exciting, sort of a sizzling place to ~
be, very stimulating. [But] The section 11
worked with in Los Angeles had very :£
similar sonic ideas and the producer, Joe
Wissert, shared my enthusiasm for that
approach. We put that into Silk Degrees.
On the LP before that, Slow Dancer,
producer Johnny Bristol helped you
to sing slightly differently.
I'd never been produced, as a vocalist,
by anyone. Johnny Bristol coaxed
more of emotional content out of my
performance than anybody had ever
done. He was a singer, he would get on
the microphone, and coming out of
Motown, the producer was very, very
responsible for getting the most
dynamic performance out of his artist.
After 1980's Middle Man, there are
long gaps between your releases.
If I can categorise it, the first half of the
'70s I had my own band and worked
out my own style, the latter half was
my 'Hollywood' music, I call them,
starting with Silk Degrees and ending
with Middle Man. The '80s I sat out
apart from a final album I made for
Columbia. The '90s I think of as the
beginning of part two of my musical
career. I started drifting back. I got a
call from Donald Fagen to join the New
York Rock'n'Soul Revue. It was
wonderful, and drew me to sign with
Virgin Records, which culminated in
an album around 2000, Dig, which I
consider the best record I ever made.
About six years ago I started touring
more than at any time in my career,
and I worked with Donald Fagen and
Michael McDonald on a project, The
Dukes Of September, and the last two
records I've explored just what I think
is very, very interesting music.
Why did you open Slim's, the 'Frisco
club that's still going?
That was in the late '80s when I was
just not doing music. Bill Graham had
had a club called Wolfgang's, which
had a capacity of about 600 or 700, all
live music, and it had been burned
down [1987] and there was no venue
in San Francisco that you could feature
artists of a certain stature. I had a
friend in the restaurant/bar business
and we found a warehouse in San
Francisco with real cheap rent that we
could have music in. It was not
intended to be an on-going club.
And the Scaggs Vineyard?
My wife and I found some property for
a getaway, a cottage in the country­
side outside San Francisco. It was raw
wilderness. We started bUilding the
cottage, planting trees. A friend had
some vines left from a planting and
put them in for us. It's a hobby we
became passionate about.
Tell us something you've never told
an interviewer before...
. (Long pause) The mind reels ... I'm
stumped. Would you leave your e-mail
address? Er, I'd like to have continued
studying the cello when I was a kid.
GeoffBrown
Boz Scaggs' A Fool To Care is our on 429
LAS