Joe Louis WaLker - SLANG MUSIC srl

Issue #218
Vol. 43, #2
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Joe Louis
WaLker
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2012 Festival Guide Inside!
Joseph A. Rosen
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
Louis WaLker
courtesy Joe
“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–produced 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 Hambridge, a Nashville producer and songwriter
noted for his work with Buddy Guy, Susan
Louis WaLker
(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.
courtesy Joe
(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.
Louis WaLker
Louis WaLker
courtesy Joe
courtesy Joe
Ike Turner and Joe Louis Walker
at the Great Guitars recording
session, 1997.
10 • LIVING BLUES • April 2012
B.B. King and Joe Louis Walker, c. 1988.
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 impassioned 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
renato tonelli
Joe Louis Walker playing at the lone Star Café in New York,
April 24, 1988.
Jacques Depoorter
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 playing 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 Peter 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.
Joe Louis Walker playing at the
Banana Peel, Ruiselede, Belgium,
October 30, 1985.
paul Harris
Joe Louis Walker with Henry Oden
performing at the Richmond, Brighton,
England, November 18, 1987.
April 2012 • LIVING BLUES •
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12 • LIVING BLUES • April 2012
courtesy Joe
“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,
Louis WaLker
Jack Vartoogian-FrontroWPhotos
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.
California, wrote most of the lyrics to the album’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 overdubbed 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.” “Rollin’, 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
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.
Jack Vartoogian-FrontroWPhotos
Month Club, 1997’s Great Guitars (featuring 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-inMuscle 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
Louis WaLker
Joe Louis Walker laughing it up with
Mick Jagger, December 2011.
courtesy Joe
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 Hambridge’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
April 2012 • LIVING BLUES •
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14 • LIVING BLUES • April 2012
Joe Louis Walker at
the Vermont Blues
Festival, August 2010.
Joseph A. Rosen
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 Thorogood’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 Hellfire, 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. (Redding, 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 Hummingbirds—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
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 Scotty 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 Garment 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 American 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 playing 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 Corinthians 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 producers 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 selfproduced 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 recording 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 Spanish 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 Senegal, 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 German. 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.”
April 2012 • LIVING BLUES •
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