Walter Trout interview - talks about Joe on his CD

Not sure if this has been posted or not......

From the Blueswax page:
BluesWax Is Sittin' In With Walter Trout. Phil Reser recently caught up with Blues guitar-slinger Walter Trout to talk about his influences, the legends with whom he has played, and his new CD, Full Circle.

BW: How did the idea to put together an album like Full Circle come together? And what was your objective?

WT: If I go back to the spontaneity and jamming tradition among Blues players, this idea for this album really started with the thoughts about knowing all of these great musicians and why don't I see who I can get into the studio and let's just jam. And we might come up with something really cool or something we don't want to release, but let's see what happens. As I started calling up everybody they were all into the idea and wanted to be part of it. It kind of evolved into, "Yeah, let's jam, but how about if we sit down and write a song to jam on." Instead of my initial thought that we would go into the studio and do old Blues songs, but do them our way. But that got thrown out as people started coming in and we started putting tunes together. I began to get excited about the prospect of, say, Mayall coming in for example, instead of picking an old Bluesbreakers' song and jamming on it, he and I are going to sit down and put some material together and although it will be put together quickly; it will still have the spontaneity with it. That really became the fun part of the whole thing. There's a couple of artists that I knew I wasn't going to have the time to write with in the studio, so what I did with those guys was I did the old immersing-in-their-styles-type of thing. I knew with Jeff Healey, for instance, that he was really busy, so I decided to go to Toronto and record with him and his band. I knew even at that we only would have about three hours total, so I listened to a bunch of his records and sat down with my wife, Marie, and we wrote that song with Jeff Healey in mind. I did the same with Guitar Shorty. I knew he was not going to have enough time. He was coming in for one day; he had a gig and had a couple of hours to work with me at night. I knew, I couldn't say, "Hey, why don't you hang around a little longer." He had to go. So I sat down and listened to a bunch of his music and came up with a tune that I thought he could get into. So with both of those guys, those songs were written by me with those guys in mind. Everything else was put together with each person, right there in the studio.

BW: Was it a challenge to get all of this done and how long did it take?

WT: You know it went really quick. For instance, both of the Mayall and the Joe Bonamassa cuts were done on the same day. With Joe, we were sitting around talking and I said to him, "You know, I only have one really slow Blues tune on this record so far" and that was the Mayall one. And then the two of us started talking about the way the Blues purists have accused both of us as having sort of gone over the top and being tasteless at times. We're not their favorites. And Joe looked at me and said, "Well, why don't we give them the reason they hate us." So we sort of sat down and put that tune together for us to just really go over the top and set each other off musically. We sat up in a semi-circle with Richie Hayward and Rick Knapp and we talked the song out; we didn't play it, here's the lick, here's the lyrics, we're going to play this progression, we're in E, we're going to go D to A, and do the walk back to the one and after a couple of verses, we're going to stay on the one chord and we duel it out. We stood there two feet from each other staring at each other in the face. It was a duel, but it was done with a lot of respect and love and we had a blast. We only played that song once, there's no fixes, there's no overdubs, and we played it once. Matter of fact, my bass player said after that, "OK, are we going to record it now?" And I said, we just did.

BW: Did you ever think about filming all of this recording and interaction between everyone?

WT: It's funny, my wife, who is also my manager, videotaped all of it. Her thought was that she was going to put together a little DVD on how this thing was recorded. But we started thinking about getting permission from 25 different musicians. It just started seeming like we might not be able to do that, so we haven't pursued it yet, but it's there. All of it, she has it on video. When Bonamassa and I were standing there in each other's face going at it, my wife was six feet away filming it. With the Jeff Healey cut, I was in Toronto, but I took my video camera and sat it on the Hammond B3 and faced Jeff and I and got that on video. The Mayall, Guitar Shorty, James Harman, Junior Watson, all of those cuts are on video. We're just not sure how to go about it; it seems like a logistics nightmare to put it together at this point.

The rest of the interview can be found at: http://www.visnat.com/entertainment/mus … ax_307.cfm

For those interested in how the songs come together, or what the artist was thinking when the song was written....(Jane).....this is a good article for you to read!

I would also like to see some of that video Walter has of him and Joe going at it!

~Rhonda