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Singer-guitarist Walter Trout: ‘I have the best blues rock band on Earth’




Blues icon and regular visitor to these shores Walter Trout is coming back to the UK this month for an 11-date tour, which will be calling in at Cambridge Junction — a venue he knows well.

Walter Trout. Picture: Alex Solca
Walter Trout. Picture: Alex Solca

A seasoned veteran of the music scene, a powerhouse of live performance who has certainly lived the rock ‘n’ roll life and then some, in August last year Walter Trout released his 30th solo album Ride to much acclaim, including a number two placing in Classic Rock magazine’s Blues Albums of 2022.

Famously, Walter’s excesses, especially early on in his career, led to him undergoing a liver transplant nine years ago this month but, speaking to the Cambridge Independent from his home in Huntington Beach, California, the virtuoso musician looked in rude health.

“I’ve been in the studio for about two weeks,” he says, revealing that he’s working on a new album — the follow-up to Ride.

“I’ve got about a week left and I actually am home today and I’m sitting here writing some lyrics and I go back in again tomorrow. This is album number 31.”

Walter Trout. Picture: Alex Solca
Walter Trout. Picture: Alex Solca

Walter notes that he and Marie, his wife of 32 years, often write songs together — including Fertile Soil, one of the standout tracks on Ride. Another great moment on the record comes in the form of I Worry Too Much, where the singer mentions his liver as one of the things that worries him.

“Yeah, I put the line in there about the liver,” he laughs, “and actually when I was recording the vocal, I sang that as a goof just to get a laugh out of the producer and the engineer and they said, ‘Oh, we have to keep that’ and I said, ‘OK, let’s keep it’.”

So how is Walter these days, health-wise? “I feel great,” he replies, “as a matter of fact I get monitored every six months at UCLA. I get a blood test and I go to their clinic there and they check me out and let me know how I’m doing.

“About two months ago I had the blood test and they called me up and said, ‘We need you to go take the test again because you’re so healthy we think there’s been a mistake in the blood test!’ And I went back and had a second test and everything was normal. I’m 72 and I feel great.

“I mean I’m still losing some hair and I could probably lose a few pounds but, like I said, when they monitored me they were all kind of amazed at how healthy I was. I’m probably a little more healthy now than I was in a lot of my younger years, back when I was drinking and drugging and stuff. I’m sure I didn’t have normal responses, I didn’t go get blood tests then, but I’m doing very well.”

Walter Trout. Picture: Alex Solca
Walter Trout. Picture: Alex Solca

Walter, who says he would love to join the Rolling Stones on stage someday, became a member of the legendary John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers in 1985 — following in the footsteps of the likes of Eric Clapton and Peter Green — before embarking on a successful solo career in 1989.

But before that came his chaotic, self-destructive years as a jobbing lead guitarist, playing for revered blues pioneers like John Lee Hooker and Big Mama Thornton, and even an unhinged tenure in an ’80s Canned Heat line-up controlled by the Hell’s Angels.

The artist, who spends a lot of time in Denmark, where his wife is originally from and where their three children now live, readily admits that he was something of a ‘hellraiser’ in his younger days. “Of course I was… they were different days back then, that was the thing to do.

“The audience back in the late ‘70s and ‘80s kind of expected they were going to come see a rocking band and the musicians were going to be drunk or high or something, and now I don’t think that would work anymore. I now myself have been sober for, let’s see, coming up on 36 years.”

The entertainer says he didn’t expect to survive the problems with his liver. “There were many nights that the doctors in the hospital would tell my wife that I was probably not going to make it through the night,” he recalls. “They’d come in in the morning and I was still there, so I feel like I’ve been given a gift, and I’m coming up on nine years of bonus life and I don’t take it for granted.”

Walter’s well-documented excess could all be traced back to his troubled childhood in New Jersey, where an unstable stepfather — himself the victim of shocking cruelty as a prisoner of war — was a terrifying presence.

As Ride took shape, such memories couldn’t help but influence the music. The title track came from a poem Walter wrote some years ago, thinking about his youth. “I ended up finding the poem and I just put it to music,” he explains.

“When I was a kid there was a lot of violence and craziness in my house. We lived across the street from some railroad tracks and I used to tell my brother back when I was like 10, ‘Look, if we just cross the street, we can jump on the freight train and we can get out of here’. I was the dreamer, he was the practical one.

“He was a little older than me and he’d say, ‘Yeah, but then we end up in a train yard in Philadelphia going ‘what now?!’’ But the train did come to represent escapism to me. Say I’m out on the road and I’m in a hotel at night and I’m laying in bed and I hear that train whistle off in the distance, it gives me goosebumps. It moves me.”

On the intense thrill he gets from making music, Walter, who hopes to release his new album next year, says: “I got that buzz when I was 10 years old and my older brother came walking in with a guitar. Somebody had given him a guitar and he asked if I wanted it. I got that buzz the first day and I still get the same buzz.”

Walter has appeared on stage at the Cambridge Junction on numerous occasions and recalls giving advice to a budding young musician who has since gone on to become a pretty successful blues guitarist in his own right.

“Many years ago I played there,” he remembers, “and a little kid came up to me and wanted to meet me. He later wrote me a letter and I started giving him guitar lessons and now he’s the amazing Danny Bryant — that’s where I met Danny.”

[Read more: Blues rock duo When Rivers Meet gearing up for Cambridge Rock Festival, Troy Redfern: Cosmic blues rock from a prolific musician]

Walter thinks that fans of his particular style of music should definitely come on down to the venue’s J1 this time around, on Wednesday, May 17.

“I think right now I have probably the best blues rock band on the planet,” he suggests. “I may be biased here, but when this band is on, I don’t think there’s another one that can match what this band can do live. We exist to play live.”

Walter Trout. Picture: Alex Solca
Walter Trout. Picture: Alex Solca

Tickets, priced £34.50, are available at junction.co.uk. For more on Walter Trout, go to waltertrout.com.



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