Blues Festival: The Headliners

By Bryce Haugen
Contributing Writer

If you’ve been struck with the road construction rues, mosquito bite melancholy, generic summer-is-fleeting doldrums or are merely looking for some brilliant music, a cathartic diversion is imminent. The 15th Annual Fargo Blues Festival comes to town this weekend, with 12 acts hitting the stage Friday and Saturday at Newman Outdoor Field on the NDSU campus.

Though they might not be household names, many performers are in the blues world’s top tier, including Walter Trout, whom BBC Radio ranked as the sixth best guitarist of all time, and Duke Robillard, a boogie blues legend and superstar collaborator.

This year’s festival has a wide variety of music, says Brady Bredell, assistant festival director. “People have this misconception about the blues being an old guy sitting on a chair playing the banjo or acoustic guitar,” Bredell says. “But modern blues is more of a fusion of rock and acid rock guitar in addition to all the traditional styles of blues.”

HPR caught up with Tommy Castro, soulful songwriter and winner of four 2010 Blues Music Awards (band of the year, top contemporary blues artist, top entertainer and best contemporary blues album) for a phone interview last week from his home turf in northern California. To hear the full-length interview with Tommy Castro, HPR invites you to visit http://tiny.cc/Bluesfest

Tommy Castro: You’re up in Fargo…I haven’t been up there for a while but I know I’ve played this blues festival a couple of times in the past. That’s a great audience for us -– that part of the country.

High Plains Reader: You’ve been doing this for decades now, with your first major recordings in ‘94, but you’d been playing a lot earlier than that. I was wondering -– lets take it way back to the sixties -– what are your earliest memories of being exposed to music?

TC: After I started playing the guitar and I started hanging out with my own friends -– and this was many years after my brother bringing home Stones records and things like that, the early Rolling Stones recordings and listening to all of that great music that was around for us in the ‘60s. Then there was sort of a blues explosion that came about …we were listening to the Stones and Clapton and Michael Bloomfield and Elvin Bishop, I kind of found B.B. King and Muddy Waters and, you know, guys like Elmore James and Freddy King. And that’s when I really kinda became a blues guitar player, and the first real deal record I had was B.B. King’s.

HPR: You guys kinda blew up right after opening for B.B. King on a summer tour a decade or so ago…

TC: B.B. King, besides being the god of the blues, he’s just really a great guy and he loved to tell stories. He was kind to me and everyone around him. After a couple of weeks on the road I finally got up the courage to go talk to him and he said, “Where have you been, I figured I’d be seeing you sooner.” And he actually said, “I was beginning to think you didn’t love me” and I said, “Oh man I just didn’t want to bother you. I know every body wants to talk to the king of the blues.” From that point on, we would have a conversation from time to time and he invited me up there to play [with him] on a number of occasions. It really was one of the high points of my musical career. I will never forget those times…

Right now is we get to go on all the Blues Cruises…that’s like the coolest blues gig that there is nowadays. There’s 25 of the top acts in the country on those cruises and it’s an amazing setting to go out and play this music, to jam with your friends, to experience the travel – it’s an amazing way to travel: you’re on a boat … you just get on that ship and it takes you around and people are just partying and having a helluva good time for a solid week from early in the morning till early in the morning, everyday. (Laughter) Hey, maybe there’s a song there. You better write that down. From early in the morning to early in the morning – write that down.

HPR: I’d listen to it.

TC: I’ve got my oldest son with me. He’s been helping out on some gigs this summer on production and helping us with hauling gear around and stuff like that.

HPR: Does he play himself?

TC: Yeah. He’s a heavy metal or what you call a hard-core metal screamer.

HPR: He’ll get over it.

TC: Oh, I don’t care if he gets over it if that’s what he likes. He actually likes all kinds of music -– he likes what we do a lot. He knows the difference between good blues and bad blues. He likes everything…his own personal music is really hard-edged, hardcore metal.

HPR: Do you like it?

TC: I appreciate the musicianship. That stuff is not easily done. You listen to some of those bands and they’re really accomplished players. He takes it very seriously. It’s something that maybe I don’t quite understand, but there were musicians that came before me that didn’t understand what I was doing, growing up listening to Zeppelin, Rollings Stones and bands like Cream … a lot of real new kinds of rock and roll music were being invented all the time and all the older people thought that we were crazy. “What is that? That’s just a bunch of noise.” So I don’t judge it. I listen for what I can take from it that I see as good ... It’s good quality stuff, it’s just maybe not the kind of style of music I like.

HPR: And who are you into right now as far as the newer stuff?

TC: Well, I think John Mayer’s a good talent, you know there’s not a lot of new blues artists out there…there’s a couple new kids on the scene like Trampled Under Foot. I like them a lot.

HPR: How about indie rock or even country artists who are doing things you like -– or even pop?

TC: I think Lady Gaga’s a good singer. I’m pretty impressed with the edginess of her stuff. I think that her whole sort of performance art approach backed up by serious vocal chops…she’s an excellent musician. I don’t care for some of the songs but I gotta say I think she’s really good. I kind of like classic stuff. I guess Green Day is old news but I really like that band a lot as far as more modern stuff…There’s so much out there I can’t really keep track of what’s going on. I hear Santana and Steve Winwood are doing stuff together. I am real curious to hear what that sounds like. Carlos is a friend of mine, he lives in the neighborhood and I would like to hear what he and Steve Winwood are doing together.

HPR: ...as far as your influences, not so much modern-day, but I chatted with Honeyboy Edwards last night…and he represents a bygone era and I was wondering what kind of influence the old time blues legends have had on you and the influence of other artists throughout the last century?

TC: In a nutshell, you could say it was the real giants of blues and R&B that kind of shape what I do. Guys like Wilson Pickett, James Brown, Otis Redding, the blues guitar legends like Freddy King and B.B. King, Ray Charles. Those are the guys I got into the most. Muddy Waters, not real big—I like Delta blues a lot but I just didn’t spend a lot of time on it. I spent more of my time listening to the electric blues stuff, soul music R&B and bands -– there’s a lot of bands I liked in my era, like the J.Geils Band and the Rolling Stones. I like great songwriters like Bob Dylan and Van Morrison and you know cats like John Hyatt…

HPR: Your music doesn’t fit neatly into a nice defined genre package. How would you characterize it?

TC: I don’t know what to call it either, to be honest with you, but I would have to say it is a combination of blues, rock and soul. That’d be the quickest way to sum it up. There’s some stuff that we do that I don’t know where it comes from.

HPR: What are you doing to continue this evolution of blues and music in general and bring it to new levels?

TC: I try to write good songs – that’s my responsibility, is to write good songs, put on good shows…I mean, the last two records we put out were voted best contemporary blues albums of the year at the blues awards, both my last one, “Hard Believer” and the one before that, “Pain Killer.” So I strive for quality recordings and songs that are thoughtful and have content and meaning…and hey, I’m not the greatest songwriter in the world. I just try my best to do the best I can do.

HPR: Well it sounds like you lead a pretty fulfilling life, I was wondering is there any hardship from which you draw inspiration these days?

TC: I don’t have anything really to complain about at the moment. I just find that life is really, really busy. You know, I’m 55 years old and there certainly were some messy times in my life 9laughter) so there’s plenty to draw from. I was married four times. I’m a musician and I’ve been struggling to make a living as a musician for many years. I had to figure out what I was going to do with my life like anyone else and this was it -– and it’s never been easy. Then I draw from sort of the collective pain of the world, you know the whole planet is in a mess and it’s just sort of the nature of life that there’s suffering. And I draw from other people’s pain. There’s plenty to draw from.

HPR: Do you think it’s important to draw on those things to create, or can you do it more superficially and still have good art?

TC: No. I don’t think so.

HPR: Why’s that?

TC: It’s gotta be real. It’s gotta be real and pain is a real good motivator. Extreme joy is also a good motivator. It’s all about the feelings and the thoughts and whatever it is, it has to have meaning, it has to have substance, it has to be real. You know, you can’t make it up, really.

David “Honeyboy” Edwards: A Founding Father of the Blues

HPR reached living blues legend David “Honeyboy” Edwards, the 95-year-old living link to the blues’ beginnings in the Mississippi Delta and winner of a 2010 Grammy lifetime achievement award, at his home in Chicago late last Thursday, speaking to him over the phone outside the Hotel Donaldson with the Fargo-Moorhead blues outfit, the Moody River Band, playing indoors within earshot.

High Plains Reader: I noticed that one of the tracks on your 1995 album, “I’ve been around” is called “I feel so good today,” and you’re 95 years old, and you’re still playing more than 70 shows a year. How do you feel today?

Honeyboy: I feel okay, you know, when I come home I rests up and when I’m on the road, when I get through playing, I go to the hotel and rests. I don’t let anything worry me too much, bother me too much, I just come back to the hotel and lay down.

HPR: Do you still go out drinking and having a good time sometimes?

HB: Oh, sometime. I don’t drink much whiskey. I drink a little beer sometimes. I go out but I don’t drink like I used to. I used to drink like a fish (chuckle).

HPR: But you made it to 95 somehow.

HB: Yeah, I made it. I made it.

HPR: Why do you keep playing the blues? Shouldn’t you be cured of the blues by now?

HB: Well I come up with a lot of the musicians down south in the Mississippi Delta and I played with most of them out of the Delta just about … I played music all my life just about. I started out playing when I was 13, playing the house parties then.

HPR: In your early years in the Delta and later on you came across some legendary names like Charlie Patton, Big Joe Williams, Muddy Waters later in Chicago. Who shaped you most as a musician and a person?

HB: Big Joe Williams. He didn’t learn me because I could play before him, but he learnt me a whole lot too. But I knowed Muddy before he recorded anything … Me and Muddy were the same age. Me and Muddy, same age and Brownie McGhee, Memphis Slim, Johnny Shines we all the same -– Robert Junior Lockwood, we’re all the same age. I knowed all of them.

HPR: You were friends with Robert Johnson, right? Can you describe your time with him.

HB: Yes, I knowed him. We played together in ‘37, I was 22, he was 26.

HPR: What do you remember most about him?

HB: He was just a quiet guitar player, I never heard him cuss a whole lot. He drank a lot of whiskey and liked his woman just like anybody else -– that’s how he got poisoned.

HPR: Legend has it you were there the night he got poisoned.

HB: Yeah…We was there. It’s a long time to talk about, it would take me all day to tell you about it and I don’t talk that long. He started going with this man’s wife -– you know, like that -– and the man did wanted to kill him so he gave this waitress some whiskey, corn whiskey, it was poisoned. Robert lived from Saturday until Wednesday. He died on a Wednesday, August the 16, 1938.

HPR: You’re pretty sharp at your age…so that was back in the ‘30s, and I was wondering what you think of the state of blues music today, after a hundred years or more of growing and changing?

HB: You have to change with the time and with the style. If you do it, you gotta keep up with what’s going on. You can’t keep in the same rut.

HPR: Right. Do you like what’s going on right now in the blues … as far as the modern groups, the Tommy Castros and the Walter Trouts and the others playing the Blues Fest next weekend?

HB: Most of the blues players now days call themselves playing the blues. Blues is not made to play fast, it’s made to be played slow. And they’ve got that fast action all the time…it’s too fast.

HPR: What kind of music do you listen to now? Do you listen to anything besides the blues?

HB: I like jazz – if they play it right I like jazz. But it gotta be played right you know.

HPR: How about rock and roll?

HB: Rock and roll’s good if you’re all hooked up and tight together. You gotta be tight together…everybody go out on time, come in on time, you know what I mean? It sounds good.

HPR: So the name of your autobiography is “The World Don’t Owe Me Nothin’” and you wrote that 13 years ago. Does the world own you anything yet, 13 years later?

HB: No the world don’t owe me nothing, it don’t owe me a thing. I done everything, I’ve been all over the world …

HPR: What do you owe the world?

HB: Oh, I don’t know. (long pause) I do believe in God cuz if it hadn’t been from God I’d have been lyin’ dead. It all come from God. The gift God give me ...

HPR: Ever thought about hanging up the guitar?

HB: Yeah well, I don’t know, if I quit I’d just be laying around the house and get lost and…so I just go out and do what I gotta do.

To listen to HPR’s exclusive full length interviews with Tommy Castro and Honeyboy Edwards, visit http://tiny.cc/Bluesfest

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