In everyone’s life, there are pivotal moments where the direction one is heading in is dramatically altered, sometimes for the better, sometimes not. For veteran blues musician/songwriter Walter Trout, there are at least three of these paradigm-shifting moments that should be noted.
The first was the evening of Sunday, Feb. 9, 1964 when the 12-year-old budding musician joined millions of others around the world to be inspired by the debut appearance of The Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show. It was at this moment that Trout knew music was going to be his vocation. Not long thereafter he heard the first Paul Butterfield Blues Band album and decided to further refine his musical aspirations to that of a devotee of the blues.
The third one, at least for the purposes of this article’s narrative, happened only a couple of years ago when Trout received a life-saving lever transplant and in the aftermath dedicated his life not only to advocating for organ donations, but also rededicating himself to his family and his craft.
Trout has been in the business for nearly 50 years, starting out in the club scene in his native New Jersey before moving out to Los Angeles. Over his career he has performed in the bands of some of the truly great blues artists of our time, from John Lee Hooker and Joe Tex to a stint in John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers as well as with the jazz-tinged hit makers Canned Heat. He has also carved out a remarkably productive and prolific solo career releasing more than two dozen albums under The Walter Trout Band, Walter Trout and the Free Radicals, Walter Trout and the Radicals and since 2008 as simply Walter Trout.
He is also an in-demand concert performer, at his peak playing upwards of 200 dates a year throughout North America and Europe. His current tour brings him to Canada for two dates, Aug. 18 and 19 at Violet’s Venue In Barrie, ON.
His most recent studio release was Battle Scars which came out in 2015 not long after he recovered from his liver transplant. It was an album that was inspired by both the miraculous recovery but also the darker, more painful and soul searing aspects of the illness that lead to the transplant.
“All I was trying to do was write about what happened to me. I thought the lyrics were pretty dark and basically depressing as a matter of fact. When I go into the portion of the show when I play some of those songs I usually say, ‘and now we begin the morbid portion of the program.’ I say it light heartedly, but the songs are graphic and the songs are dark. But musically I think there is a joy to it where I am saying, ‘hey, I made it.’ I am telling you what happened and I know a lot of you can relate to this because you have been through similar things or people you love have been through similar things,” he said.
“It was my wife who said to me, ‘you need to sit down and you need to write about what happened. ‘ And when she gave me that idea, she went out shopping for the day. When she came back five hours later I had written six of the songs on the album. By the next day I had finished writing the album because it all just came tumbling out.”
The result was a powerful record that captivated audiences and critics alike and garnered him Blues Music Awards for Rock Blues Album of the Year and Song of the Year for Gonna Live Again.
The difficulty for Trout began in 2013 when he noticed he was feeling unusually tired while on the road.
“I had symptoms for a few years like equilibrium problems, pretty bad, deep fatigue all the time and that was for a couple of years and then I would be dizzy and my body would cramp up. I would get intense cramps in my legs and my hands and I couldn’t stop them and I would walk around my house crying in pain. I just figured I really did a lot of damage to myself in my youth. I made stupid decisions and I did stupid things – even heroin addiction. You name it, I was there and I did it. But even though by the time I got sick I had been sober for like 25 years, I just chalked it up to the fact that I did stupid things and I wrecked my body,” he explained candidly.
“We were trying to get life insurance and I got a blood test and they said I had Hepatitis C and then it all made sense. The
COPYRIGHT PETER DE JONG©2015
Hepatitis was causing cirrhosis of the liver and we figured I could control it by eating organic and living very clean and not eating any stuff with preservatives or chemicals and not running anything through the liver. But I tried that for a while and it didn’t work.
“Then I was on tour in Germany in 2013 and I woke up one night at 3 or 4 a.m. and my legs were swelled up like telephone poles and my stomach looked like I had swallowed a basketball. I had only two more gigs on the tour and I did them sitting in a chair. When I came home I went to the doctor and was told my liver is done and they put me in the hospital. I got the transplant on May 26, 2014, but I had been in three different hospitals for months and months.”
Trout was saved from the jaws of death in the nick of time, but his body had been incredibly debilitated by the ordeal and further impacted by the extensive surgery and post-operative issues.
“It took me a year to recover. At one point I lost the ability to speak. I had to relearn how to talk. I lost 120 pounds. I had brain damage. I didn’t recognize my wife and my kids and also when I got out I couldn’t play the guitar any more. I had to start over. So I was looking at quite a recovery,” he said.
“When I got out I was still pretty screwed up, but I realized that if I worked really hard at rebuilding the muscles in my body that I had lost and relearned how to talk and practicing four or five hours a day on guitar there was a chance I might get back to where I was before. And I am back and I am now in what I consider to be the best years of my life.”
Part of his focus post-recovery is to be a living billboard for the importance of organ donation and transplantation. Trout truly feels that he was given this task as a condition of his recovery.
“That’s why I figure I have been kept alive: I have this public platform that a lot of people don’t have. I consider this my mission in life. I talk about transplantation every night and how it can save lives. I talk about how there are eight life-saving organs you can donate and how you can donate your skin to burn victims, you can donate your eyes to the blind, you can donate your tendons to people who can’t walk and more. There is unbelievable technology, the only problem is not enough donors,” he said.
“I tell them every night that just in the U.S. alone 120,000 people are on the waiting list and every month we lose 1,500 of them. And it doesn’t have to be so.”
He also said going through such a life-altering experience has definitely helped him prioritize what is and isn’t important in life.
“Things like my family, things like my music have become much more important to me. As I said on one of the songs on Battle Scars, the things that used to get me before, they don’t bother me any more – those little things that used to rub me the wrong way. Here’s an example, I used to get mad because some guy was selling more records than me? Why are they getting such and such a gig – I should be getting that one. Stuff like that,” Trout said.
“I just don’t care anymore. I am happy to be alive, I am happy to have a career, I am happy to be married still to the love of my life and have three great kids and have a second chance at all of this. I actually feel that in some ways I am starting over because my attitude is so different, especially with my family. I used to be so caught up in my career that there were times that I didn’t see my family. And I mean by that I was with my family but in my brain I was worrying about other things related to my job. Now if I am going to be with my wife and kids, I am going to savour every single moment and I am going to be there mentally and emotionally with them. I want them to know how much I love them and I will show that to them. So my perspective on things is vastly different.”
Trout grew up in a home where music was not just appreciated but was a focal point. His indulgent parents used to take Walter to see some of the top acts of the day when he was a child, instilling in him his own appreciation for creative excellence.
“For my 10th birthday my mom worked it out that I could hang out with Duke Ellington and his orchestra for the day. She also took me front row to see James Brown, Ray Charles, Harry Bellefonte, Lou Rawls and the Righteous Brothers. And my dad would take me to the best black jazz clubs to see great jazz musicians,” he said.
“But what really did it for me, where I decided I wanted to play electric guitar in a band, and a lot of guys of my generation will say this, was Feb. 9, 1964 – the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. The day after everything was different in my life. I remember it so well: 8 o’clock at night, Channel 2, CBS from Philadelphia. It was life changing. And it’s hard these days to even try to explain to younger generations the impact that that had back then. They don’t get it. It was world changing right there. Dig this man, the population of America was 180 million and 78 million saw that show. That’s almost half. That will never ever happen again.”
After picking up a guitar, a year or so later the second major musical explosion happened in Trout’s life.
“Here’s the thing. I got a guitar, I am learning and playing Beatles song and I was also loving Bob Dylan. But in 1965 I heard the first album by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and it had a guitar player named Michael Bloomfield and it starts off with a song called Born in Chicago. And I heard that and said, that’s it, that’s what I want to do. And there is another group of people from my generation who are blues guitarists and felt the same,” he said.
“For example, I just played a few days ago in a band with Robben Ford, Steve Lukather from Toto and Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top called The Supersonic Blues Machine. We all loved that album, Robben and I were just talking about it at the gig in Norway. We all bonded over this album. So I started to play the rockin’ blues stuff and even though had a pretty successful club band in New Jersey, I knew that I f I wanted to do something more I had to go to either New York or Los Angeles.”
He chose L.A. because at the time, it seemed to be a more wide open musical vista than the more closed environment of the highly competitive New York scene.
“I packed up my VW Bug. I had $150, I had a Martin D28, a Gibson 335 and Fender Super Reverb amp. I had a trumpet, a mandolin and some clothes and I put that all into this little car, and you can write this if you want, along with a pound of weed and 30 hits of LSD and I drove across the country and came to L.A. and started going around to clubs asking if I could sit in,” he said.
Eventually he formed a small club band and started gigging around the city and soon gained the attention of the other blues players on the scene, as well as those travelling through, becoming an in-demand sideman for some true music luminaries such as Big Mama Thornton, John Lee Hooker, Percy Mayfield, Joe Tex, Lowell Fulsom, Pee Wee Crayton and Bobby Hatfield of the Righteous Brothers.
“When I was playing with John Lee Hooker I got heard by the guys in Canned Heat and they asked me to do one tour with them. That turned into four and a half years. And then when I was with them we did a show with John Mayall and he asked me to join his band and that became five years with John,” he said, although admitting at first he was intimidated about taking a guitar slot in The Bluesbreakers that had been occupied by some of the most talented, influential and revered axe-slingers in music history.
“I had grown up on his records. I was in high school and bought all those records and studied all those guitar solos of Mick Taylor (Rolling Stones) and Peter Green (Fleetwood Mac) as well as Eric Clapton. So I was very aware of the pedigree and the first night we went on stage and did all those songs I played the Clapton solos note for note. On the second night John pulled me aside and said, ‘hey Walter, I want you to be Walter Trout. I didn’t hire you to be Eric Clapton. I want you to play those songs the way you play them. Have fun and see where you can take these songs. Don’t feel shackled by this tradition’ And that freed me and once he gave me that freedom I learned so much about improvisation and how to play spontaneously from him. He was an incredible teacher and why that guy is not in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is a travesty.”
And for the past 30 years, those lessons have been put to good use as Trout has garnered an incredible following throughout the music industry and with blues fans around the world.
Trout said he is looking forward to his shows in Barrie and says he has a great affinity for Canada, Canadian audiences and one particular legendary Canadian blues musician in particular.
I have played many times up there. I used to play at Jeff Healey’s club. He was a really, really good friend of mine. I actually made a record with him (Full Circle). I actually recorded the record with him in Toronto with his band. I used to play up in Canada and Toronto in particular a lot with Canned Heat and also with John Mayall. I have done a lot of festivals in your country in smaller towns and they seem to get a really good turnout and they treat us great. I know in some places the blues kind of went into decline but I kind of thought that the blues in Canadas never really went away. When I was going there with Canned Heat in the early 1980s we always did great and then with Mayall, I joined him in 1984 and toured with him until 1989, and we would come up there a couple of times a year,” he said.
“The way I met Jeff Healey was that I was touring Canada with John Mayall and Jeff was a local guy out of Toronto and he was our opening act for about 10 cities on the tour. And within a year and a half we were opening for him. We hit it off instantly and we bonded over our love of blues and R&B and also old jazz. He loved old jazz and so did I and I was actually a trumpet player before I played guitar, just like him. So we had a lot to talk about.
“They had this memorial concert at Massey Hall in Toronto a couple of months ago and I came up and played that along with Randy Bachman, Sonny Landreth, Albert Lee, Philip Sayce and a lot of other great musicians. I came and played just to remember Jeff.”
Those seeking more information about his shows at Violet’s Venue in Barrie can visit http://tickets.violetsvenue.com/events/view/122.
For more information about Trout, and his latest release, Live in Amsterdam, visit http://www.waltertrout.com.
* Jim Barber is a veteran award-winning journalist and author based in Napanee, ON, who has been writing about music and musicians for a quarter of a century. Besides his journalistic endeavours, he now works as a communications and marketing specialist. Contact him at jimbarberwritingservices@gmail.com
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhCFG2rLomA
SHARE THIS POST:
