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Ride

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However fast or far a man travels, he can never truly outrun his past. On his new album he found himself eyeing the horizon and the green shoots of his triumphant late career. There was a new record deal with Mascot/Provogue. Arriving on the US West Coast two weeks before sessions began, Trout settled to write the Ride material in his now-deserted house in Huntington Beach, California. But even in this beachside paradise, amongst the swaying palms and ocean breeze, the past came calling.

Walter Trout is undeniably one of the favourite characters on the blues scene. Tremendously skilled, insatiably passionate and quite frankly incapable of being a past time, Trout has been a true staple point of the blues for the past 50 years. The man simply will not quit. Not to say that we’re complaining. Not. One. bit.By 1981, Trout had switched to West Coast boogie-blues titans Canned Heat for a period he diplomatically recalls as “turbulent”, but even this gig was topped three years later by a fantastical phone call from John Mayall, dangling the revered guitar slot in his iconic Bluesbreakers outfit. “As far as being a blues-guitar sideman, that gig is the pinnacle,” states Trout. “That’s Mount Everest. You could play with B.B. King or Buddy Guy, but you’re just gonna play chords all night. This guy features you. You get to play solos. He yells your name after every song, brings you to the front of the stage, and lets you sing. He creates a place for you in the world. Where do you go from there…?”

So Many Sad Goodbye’s’ and ‘High is Low’ are the creme de la creme of mid-tempo blues splendour. Trouts vocals on the latter are especially good. It’s the kind of husky outpour that reminds us why sometimes the classic arrangements are the best. While his modern edge and sparkling energy are sure to electrify contemporary fans of the genre, the memories Trout bravely digs up about his dysfunctional childhood and unstable stepfather heavily shape this LP. Even Trout admits there were “times in this pandemic where I sunk into some pretty deep depressions”. Reverb-cloaked, faintly Hendrixian and vocally influenced by Chet Baker, the stunning album closer Destiny gives an unvarnished account of the guitarist’s first meeting with Marie at a Danish blues festival in 1990. In a way, that’s what makes it so wonderful, because if Walter Trout can feel like this, when he’s Walter Trout for goodness sake, then we can all feel like that. Consider this your permission.This one-two punch of explosive guitar playing and relentless oomph is classic Trout and a reminder (if one were needed) of the brilliance when he steps his foot on the gas. However it’s not quite full steam ahead from this point as Trout (as he always does) pulls over for the occasional, soul-searching ballad.

As we move into the second half of the album we’re blessed with Trout signature protean ways. Personally I think the brilliant thing about Trout is his ability to give each song on his many albums a completely different feel. The blues can only be done a certain amount of ways but it’s with layered production and attention to detail that he succeeds in doing just that. Of all the peaks in Trout’s trajectory, his abiding memory of the late Chicago bluesman is perhaps the most literal. It’s 1986, and high above Lake Geneva, at the palatial Alpine chalet of late Montreux Jazz Festival Svengali Claude Nobs, lunch is being served. “So we’re up at the top of the Alps,” Trout recalls, “in this big room with John Mayall, Buddy Guy, Junior Wells, Robert Cray, Otis Rush, and as we’re eating, Dr. John is serenading us on acoustic piano. I was sat there with Luther Allison, and we had a great talk.

Companies, etc.

Yates, Henry; Trout, Walter (May 29, 2014). Rescued from Reality: The Life and Times of Walter Trout. Omnibus Press. ISBN 9789082200201– via Google Books.

This album is obviously what I was going through mentally and emotionally,” he considers. “All I did was express it. I spent a lot of time crying, because I would dig down into my emotional core. I want my songs to have some sort of truth to them.” Some memories that Trout examines on ‘Ride’ are long-distant but eternally poignant. Photo taken in Los Angeles on 02/21/20. Local bands never got the breaks, and in 1973, Trout made the death-or-glory move to LA, where he slept on couches and scrabbled for work. “I came out here and it was a overwhelming thing,” he says, “because I didn’t know anybody. I just started going around to clubs where there were bands playing and asked if I could sit in. My first gig, I was stand-up lead singer in a country band, singing Merle Haggard tunes. And with my third paycheque, I went and bought that Strat that’s still on the cover of all my CDs.”Find sources: "Walter Trout"– news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR ( January 2020) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) In 1998, Trout released his self-titled US debut album and renamed his band 'Walter Trout and the Free Radicals' (later renamed 'Walter Trout and the Radicals' and currently simply 'Walter Trout'). Since, Trout has been recording prolifically and touring in North and Central America, Europe, Australia, and India. Released June 10, 2013 on Provogue Records, this latest collection was bottled at Hollywood’s Entourage Studios alongside producer Eric Corne: the same combination that birthed 2012’s acclaimed solo release, Blues For The Modern Daze. The atmosphere, remembers Trout, was one of spit, grit and seat-of-the-pants energy: “Spontaneity is so important with this sort of music. Everybody was saying, ‘Well, aren’t you gonna get together and rehearse?’, but you don’t want to over-analyse or get too sterile. This album was all pretty much first or second takes. It’s gotta have warts on it. It’s gotta have a bit of grease in it.” From the grinding riff and freight-train harp that light the fuse of opener Ghosts, it’s clear Ride is like nothing else in Trout’s catalogue. And that’s not even a digression in this case, because if “Ride” is anything, it’s the product of worry, of anxiety and self-doubt.

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