Joe Louis Walker: Scaling The Electric Fence
photo: Mickey Deneher
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“I’m not interested in doing what I did last time. What gets me going is trying something new,” declares Joe Louis Walker, as the acclaimed guitarist and singer considers the material on his new album, Weight of the World. Although the 73-year-old musician is a 2013 Blues Hall of Fame inductee and a Grammy nominee in the blues category, his latest album reflects his affinity for soul, funk, jazz, rock and gospel.
“I don’t want to fill up an album with all the same songs,” he reveals. “I don’t want it to be where the first verse goes, ‘I lost my baby’ and the second verse is ‘I’ve got to find my baby.’ Then there are 19 guitar solos and the last verse is ‘I found my baby.’ I’ve got nothing against that, but it isn’t me.”
Walker initially made a name for himself as a guitar virtuoso, swapping solos with B.B. King, Freddie King, Otis Rush, Buddy Guy, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Mississippi Fred McDowell and many others over the course of his storied career.
“I love guitar playing, I just don’t want to hear it for breakfast, lunch and dinner,” he adds with a laugh. “I grew up in guitar heaven. I went to the Fillmore Auditorium every week where it was nothing but guitar players. I listened to those 19 guitar solos over and over and over again. So I can cut loose, but I also try to do something melodic that still has something to do with the song.”
He recalls a conversation he once had with Alligator Records founder Bruce Iglauer, who observed that “No one goes home humming a guitar solo; they go home humming a melody.” Walker explains, “He didn’t say it in a harsh way, but what guitarist can you name where you go home and you begin humming their guitar solos? I can think of a few— Buddy Holly, George Harrison, Jimi Hendrix, Curtis Mayfield and some of the Motown guys. You could hum their solos because they made them melodic and interesting. I have found that if I start playing the same thing over and over again, unless it’s in the proper context of something, it’s just the sound of one hand clapping. You’re sort of looking at yourself in the mirror and saying, ‘Oh, I’m the fairest of them all.’”
Walker began his career while still a San Francisco teenager. There he was in a unique position to experience a cultural transformation.
“Me and my cousins were living in the projects, and we went to Benjamin Franklin High School, which was a block away from the Fillmore Auditorium. We used to have our Battle of the Bands there. We saw James Brown there when he got a new bag. We saw The Temptations—the real Temptations with Eddie Kendricks, David Ruffin and Hamilton Bohannon on drums. That was our Apollo Theater.
“It was our community playhouse, in a district where we could play five to seven nights a week—even though I was 15, I was playing nightclubs. Then all of a sudden, the script got flipped when the Mime Troupe came in and had a show at the Fillmore with Chet Helm and Bill Graham. That’s when things started to change and you had all the young kids trying to get away from the morays of their parents. They wanted to grow their hair long. They wanted to have a relationship that was considered taboo. Instead of getting drunk and fighting, they wanted to smoke pot and eat brownies. It represented so many forms of change.”
Although Walker had already established himself in local blues circles by this time—he joined the Musicians Union Local 6 at age 14—he embraced the influx of artists and perspectives. “I was young enough to adapt,” he says. “I grew up with the traditional blues through my dad but when people like The Yardbirds came to the Fillmore, I’d go see them. I liked the English groups because they had a good energy. Plus, they put their money where their mouth was, especially The Stones. They put Howlin’ Wolf on TV. [The Rolling Stones agreed to appear on Shindig! in 1965 but only if Howlin’ Wolf performed as well.] My daddy watched that with me and he was like, ‘Lord have mercy, them boys can’t sing. But I love them because they put Big Foot Chester on TV!’”
Walker would go on to become roommates with Mike Bloomfield, while connecting with other generational peers. “I’m still friends with Jerry Miller from Moby Grape and I knew Skip Spence. I keep contact with Bobby Weir once in a while. It’s all San Francisco— some of us were homegrown and some of us came there. I think me and Bobby were born in the same hospital, and even though Carlos Santana came from Mexico City, he grew up in San Francisco. But everybody would play together. That’s something I liked about the Dead in particular. They would turn their fans onto Rahsaan Roland Kirk or The Neville Brothers by having them on a bill. They would push the boundaries.”
Walker applied a similar broad-minded ethos to his own musical expression until 1975, when he turned to gospel, joining the Spiritual Corinthians. He admits, “When I left the blues to do gospel full-time, there was no plan. My friends needed a little help with a program on a Saturday night. I tell everybody that I went for a day and stayed for 10 years. I wanted to get off of the secular music treadmill because there was so much excess that came with it, and I was experiencing some of it myself.”
Then in 1985, while performing at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, he had something of an epiphany. “I’d been happy up until that point but I suddenly felt restless. I explained to everyone: ‘I’m still here in heart and mind but I’ve got to go back and finish what I’ve started.’ I still listen to gospel a lot and I continue to take inspiration from it—I was listening to Brother Joe May just last night.”
Walker explains that he is also galvanized by creative partnerships, which is what led him to record Weight of the World with producer and fellow songwriter Eric Corne (John Mayall, Walter Trout, Sugaray Rayford).
“What I’ve found out after doing a lot of records—this is like my 31st album—is that I like to collaborate with people, but I don’t want the collaboration to be all about patting you on the back. There’s got to be some push and pull. I’ve done that working with producers like Tom Hambridge, Tony Visconti and Steve Cropper because I don’t know everything. If I did, then I’d be the head honcho of the world. So someone can tell me: ‘Joe, that might be a good song for a live gig, but it might not be too good for a record.’ Or Cropper sometimes would say to me when I’d bring him a song: ‘Joe, that’s great, man, but it’s like four songs in one. Can we get one at a time?’”
The guitarist chuckles, then notes, “That’s where Eric came in—he lit a fire under me. We had been communicating for several years. Then he finally said, ‘Joe, I’d like to do something with you but I want it to be all original. You’ve got songs and ideas, I’ve got songs and ideas, so let’s work together.’”
Although one could classify Weight of the World as a blues album, there are many more reference points throughout the 10 tracks. For instance, Walker describes his original “Don’t Walk Out That Door” as “a straight, plain soul song.” He explains, “I was thinking of David Ruffin and ‘Walk Away From Love,’ without all the high notes. I wanted to write a love song that didn’t have to be, ‘We walked off into the sunset.’ I thought it could be, ‘I screwed up and please don’t walk out the door.’”
Walker’s “Is It a Matter of Time?” uses a familiar form to address an atypical subject matter. “I wrote that song because of the different platforms that they use for music. I won’t name any of them, but it’s like, ‘How many spins do I have on your platform? A million? And how much money do I get, $17.22? When can I get paid?’ The answer usually is: ‘It’s a matter of time.’ Why is it always a matter of time? Who came up with that?”
“Hello, It’s the Blues” was prompted by a common interview question Walker has received—“What is the blues and what does it mean to you?” For many years, he aspired to provide an answer in a song, and he emphasizes that “the blues is in my heart and mind, but I also take pride in all the different influences that I have. There’s a lot of jazz, for instance. I was in the Monk Institute with Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter. I played with Ramsey Lewis. I was on a Branford Marsalis record. It’s all natural to me and that’s because there are no real boundaries there. I think a big part of that is because of how I grew up in San Francisco.”
Then he adds, “The blues has always had something of an imaginary electric fence that can zap you if you test it. But if you can make it through that fence, you need to have something to do and something to say. There has always been experimentation, though—I think of someone like Earl Hooker, who had a doubleneck guitar 20 years before Jimmy Page did. And Earl Hooker knew what to do with it too! It wasn’t for show.
“Going back to the first album I recorded, when I came back out playing the blues instead of gospel, the main song is not a 12-bar blues. There are only two or three 12-bar blues songs on that album,” he continues. “I could do the same thing over and over again, and people would like it. People would say, ‘Wow, you sound like Magic Sam when you sing that’ or ‘Man, you sound like Elmore James when you play slide.’ But where does that put me as a musician?”
Ultimately, Joe Louis Walker is doing what comes naturally to him. “I think Willie Dixon had me down,” he says. “I used to go down to Willie’s to try and learn a little bit from him. One day he told me, ‘I’ve figured out your style. You’re all over the place but you know what? It works for you. Don’t change it.’ I’m not all over the place just to be all over the place, but at certain points, I like John Lennon’s stuff as much as I like Muddy Waters’ stuff. I do what I do not for the sake of being different. I do it for the sake of having something different to say.”
