The night before his performance at B. B. King’s in Nashville, guitarist extraordinaire Sonny Landreth checked into his hotel a block or two from the venue. It was late and he was clearly exhausted as he trudged to the front desk, guitar in hand and backpack strapped in place.
“Have you stayed with us before, Mr. Landreth?” the clerk chirped cheerfully.
With a world-weary irony, he replied, “I’ve stayed here so many times you should have my name engraved outside.”
The plan was that he and I would do our interview right then and right there, in the lobby. But his exhaustion was so palpable that when I stepped up and introduced myself, I asked if he wanted to bump it back to the morning, after a full night’s rest.
Trooper that he is, he smiled, shook his head and nodded toward a couple of chairs nearby. In a minute, I was recording and our conversation ensued.
I should say here that I am not a guitar player. I’ve banged on a few acoustic six-strings, but never above the third fret. So, as Chip Stern did on my assignment to interview bass guitar monster Victor Wooten for Musician magazine (as described previously here), I kept the focus on broader issues of musicianship and experience. Certainly the tech-heavy articles have their place, but so do those that unfold on a different level.
A few words about Sonny Landreth: His mastery of slide guitar is astonishing. To my ears, his playing goes beyond mere chops and into areas of emotion that are hard to analyze. Some of that has to do with the idiom itself: Slide guitar, as evolved in the Mississippi Delta, somehow evokes both nuances of human speech and the wordless moans of more haunted spirits. To my ears, Landreth fully commands these elements but raises them to a unique eloquence through electronic devices, some of his own invention.
That explains why the house was packed that night at B. B. King’s, not just with music lovers but with most of the top-level guitar players in Music City. They were there to learn as much as to experience the magic of Landreth’s music.
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You just got in from Illinois.
Yeah, we played in Chicago last night and in Dearborn the night before.
How long is this tour?
It's like a long weekend. We go home tomorrow. My dad's real ill, so I came home early back in December from out in California. We're doing long weekends up to a week and then going home for a couple of weeks until April. Then in April it's solid -- school season kicks in and all that.
Your dad lives near you in Louisiana.
Yeah [unintelligible].
As you play year after year, does music become routine? Is there less interesting stuff to discuss about work you're doing now than during your personal and artistic formative years?
It's interesting you ask that because Eric Johnson once said something in an interview: If you can hang onto some of that magic of hearing music and playing music that you were so fired up about as a kid, that's the thing. It's really true for me as well as I'm sure a lot of other people. There's still that thing that happens onstage when you're playing for people. Everything else, getting to and fro, is a cumulative effect of being hard over years and years of doing it. But on the other hand, there are things like meeting people and friends all over the country and in Europe and Canada. It's great. It's good to have that support.
You're saying that the distinctive musicians, those who have achieved something unique in their sound, maintain a connection with the wellspring.
Absolutely. In my case, in south Louisiana, I'm really fortunate to have been raised there because of the culture. There's a strong sense of tradition that's very much alive. You see it in kids coming up in Cajun and Creole families. They come up learning to play several instruments each. It's really something. It's such a rich culture because of the music, the food, the way people dance; it's all part of the social structure there. And their whole outlook on life is unique. It's not like that anywhere else. We're our own little cultural outback, like our own little country, down there. That continues to inspire me, especially when you have the generation that came before, which had such a profound influence that's handed down, and I've had the experiences I've had, and you see these other kids coming up, that's a good thing.
You wouldn't have the opportunity to play with Clifton Chenier if you were raised in Indiana or Wyoming.
No, you wouldn't. That's why I feel so fortunate. For me, speaking of Clifton, that was like if I had been raised in Chicago and Muddy Waters took me under his wing. It was that big.
Delta Roots
You were born in Mississippi, though you moved out when you were really young.
Yeah, I was seven years old. My family is from northern Mississippi, but they had ties to the Delta. I used to go there when I was a kid, so I have memories. Something touched me. Later you look back and you have more of an appreciation and a realization of some things, but the main thing was that music was always really important to me. I have an older brother, Steve. He really loved music. He was always bringing music into the house, so it was as long as I can remember. And by the time we did move to Lafayette, speaking of culture, that was my experience with culture shock [laughs]. That was another world, man. I couldn't understand what anybody was saying. Everything was different. But it was the best thing that could have happened to me.
A lot of northern readers think of everything south of Kentucky being approximately the same.
No, it's very much different.
So even as a kid you sensed an otherness about the new place.
It was another world. I was excited because Jim Bowie was one of my heroes and we were going to where he was from. I had all this imagination. I don't know what I thought, in my little brain, what it was going to be like. But my first Mardi Gras, I heard Ray Charles on the jukebox, doing "Unchain My Heart." It just stopped me dead in my tracks. I snuck in this little bar -- I was so short that no one noticed me -- and I was mesmerized by the sound. Cajun bands were always playing. They all played on TV on this Saturday morning show. Whenever there was an opening for a Western Auto store or something like that, they'd have a band playing on a flatbed trailer. Then listening to the radio and buying albums … also, we'd go to New Orleans on a fairly regular basis. The first time I heard jazz, the second line, R&B, it was all happening at once.
New Orleans is like another planet.
It is. South of the whole Cajun country, Lafayette, Appaloosa, and all that, and you go down to New Orleans, it's another planet. It's the most soulful city in the world.
Distinctive kinds of music are associated with New Orleans. Yet it's regional, from the same area. What ties all this together?
Well, I think it's mostly that New Orleans was such an old port. Historically, something unique happened there in that it developed the way it did. Of all the different influences -- French, Spanish, African, Germanic and Italian because that's where the accordion came from -- and Creole meant different things at different times in history. But all of the Latin and Caribbean influences are like a melting pot. I always compare it to the gumbo: You throw it all in there and cook it a long time, and something comes to the top that's really unique. It affected everything and it spread out to the countryside.
Cajun music seems to accent the one and the three, while zydeco and jazz accent the two and the four. Yet they all enrich each other.
Well, they do. Not to get too far out on a limb, but Cajun and Creole grew up together. They farmed rural areas side by side. That's where the spice comes in from one direction and something came in from the other, and the music too. You had black and white musicians exchanging.
When you say the one and three I assume you mean the waltzes, which came in …
No, it's more like hearing the bass on the one and the three in a Cajun groove. They have the two-steps. Basically, it's a two-step and a waltz, all night long. That's from the descendants of the Acadians and what they brought from France through Canada when they landed where they did through deportation. Zydeco is more African influenced; it's more syncopated. It's more of that blues element, deep down. You're right; it's all mixed in there. You hear blues songs on some of the old Cajun recordings. Of course, you hear them on the early Creole field recordings. There's a definite connection.
Louisiana seems to have been different from much of the country in terms of free mixing between whites and blacks.
Well, there was segregation. It wasn't to the extent, in my memory, of Mississippi, but it was there. The thing that I learned and could recognize and appreciate later was that you had that more in the cities. You get out into the country and it's a different thing. Many years later, when I was playing in clubs, we would leave in the morning and go to the gig somewhere and be out in the middle of nowhere. I never could have found it otherwise. And we would always go to a friend's house. As soon as we got there, they were already cooking. They cooked all day. It was a party all day before we played that night. They just welcomed you into their home. It was an extraordinary experience.
How young were you then?
I met Clifton when I was sixteen. Like a lot of white kids in the suburbs, I was discovering blues on another level. Through interviews with Eric Clapton, John Mayall, and these heroes I had in England, I was like, "Wait a minute. B.B. King is playing in New Iberia!" That was the first time I heard B.B. He had a small combo. Then I heard about this guy that played blues on an accordion. I was like, "Man, I gotta see this." A friend of mine and I went to the Blue Angel Club on Orange Street in Lafayette -- that was his headquarters. He saw us from the door, and he was like, "Hey, soul! Come on in!" He just took us in. I couldn't believe it. Then when he got through the band and started the set, that just blew my mind. It changed my world.
You were his first white sideman. Was there a sense, then, that this wasn't just another gig for you -- or for him?
Well, I thought more for myself, because he was my hero. By then I'd been listening to him for years, from that first time I was sixteen. So when I finally got to play with him, he invited me to sit in at the Boucherie [i.e., La Grande Boucherie des Cajuns Restaurant] in St. Martinville. At the end of the night he goes to pay me. "Oh, no! Are you kidding? This is the height of my musical career. It can only go down from here [laughs]." He said, "No, I want you to come to New Orleans with us." So I went to New Orleans, and then he asked me to join the band. But I knew it was an amazing opportunity.
Trumpets & Tone
You played trumpet as a kid. Why was that your first instrument? And why did the guitar have a more powerful pull?
Again, my brother was the influence on both accounts. When I was really little, we used to entertain the relatives by pantomiming Elvis Presley songs. He had one of those plastic Elvis guitars they used to have back in the day. For some reason he traded that for a ukulele, which our dog chewed up. I came home and he was gnawing on the headstock, strings were going boing, splinters were coming out …
He was your first critic.
You know, he did us a service there. So my brother took up trumpet, figuring it would be harder for him to chew [laughs]. That's how I began. It was my first official instrument. But guitar was always my first love. I kept bugging my folks until I got my first guitar, when I was thirteen. I just couldn't wait.
The trumpet was just something you did.
Well, I dug it. I fell in love with the music. That's how I had my exposure to classical music and jazz. But the guitar was the thing. It's a great thing when you're young like that: You don't try to intellectualize anything. It's more about experience. There was nothing weird to me about having this instrument in the academic world; I'd read music and play with my eyes open. I dug those influences. Then I'd go play guitar with my eyes closed in a band on the weekend. That was a completely different kind of music, more from the heart. I just had an affinity for the guitar. It was obvious early on. Even though I did well with trumpet, I never could improvise well with it. It was just so much work. That's what prepared me for showbiz, period. I had good teachers. They warned me how hard it would be. But playing the solo festival with braces on trumpet … I mean, after that, the guitar was a piece of cake [laughs]. The judges are just critiquing every little note you play. And yet that gave me a strong sense of dynamics, articulation, and discipline that I wouldn't have had. I had to kind of unlearn some of that later.
What did the trumpet teach you about tone?
Tone was huge. I was big on tone early on. Sounds just pulled me in. That's what hooked me on the bottleneck slide guitar. Later I realized that my jazz heroes and blues heroes were all striving to emulate the human voice on their instrument. The slide guitar was the …
Is there a moment you remember when you heard something that clicked a light bulb on and you realized this was your instrument?
I think that came from the early records I heard.
“I got that idea of the finger-style approach with the right hand and a bottleneck slide on the left.”
These weren't necessarily slide guitar records.
Not at first. In fact, I didn't even know what slide guitar was. But as I began to have this awakening and started digging into the blues, I kept reading about slide guitar. These names would come up, and I'd seek out these records. I learned my right-hand finger-style technique from Chet Atkins. Listening to the blues albums, I heard Robert Johnson. A friend of mine had the Columbia vinyl albums. I borrowed them, and I'd never heard anything like that, even from all the Delta cats I'd been digging on. That's when I got that idea of the finger-style approach with the right hand and a bottleneck slide on the left. That set me on my path.
Did you take lessons?
I tried to take lessons, but I was bored into quitting. I just didn't want to play anymore. They came around a couple of weeks later and I started working on my own … hunt and peck. It's like you've got this shiny, nice guitar, and you go, "Okay!" Then you sit down and you go … "okay. Okay?" So that was the logical thing to do. A kid who was older than me, working in a music store, he taught me the Chet Atkins style. Later, Bobby Brooks, who's an accomplished jazz musician living in our town, helped me with chord melody and substitutions and to read big band charts when I was in college. That's pretty much it. The slide thing was a complete mystery. Nobody showed me anything. In a way, I think that was a good thing, because I didn't have any expectations. There weren't any points of references, so I think I took a turn in direction that maybe I wouldn't have taken otherwise.
Somebody would have shown you the "right" way to do it.
Yeah.
Slide guitar seems like a hard thing to teach because it's so personal, so connected to the voice. Could you teach someone how to play slide as he or she should do it?
I've thought about that. I used to teach a lot in the past. It's been many years. But it would be something where I would probably have to retire from the road. A couple of young guys around Lafayette have been coming to my gigs, and I'm really proud of them. They've picked up on it. They'll be some of the torch bearers in the future. But it is a personal thing. The thing with slide guitar is that there's nothing more bizarre to try to do after you've already learned to play guitar with a standard approach -- with a pick or maybe not, finger-style, but actually fretting the fingerboard. Then you put this thing on your finger and all of a sudden it's a completely different thing. It's the most awkward, frustrating, horrible sounding shit you've ever heard in your life. If you're torturing the household to a level they hadn't anticipated … they'd gotten used to what I was doing up to that point.
How old were you on your first gig?
I was fourteen. My dad worked for State Farm Insurance; that's what brought us to Lafayette. Back then, it was a real close-knit family of people at work, a very small group that worked there. They would have parties all the time, so they hired us to play. We knew maybe six songs. They were mostly the Ventures. The drummer, who has been playing with Beausoleil for twenty-five-plus years, Tommy Alesi, and another guy, Danny [sounds like: Aware-oh] on guitar, and me -- that's all we had. We played those six songs over and over. At the end of the night they gave us five bucks and I was hooked.
Tightened By Time
You've been playing with the same guys for quite some time.
Yeah. [Bassist] David Ranson and I go way back. In fact, I was going into my eighth grade, I think.
You were fifteen, I believe.
I was fifteen and he was fourteen. I was going to be fifteen; he's a year younger. But we didn't start playing together until later on in high school and right after.
What does it mean to you to have a musical relationship that's endured that long?
Well, there's the old saying: If it ain't broke, don't fix it. But on a much deeper level there's consistency. There's a connection of instinct. We literally know what we're each thinking when we're playing. It enables you to go places you couldn't get to on your own. You don't have to orchestrate. It's much more about spontaneity, music that's made on the moment. To go through all the changes over the years of working things out in the studio and how to make sounds … You write a song and, okay, what's the best way to do this? Dave, being the groove king, has always been the foundation in that regard. He's the anchor. He's what enables me to take off. He's keeping everything where it ought to be. The other thing is that it gives you a different overview. When you have a connection like that you tap into a much more soulful area than when you're playing with guys that are great too but you don't have that connection. It's much more pieced together; it's not as much about the life experience of being raised in the same culture and going through all those changes.
You've played with Ken [Blevins, drummer] for a long time too.
I met Ken when he moved to Lafayette in the late Seventies.
You know each other so well musically that trust is a factor in how you play. You're not coasting, but you know you can dig deeper into yourself because they're there for you.
It's not a matter of coasting; it's a matter of being able to relax and get into that mindset that enables you to get into that space.
“The difference between a studio album and playing live is energy. It's air.”
When you're really into a solo, are you in a trance state?
Oh, yeah. I don't know where it's coming from. For me to go back and figure it out, it's not even worth the time or the trouble [laughs]. I'm aware of the thing that's happening technically and it's mental and physical demands. It's like, the more I push myself … How do I explain this? There's a point where you let go and it becomes this other thing. That's what I would call honoring the moment. The creativity is coming out in ways I couldn't sit down and orchestrate. It's like this live album. There's no way I could play like that in a studio. The difference between a studio album and playing live is energy. It's air. It's what's in the air and what's not. A lot of studio albums I've done for years, it's more of a production piece in that regard, with layers of sound and really cool things. It's like painting a picture or making a sculpture, I would imagine. On the other side of it, with the live thing, you're feeding off the energy of the audience. That's the electrified air that you just can't get in a studio.
The audience response on the live album [Grant Street] is mixed fairly low. It doesn't intrude on the music, yet you can hear the inspiration there. You play some things on this record that make my hair stand on end. As good as it was in the original versions, there is something extra here. It's almost haunted.
That's the thing we get back to about the three of us. I did it there [at the Grant Street Dancehall, Lafayette, Louisiana] because of my long-running history with the club, my long-running history with the guys, and the history of the songs as they've evolved. That's what you're getting. We were talking about this the other night at dinner. Some songs will speak to you. You'll know which ones work live and which ones are best left alone in the studio. The ones that work live will take on their own life and grow and develop and change. Also, I'm really keen on taking a production piece in the studio and then interpreting it as a three-piece band because I always felt a really good song could be interpreted in any number of ways. It's getting at the essence of the song somehow in a stripped-down fashion that sets up the opportunity for that magic to come through.
A good example of that on this album is "Broken Hearted Road," which is very different from the original version.
Right.
I love the major IV chord in the minor blues. Even that change opens the door toward getting deeper into the song.
Well, it does, and that's much more apparent in there live than some of these other parts that aren't there in the mix. You learn to make the most of both. It's apples and oranges: Why settle for just one or the other? That's what keeps me really excited to do it, getting back to the original …
So you cut this album in a club that you knew very well.
I played there on its opening night, the fourth of July in 1980, with Clifton Chenier. That joint put Lafayette on the map of the blues circuit. I mean, everybody from B.B. King to Albert King to Ray Charles to Muddy Waters … and we got to open up for a lot of them. Then I played there with my bands over the years. Finally, I guess this was over ten years ago, I started playing there every Saturday night during the International Festival in Lafayette; that's been my once-a-year hometown gig. This time last year we played both nights, Friday and Saturday, giving us two nights to record and to take the best of the two nights.
And that's not far from where you live.
I'm just down the road.
A Moment With Jimi Hendrix
A lot of people learn to play blues with an archival instinct. They're trying to emulate somebody else: How close can they sound to Robert Johnson? You, on the other hand, went into something more original and unexplored. How did you get past the process of copying to finding your own path?
That's a very good question. I've thought about that. I believe what happens, in your journey to emulate, are the things you can never foresee, the little surprises. You go, "Whoops, what was that? Wow, how did I do that? That's pretty cool." Also, even from the beginning, I wanted to have my own voice on guitar. Looking back now, I'd have to have been a philosopher to figure this out. As a kid, I always wanted to learn to sing the guitar. That was the goal that all my heroes had. That's what I heard in their music anyway. So I think I just heard the call of the wild. It fascinated me to the point that it was much more important to me to find myself in those songs, as much as I wanted to know what I could about them, there was another part of me that wanted to keep it a complete mystery. I didn't sit down and try to figure out how to do "Walkin' Blues" by Robert Johnson. Now, I did that with Hendrix. All this happened about the same time for me: Clifton Chenier, B.B King, Hendrix in Baton Rouge. I actually met him …
You met Hendrix?
I met Hendrix.
I know you saw Duane Allman play.
I saw Duane Allman play once.
Tell me about meeting Hendrix.
Well, my friends and I had been living with those first two albums glued to our ears: Are You Experienced? Axis: Bold as Love. I'd play those two albums as I went to bed. For their gigs in Baton Rouge, we decided we'd get there around eight o'clock in the morning. I don't know what we thought we were going to do. But there's an interesting lesson here. So we get over there, a car full of friends. We're all going, "I hope he does this song. I hope he does that song." Next thing you know, we're in the hotel. We're alone with all these other kids. We're running around the hotel, trying to find Hendrix. This big English roadie runs us all out. We finally get up on the floor where he was, but before he runs us all out -- we were scared to death of him -- he had a little two-room suite. It was a funky hotel, with two adjoining rooms. He had a reel-to-reel tape machine and he was listening to tracks he had obviously done in the studio. Anyway, they run us off, and I'm downstairs, walking around. My buddy and I go into the gift shop. We had five hours to kill [laughs]. Well, in walks Hendrix.
Was he all dressed up in stage clothes?
No, man. It was like he'd been on the road. His hair was a mess. He walks in and we freaked out. We go up to him. Here I am, and the next thing I know he sticks out his hand. What struck me, number one, was how short he was; I imagined him being very tall. The other thing was how long his fingers were. It freaked me out. It's like, my hand just disappeared in his fingers. He's looking at me, and all I can think of to say is, "Well, tell me, Jimi, what does Axis: Bold as Love mean?" So he goes, "Well, man, I tell you, it's like an analogy, man, you know, a man's love for a woman … I don't know, man. I just woke up." He's getting a toothbrush and some toothpaste. He signed our tickets. A year or so later I recognized the tracks from Electric Ladyland; that's what he was listening to. Many years later I became good friends with Noel Redding, and he remembered the gig. It was a trip to see that from the other end of it. God, it was a heartbreaker.
You didn't meet Duane Allman, but when you saw him you were already deep into slide playing.
Oh, yeah, I was way into my own thing. When I heard him I got worked up to go home and crank it out. It was almost like I was being too polite: I was thinking too hard. He made me go after a more powerful sound -- and he impressed me with how tasteful he was. He came out, with his reputation as a slide player, and played three songs on slide, and then retuned and played the rest of the set without ever picking it up again. It was very tasteful, very much about the music and taking off on the spot from ideas that came up.
Does it take two distinct personalities to play slide and regular guitar?
Yeah. It's so different. One of the hardest things for me, from the beginning, was to be able to make that switch in the middle of a gig as it goes from one song or another. I'd get it all worked out at home, I thought, only to get on the gig and find that it completely falls apart like a cheap suit. That took time. At one point, because the slide is such a strange thing to begin with, so clumsy and awkward, you begin to get comfortable with it and it becomes more seamless.
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"USS Zydecoldsmobile" is a total jam.