The Derek Trucks Interview

[Music] hey everybody it's my pleasure to welcome mr derek trucks derek thank you so much for being here thanks for being here my first question to you which i've always wanted to ask and i like to ask great players like yourself what is hard for you to play it depends on the day it depends on the day what do you work on tell me some things like when you first sit down and play i've heard you warm up here for a few minutes but what are the things you like to do you know it's usually uh jumping between chord voicings that might hang you up certain tunes a lot of times uh i know you'll write something in a certain mood or a certain head space and then years go by and you kind of forget that you were ever in that place when you go back to it it kind of hangs you up a little bit so i work on that stuff a lot but it's really whatever you can't get at when you're in the heat of the moment you know when you're hearing things in your head and there's something you maybe go for and it doesn't quite happen the way you you imagine it those are things that i'll maybe just work on the next day or even that night after the show that's exactly what i was going to ask you so i saw you play last night is there anything after the show that you'll think about like hey you know i should really this is this is something that we should work on as a band something i should work on myself you know last night was a pretty good night i mean it's a it's an interesting sounding stage at the fox so you i don't hear all the details that you would in some other places but usually it's dynamic things that that i would talk to the next day with a band or just you know where we could have bobbed and weaved a little bit differently or just laid something down in a different place and you don't want to overthink those things because uh when it happens naturally it's kind of the magic but there are there are certain tunes where you know especially the scripted parts of the tombs where you want sections to be big and then when a vocal comes in you want it to just you want to be the bed and um so those things we talk about quite a bit little arrangement things endings and we were changing things all the time sometimes we go back and um you know we have a new member come in the band you'll send them the songs you want to learn and like isaac or driver he's like well which version 10 version like oh yeah sorry i don't know pick the most recent one we'll start from there so you know you're constantly trying to evolve things um songs never really get to a place where you feel like you want to just leave them that way forever especially when the personnel changes too you know when different people come in you want to kind of play to people's strengths and not just uh try to repeat what somebody else did and sometimes an impossible feat to repeat what somebody else did so it's just better to leave it alone you have such a large ensemble you have a lot of competing elements as far as frequency ranges you have yeah obviously you and susan's guitars you have different guitar amps and different different guitar sounds but then you have you have a whole brass section you've got two drummers you've got a percussionist you have keyboards that play multiple things a lot of mid-range yeah right so a lot of stuff go i mean that's what is it 11 or 12 pieces it's 12 um here at the fox we have a sousaphone on stage this third that's right that's right okay like we need more low limit okay so where do you find where's your mid-range for you between you and susan how do you do this how do you project i mean you were it was so easy i was i was telling derek how great the mix was out front but how do you find the clarity for yourself and uh differentiate yourself on stage so you can hear what you're playing what do you do i mean that's the stuff we work on every day at soundcheck is kind of finding especially when you're indoors in a theater is finding the frequencies that are going to take off on you and just try to get try to cut them try to get rid of them and it's usually it's usually the low end of the guitar she's at the low end of the b3 choose the kick drums it's usually the bass guitar and you know it depends on the room man sometimes the hollow stage is just unavoidable yeah and you're just going to have to kind of imagine what is is happening which isn't our favorite way to do it but you know this band adjusts pretty well on on rooms that are too lively we just play quieter for the most part i mean you know you always have that sixth gear if you need it right but you don't live there um and some nights are just easy some nights you just hear everything and but it's funny with a 12-piece band it's rare that we get off stage if me and susan have a great sounding night usually the horn section of the singer was like it was awful for me it's rare that everyone was like that sounded incredible tonight right it's kind of you know you you you pick your good nights and you appreciate himself but i mean that's it's one of the uh challenges of doing this i mean i'm 30 something years being on the road and there hasn't been one night where you just plug into your app and and you're like oh that's great like from start to finish that's great you're always it's always a bit of a search and a bit of a battle um i guess that keeps you coming back i couldn't tell lester you guys play with wedges or do you play with in-ears how do you do it there's a few people on stage in in-ears elizabeth lee plays trombone she uses them almost everyone else is wedges i don't use wedges i just kind of walk around the stage and hear what i want to hear i have one up there just in case but i rarely turn it on you have such good pitch in your slide playing everybody says ask derek how he plays so in tune i mean it's so funny talk about that talk about playing slide and playing in tune i think when i think when i started it was all by ear and the things that you would gravitate towards are just the every once when you hear a note just stop moving it's right there and then at some point i remember i remember being turned on to ali akbar khan and a lot of indian classical music and when you hear him playing the saro there's just something so pure about and and i've played that instrument since i would go sit down on classes it his uh his college out in san rafael he would let you kind of sneak in the back and he would make everyone take vocal classes before you take the instrumental class exposed to sings of your instrument which was a little mini epiphany i was like oh yeah but the sarod has all these sympathetic strings under the main melody strings and when you hit a note right on you can see three or four of the sympathetic strings start vibrating so like those are the things you're kind of you're kind of looking for i mean you can feel it when it's when it's right you know um and i mean with slide it's all intonation really i mean there's no there's markers you're looking at but not really it's all you hear it or you don't but i feel like with a great singer or a great really any instrument you know that's that's that's the thing it's tone and time and those are the things you're after if i were to say what's the one thing if somebody's beginning to learn slide what is the most important thing that they need to learn to do i'm actually asking you for me derek i mean i think it's it's all it's all ear training you know i think it's all just it's all hearing it um i mean i would i was always i would tell people just like go listen to elmore james like to me that's the starting point for electric slide you just if it's kind of all the blocks are kind of there yeah he's playing major minor melodies he's he's aggressive with it there's there's times where he's not it's uh the tone is incredible and i always felt like his intonation was um his between his voice and his his guitar it was just incredible it's the quintessential kind of calling response which is kind of where the slide guitar started it was delta guys answering their own vocal line with a with a slide it was the woman's voice or you know it's another voice but elmore is kind of a for me a starting point um elmore and then duane and then um and then it was kind of horns and singers and indian classical musicians and all of those things i mean there's a ton of others and johnny winter was a big influence at one time and lowell george and you know all the guys with tone jesse ed davis just you you try to listen to all of them at some point you have some connection with your kids names to some jazz musicians for example john coltrane and you've played coltrane tunes on some of your records mr pc can you talk about your jazz influences i remember the um you know even as a young kid you you hear all those names um you don't know what they mean quite yet um but being around my uh mentor and friend colonel bruce hampton i remember he he turned me on to uh love supreme when i was maybe 14 or 15. and around the same time i remember being uh we were playing some some club in port charlotte florida and there was a band house that we stayed in and there was some vhs tapes and there was a miles coal train vhs and he popped it in and there's this black and white footage and when it when it focused on uh cold ranges there was something about his look and the sound that came out of his horn that just it pinned me like it was like here in holland wolf for the first time there was just there was an intensity and there was just no bs like it was just i mean it was it was religious you know it was a thing and then and then it was you know i never turned back it was just find everything and that you can find and listen to all of it and you know some of it was really challenging you don't even understand it while you're hearing it but years later it starts to you start hearing it differently or you remember it and you go back and you're like that's what that is or some of you is still unfolding you know but i mean there's certain uh obviously kind of blue is a great entrance point for people my favorite things is a great one for for train but for me there was this moment um live at birdland uh where mccoy's taking this incredible solo and elvin's just he's just given him everything you could handle and then train comes in with this with this riff that's just it i mean it sounds like a marshall on tin and it's just so intense and incredible it's one of those where on record you pull the pull the needle back 20 times or you rewind rewind so i mean those are moments that i think about a lot when you're playing like um colonel bruce samson would always talk about the mo the first four bars and the last four bars that's all anyone ever remembers already it's not wrong the journey sometimes incredible but it's usually how you get in and how you get out and that that was uh that solo in particular is one where uh i think about that one all the time him and john gilmore was another one sunrise tenor player um and gilmore it was just his tone and just the way he would he would go at things and really a beautiful player too i tell people that are not into jazz that if you listen to alvin and mccoy and coltrane oh yeah that that that's his rock is that heavy as anything could possibly be musically without a doubt and they played that way and they felt that way and they um i mean there's uh there's just incredible elvin jones quotes all over the place but there's this great box set and it's and at some point he's like to play the way we played together you had to be willing to die for a and you're like yep yeah that's that's what it sounds like that's what that sounds like and you only get to that if you're lucky once or twice in your life where you're with people that you feel that way about or you're playing music that feels that way and that's um you know when i think about my uncle and almond brothers in the early days they they had that and you could right up to the very end i mean that those first two or three years when they were charging down the road that that was that meant everything to them to their last breath i mean they're they're all being buried together in the same place at roseville cemetery and their lives went in completely different ways and they weren't all tight at the end but right like they're all planning on being buried in the same place i've never heard of that that's incredible i mean it's one thing for the two brothers but like right it's barry barry's there now and dwayne's there now and greg's there now and greg's mom is there now and my uncle's ashes are there now it's kind of incredible that's kind of an incredible thing but that that kind of connected feeling is uh when you think about the coltrane quartet they they had that with without a doubt that's what they were they were doing i did this record or this one track on a record with mccoy tyner and i went to meet with him and i was just like the day before christmas you know just thinking about it i was like you know what i'm not going to ask him about john cole i'm not going to be that guy i'm not going to bug him but went to his apartment hung for a while we went out to lunch and and then he just started telling stories like i didn't even have to prompt him and then and when he did his eyes would light up like it was just a different feeling he wanted to talk about it that was a good day just stacking forth so just it away and just incredible his solar record is so much good stuff so much good he was such a big part of that sound and and elven of course when i was first signed to sony it was columbia um records at the time they wanted me to get like guests on a record and i think they were hoping to call like famous rock star friends and i was like well how about elvin jones did they say who you know i mean the luckily the ar guy was like he knew and he convinced them like oh this is actually a good idea yeah um and so we met with elvin a few times and we were going to do a record with me and elvin and otil burbridge and kofi and i went and hung with elven a few times at the blue note um unfortunately he got he was getting he was sick at that point and he didn't last but a few months longer but we we talked tunes we talked about things had a few incredible hangs with him um one of my favorite moments we we would you know the ahmed brothers would do the beacon theater run every year and when i first joined they were doing maybe 15 up to 18 shows and so it was all month and then some and a lot of nights off and in the late 90s early 2000s there was still a lot of legendary jazz musicians playing in the city every weekend every week you know yeah and so you know i would i would just head downtown and see everybody that i could um and elven was in town around the time we were talking about doing that record and uh i mentioned it to my uncle and jamo and and uh they were they lit up they're like oh we we've been friends with alvin forever and i'm thinking yeah sure i'm sure you can share your uncle but you were hanging with alvin and he's like well you know we'll come down so we go down and see elven sets set ones over we go up to the little dressing room and we walk in elven's in a robe he sees butch and jama and he just lights up i was like oh they're not kidding like this is real they've been playing together since the early 70s um but the beautiful part was elvin sits back down and and my uncle who wasn't the most modest bit like he was you know he was incredible um but i didn't see him super humble a lot but in elvin's presence it was just the most beautiful sight like he sat down cross-legged on the floor under the couch and it was there was something about it just felt like there was beautiful balance in the universe but you know it's like when you're when you're around people like that you just know you know where you stand that it was uh it was a beautiful moment and you know him and jamo had an incredible conversation and then later on i found uh this amazing picture of them in the early 70s of butch elvin and and just looking like total badasses but it's really a beautiful a beautiful thing but yeah those those guys were all that's what they were listening to you know that's what when they were in the winnebago as a young band the ahmed brothers uh jamo told me they were listening to rason roland kirk and they were like those are the those are the records that they were that makes sense and you can hear it yeah when they when they took a turn it wasn't uh yeah it wasn't just a rock band playing yeah other than they were they were playing like jazz musicians yes no they were hearing things so um you know that was that was a huge inspiration early on for me too those are the things that uh that that you think about or it's nice to know that when you're because i grew up with that music with the almond brothers music and playing in blues bands and in jacksonville and there was you know there's a there's a playbook and there's a repertoire that you that you know and then you get turned on to other things and you kind of you don't distance yourself from it but i didn't want to play one way out forever as a 12 year old and you know be look at the little kid right you know and so once you take that turn there's a bit of pushback and there's you know like you're playing these blues clubs like what are you doing like get do the other stuff like this there was a years of that um but which just pushes you further in the other direction you're like well then how about how about we'll do a night of sunrise how about that and so you know you start digging down and finding all this music and then and then when you come back to your roots and i i kind of get re-thrown into the almond brothers band and music you realize oh that's what they were listening to all the things where i thought i was just taking a hard left and leaving that stuff behind you like it actually made you that's what made me the right guy for the job at 18 if i just kept playing that stuff and trying to emulate it or just doing what people thought that music was i would i wouldn't have had the i wouldn't have the layers to to make it make sense and then our vocabulary together as musicians wouldn't have connected you know you really need to you need to hear around the corners and there needs to be there needs to be things behind what you're playing not just the it's not just the melody it's the where where do you think it came from where's the what's the emotion behind it what does it mean what is it what are you trying to say um those are the things i think you learn the the wider you listen and the more you listen do you think of the slide is being more of a horn-like instrument in a way playing a slide yeah at times i mean you know with a horn you can you can lean into a note and the micro tones and you can you can i mean you can do that when you're fretting you can bend notes but with the slide it's really seamless i think of it more as of as a voice you know a human voice i think is what you're really trying to emulate but there's definitely times you're trying to emulate a horn there was a good handful of years where i listened to almost no guitar players just almost none i mean charlie christian and wes montgomery and a few um derek bailey things that were just not guitar you know but it wasn't my it was almost all horns and vocals and drummers or whatever any anything anything from blue note or impulse in the 60s and early 70s okay so so let me ask you about charlie christian and west montgomery for example yeah what is it about their playing that really drew you to them well with charlie christian it was there's this recording from menton's uh playhouse that's uh i think the tune is swing to bop and it's just this it's just this audience recording and he just takes this solo that's one of the most perfect things i've ever heard man and the tone is just outrageous it's there's nothing safe or polite about it it's the most non like what you think of this jazz guitar it's just burning and he's so much better than everyone else on stage right dizzy's on stage like these are these are the guys like this is the thing being born and charlie was just out in front of them and it's he gets done taking his solo and i think disney comes in and you're like oops and of course he became you know dizzy but there's something about that solo that's just and and again it's kind of like that coal train thing where it's the it's the way he's leaning forward and just like dragging everyone along with he's just off on this thing man and it's just ideas and it's it's a dance i mean it's it's uh i mean anytime you watch somebody that's that good at anything there's there's something to take from it you know you get that feeling watching sports sometimes you get it with other things but that's solo in particular and then there's a ton of his stuff i mean you can dig and dig but that was the one that hit me between the eyes when i was young like before i before i had listened to his other stuff that's the one that made sense someone like wes montgomery there's just the jimmy smith wes montgomery records those are things you could just put on at any day of the week and there's just there's some live recordings of his that are incredible to have my favorite recordings of wes's are that live at the half note and uh full house those two they're two of the best jazz guitar records ever and those were two that uh a good friend of mine from here in atlanta georgia jeff site turned me on to um jeff and colonel bruce turned me on to so many great records when i was uh you know that age where you're you're just maybe you're not old enough to understand it yet but you're old enough to understand that you like it or that there's something there that it's going to stick with you um 14 15 16 17. colonel would always ask because i knew him from the time i was maybe 12 or 13 he was like do you know do you know yet it's always trying to get from you like how just how wide your your lens was and it got wider the more you're around people like that they definitely crack your head open a little bit so it's good for you how much do you work on new material when you're at home you know between records or during this time off were you working on new songs constantly you and susan yeah well i mean that this uh during the lockdown during the pandemic we had uh you know we had taken we had decided to take about three maybe four months off for the first time ever as a band first time since i was probably preteen that would have ever taken a chunk of time off and it was it was because we had been running hard for a long time and we had just lost kofi uh burbridge who was i think he was with we were together for almost 20 years playing music and uh he was just such a big part of our life and and music and we lost colonel when we lost my uncle and greg and there was just a lot of a lot of time a lot of our history just kind of disappeared and you know we kept plowing away and things were things were going well musically they were feeling good but i think as a band at least the core of the band that had been there from the jump i think we knew we needed a hard reset and we just needed to just wanted to take stock of what it was and not pretend that it could ever be the same because it just it can't you know it just can't be um so we were just trying to figure out what that meant and we when you're touring constantly you never have time to really look inside you know you don't you just don't you don't unpack your suitcase when you're home for a week you just you're not home you know you're just moving um so we had planned that starting in march and then the world stopped yep so we had planned for four months off and but then just gigs are starting to drop tours are dropping you're like oh we're not working this year at all yeah and then you're thinking how are we going to keep a 20 something piece operation 12 on stage 12 crew like how are we going to keep this rolling you just everything started you know for everybody the whole world is just kind of upside down i mean it'll be in 20 months without a gig you know yeah and so we had all this time we had that studio down there just kind of to stay sane and busy we started digging through tapes and we uh we mixed a few records we did that live layla record um we just we just wanted to put something on the board and hear it and it sounded so good like this is this might be worth putting out um but around that time uh mike madison who's been he was in my solo band and he's been in this band from the jump he had this idea of when the band couldn't be together of everybody kind of digging into a a source material so we could be thinking about the same thing just chew on the same thing and he thought about the leila majnan uh poem like yeah the persian poem yeah and he was like why don't we all read this instead of just thinking of it the way that layla album was written of this guy that's in love with somebody he can't have what about flipping it what did she think about it what was layla's take on this um so that kind of started this idea of uh sitting around you know ruminating on the the same concept and we could finally get people together it was just a wealth of tunes and so we spent a good six eight months just writing and staying in that headspace and bound to come down to the house we'd go up to our farm we would just all live together and and write and so there was this really nice period where every day you would just get up and you know make breakfast have coffee pick up a guitar oh maybe this is a thing all right um head out to the studio you just sometimes you would bring up hey i have an idea sometimes you would just play and if people fell in like all right that's that kind of would you start recording then too or no yeah we always recording we're kind of always recording i mean there's there's a difference with us sometimes with like we're recording now yeah or we're just capturing ideas yeah and sometimes it's just throwing up mics but what usually happens is once we i mean our studio is there all the time sure once we start getting sounds and realize that we're on to something bobby t is our engineer he just starts dialing it in more and more and then a few days later i'll walk in the control room and i was like oh we're like we're making a record now like it just kind of happens without you thinking about it so a lot of times a song or idea will get captured the first time it's played right you know yeah the first time an arrangement's played the way that you're conceiving it is what's on the record which is a really nice thing that first thought best thought i mean that's one of the things about kinda blue that's so magical is like throw the charts in front of the guys and let's roll tape it's it's the first idea it's the first thing that comes to mind and uh there's there's a handful of songs on on the these last records that we did that are that way where um that you know the the day it's written it's it's recorded and those are nice that doesn't always happen some things you work at for a long time some things you hammer away at sometimes it's um i need help with this section that i'm hung up and somebody will toss something out but it's nice being in a group where um just a lot of creative people a lot of musical minds and uh there's no there's no like song competition you know no one's trying to because look we we're not going to ever have a song on the radio there's like there's no that was like it's not lyndon mccartney it's like i gotta have mine's gonna be a single like it's just not this is that yeah it's like it's just going on a record that we're gonna put out that hopefully people listen to so that that it's nice everyone's just willing to contribute to to anything without any thought of where it falls i interviewed ron carter last year and i asked around i said ron did you guys ever rehearse for miles records he said no we'd show up and put the chart just like you said yeah he said he just put the chart on we'd look at it for a second and then roll and roll yeah i said what about me recorded he was on the maiden voyage record with kirby and he was on speak no evil yeah i said what about those records he goes oh we rehearsed one day the day before for the yeah for those but that's it yes but miles records never rehearsed good point yeah and and they have a different feel than those records that's right um i mean and and i love i love them both for different reasons but the miles stuff always had a little different edge yeah like it felt like it could just come apart at the seams at any time or there was there was just a lean to it too and you you can feel when people are are playing comfortably or playing like maybe their toes over the edge of the cliff like it's well it's like tommy's playing again on giant steps when coltrane has been practicing giant steps for four months and he throws the chart good luck all right here we go wait what that's pretty cold-blooded if you think about it i know right for tommy that's amazing so on this tour here how many songs do you typically rotate out when you do because a lot of cities you play multiple dates in yeah we talked about it just before we started but how many songs are you drawing from i'm thinking back to like when we did the beacon run last year beacon theater run we maybe did six seven shows we probably played a hundred and ten fifteen different songs over that run how do you remember everything i mean we rehearse a lot you know we set up a room in uh in every venue we go to with the little little drum kits amps and we just blow through things it's really uh it's the singers that have really a lot of lyrics but you know it it keeps the band on its toes and it keeps us fresh and uh we just i noticed that we just the best nights are the nights where we throw in something that we haven't played before or something we haven't played very often or it's been a long time it almost makes all the other tunes fresh again something about just one or two songs a night um this tour has been a bit different because we're releasing an album every month and there's we you know we kind of made a pact with ourselves that we wouldn't play any of the material before the album came out so as the records come out we have seven five seven six songs of new material that we can throw in that we've never played so that's exciting um and then we a few nights we decided to play the first record of the series crescent from top to bottom we started the show last night with with that record that's been really fun to do something we've really never done before but it's really nice having all this new material that was written with this band yes with this version of the band yeah and there's no one on stage that's having to play somebody else's idea or thought it's all things that you know we're conceived together and that's and and that's made us playing the old material fresher too because we kind of now we're starting to form our own uh language as a band which is which is nice we were really lucky in that lockdown writing all that music together and spending that time just playing together and it's really different making music writing recording when there's no gig on the horizon when there's no when there's you know there's no deadline there's no you know all right we can stay we can be creative this week actually until thursday because then we got a tour coming up we really should think about what we're going to play and we need to start rehearsing for that there was none of that you know it was just we could stay in it the whole time and you know you're living together you're cooking and eating together it was uh um it felt like the early days when you're when you're just playing music because you you're trying to figure it out and you want to do it but it was just a bunch of grizzled veterans doing it it was really nice you know if we everybody came out of that thing i think really refreshed and i think it it really it breathes a lot a lot of new life into the band and really helped us turn the page on a an incredible chapter but one that you know that you just you can't can't go back to i mean and look i've played in bands that have everyone deals with loss and they're you know but i played in bands where the like the heart of their band has been ripped out and they've continued on for 30 40 years and the only way you can do that is by just taking a turn you know you and you can revisit those things and you can come back and you can honor them and we you know we do it every night um and ever i mean there hasn't been a show uh since kofi pass where you don't look out in the audience and there's somebody with there was these shirts that went around that just say kofi with a big heart in the middle and i probably saw five six of them from the stage like every night you see these things so um i mean they're already present on stage i mean kofi's b3 and rig are up on stage every night his sound is there um the b3 is an interesting instrument it's like i mean it's it's just it has a mind of its own and it's i mean it's a living breathing thing and when somebody plays an instrument for 15 years you were in that sucker that's right there are times where gabe will play something and that like the certain tone will come out and i'll i mean i know i just i'll look over i'm like you just you feel it man you can feel those things and you know in these these stages i mean i've been on i've been on that stage with greg and butch and john rico and kofi a lot of these venues that we play are places that we spend a lot of time with a lot especially here especially at the fox yeah the fox has a i mean it's a really unique spot there's ghosts on that stage right for sure we lost one of our best friends on that stage so it's it's quite a trip pulling up today i was asking um the lady that was driving us who who works here i was like is is there a is there a monument or plaque is there something for colonel here like there needs to be there needs to be a sign outside because he he was instrumental in helping save this place back in the day absolutely for those of you that don't know that what derek is talking about can you explain what happened here back in 20 2017 yes i think it was 2017. um well colonel bruce hampton who is just uh it's hard to even explain who he is right yeah exactly he was larger than life he was he was a part of the music scene in atlanta from the jump he was in piedmont park in the late 60s he uh um but he he just took musicians under his wings the best in the world that's right and broke them down into a million pieces and then built them back up just better people better musicians he he would say all the time he's like i'm just a minor league baseball game trying to get people ready but he was more than that but um people really revered him and i did i mean he changed a lot of musicians lives and absolutely and and he was a friend and you know i knew him since i was a child and we were playing his birthday here 70th birthday party here yep at the fox theater and it was really a stage full of his disciples it was all of all of the musicians that came through him and um it's a four-hour show and just an incredible night just a incredible hang and during the second or third encore playing turn on your love light which was his his favorite song of all time i mean he he went down on stage i mean it wasn't me to that that mic stand over there and he he went down but the colonel was such a character that he thought he did things like this yeah it was andy kaufman or like he i mean he he he was notorious for just doing the most outlandish stuff he opened for three dog night in the early 70s and played all of their songs to get a police escort out of there like he was just he was just a like he was just a punk in the best way and just outside thinking so when he went down everyone thought he was doing the james brown and then it was a bit uncomfortable and you're thinking oh this is what he's been training us for like it's he wants it uncomfortable yes and and it was just but then at a certain point you realized it wasn't it wasn't that at all and you know and he he was gone he was gone right there on stage he did on the 70th birthday with a crowd chanting his name and his and his favorite song going and it's it it spun everybody that was on that stage out in a way i mean because there's something incredible about it but there's but there's also something incredibly tragic his wife was in the audience and you know he yeah and i mean the colonel was all for big grand things but he he didn't he didn't like people hurting you know so i don't i don't think it's something it's just it's a hard thing to unpack completely but whenever you come into this room whenever we come into this room you feel that and where i'm standing on stage with our stage setup is exactly where i was standing on stage and the the monitor the wedge that is in front of me is right where he went down and this time when we showed up at the fox for soundcheck the first day it was the first time where i was like you know what we got this like but then we started soundcheck and you just had a you have a moment you're like you can't help but you can't help but be there but you could feel him last night there was a few times the audience was chatting his name again which is pretty incredible that's pretty incredible but yeah the colonel has his fingerprint on a lot of people i mean he uh he affected a lot of people in a lot of ways and uh definitely miss him but of all the ways to go it's incredible i mean all your friends around on yours i mean he looked up and he saw just a group of people that loved and revered him and i mean that's uh that's something for sure yeah that is something it's uh it's wild i mean there's a there's interviews from him i think it's the great speckled bird which is kind of the the hippie paper in the southeast way back in the day where they're asking colonel because he had a band called the hampton greece band who uh they were asked to play woodstock he's like no i'm going to the ann arbor jazz and blue sun house is going to be there it's like best career move i ever made but they asked it like uh what's greece like what's uh like what's reaching ultimate greece that he's like to go out on stage that would be ultimate grief like 50 years later however long later right pretty wild yeah so the fox theater has uh has a lot of a lot of stuff here you know i was thinking about that last night actually i was thinking about colonel bruce and that and then seeing you on stage playing and yeah and when you said there's ghosts here literally oh yeah no absolutely and you in the crowd knows too because there was a lot of people come out to our shows that were at that show there's a lot of people that saw greg alma the last time he was on that stage with us and there's times i mean there's there's a lot of a lot of history in this room and there are some places where you feel that like you've you can tell the audience knows what you're feeling you can tell you could you could tell you can feel what they're feeling which is uh it's kind of a nice thing you know sometimes the hometown gigs are the tough ones right and even though i'm not from here i kind of grew up here so you are kind of from here yeah i kind of am yeah and the almond brothers are and half of our band there's a lot of history here i actually met my wife for the first time at smithson bar down the street here i drove out there today with with my son in the car and uh that's where i met your mom that's pretty wild this this intersection is i was riding in the colonel's like 1970s ford falcon or whatever the car was and he ran out of gas and i had to push him through the intersection at prior club i wasn't driven by that today i was like there's a lot of a lot of memories in this town was she playing at smith's is that where you where you are i was playing smith and she was dating guy that brought her out to to meet me there okay and uh i mean that had to be a long time ago right 20 years ago it's probably 97 96 yeah yeah we i was playing up here there's a club called the cavern i think i was 10 or 11 the first time the cotton club which is right down the street yeah a lot of a lot of great places many nights at a variety playhouse so a lot of good shows there yeah so bob margolin there with willy big eyes smith and pine top and uh nappy brown so some pretty incredible shows there so november 9th 1970 why is that date significant well one my wife was born right now the layla record derek and the domino's record that i was named after was released which i mean what are the chances of that right pretty wild i mean we were heading to we're heading to rehearsals in new york city we had one day of rehearsing that playing that whole record with trey anastasia and we were heading to the rehearsal room and i was thinking about the tune i am yours i was like i think that was an old sufi poem and i i went to look up uh the origins of the tune and it said released on november 9th 1970 i was like there's no way no chance that's way that's true i need another source sure enough so yeah tom dowd who produced the record also recorded was the engineer on giant steps pretty incredible unbelievable right and one of the last records that tom dowd ever did was a susan record and he he stayed at our house for a little while and had an oxygen tank so he couldn't really head upstairs so he slept on our couch downstairs for the week but was just an incredible human being and fascinating guy and he was in the gosh in the process of making that film uh they made a movie on his life which is amazing for those of you that haven't seen it that his documentary is incredible it absolutely is and and so he was in that mindset and he was telling a lot of those stories and stories about i mean he was he's like the genius forrest gump he was just there for everything right but he was giant steps ray charles i've got a woman uh almond brothers phil maurice laila like just all those records everything yeah across the board yeah and and he he kind of stumbled across that he was he was crunching numbers for the manhattan project when they're trying to that's right with oppenheimer they were inventing the atom bomb and and then he went back to school to finish up and he was taking these courses where they were trying to teach him things that they had just disproven that right and he's like i'm not going to spend two years learning something that i know is not true and then he started working at atlantic like uh and he was saying back then he was like the people running coffee at atlantic records in a record label then could read write score music like this you go to a label now like there's not even a musician that can do that it's like how different the day was no and you know and yeah tom dowd he helped invent uh the fader the fader it's like why are we twisting now you know i have fingers we could we could do a lot more work here because all the mixes were on the fly then that was you know he he did so many of my favorite records yeah at some point i mean i have so many different genres of music ray charles like yeah john coltrane to leonard skinner do that right that's impossible it's it's really yeah it's amazing he he i don't did you ever meet him i never met him man he was fascinating and and even i mean he was pretty up in age when i recorded with him and then years later when sue did but i remember um my dad sitting in the control room with him and when he would get excited about something he was like bite like if you were playing and he was getting into it he's like it was the first time he had ever like heard something like that it was he was so he was just so full of life and and he was one of those guys where his body gave out but he was sharp as a hack man he was he was one of the smartest people i was one of oh ever absolute genius yeah beyond geniuses yeah it's funny um we got spent some time with les paul too and they had a they had a similar spirit yeah just just they were always thinking about something different always thinking about something different we we got to sit in with les paul a few times at the iridium and then once at carnegie for one of his birthday celebrations but one of my favorite moments uh with sue and my son he was charlie was uh i don't know six seven months old or maybe a little older he was a really good quiet baby so we felt like we could take him to the iridium because we wanted to go unless like wanted to get us both up and sue had to like just bring him on stage he sang with les paul with with charlie in her arms and and it was just a it was a beautiful moment man a really incredible moment what a character though yeah it was a card yeah he was a card so derek can i get you to play something yeah i was trying to think of things uh you're talking about writing that we did um you know during the lockdown all the different types of tunes and i you know a lot of times you'll i'll write something and then i'll i'll remember where i think it came from or and one one of my favorite guitar players is this guy named uh the gary he's from madagascar okay just really unique player and there was a there was a few a few songs on the record that um he plays a lot of open tuning things i don't even know what the tunings are like it's just a wild style he has but a few of the tunes turned into songs on the record that just it just felt like his stuff and one of them one of those rare times where you have an idea and it's just kind of fully formed and i recorded it on my phone and i thought of the gary and then i thought of my friend oliver wood who's a great singer songwriter yeah guitar player and i just sent him the clip and he was like man i've been i've been listening to that melody for days you mind if i finish writing it like have at it so he wrote this beautiful tune that ended up being called uh i can feel you smiling which was kind of written about the colonel oliver was there that night yes so but this song um i'll just play a little bit of it but it's got a little bit of the gary thing it also has a little bit of the uh maybe dwayne almond little martha vibe um but a lot of that's just open tuning you know so [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] something like that awesome but that's got a little bit of uh i don't know somewhere between madagascar and macon georgia there's a place there um you know there was another phrase that that popped into my head that um that also felt like uh the gary and it's all that open tuning stuff uh this one we've never played live i gotta remember it but uh [Music] it's kind of the base of the tune but his his stuff is always a lot of his stuff is all triplets he plays a lot of triplets but the melodies that i take out of his stuff uh just seem to come from a different place i highly recommend there's a record with him just playing acoustic guitar on the front it just looks like he's in the jungle somewhere but he was kind of famous for he would roll in for these sessions without a guitar they'd buy him a guitar he'd record and then just split sorry like he's just he would just he was just kind of he would just wander man um he ended up playing in the states he did a festival here uh our sound man at the time was living in atlanta and housed him he put him up and uh into gary and his percussionist i can't remember his name through a house concert for them which i wasn't able to go to but i heard it was one of the greatest evenings of their life but some of the styles that um on the record you go from that to i mean as a side player i listen to as much charlie patton or uh booker white as i do anybody and so there was a there was a few song ideas that came out of that but when i think about my favorite slide moments i go i go back to these book of white licks uh i think the one i'm about to rip off is i think it's him doing fixing to die okay but there's just these these melodies he plays that i think are i just i think they're beautiful things but [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] just little things like that that i could listen to all day long when you're doing this stuff are you muting with with the palm of your right hand also at the same time how do you get the clarity of every note like that i'm not sure i have to look this time so you know sometimes but it's usually i'm using almost all of my fingers so you're kind of muting that way without thinking about it you do some of these incredibly fast runs though that i can't even fathom how you do them and play them so in tune you know those are probably laying my thumb down okay and and the for example the single nodey stuff uh like uh let me just like i'll just play some melodies for you yeah [Music] so i guess i am i'm muting all the way here a little bit with the thumb yeah and just whatever string you're at you're one finger decides that we're going to take over everything else is is kind of muted other times you're just letting it fly right um the elmore stuff that stuff is always uh [Music] [Music] just melodies for days those those are the guys that i think you can always go back to the well there's always um almost when we went when we dug into that that poem that the zombie poem um like there's so much here i mean there's when something lasts a thousand years there's a reason for it usually but it's the same with elmore and those guys like there's there's so much music there everyone thinks it's uh it's the same song or it's all the same progression but the amount of melodies that are that are hidden in there really incredible um you know all those blues guys sun house there's just there's stuff for days man if i'm ever out of gas with ideas or inspiration there's certain people you can go back to albert king or or just the intensity of their plan the way you've been passed a note or any of that stuff now you you have these all these these records that you're releasing one after another yeah do you think that that people have the attention span to listen to a double record even or like why why release things separately or what what do you what are your thoughts on that about kind of the modern listener yeah i don't think people do have the attention span which is when when we got into this project we had 24 25 tunes and we thought about just releasing it all at once i just felt like such a waste i was like no one will dig into it the right you know no one will listen to it the way we want them to hear it um so let's just i mean how do people watch or listen to things now it's kind of small chunks it is it's like it's like the tv shows that people will binge watch but they'll watch instead of making one movie that's two hours long yeah you make it in this in a series and then i think somewhere along the way our perception kind of just leaked and it was never really that way like all of our favorite records were a lot shorter than we remember them you know like that's true and that was kind of a revelation we had because we listened to vinyl and upstairs in our studio and i remember we were in the process of writing all this stuff and we we often go upstairs and listen to everything we've done up to that point once a week just to kind of see where we are see what's holding water what's not um but we you know we're spinning records we're listening to a love supreme we're listening to axis bold as love listening to sly stone fresh and then i remember looking at the bag i was like 33 minutes right 36 mil are you kidding i mean like everyone actually you guys you think that these records are incredibly long no but they just take you places and when they're done you're like i would listen to that again right start that sucker over so that that was kind of a mini epiphany we had when we were thinking about this i was like there's no reason i mean at some point it was just like how much can you cram on a cd you're like that's not there's nothing artistic about that right about let's just record until there's enough time like that's not a i mean that never happens you know you think about uh yeah you think about your favorite records i bet most people are surprised when they go back and and think about how long they are i mean a double album was a little bit over an hour or so right i mean because you and and this is something i didn't really know until we started really getting into the way we were recording we have this beautiful old need console and we're recording as analog as possible sometimes we only hit tape and we never hit anything else and and then you really start looking into vinyl cutting which is difficult because there's not a lot of people doing it anymore it's hard to get the materials yeah um and you really dig into well why does this vinyl sound terrible in this one you're like well you can only squeeze so much that's right you can squeeze more but you lose sound quality so most of the great records are 18 minutes aside 15 to 20 but you know you don't want to squeeze much more and you think about that you're like that's a half hour basically so i mean yeah so that that was part of it and then uh and then the other thought we had was very early in the lockdown we started uh airing live concerts every thursday just for our fans on i forget what it was on some a youtube channel or something and it would you know we just eight o'clock there's going to be a two hour concert and maybe a day before like it's from red rocks 2016 and people were tuning in every week tuning in and it was something to do and it was kind of this communal thing a lot of our fans travel and know each other and it was a way when people were separated to kind of at least be on the same wavelength for a minute so we did that and then we realized we weren't going to work forever we started we did a few where we filmed the band at our house or at the farm we did those and it was always on a thursday and there was something that was just something to look forward to and we had that and we were home with our family in the lockdown certain tv shows that come on bi-weekly or weekly and you're like cool we have something to do right friday where there's just nothing that you can do and so that was part of the thought of why don't we release this as episodes why don't we wouldn't it be nice if we could get people to listen to the album for the first time together communally because every record we've done in the last decade or so you know you spend a long time you've spent there's a lot of work that goes into making an album and then uh they're like yeah well we're gonna the first two tracks itunes is gonna give away a month before the record and they're gonna stagger them and there's two singles and then the record comes out and everyone's heard half of it that's right but piecemeal like right exactly not the way that you it's like why do we even bother sequencing this thing like if everyone's just going to hear it randomly yeah um and so we wanted to be really stubborn about we want this thing to come out and we want people to hear it the way we want you to hear it you know and like this is a there's a reason it starts here and ends here you know and and so that was the thought and then we put visuals with it and we're like well let's just we'll just air it for free for some time and and then we'll release the records like you release it and see how it falls but it's been really nice because now when we we play this material live you can tell people are connected within a little bit different way i mean we're the first show of this tour in jacksonville the record had been out a few days and people knew the tunes which is really unusual for us people it usually takes years before there's song recognition with the kind of music we play it's not like people run out and buy records anymore so that's that's been really nice just feeling that and we're only halfway through it or you know we're still on this tour where uh we're getting to a point where there's records coming out while we're out here so like oh we better we better learn these last 10 tunes that are coming out so that's been fun too i think the band's really enjoying the uh the challenge of it and the uh i don't know just the freshness of it well derek i really appreciate you taking the time today to catch up with me and uh it's really a pleasure to uh to hang with you and meet you likewise we'll have to do it again and uh if you ever down our way come down to the swamp love to the studio and the alligator to see it there you go perfect well cheers thank you

Channel: Rick Beato

Views: 687,523

Keywords: rick beato, everything music, rick, beato, music, music theory, music production, education, derek trucks, tedeschi trucks band, allman brothers, derek trucks (musical artist), derek trucks interview, slide guitar, susan tedeschi, eric clapton, derek trucks solo, derek trucks layla, derek and the dominos, Southern Rock, Slide guitar lesson

Id: qMVZtd7XKcQ

Length: 58min 22sec (3502 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 19 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/Historical_Guess5725]

So dope to stumble on this today 🤩

[u/realcarlo33]

Great interview, thanks for sharing. I would’ve loved to hear an Elvin Jones, Derek, Kofi and Oteil record. Off to find that Charlie Christian solo he’s talking about!

[u/bailey_1138]

Had to check out this D'Gary guy Derek was talking about, good stuff!