Joe Louis Walker, the 65-year-old Blues Hall of Fame ferocious electric guitarist and fervent vocalist, cites one prime ingredient in his formula for longtime success and his undiminished capacity for delivering knockout performances both on the road and on his latest sizzling CD, “Hornet’s Nest.”
“You’ve got to show emotion or it doesn’t mean a hill of beans” says Walker who’s on the road again to promote his 25th album, a tour that includes one stomping, soulful stopover in Connecticut.
“It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing as Duke Ellington said. People have got to feel the music from the heart and the gut. The brain goes there, too, I suppose, but the brain can be manipulated. But you can’t manipulate the heart, and you can’t manipulate the soul,” he says.
Walker sets down with his red-hot, contemporary blues band to perform at 8 p.m. Friday, Feb. 20, at Infinity Music Hall in Norfolk.
Starting out at age 16 by jamming in clubs on the booming San Francisco Bay Area music scene in the 1960s, Walker hung out with and absorbed the ancient wisdom of legendary blues giants like Lightnin’ Hopkins and Albert King. Over the decades since then, Walker has forged an all-embracing, yet highly individual, gutsy style. It galvanizes the early traditions of the blues with a contemporary sound plugged into high wattage adventures, rock ferocity and just plain fun with licks and lyrics.
A molten melting pot of multiple genres, Walker’s unique style includes blistering electric blues, R&B, soul, funk, country, jazz and high-energy rock, among other saucy elements. His passionate guitar solo celebrations are laced with volatile elements of everything from Muddy Waters to Jimi Hendrix and the brilliant, but self-destructive bluesman Mike Bloomfield. A close friend and powerful early influence on Walker, Bloomfield, a phenomenally gifted guitarist, died from a drug overdose in 1981.
You can hear just about everything from the sanctified spirit of gospel to the earthy, sensuality of Sly Stone surging through Walker’s award-winning, true-grit discography, which he’ll tap into at Infinity Hall, perhaps even his recent disc on Alligator Records, a celebrated indie label.
“I think the best way I can describe my music,” Walker says when asked to define his savory smorgasbord style,” is the way Willie Dixon (a blues legend) did. Willie once said to me, ‘Joe, you’re all over the place. You played with all the older guys when you were a kid coming up years ago, and now you’re playing with all the younger guys coming up today.”
Getting to the point where you finally find your own voice, Walker says, is one of the most important personal journeys that a blues musician has to make. It’s a tricky evolution, he adds, that includes absorbing everything without, at the same time, drowning your own individuality.
Walker explains: “I didn’t want to be one of those guys, who when they play your record, somebody will say, ‘He sounds just like Albert King or Jimi Hendrix’ or whoever you happen to be imitating. I never wanted to be that. I can, however, respect guys who get through the door by doing that.”
“We all start out emulating somebody,” he continues, “but the trick here is that if you emulate someone too well, you’re somewhat of a parrot. There’s a real thin line here you have to tread,” he says, reflecting on his personal experience in dealing with the overwhelming influence that Bloomfield, his good friend and roommate, exerted on him early on.
“The hardest thing for me back then was not trying to sound like Bloomfield when I was rooming with him at his house in Mill Valley, Calif., where everybody dropped by —- Bob Dylan to Carlos Santana.
“Mike was a guitar hero at the time. When you saw him play, he absolutely became part of the guitar. With him it was strictly music, never about burning a guitar or breaking up an instrument on stage, or trivial things like what he wore or how he appeared on stage,” Walker says.
“I remember Mike walking in on my gig that night and standing there listening to me trying to be Bloomfield. During a break, he walked up to me and, chuckling to himself, said, ‘Joe, it’s a good thing you can fake because you ain’t playin’ nothin’ on the guitar.’ “
Those candid words from him ended Walker’s imitation Bloomfield period. Although hurtful, they marked the liberating dawning of Walker’s realization that he had to find his own voice.
“I’m not the greatest singer and sure ain’t the greatest guitar player and ain’t the greatest songwriter. But the one thing that I’m sure about is that I am who I am. When I talk to younger, top blues musicians like Derek Trucks and Jonny Lang that’s the one thing they’ll tell me. ‘Joe,’ they’ll say, ‘you’ve always been Joe.’ “
Being true to himself, he says, he couldn’t devote his career to covering traditional blues classics, no matter how much he loves that venerable form. He had to move with the times, he explains, and embrace contemporary blues.
“For better or worse,” he reflects, “I have to come up with something that is definitive of me. Usually when you take that path, you learn more from your failures than you do from your successes. And I have no problem with that process.”
JOE LOUIS WALKER performs at 8 p.m. Friday, Feb. 20, at Infinity Music Hall, 20 Greenwoods Road, Norfolk. Tickets: $24-$34. Information: infinityhall.com and 866-666-6306.
