Derek Trucks Interview

As a student of the guitar, Trucks had found his kindred spirit that would be the guide of his euphonically developing mind, and by age 11, he set out on a limited touring basis with the ABB. Shortly afterward, he was sitting in and recording with a who’s who in the music industry, including Buddy Guy, and by 1994, he had formed the first incarnation of the DTB.

Trucks became a full-timer with the ABB in 1999 and it was on that initial tour that he met his future wife, singer and guitarist Susan Tedeschi, whose band was opening for the legendary Southern soul stirrers. The pair, married since 2001, currently live in Trucks’ native Jacksonville, Fla., and have a 7-year-old son and a 5-year-old daughter.

Because of the incessant touring with both bands, Trucks has built a reputation as not only one of the hardest working men in the business, but has also established himself as one of the best at what he does. Trucks found himself on that same aforementioned Rolling Stone “greatest guitarist” list, ranking at No. 81 and, at age 24, was the youngest living person on the list. In a February 2007 Rolling Stone, he was pictured on the cover along with John Mayer and John Frusciante of the Red Hot Chili Peppers for a feature article titled “The New Guitar Gods.”

When Trucks plays with the ABB, he’s strolling the musical cosmos along stars that were aligned before he was born. But with his own band, he leads the direction in music, which can include anything from Pakistani and East Indian Qawwali, Latin, jazz, blues and Afro-beat. His sixth and latest studio album with the DTB, Already Free (Legacy), released last January, debuted at No. 19 on the Billboard charts. While his previous albums have been rooted in blues, the new one really lets each member’s idiosyncrasies color the sound. (With Trucks, the DTB consists of Kofi Burbridge on keyboards and flute; bassist Todd Smallie; Yonrico Scott and Count M’Butu handling drums and percussion; and Mike Mattison on lead vocals.)

The Derek Trucks Band will perform at the Mulroy Civic Center’s Crouse-Hinds Concert Theater, 411 Montgomery St., on Sunday, Nov. 1, 8 p.m.; tickets cost $30 to $50 and can be purchased by calling 435-2121. Trucks recently spoke with The New Times from a hotel room in Arkansas at the end of a fall tour with ABB, about his inordinate touring schedule, life with the ABB and DTB, as well as finding harmony on the road in a musical family.

Q: You’ve got another week or so on the road with the Allmans, then 10 days off before you start the tour with your own band. I take it you’re not the kind to sit still for too long?

A: If you want to keep a band together you really don’t have a choice, you got to get out there and work. With the ABB’s schedule, it makes it really busy, but I love to play and I love to travel. It’s a little different now having kids and it makes traveling quite a bit different. But we built a home studio last year, me and my wife, and we’re really thinking about next year and rethinking the way we travel and doing it a lot less and spending a lot of time in the studio writing and recording.

Q: Your wife Susan is a very talented musician in her own right. How do you balance the touring schedule and family life between you both?

A: It’s a juggling act, for sure. Over the 10 years we’ve been together we’ve had two kids, probably eight records and six or seven bands, so it’s a crazy life. {laughs} At one time, Susan was pregnant and on the road singing with the Dead, and I was out with the ABB and my group, and then Clapton’s band, and then me and Susan did a band together, so it’s crazy getting all the schedules to line up. Now that all of our kids are in school it’s a completely different ballgame. Before, they could just travel with us but now they’re in public schools so somebody has to be home at all times or you both stay gone just two or three days at a time and my mom will help out. We’re lucky; we have a really close family that all live near us at home and that makes all the difference.

Q: Splitting time between the Allmans and the DTB, is there a different mindset or approach to playing with each respective band?

A: With a band like the Allmans, who were in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame before I joined the band, there’s a serious legacy and the arc of the band is pretty well intact, so if anything, you’re trying to infuse new life and continue to make it fly. With your own projects, you really feel like you’re writing the story from scratch, so it is a different approach. But anytime you’re on the road or onstage playing you’re completely dedicated and locked in.

Q: Is there a different understanding of the Allmans’ music now as to when you first started sitting in with them at 10 or 11 years old? And were you more or less trying to emulate Duane {Allman} in the early days?

A: When I first started sitting in with them, it was just a song or two here or there and you’re kind of playing what you heard before. When you join a band—I joined {the ABB} when I was 19—you take a different approach. It’s kind of one foot in the past and one foot in the future and as you go further along that whole dynamic changes. The longer you’re in the group and the older you get, the more comfortable you get helping guide the direction of the band musically, and my role has shifted quite a bit from the very beginning.

Q: What is the creative process like in the Allmans these days?

A: It’s really a musical democracy. From night to night it subtly shifts from who is taking control. {Guitarist} Warren {Haynes} has really assumed a great quarterbacking role the last few years. He’s been in the band on and off for 20 years now and has a great rapport with the new wave of musicians and the original guys and, being a lead singer and a bandleader {with Gov’t Mule}, he naturally takes on that role. But musically it really is open to whoever wants to grab the reins at any given moment, which is a great situation.

Q: Duane was obviously one of your influences in the early days, but who are some of the other people that influenced your style of playing?

A: It really goes everywhere. Elmore {James} and Duane were the first two, but from there, it went back further in the Delta blues to people like Son House and Bukka White and then Wayne Shorter, John Coltrane, Miles {Davis}, Sun Ra, a lot of Indian and classical musical, and a lot of vocalists like Mahalia Jackson, Sam Cooke and Jackie Wilson. You listen around and I think it’s important to find the masters in every genre and figure out, No. 1, where it was coming from and, No. 2, what’s different about them. And the more you listen to that stuff, I think the more you appreciate people really focusing in on what they do.

Q: Your new album Already Free has kind of a vibe similar to The Band’s 1968 LP Music from Big Pink, where you can’t really pin down an exact type of music to label it. Was that kind of the approach on this one and do you approach albums to develop them, or do you just kind of let them develop organically?

A: With this record that was definitely the case and it’s very much kind of a brew. I think all the varied influences over the years have finally been melted down into whatever this is that we’re doing. All those influences can be heard on the record and they’re not as obvious as they were on past records where we do a straight-ahead tune or an African tune. Big Pink was a big influence, too, and when I listen to that it feels very organic and very original and very relaxed at the same time and that was part of the mindset. I think having a home studio and the ability to experiment and try things and not be worried about how much every hour in the studio is costing is a really nice change of pace. I’ve never really done that before.

Q: Did having a home studio change the way you approached the album?

A: We’ve done records in the past that I’m really happy with but it was always “you got five or six days to knock it out,” so you don’t do a lot of writing in the studio. Usually everything is figured out by the time you get there because you don’t have the time or money to waste. But when you have a {home} studio sitting back there, you can just do your thing. There was a month when every day we were writing and recording a song a day and there were new ideas all the time. When you’re not forced to be in that situation it happens a lot more naturally and you can feel that on the record. There’s a freshness to a lot of the tunes because they were written sometimes an hour or two before they were recorded and sometimes the recording on the record was the first time we played the song through correctly. There’s something about capturing the birth of an idea that’s really nice, and I’d like to explore that a little more.

Raga droppers: The Derek Trucks Band takes a front porch view of the world when it comes to music, while Trucks’ individual style is rooted in the blues.

Q: A lot of musicians say there’s nothing they dig more than performing live. Is that still the case now that you’ve got your own studio to experiment in?

A: For the longest time that was definitely my take. When you’re playing live it’s on the fly and if something breaks you just have to blast through it, and there’s something nice about being able to craft things in the studio. Eight years ago if you would have asked me the difference between live and studio it would be hands down I’d prefer to play live and the studio was a nuisance at best. But the last two records I came around to the process and really started enjoying the creativity and realizing it’s another creative outlet. When you hear some of these great records like the Allman Brothers’ Eat A Peach, or those great Hendrix and Beatles records, those are things that couldn’t have been created live and had to be in a laboratory where you could just throw ideas against the wall and see if they stick.

Q: Mentioning that when you’re playing live and something breaks, you have to blast through it, what were some of those crazier onstage moments? Maybe one of your band mates cracking you up or a girl in the audience flashing her top or something else that kind of shook you a little bit?

A: {Laughs.} Yeah, we’ve had a lot of crazy moments on stage. All the things you said and more. Recently, I had an amplifier catch on fire which was a few minutes of, “All right, my amp’s on fire.” Then it was like, “Oh shit, my amp’s on fire!” But we’ve had all kinds of crazy moments, some of which aren’t fit to print.

Q: Some people might have thought you were channeling Hendrix when your amp was on fire…

A: That’s right, it just wasn’t intentional. {laughs}

Q: Being that you perform live so often, how do you approach each new concert? And do you think there’s a dynamic between the band and the audience that kind of guides how the evening will go?

A: A lot of time I think there is. With our audience with my group and the Allman Brothers, there’s an expectation that things will be different from night to night so that keeps us on our toes. And I think as an improviser at heart you always want to change things, whether it’s subtly different or obviously different. Every solo you take you really do try to reinvent the wheel and you rarely completely succeed, but when you do, it’s those moments that really make it worthwhile.

Q: Soulive was in town recently and I know you jam with them on occasion and have also sat in and jammed with quite a few other people on the music scene outside of your core bands. Do you enjoy getting out and seeing what other people are up to and bouncing ideas off of your contemporaries?

A: It’s a small world of touring musicians and there are some people you just have great chemistry with. We’ve been playing with Soulive for years and they’re one of those bands that we always look forward to sharing the stage with. I think bands of that caliber that are new and doing new things, you kind of feed off of that energy and it makes you get on top of your game a little bit more. I do think it’s a very symbiotic relationship with bands like that because it makes you focus that much harder and I think it works both ways.

Q: A lot of music purists gripe about the music scene today, but if you really do look, there are a lot of bands like the Derek Trucks Band out there that are still keeping it real. What’s your take on the modern music scene?

A: Somewhere in the middle. I do think that there were eras that were producing more original and more meaningful music than there is now. But there is music out there if you look for it.

The whole record and radio industry at this point is certainly not set up for legit music and most of the stuff that is getting thrown in front of people is complete bullshit. I think that’s always been the case to some extent, but when I think about musicians like Sam Cooke or Jackie Wilson or just some of those great pop acts, they were geniuses at what they do. I don’t see that a lot these days and when I see what I think is a great musician or what I think is borderline genius, I usually don’t see a lot of hype around it. The stuff that you do see hyped is pretty shallow and I think a lot of that is that music is really image driven and it’s kind of celebrity first these days, and depth and talent second and third…maybe.

But there is music out there and there is a scene out there and I think with digital music and the record industry kind of failing, it’s going to be upside down for a minute and there’s no telling how it’s going to turn out. I really do think it’s a time of uncertainty in the music industry, but I think that could be a good thing in the long run.

Q: From a musician’s standpoint, have you noticed a distinct transition into the digital age?

A: When Already Free came out it debuted at No. 19 on the Billboard charts, which 10 to 15 years ago would have meant we were well on our way to a gold record and that’s just not the case anymore. Nineteen on the Billboard charts just ain’t what it used to be; people just aren’t buying as many albums and that’s just fact. We’ve never been a band that lived by record sales; it’s always been tour, tour, tour. With our hardcore fans that have always supported us and kept us going, I don’t see that changing.

Q: What are some of your long-term plans or goals with the ABB and the DTB?

A: I feel like the next few years, especially having kids, I’m going to have to force some time off and make myself be around. I’d like to do a band with my wife to start from scratch and that’s definitely high on the agenda. And with the ABB, it’s their 41st year on the road and we’re going to be slowing down touring next year and that works out really well with the things I want to do at home recording in the studio. So there’s a ton of projects that I have in the back of my mind that will finally see the light of day.

Q: A lot of people are into your sound, but what are the three albums off the top of your head that’d be your desert island albums?

A: It really would shift from month to month, but there’s an Ali Akbar Khan disc called Signature Series Volume II that I think is really a slate cleaner for me when I get back to the root. Sly Stone’s Fresh; I’ve just been listening to that so much lately and I think that would be on the list. And No. 3, maybe {Miles Davis’} Kind of Blue. I think all three of those would be medicine if I was on an island. A week from now it might be a different three, so I’d be screwed if I was already on the island. {laughs}