INTERVIEW: Joe Louis Walker sings the blues in Vegas
Photo: Joe Louis Walker’s new album is called Viva Las Vegas, a live recording that comes with a CD and DVD. Photo courtesy of Cleopatra / Provided by Glass Onion PR with permission.
Consummate blues musician Joe Louis Walker has memorialized a recent concert in Las Vegas with a special CD/DVD release that captures the sound of his masterful musical skills and the expert accompaniment of his band. Viva Las Vegas, released by Cleopatra Entertainment, features his 85-minute performance at the Boulder Station Casino in the iconic Nevada city, and Walker promises to play some of the same tunes on his worldwide tour.
“We had a lot of songs that we’ve been doing on tour, and a lot of people were saying, ‘Listen, we really like these songs. We really enjoy the songs that you’re doing, and can we get these songs on a CD?’” Walker said in a recent phone interview. “And so the record company said, ‘Joe, why don’t you record a live CD/DVD.’ And we had discussed it earlier, and it just looked like that was the time that arose to do it in Vegas where everything sort of aligned where we could do the filming and the recording all in one fell swoop.”
The special CD/DVD package includes not only the concert but also an exclusive interview with Walker and a behind-the-scenes slideshow.
“When the opportunity arose, we picked a date, a place where we had played before, where we knew the sound was good,” he said. “We flew out the guy to do the DVD and the filming, so everything sort of aligned. And it was great.”
Walker and the band had been playing some of the tunes on their back-to-back European tours, so they had worked out all the notes and lyrics for weeks beforehand. The songs on the record include everything from “I’m Not Messing Around” to “Sugar Mama” to “Soldier for Jesus.”
“So we had faith that it would be something that we felt comfortable with,” Walker said. “It wasn’t like going into the studio and playing a song that we’d never done before. We knew how it was supposed to sound. We knew how it was supposed to feel, and we’re like, OK, we’re going to do our part. If you can capture that on film and tape, then we think we will have something pretty good, and it turned out pretty good.”
Walker’s touring schedule is almost nonstop and takes him to the far reaches of the world. He’s not simply an American blues act; he has exported his unique sound to many countries and cultures.
Fans can catch him Friday, Aug. 16 at the Iron Horse Music Hall in Northampton, Massachusetts; Saturday, Aug. 17 at the Chenango Blues Festival in Norwich, New York; and Saturday, Aug. 24 at the North River Blues Festival in Marshfield, Massachusetts. In the fall, he heads to Canada, France, Denmark, and Florida. The winter finds him in Costa Rica.
Walker is a Blues Hall of Fame inductee and four-time Blues Music Award winner, according to the biography on his official website. His instrument of choice is the guitar, and he is one of the most respected interpreters of that instrument in the business.
Walker first became interested in music at the age of 6 or 7.
“My parents played music,” he remembered. “My four older brothers and sisters played music. My eight, nine, 10, 12 cousins played music on the radio on their stereos, so I was always into music. As I got a little bit going into grade school, we’d check out instruments. At that time, you could check out instruments like you check out a library book, you know what I mean, as long as your parents signed that you would bring the instrument back in the condition you checked it out in. … You take the instrument out for a couple weeks or something, and then you find if you have an aptitude in it. And then if you did, you take another step further and get a music teacher.”
He added: “I always wanted to make music. I didn’t care what kind of music. When you’re young, you just want to make music, and so that’s what I did. When I got a little bit older, 12-13, my cousins had a band in the Fillmore District of San Francisco, and I joined that band. When one of my cousins turned professional and went on tour with a touring act, I took his place, playing with my cousins when I was 12. We joined the musicians’ union when we were all 14.”
At 16, he left home and started performing with professional acts. His first solo album came in 1986 with Cold Is the Night, and more than 30 years later, he has continued to trail-blaze and tell his own story in a difficult industry where longevity is rare.
“When you’re young, you have a dream that one day I’ll be on stage with so and so, or I’ll be making a record with my heroes,” he said. “You basically have a dream, and we all do when we’re coming up as kids, whether it’s being a football star or a movie actor or whatever. If you can live out your dream, then you’re doubly fortunate, and so to be able to live out my dream, that’s something you never take for granted. I never took it for granted that it was going to happen for me. A lot of this is 99 percent perspiration and 1 percent inspiration, so a lot of it came from me touring incessantly, gigging incessantly, playing incessantly. And you wake up one day, and you say, ‘Wow, I wanted to do X, Y and Z, and I did X, Y. And I’d like to try to do Z.’ I feel very fortunate.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Joe Louis Walker’s new album is Viva Las Vegas, a live CD/DVD featuring such tunes as “I’m Not Messing Around,” “Sugar Mama” and “Soldier for Jesus.” Click here for more information on the Cleopatra Blues release.
