“The slide is really expressive,” he says. “You can emulate some of the more Middle Eastern melodies and microtones. But even in a straight blues context, it can really sound like human voice. There’s a lot of common threads that run through both those genres.” So while Trucks’ blues are rooted in the Mississippi Delta, they range all the way to the Nile Delta, the River Ganges and points beyond. Musical guests on past Derek Trucks Band albums have included salsa great Ruben Blades, Sufi devotional vocalist Rahat Fateh Ali Khan and American soul giant Solomon Burke, which gives Trucks’ group more spice than most jam band noodlers. “To me, it really comes down to any soulbased music,” says Trucks, “any music that’s traditional. It’s all human emotions coming out through sounds. You read Robert Palmer’s book Deep Blues and it traces different rhythmic patterns all the way back to Africa—different tribes, different sounds that made their way over to America. That’s one common thread. Also, it all seems to be a lot of music coming out of poverty. You hear a lot of the same themes, melodically and otherwise. When I was in Japan, somebody played me some traditional Korean music, and the first two or three bars sounded exactly like a Delta slide player. The human condition is pretty much the same anywhere. When you’re listening to a great gospel singer, a great blues singer or a great qawwal singer from Pakistan, there are moments when the feeling is exactly the same.” While not quite as international as Trucks, Bramhall’s guitar playing is also founded on an unconventional technique. He’s an “upsidedown” or “wrong way” lefty: a left-handed guitarist who plays a conventional right-hand stringing. This is something Bramhall shares with blues and folk greats like Albert King, Otis Rush, Elizabeth Cotton and Coco Montoya. In Doyle’s case, as in many others, it stems from being born left-handed but learning to play on other people’s guitars: “There were a lot of right-handed guitars laying around the house when I was growing up,” he says. “So I’d pick up a guitar when I was six or seven and mess around with it. I don’t think I even knew left from right at that point; I just held it the most comfortable way. And by the time I decided to take a lesson, the teacher told me I was playing the wrong way and if I wanted to be taught I would have to reverse the strings or start to play right-handed. But by that point, I’d already learned about 200 songs. I wasn’t about to start over.” To watch Bramhall play—particularly when he and Clapton are on acoustics, recreating one of Robert Johnson fingerstyle passages with chilling accuracy—is to realize that “the wrong way” is sometimes the best way. “I used to think that playing guitar left-handed upside down was a handicap,” he admits. “That you really can’t do what a right-handed guitarist can do. But that theory was completely blown out of the water when I saw this guy playing with [jazz organ great] Jimmy McGriff. I’m afraid I don’t know his name, but he was an upside-down lefty. And he played the greatest walking-chord lead I’d ever heard.”
Bramhall plays in standard (right-handed) tuning. Like many “wrong way lefties,” he generally finds left-handed guitars—so as not to knock into the tone and volume controls with his picking arm—and then restrings them righty. “I have some straight left-handed guitars that I’ve restrung. But I’ve also got some that have a left-handed body and a right-handed neck.” Bramhall’s main ax is a ’64 Fender Stratocaster, but he’s also using two new Strats, a Fender Telecaster, Gibson Les Paul and a Lindhof guitar on tour with Clapton, alternating between a Savage amp and a ’68 Super Bass Marshall. Trucks, for his part, is playing his trusty Gibson ’61 SG reissue through two Fender Super Reverbs. Both guitarists keep it simple, gearwise. Then again, with three great axmen in the band, there’s not much need for elaborate effects rigs. Trucks finds that a “less is more” approach is often best when it comes to equipment and guitar arrangements. “Some of the tunes on Layla had three guitars originally,” he says. “So on that stuff, it’s easy to delegate parts. But some of the other songs we’re playing originally had only one or two guitars, so you have to find your space. Sometimes not playing is the right thing to do. In an ensemble like that, everyone doesn’t have to be playing all the time. On certain tunes I find myself laying out for certain parts. And when you feel like you can add to it, you add. It’s almost like a horn section. You color it when you need to.” Given Derek’s slide prowess and Allman musical heritage, it’s only natural that he covers many of the slide guitar parts that Duane Allman originally played on the Layla album. “But it’s not that cut and dried,” he adds. “Because on a tune like ‘Motherless Children,’ Doyle and Eric are playing the slide. So everybody gets a hand at it.” Bramhall still seems a little amazed at this state of affairs. “At first I told Eric, ‘I don’t want to play any slide, because Derek’s so good at it.’ But Eric said, ‘Why not? C’mon.’ ” Trucks and Bramhall both characterize Clapton as a focused but flexible bandleader. “This is basically a new band for him,” says Trucks. “So he had a lot of different ideas at rehearsal. We ran through a ton of different things. This band naturally gravitated toward a certain era of tunes—the Derek and the Dominoes era and a lot of stuff recorded around that time—and that’s the material we ended up loading the set with. So even though Eric came in with some definite ideas in mind, he was also open to what was naturally gonna fit the band.” “It seems to me that Eric wanted to have different artists in this band,” says Bramhall. “Not just road musicians. He hired artists, so he basically just wants everybody to be themselves and do what they do. He sort of wants to showcase each of us.” “In the solo sections,” Trucks adds, “Eric gives me and Doyle a lot of freedom to do our thing. He’s really generous that way. And obviously when Eric gets into a slow blues, then we all know we’re going to hear some amazing solo playing.” But what does it mean, here in the 21st century, to stand up and play a 12-bar blues in front of an audience in Germany, Brazil or Japan? What does it mean to be a fourth or fifth generation bluesman? To carry that tradition in today’s world? “The blues is gonna be relevant always,” says Trucks. “John Lee Hooker, B.B. King, Bobby Bland, Son House, Bukka White… I think that music stands the test of time. But I also feel that the pure forms of that music are gonna pass with that original generation. I don’t think that it is something that can ever be recreated. It was music that came out of a very specific set of circumstances. It was field-holler music; it was music learned on a plantation and then moved to Chicago or Detroit. So it would be insulting to the real legacy of the blues for someone like me to think that I can come from a suburb in Jacksonville, Florida, and play the same music that Charlie Patton and Son House were playing. But all those great old-time guys planted seeds for other things. All of that music continues to inspire new generations. But you have to make the music you play relevant to the time you’re living in. Otherwise you’re doing a disservice to it. “Blues and jazz are still young, compared with either Indian or Western classical music, where you’re talking 10 or 20 generations. With a classical form, you’re playing a composer’s pieces as they were written. While performance styles certainly evolve, the music doesn’t change that much. But blues is folk music, not classical music; it’s guttural and raw, a very personal thing. John Lee Hooker and Howlin’ Wolf weren’t rehashing old shit; they were changing the world with that music when they first came out with it. And that’s the ultimate goal I think—to tap into that spirit. The blues is still growing.” But will it have room to grow in today’s increasingly regimented, corporate musical environment? “At this point, music is in such a weird stage,” Bramhall concedes. “In the Sixties, you could turn on the radio and, even in a pop song, you would hear the influence of blues or jazz. Now you don’t hear it anymore, and the people who are doing it for real aren’t being heard. The only way to see them is to go to a local place and just happen on them. So it’s strange, because not a lot of people understand the blues these days. They think it’s just a primitive type music—easy to play—and that it’s not all that relevant to pop music right now. But I think that’s all about to change. Because there’s only so much people can take before they have to get back to what’s real in the world.”
