Electric blues guitarist Joe Louis Walker to perform
Electric blues guitarist Joe Louis Walker to perform
March 14, 2012
JEFF SPEVAK
DemocratandChronicle.com

Joe Louis Walker was recently visiting Mick Jagger at his villa on the private Caribbean Island of Mustique — how’s that for a jet-setting first sentence? — and asked Mick if he minded if he recorded a version of “Ride on Baby,” from the Stones’ 1967 album Flowers. Walker wanted to slow it down, however. He thought the Stones’ version was too fast. Walker wanted to emphasize the chorus.

Mick said, “It’s cool, it’s cool, do it.”

B.B. King is a friend as well. “He told me to make my music inclusive,” Walker says. “It’s about touching as many people as you can.”

This is the crowd that Joe Louis Walker runs with: Mick and B.B. “The two people I know who have seen everything,” the veteran electric-blues guitarist says. “I’ve got friends in low places and friends in high places.

“It’s good to have lot of opinions from a lot of people. There’s a road map, and you follow that road map so you don’t end up like the real Joe Louis.” Joe Louis, the fighter and Walker’s namesake, ended up broke, battling addictions and mental illness.

Walker has followed that road map for most of his 62 years, although there have been a few detours. He plays Sunday at The Club at Water Street, a man completely consumed with preserving and advocating for the authenticity of his art.

“Take a jazz musician, take a classical musician, a Latin musician, put them all in one room,” Walker says. “They ask, ‘OK what are we gonna play?’ They’re not gonna play ‘Daytripper,’ ‘I Did it My Way.’ They’re gonna play a blues.

“Everywhere I’ve been, and I’ve been to many countries, the blues has been really accepted because most of the rock guys, from the young guys back to the older guys, in some way are connected to the blues. The Beatles. The Stones. I never met an English guy who has not given credit to those who came before them in America. And a lot of them have played with Sonny Boy Williams, Muddy Waters. McCartney played with Little Richard. Ask Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Pete Townsend, who inspired them. They’ll tell you Bo Diddley.

The blues is a lifeline. Some of those cities where those European guys grew up, they are t-u-f-f cities, tough cities. You could call them Harlem, or Chicago in the old days. These are tough boys. John Lennon was a tough boy. Van Morrison was a tough boy. And the blues means credibility in those places.”

And you still see that today. “If I had a dime for every rap guy who put out a blues record because he needed credibility,” Walker says, “I’d be rich.”

Born and raised in San Francisco, “We lived a few blocks from the Fillmore,” Walker says. “The real Fillmore.” That was the ’60s, when Walker’s blues-infused brain meshed perfectly with the psychedelic rock era. “It was a big musical tent, and the one thing we all got in common was the blues,” Walker says. “I’ve known Bobby Weir all my life. The Grateful Dead started off playing ‘Good Morning Little School Girl.’

“I saw the Butterfield Band on a Thursday night at the Fillmore.The next day I was walking down the street, one street over from Haight-Ashbury, and this guy comes up to me and says, ‘Hey brother, do you know where a bookstore is?’ And it was Bloomfield! Well, he’d just moved his Electric band into his house there, and there wasn’t any room, so he ended up moving in with us.”

Mike Bloomfield of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, The Electric Flag and all kinds of blues-rock fusions, remained Walker’s roommate for years, introducing him to The Dead and Jimi Hendrix.

Bloomfield also sent Walker to Chicago, his hometown, to hear the blues greats and audition with Otis Rush. “Mike sent me there for a dose of reality,” Walker says. The Rush gig didn’t work out, but Walker was soon backing guys like Muddy Waters.

They did a lot of touring in Canada, which worked out fine for Walker when the draft board came looking for him. “They inquired while I was gone,” Walker says. “One of my cousins came to stay with us on his way to Vietnam. He was dead within two weeks. My mother said, ‘This is not gonna happen to Joe.’ May God rest her soul.”

Walker mentioned he has friends in low places as well, and they have a way of finding you. Bloomfield, consumed by a heroin addiction, was found dead in his car in 1981. Walker wasn’t around to help his friend.

“I wish I was,” he says. “It might not have happened. I’ll always remember what Buck Owens and Bo Diddly told me. ‘Surround yourself with good people.’ Mike just wasn’t around good people at the time. A lot of good people died in a car. But they actually didn’t die in a car. They died at a party, and someone drove them there, and left them.”

Weary of that self-destructive scene, Walker had given up the blues in 1975. “I lost my taste for it,” he says. “I dropped all of that and did nothing but gospel for 10 years.” He knew his way around there. He’d played gospel as a young man although, he concedes, “I’ve never been a real Bible-thumping person.

“Everybody goes through life different. ...I think experience is the best teacher. I’d been through rehab myself, went back to college, got a couple of degrees, had a new outlook of life.”

He has degrees in music and English history, and for the past six years he has lived in the Hudson Valley. “I got divorced, re-married,” he says. “I married the other person I guess I should have married 23 years ago. I’ve taken a circuitous route. I’ve been in somewhat of a comeback now.

“I’m a musician. Blues is what I was raised on. It was just time. No epiphany. Just time to get back to what I loved.”