On the darker side of American music is where I've always wanted to really be. And I didn't discover the Blues 'til I was about 15. Really discover them, you know? See, I didn't have that whole thing where I grew up in a family that always listened to the Blues. 'Cause my daddy, you see, he was a preacher, and blues wasn't something we were really allowed to be involved, or even interested, in. If you'd said 'rock and roll' to me when I was a kid, I'd have figured you meant a stone and a ball.
I didn't really meet the Blues 'til I was just about sick of trying to figure out how those rock stars made blistering space-age solos come out of their guitars; and just out of nowhere, like some wild comet, a man called Jimi Hendrix showed me what the Blues was. He played me a song called 'Hear My Train a-Coming.' And just about a second after that tune ended there I was, entranced, legs hanging over the side of my bed, picking at that Fender Stratocaster.
I felt it then but I've always believed, even before I knew what it really meant, that to sing the Blues you've got to know 'em, and to know the Blues you've got to have 'em.
So as I was growing up, I always felt that blue sting in the back of my mind, my soul's mind. I ended up figuring out how to do all that rock solo stuff, and hung on to it for a long while, playing around Texas in several bands. Eventually a friend of my father's said I should come jam at these blues clubs, that anyone could do it and I was at least half as good as they were. He was wrong about that last bit, but my ego was tough as nails, still is, and I went – secretly terrified, of course.
So I started sitting in on those sessions, meeting a few cats who really dug me 'cause they thought I could be something, and several others who hated me for the same reason. But I was really loving all that Texas Blues, even though everyone wanted to be and some really believed they were Stevie Ray Vaughan. But my hero and mentor – though long since passed from the physical world – was Jimi Hendrix. So I didn't really want to be Stevie. It was more like he and I just had something in common.
Well years passed and I had my own band eventually after really getting the shit kicked out of me in Boston, where I'd moved to in order to marry this lovely little chick – whose name was Hendrix, mind you – and I realized over time as life became more and more fucked up with drugs and love and hate and money that I was really just wanting to play the Blues. The real Blues. But I still didn't really know 'em, and I was fully aware of that.
So I let it go, with my daddy always telling the band that we were really better at the Blues than anything else, even though the other members couldn't stand 'having' to play them. Which was sad, 'cause I really wanted our sound to be blue, and they just weren't about the soul of the whole thing.
Then dad died, and I got confused and scared, terrified even, of death and myself and my mind and all the things in the universe that I realized I didn't really understand but that were major players in the lives we all lead. It was a mind-bending experience. I was out of the world, out of time, and totally out of control. After I finally composed myself enough to get back on my guitar, I'd just spend hours by myself in our little makeshift studio, playing. And it was Blue.
I wrote all sorts of new pieces, but couldn't put them together like my soul was telling me to. I didn't get that what I was doing was playing the Blues. Because I really knew 'em now. I'd been introduced in Boston and then formally beaten by curving roads with no ends and no beginnings – leaving me wondering how the hell I'd even got there.
The band couldn't get down for it, but I knew I was playing for my dad. And for Jimi. And so I let those cats go. And I came out west to really be myself, and I think I'm finding what I've been looking for by really not finding anything at all.
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