Guitarist (UK), February, 1992 p 102-103
By Eddie Allen
Anyone who went to see the legendary Buddy Guy on his recent UK tour would have had the pleasure of witnessing Louisiana bluesman John Campbell, who was Buddy's special guest throughout.
With a debut album just released, Campbell may well be a new name to a lot of blues fans. But he's been gigging for over 25 years, serving his time in the roadhouses and clubs that lie between Houston and New Orleans, before hitting the New York club scene only recently.
The product of all this experience is the excellent 'One Believer,' though surprisingly, rather than draw songs from the past 25 years, John (collaborating with Robert Cray's bassist Dennis Walker) chose to start from scratch.
"I had to do something specifically for this because I felt I had been building a vocabulary all these years and now was the opportunity to say what I wanted to say. It's like we'd walked into a room and the room was empty and the walls were blank, and we had the chance to do maybe ten paintings to hang in this room. I tried to have a thread that would run through the album but I have to feel about something to sing about it. We wrote about what was happening personally and was going on in the world around us."
"It was a very exorcising process in a way. It may sound a little corny, but it really dealt with a lot of skeletons in a lot of closets. I let myself go more than I ever have before as a musician. Hopefully I played a little more concisely than I have before as well - not so much rambling around, but really saying something. Gatemouth Brown made a great impression on me after a concert once; I was very young and I'd opened for him and he said, 'You play great but your making the guitar holler all the time. If you never make it whisper, when you raise your voice no one will pay attention to you.' So that's something I've been consciously working on for years. With this album, I think the emphasis came on the songs; the guitar was there to emphasise a point."
A stranger to careerism, John Campbell has always resisted the temptation to promote himself. "I never even sent a demo tape to a record company," he reveals. "I lived a very solitary life and I moved around a lot, so my world didn't involve making a tape to present to somebody; I was just playing for the moment. I lived in the country and it just didn't seem like part of the musical experience for me."
So how did he get a record deal?
"I was opening for Albert King at the Lone Star Cafe in New York, and Peter Lubin from Elektra Records had come to hear Albert, heard me and that's how we met. I had always wanted to make an album, but somewhere along the line I suppose I'd forgotten how much I wanted to do it."
As for equipment, Campbell stayed with his main guitars but made some changes to his amplification strategy. "My guitars are all acoustic instruments... I have a 1952 Gibson Jumbo fitted with a DeArmond pickup - that's what I started with. I have a 1934 Duolian steel guitar and have a pickup attached to that as well. Then I have a three-quarter size National Resophonic student guitar which I also attached a pickup to. I then rull all these into two Fender Bassman amplifiers. But I didn't even have an amp until a couple of years ago - I used whatever was at the gigs - but for the album sounds to be reproduced on stage I had to run the guitars through amps."
Before 'One Believer' life was not always eays for John Campbell. Finding enough work to live was the order of the day. "I could always gig," he recalls, "even when there wasn't a a place to gig I made a place. I would play on the streets, I played in pool halls, gas stations; wherever I was I would sit down and play the guitar. It was difficult to make a living that way and people have said to me, 'Why do you do it? You could have a better life.' But I started having fun from the first day I started playing the guitar, and that really hasn't changed. Since I've made the record, in fact, I feel younger."
Coming from a musical family, where his maternal grandmother played lap steel and his grandmother on his father's side played piano, and living in Shreveport Louisiana, home of James Burton and many other fine players, Campbell was heavily influenced by music.
"The men in our family did construction work," he confides, "and I've done a bit of that as well, but because Shreveport was so guitar oriented - we had the Louisiana Hayride there, which was before the Grand Old Opry - I was naturally surrounded by guitars. I studied every guitar player I saw. I used to skip out of school and go to the trailers where the bands stayed when they were in town, and I would get guitar licks from them - maybe trade them a cigarette lighter or something for a guitar lick. And then I'd work on that lick over and over. If someone played guitar I'd sit and watch them; I was always the little kid in the music store who was bugging somebody."
It was as a result of horrific injuries sustained in a car accident that John Campbell got more deeply into the blues.
"I had heard the blues as a music when I was young," he tells us, "but it was really the guitar sounds that attracted me to it. After the accident I was spending time alone and playing the instrument and listening to people like Howlin Wolf and Muddy Waters and then trying to learn to play these songs. In that state I was in these songs really said something to me. Then when I actually played the songs it soothed my soul in a way that nothing ever had..." – Eddie Allen
Copyright 1992 Guitarist