Interviewed by Bob Chapman

Blueprint, Issue 48, February 1993 p 12-13, 16

By the time our readers receive this issue of Blueprint, John Campbell's latest recording 'Howlin Mercy' will be on sale in your high street megastores. With the 1991 release of 'One Believer' and the subsequent European tour, we realized that a major new talent was hitting the blues world. John was in London recently on a promotional tour, and took time to give Bob Chapman a guided tour of his new record....

J.C. – When we got back off of tour, we immediately went into the studio and made the new record. And it worked out just the way I wanted it to, 'cos the record kinda revealed itself to me as being a road record and a live type approach. So we went immediately from tour into the studio, cut the basic tracks in four days, and then we had some time to touch up this and that, but not much work was required at all. Essentially, we treated it like a live record. Then my wife and I had a baby...

Congratulations!

J.C. – Thank You. And then I toured the states with Chris Whitley. Now it's a new year, and time to start touring again.

The twelve months or so since we first saw you in England, when you supported Buddy Guy, and you had 'One Believer' out, until now, clearly must have meant a very major change in your life. I suppose the question is, what's been the best thing about it and what's been the worst?

J.C. – Well the best thing about it has been the opportunity to travel around the world like this and to play music, and to tour with Buddy Guy, that's obviously been a lifelong ambition of mine. The worst part of it? I have a kind of hard time thinking of it, to tell you the truth.

You can't actually say, "That I don't enjoy." I mean what about giving this kind of promotional stint now, where you must keep going over much of the same kind of ground?

J.C. – Well you do sometimes. But then all in all, you know, I really enjoy it. It's not that I enjoy talking about myself that much, and I can tell you this, that this is what I've always wanted to do. I never really looked past this point, Bob. My whole life I've wanted to travel and play music. So to get the chance to do it, call me naive or whatever, but for me, it's kind of celebrating what I wanted to do. When I got out here on the road last year, and I came over here and played a lot of places I'd dreamed of playing, it had a kind of heavy effect on me. It's like I was looking at the audience and I didn't do that a whole lot before. Having the chance to tour with a band to this extent is new for me, and it's been very invigorating. There are times when maybe you're riding fifteen hours on a bus, or something, and you're thinking, "Oh man I'm so tired," but to be honest, we got a chance to do the show and I've made some friends along the way. I've wanted to do this for so long, and to tell the truth, I'm more satisfied now doing this than I was in other years. This was the way I started with music, I feel I'm more connected with the way I started.

Does it make it more difficult, the process of producing the music, if you feel more contented about your existence, is it too simple to think that there is a kind of inverse relationship almost, that the more miserable you are, the more edge there is to the music?

J.C. – Well now, I mean, we're talking about the band, the experience of performing. I'm content with that, because that's the music, and by content with that, I'm saying that I'm getting to do what I've wanted to do. That's the way I started, with the need to go somewhere and play guitar. The journey always fed me, when I was a kid knocking around, and I would go from one Greyhound bus station to the next, it seemed like I had an extra guitar lick when I arrived, wherever I was going, the journey gave me that. At the same time, I'm forty-one years old, and I'm not gonna tell you my life is a bed of roses. I'm working as hard as I can to keep things going, to support my family. It is very hard work, and I get physically tired, and I'm beat up a lot, so it's not like I'm living in the lap of luxury! We're a hard working, touring band but, hell man, I'm glad to be able to do it. So sure, it's tough, I don't feel like my music's gonna lose any edge. I mean we're on the edge every day.

It really shows on the new album that the band is together. Was it really difficult to almost start over again, losing Jimmy [Pettit] and Davis [McLarty]?

J.C. – That was quite a band. The last tour we did with Richard Cousins on the bass and a great drummer out of New York named Robert Medici, and it was different. Everybody brings their own thing to it, and that was what I was hearing, and I was very comfortable with it. I'm very glad we had the chance to make the record, cos it's its the accumulation of our work. Jimmy will be with me on the next tour. To say difficult, well it's different. I'm comfortable working with an ensemble now, more so than I've been, but I'm really glad we had the chance to make the record as a band, and we didn't use any outside musicians. I'm happy with that.

Let's talk about the new record. What about the process of producing it this time? Did you feel much more confident that you knew what your sound was now?

J.C. – I think so. I think it more directly revealed itself to us on the road. After we did that 'One Believer' record, we came out and started playing the songs and they were different. The live performance aspect changes things, the grooves get deeper, it gets road muscle on it. I realized that this was a road band. So we took a three week break, learned some songs and then took them immediately out on the road. So when we hit the studio, we had the songs, we had performed the songs 30, 40 times. Dennis Walker was very attuned to, "OK, yeah, let it breathe," so we had a producer, but at the same time a producer who was aware of the fact that this was a live thing. We picked a room at the Power Station in New York City that's known for its live sound, and so I would say that about 80% of the stuff was first take with live vocals.

Am I right in detecting more recognizable guitar riffs in this one? With 'Written in Stone,' 'Wiseblood' and 'Firin Line' you can hear the riffs straight away and you're into it. That seems to me something which is part also of the live sound, and I hear more of that than I did on 'One Believer.'

J.C. – It's a much more guitar-based sound. The structure of the songs is built around guitars. With 'One Believer' I didn't play as much guitar on that record. I think that record emphasized the song lyrically and the music was atmospherically supporting it, with the keyboards having a very dominant figure. That was the way to interpret those songs, but this one is a direct result of live performance.

Let's talk about some of the songs. Just going through them: 'Ain't Afraid of Midnight,' What's the feel behind that one?

J.C. – That one to me kinda sets the tone for a lot of things. That's a song which in essence says that, OK, I have personal phantoms, as everyone does, we all deal with a struggle for balance in our lives, no matter what it may be. For me this states a kind of reaffirmation and allows me to celebrate the performance. To me that's very much what the record does.

So it's getting the show off to a positive start, saying "Right here we go?"

J.C. – Well, here we go yeah. The whole record itself, it's very much back to the roots for me, like somewhere between this duality and this dichotomy that we exist in there is time for a song, and maybe I've discovered that a little bit. And by that I mean a song with some spontaneity and I think this album's got a lot of spontaneity on it, and I'm just very physically involved with performing it.

OK. 'When the Levee Breaks.' Everyone is going to ask you about this, you must get sick and tired of talking about it, but when and why did you think, "Oh, that would be a good one to do"?

J.C. – Well, it hit me in a lot of different ways. I think first of all the song speaks to me on a level that I understand what it's saying. I'm from Louisiana, we have Levees, its a fact of life, and when they break it does flood! The song was originally structured by Memphis Minnie, classic blues woman, and then when I heard it again after a lot of years, it was like, Wow, OK, this band [Led Zeppelin] has felt that and they are interpreting this, and I was very impressed by the whole thing. I think it reflects the spirit of incorporating the Classic blues into your life, expressing it in a contemporary way, it adheres very much to the tradition but also it's very honest with a certain aspect of incorporating your own life experiences to it. So the spirit of the song was very powerful to me, and so I thought, well, yeah, somewhere in the middle I'll do my thing with it. Yeah it hit me man.

I don't really know offhand, but I haven't actually seen that many other people who have tried it since Zeppelin brought it out. I think a part of the problem may be that it rather daunting for drummers to do it, because of Bonzo Bonham.

J.C. – Well it's a massive drum sound.

But Davis does a great job so it doesn't lose anything at all.

J.C. – An incredible job on that. And he didn't try to copy a style. I think he is a great admirer of John Bonham's ... absolutely. The song had some power to it, and it communicated to me on many levels.

OK. 'Down In the Hole', the Tom Waits song, what's special about that?

J.C. – Well, the song, it addresses a lot of things I could relate to. It's almost structured like an old blues spiritual. It's like acknowledging the enigmas of good versus evil, that balance, and it's almost like he's preaching it to me, it's like, "This exists, but you've gotta keep it down in the hole." So I was really moved by the song. I think Tom Waits is brilliant. So we did a version of it, and incorporated some ceremonial type percussion instruments, the instrument you see on the picture of the CD.

OK. 'Look What Love Can Do.' It sounds as if that's the answer, the title says it all? Is it as simple as that?

J.C. – It's kind of autobiographical. As it says, I'm married, we just had a baby, I have an apartment, I have a phone, I have a mailing address. I wake up when I'm at home and I see pictures on the wall. It's like that.

'Saddle Up My Pony' is much more back to the roots again, and that is something which seems to be going along as a fairly traditional kind of sound, and then suddenly it takes off. Where did you get that one from?

J.C. – Well, the first recording I ever heard of is like the oldest blues song I know by Charley Patton, and there were several different versions of it along the way, and then I go into some lyrics by Robert Johnson. I think that song took shape over all the years that I've been doing this. It's something that I've tried to get comfortable enough to do in the studio. I would do it in a performance, sing aspects of traditional blues because, by aspects, I mean like, I was always impressed by the way one person would do 'Saddle Up My Pony' and then the next version would incorporate some totally different lyrics in it. I think it's a kind of hand to hand thing, so that song for me maybe symbolizes my road. You see, I never learnt a whole song, you know. When I was coming up I would learn part of a song and then you would be left on your own to express how you feel. So I kinda go through in a sense of tribute a lot of the songs that meant something to me, and then at the end it just breaks out to this wild boogie, which is very much what we do when we perform.

And very much of the tradition of the blues, never to play it the same way twice, or to sing it the same twice. It's of that moment.

J.C. – Exactly! That's what I tried to do throughout this record.

'Wolf Among the Lambs' is kind of similar to 'Saddle Up My Pony'.

J.C. – In structure, absolutely!

Same kind of structure. What's that one about?

J.C. – That one addresses a lot of the aspects of my life over the years, I think, and maybe I'm just commenting on the fact that I've rambled so much - I've been over the years compelled to play music so much. It seems like when the moon is shining, I need to howl. And that's the way I felt, man. I think there is a little bit of wolf in all of us. It's not necessarily a bad thing, it's just a part of nature.

And 'Firin Line' - What about that one?

J.C. – That's being in trouble with a mean woman man! You're in a mess and she's fixin to get you. It's one of them tunes, and you just describe the situation.

I noticed that your singing on the new album as whole, obviously there's a live feel to it, but you're going far more for it when you're singing. The power in the voice is much stronger on this album than on the previous one, and that presumably is partly the result of touring so much?

J.C. – I think so. Definitely. That's really what shaped it. I think that touring so much, it's working with microphones, cos' so much of the playing I used to do was not with mikes, and I didn't sing any louder than my acoustic guitar a lot of the times. I think it's just a natural outgrowth of that.

OK, moving on to other sounds on the album, there's 'Written in Stone' which I heard before on your last tour, and I thought then that it was the outstanding new one. In your own words, what's that one about?

J.C. – Well, it's musically got that swampy kind of groove, like that Tony Joe White kinda thing. That Louisiana swamp sound, and the song itself is addressing commitment in a relationship. We're gonna stick it out together, it's like committing to someone.

And 'Wiseblood,' which again I think is a cracking good song?

J.C. – Thank you. Now 'Wiseblood' is complex for me to explain. There's a book called Wiseblood and it's a classic work. It deals with this mythical figure who set up this church where there was simply no religion. I have not read the book, but my guitarist Zonder told me a lot about this book, so we talked a lot about it. What a concept! What are the implications? What's that suggesting? And then I started talking with Dennis, and then it was, like, OK, and Zonder said, "Well what if Wiseblood might have meant that he has wise blood, that he has blood which gives him wisdom and enables him to see through certain things?" So then we incorporated this notion. And then I started thinking, all right, this church of no religion, I started thinking about some of the false prophets that come on TV, they try to sell you religion and take your money, you know, and then it's like the image of, there's no salvation, you can go to confess, but there's nobody there, just leave your money and leave! And so this whole notion struck me and I think that song is a multi-layered thing, but it comments essentially on having wise blood and on the contemporary situation.

You're getting a lot of favorable reaction to this album. I just looked at Metal Hammer on the newsstand, and you get a 5. It's clear that you're attracting the rock press this time around. Does that bother you or are you happy that anybody is interested in your music?

J.C. – No, it doesn't bother me at all. I'm very pleased actually. It's been a long time coming for me to get to the point at which I can express the vocabulary I've striven to achieve on the guitar. You and I have had conversations about this. I think at the time the classic blues men, the blues masters, created this music, it was very vital, it was very modern, it was very much against the grain and very daring, and in that sense it rocked. And I think that along the way I've been developing myself to where I could incorporate my vocabulary and get to the point where I could let it out. I cannot presume to know what Robert Johnson's shoes were like to walk in, I've never walked in them, he was a great man and he created a great sound, as did Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker. And this was the magic that made me want to play this music, and yet as I travel around the world and play music, I have to incorporate elements of my life, that is, very high energy. I have learnt how to use amplifiers and I think that the early ensemble blues stuff had that spirit, man. Also, the direct effect of being on the road with Buddy Guy, I mean seeing him every night reshape his music, and play just spontaneously with such a wide spectrum of traditional yet explosively different stuff, it was inspiring and led me to try and incorporate more textures to what I'm doing. I think if this album rocks, it rocks because it's organically grown that way and it demands to. I think that at the same time, this album is more in touch with my roots and pushing forward, cos I think that, of course, there's some stuff which is not at all like traditional blues, but there are parts on this record that are more traditional than anything I've ever recorded. So I really don't know how to categorize it.

Well, does it even matter to categorize it?

J.C. – No, it doesn't to me. No. I think it's been vital for me to allow myself to continue to grow. Ultimately to breathe that immediate life feeling into the music, and if you are working with a band, you gotta do that, with conviction. In a way I'm attacking it in much the same way I did when I was playing solo, but I'm learning to incorporate this stuff and it's been a great release for me to have toured with that band like that.

Well it was a great release for the audience as well!

J.C. – Thank You.

So when are you coming back?

J.C. – We're gonna start touring the beginning of March, we'll start actually in London at the Mean Fiddler, and then we'll be over for about a month, and I think we're gonna try and add a date at the end of the tour to come back to London.

OK, we'll certainly look forward to March.

J.C. – Thank you my friend.