Another skinny white kid trying to play the blues. It seems almost a cliché now, as we move further and further away from the dusty roads of hard living that actually gave birth to what is universally known as the blues. But more and more kids of every skin color are experiencing a deep moving feeling somewhere in their soul and picking up a guitar to try and figure out what it is.
Shreveport, Louisiana, native Kenny Wayne Shepherd has been listening to the blues since his early childhood. After discovering Muddy Waters in his father’s record collection, Kenny Wayne has been mixing some rock & roll with those blues and blasting out something that catches fire once he hits a stage, because that is where he comes alive. On his new CD, Live In Chicago ( which has been nominated for a Grammy for Best Contemporary Blues Album), Kenny Wayne has been able to capture that spirit while playing alongside some of the legends of the blues. This follows the 2007 release ofTen Days Out…Blues From The Backroads, a CD+DVD package that features Shepherd and the Double Trouble rhythm section of bassist Tommy Shannon and drummer Chris Layton performing with some of the greatest blues players of our time as well as lesser-known but historically significant bluesmen.
Calling from his home in California, Kenny Wayne has a friendly air about him and a strong love of the blues music he plays. You can hear it in his voice when he talks about the revered greats that he has heard and has had the opportunity to play with. He loves this stuff and is bound and determined to honor those influences by becoming one of the best blues guitarists creating music today, not only learning from but adding to what they have given him in inspiration.
Hi Kenny, how is everything going?
I’m doing good, just working away out here. We played a show in Los Angeles last night and this evening we are playing in an area called Solana Beach, which is just north of San Diego.
You seem to always be on the road. How many days do you average out there a year?
It kind of depends on if we have a new record out or not. Normally when we put out a new album we go out and hit the road pretty hard. We can do up to 250 shows a year. But then when you’re kind of on the back end of a tour or the back end of an album cycle, and you’re in between records, then you know we can do, I don’t know, a 100 shows a year. I mean a lot of that time is spent when you’re in between records writing material and going into the studio and recording and stuff too. So you have to kind of find a balance.
So how do you keep sane on the road?
I try to bring family. You know my dad comes out, my wife and kids come out when they can come out. But my band and crew and everybody is like a big family too. But we do kind of normal things, you know. We go out nowadays and kind of do a little bit of sight-seeing. One of my favorite things to do is, I have the Yelp app on my phone, and I always try and find local restaurants in whatever town we’re in that have really good reviews and I always try and find a nice restaurant that is exclusive to the area that I’m in and go experience the local cuisine and that’s always fun.
I think we all do that. That makes you normal (laughs). Your children are still young so they can pick up and go with you anytime?
I try not to bring my family too much into my professional life as far as like interviews or if I do something on TV. I don’t try and bring my kids on camera or anything. But it’s my family so I don’t like to be away from them too much. As much as they can come out, they do. Like we’re about to go do this Experience Hendrix tour and I’ll be gone for a month on that tour and they’re going to come out. I think I’ll be out for a week and then they’re going to come and join me for the rest of the tour. Like to try and keep them involved.
How do you handle missing them?
You know, one of the great things about modern technology like Skype, or the new iPhone has a video chat, that makes a huge difference. I mean, I talk to them on the phone almost on a daily basis. We get on and do the video chat and I think that makes a big difference with them actually being able to see Dad on the phone rather than just talk to him on the other end of the phone. Stuff like that helps; then anytime I get a break, if I’m on the road and I get a two day break, then if it makes sense I’ll just buy a ticket and fly home and spend the two days at home and then fly back out and pick up the rest of the tour. 
And it’s worth it.
It’s absolutely worth it. It’s the biggest investment you can make is in your child’s future and their stability, you know what I mean.
Talking about playing live, your new CD is superb. It seems like you really captured what you and your band are all about – the heart, the soul, the sweat, everything you put into a live show. This seems to have captured that really well.
I appreciate it. That’s the goal. I mean I had a couple of goals that I wanted to accomplish and one of them was making sure that it sounded as good as possible and put the listener right smack dab in the middle of the audience basically. And then also I wanted to make it a unique record. You know most live records are just the whole album with live versions of songs you’ve already heard before. But this record, half of it is live versions of Kenny Wayne Shepherd material but the other half is us playing with these guest artists and we’re doing songs with them. We’re doing blues songs but it’s nothing that we’ve ever recorded before so most of the people that are buying this record are getting a new listening experience as well. They’re hearing us do songs they’ve never heard us do before.
Was it hard picking through the songs to put on the CD?
As far as the songs we did with those artists, I chose a few of the songs and then I also let them choose some of the ones that they wanted to perform. When we were actually mixing the CD and putting it all together, the stuff that we did that night and the tour that we did, there was a lot of material that couldn’t make it to the actual CD because you can only put 80 minutes worth of music on a CD. So we did have to kind of pick and choose between some of the performances. And you know, we just tried to pick the ones that I felt were the best performances and also that made for a good selling record cause you want to keep in mind the tempos. You don’t want to have too many slow songs or too many songs that are really, really fast or anything like that. You want to keep the pace consistent and keep it interesting, you know, mix it up a little bit.
And why did you choose to leave “Voodoo Child”, one of your most popular songs, off the CD?
Because we couldn’t fit it on there (laughs). The main thing was we couldn’t fit it on there cause I think the version is like over ten minutes long and it would have taken up too much space for the CD. BUT we did release it for download on itTunes. You can go and download what they call a premium version of the record and it has “Voodoo Child” and I think it has like two or three additional songs on it as well. So it is available.
What took you so long to put out a live recording?
You know the opportunity, the right opportunity, didn’t present itself. I don’t know, I focused a lot on all these studio records and then we did the Ten Days Out project and I just wanted the right timing for it. I just think the timing was right for this and also the right concert happened, you know, where to me it was interesting. Like I said I didn’t want to put out a live record that was just all live versions of songs that people were already familiar with. This was like the perfect combination of everything in my opinion, cause it had some really special appearances by people I looked up to over the years and then it had some new songs that we’re doing with them and then it also has probably some people’s favorite Kenny Wayne Shepherd songs on it as well. It was all kind of like the perfect combination of everything I was looking for at this point.
Can you tell us about some of those special artists that appear with you on Live In Chicago?
Yeah, Hubert Sumlin was a guitar player in Howlin’ Wolf’s band for most of his career and then he also played with Muddy Waters for a short period of time. But Hubert is like one of the most influential guitar players probably to ever play the guitar. Like Eric Clapton was influenced by Hubert. You know, Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughan, just about everybody that came after Hubert Sumlin has learned something from him. He’s just been that big of an influence on guitar players. And then Willie “Big Eyes” Smith was the drummer in Muddy Waters’ band and he came out and he sang and played on some songs with us. And then Bryan Lee is a blind blues guitar player that plays down in New Orleans and he was the first guy that ever let me get up onstage with him when I was thirteen years old. He came out and did some songs with us. And this guy, Buddy Flett, who is from my hometown of Shreveport, he’s one of the guys I watched when I was a kid. I watched him and his band playing around town and him and his music had a big impact on me. And we also had Tommy Shannon and Chris Layton from Double Trouble, the rhythm section for Stevie Ray Vaughan’s band.
You’ve been playing with Tommy and Chris for quite a while on a pretty regular basis. Is that your permanent rhythm section now?
You know Tommy doesn’t really like to tour so much now so we’re using him in the studio. We’re actually working on a new studio record that we hope to put out in April. So he’s been working with us in the studio but he doesn’t like to travel so much anymore so Chris is my permanent drummer in my band and then we have another guy that plays bass with us on the road and his name is Scott Nelson. Scott actually plays on the live disk as well. Tommy’s not playing bass through the whole show.
When did they become like YOUR band?
You know Chris played on my first record and then when I did my second album we brought Tommy in and I had Chris and I also had Reese Wynans, who was the keyboard player in Double Trouble. And then I used them on my third album as well. You know, probably around the time of my second record and after that is when we really started doing a lot of stuff together. We started doing some shows together and you know at that point I was using them on almost every record that I was making and still do to this day. You know the thing is their band was such a huge influence on me and my playing and it just works well because I grew up playing along to them. So when we play together it seems very natural because that’s how I learned how to play guitar was playing along to their records.
The new CD is sparked from your Ten Days Out project. Watching the DVD, you seem like this little boy sitting at the feet of your heroes in awe of them. Is that really how you felt?
Absolutely. When I get around all these people that I looked up to and these players that are older than me and been doing it way longer than me, I kind of revert back to like being this little kid in the living room of my house, playing guitar and fantasizing about playing with these guys. I mean, these guys were heroes of mine. Even though I have a career in music I’m still a fan of music. I’m still a fan of people. It was definitely a real special experience and that’s probably one of the things throughout the life of my career I’ll be the most proud of, that project. I think it was a tremendous experience.
You had said that you didn’t want to just go out and get the big names for this; that you also wanted artists that didn’t necessarily have the recognition they deserved. How did you pick who was in Ten Days Out?
We did get some of the big names. I mean, we played with BB King and Gatemouth Brown, the guys from Muddy Waters’ band and Howlin’ Wolf’s band, but the goal was also to get some people that have been playing the blues their whole life but didn’t catch a big break. And I wanted to put those artists on the same disk as the likes of BB King to try and help elevate some of these other artists’ profile and to introduce the rest of the world to some of these people’s music. I got a ton of music submitted to me. We kind of put the word out amongst the blues community that we were going to do this project. So people started sending me CDs of different artists for consideration and I went through everything and I chose every artist that was on that project. Part of it was based on if I dug their sound and their personality and their music. It was also a requirement that we wanted to record songs that they had written because we wanted people to see who they were as an artist but also because they’ll reap the financial benefit. If they wrote a song and it goes on this record then they get money for that. So I was also looking for songs that I thought were good songs and people that had good material to make a good record. It was cool. I think it was a really great combination of personalities and performances and I’m really proud of it.
And the proceeds go to charity, correct?
It was a benefit project so part of the proceeds of the sales of the disk went to the Music Maker Relief Foundation [www.musicmaker.org] that helps out blues players, the elderly blues players, with some of their medical bills and helps them to pay their bills. It also helps get instruments back in the hands of some of those people that can’t afford their own instruments to play music anymore. It’s a pretty good organization.
One of the people that interested me the most was Etta Baker. She was like 91 years old and yet her fingers were so nimble and she played so effortlessly. It was amazing.
And she told us she hadn’t picked up a guitar in like six months when we showed up there. It’s one of those things, she was born with a gift and to a certain degree you have to kind of nurture it and take care of it and like practice, but still if you’re born with a gift it’s always going to be there.
Not long ago I had the pleasure to see BB King again and met his guitar player Charles Dennis. We talked about you and he said you just played your ass off and really praised you. How does that make you feel hearing legends talk about you like that?
It’s pretty flattering, I got to say. I’m kind of shy when it comes to that stuff but BB, he’s become like another father to me. All those guys, we’ve had a lot of great times together and I’ve played with him and his band so many times. But it’s good. When I was a kid I was met with a lot of resistance trying to play the blues, when I was thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen years old, even older than that. Cause a lot people are skeptical about kids playing the blues and what do they know. But it’s good because I feel like I’ve reached a point in my career that I’ve been doing this long enough now, people have accepted me now as a part of the music and blues community and they take me seriously. Age isn’t so much a factor anymore but people still think I’m really, really young, which I think that’s great (laughs). I can be young forever (laughs).
When people tend to talk about Kenny Wayne Shepherd they tend to also mention Stevie Ray Vaughan in the same breath. But did you get most of your inspiration from the older bluesmen?
I think me and Stevie had a lot of the same influences. I mean, I learned about his influences because of him and learning about him. I would imagine Stevie listened to as many of the same people as I listen to. He probably listened to the blues all the way back to the early 1900s, just like me. My music is a little more rock than Stevie did. He definitely played very contemporary blues but there’s a lot of, I don’t know, I grew up listening to a lot of ZZ Top, a lot of Jimi Hendrix and stuff like that and I feel like that rock influence tends to find it’s way a little more into the music than I make than into the music that Stevie made. But I still think that the majority of influences and the foundation of what I do and the foundation of what he did are pretty similar.
Do you think from listening to a lot of the new blues guys coming up today, that they are being inspired more by Clapton, Stevie and Hendrix than Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy and those men? And how do you think that is affecting the progression of blues music?
There is some people that just listen to Stevie Ray Vaughan and Jimi Hendrix and maybe Kenny Wayne Shepherd and this generation of blues musicians, but for me, and I think for a lot of people is a real student of the blues, you do your homework and you go back and learn about the people that played before you. I would think that if you got really serious about playing blues music that at some point you would go a little bit further back and learn about the other artists that played ahead of those people and find out where their influences came from. I think the blues music is in good hands and every time a new young guy comes in and breathes new life into this genre of music and to keep it going, I mean, the blues is already like almost a hundred years old and it’s still going strong. So I don’t think it’s in any danger of disappearing.
You mention in your liner notes that you thank your grandfather for “being such a strong example for all to follow”. What made him so special to you?
Well, my grandfather was in the military. He just had a lot of character and the kind of guy that showed me that respect is earned. And once you earn that respect then you have that for the rest of your life. He was just a real good guy and I spent a lot of time with him later on in my life. I just kind of watched him and what he did and the kind of reputation he had amongst his friends and people that knew him. I just really admired him.
You also mentioned that you were sick that night. How do you do it, how does any musician when you’re sick and just want to stay home in bed, go out there and end up playing maybe the show of your life?
I just drag myself out on the stage and I think the energy from the crowd and the adrenalin from the music and the power of the music just takes over.
I hear you have a fascination with old cars.
Ever since I was a little kid I’ve been fascinated with old cars and I used to have the hot wheels cars and matchbox cars and took them with me everywhere I went. In art class I used to draw cars constantly and stuff. People always ask me if I didn’t do music what would I do and I’d always say I’d be like a racecar driver or something. But my music has given me the opportunity to pursue my passion in cars. So over the past several years I’ve been building custom cars. I like the sixties and seventies models of cars. I like customizing cars and driving them and it’s really cool. I mean, a lot of guitar players are like that, Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top has a big car collection, Jimmie Vaughan. I think most guitar players, it’s like cars and guitars go hand in hand (laughs).
Last question: Do you think you’re going to still be doing this when you’re in your 80’s like all your influences?
I hope so. I can’t imagine my life without playing music.
