Luther Dickinson – The Interview

Luther Dickinson is a man who needs no introduction. He is a well-respected musician, known to many as being so naturally talented on guitar that he can blow anyone off the stage with the subtlest of notes. He is a genuine human being, very humble and positive in a business full of gigantic egos and money-driven ideas. And he has the child-like passion that drives him as much today in his late-30’s as it did when he was a young boy practicing for hours in the hopes of becoming a good guitar player.

As the eldest son of producer Jim Dickinson, Luther has carved a niche for himself in music with not one but several bands. With his North Mississippi Allstars, which also features his brother Cody on drums, they are legends on the circuit as being full-on energy until the last note, which often comes at the two am mark on any given night. He has also been the brother-in-frets with Rich Robinson in The Black Crowes, a gig that is currently on hold as the band goes on an indefinite hiatus.

Which leaves the time and space open once again for the Allstars to pick up and load onto the tour bus for more rounds of shows across the country and most recently over the pond to Europe.

During all this craziness, Luther took some time out of his very busy schedule to talk with Glide a few months ago while opening for Robert Plant & his Band Of Joy.

Hi Luther, how are you? How is everything going?

Really well. We’re out on the road. My brother and I are opening for Robert Plant and having a blast.

Have you been able to spend some time with him?

Yeah, he’s super cool. He’s really admirable cause he works so hard and keeps pushing for new things. You know, they’re always rehearsing and rearranging things. His band is like Buddy Miller and Patty Griffin and its amazing … I love hearing him rearranging the old classic Zeppelin stuff.

Has he given you any advice?

Oh definitely. We always do it with our own band and our own tours, but he encourages us to keep a set list so that we can keep changing it up. He was talking about his own band and he said you’d go crazy if you played the same set every night. But then he kind of winked at us (laughs) and we were like, Yes Sir (laughs). We got you covered, we got plenty of music.

Were you surprised by how he is or was he just like you imagined?

I was really surprised by how hard he works. They rehearse sometimes for an hour, hour and a half, and he is just constantly pushing to work up new songs, work on new arrangements than what they are already doing. He’ll just stand there and just has these cool ideas and they’ll work’em up, you know. He’s what? Sixty-two? It’s just very inspiring to see someone who on one hand has been so successful but on the other hand, it’s just inspiring to watch. I love rock & roll because it’s just proven that it’s an art form that you can age gracefully in.

You have a long history in music yourself. Your father Jim Dickinson was a legend, a great producer. What can you tell us about him, for those who may not be familiar with who he was.

He grew up in Memphis, a teenage rock & roll musician. He saw the invention of rock & roll as a teenager in Memphis in the fifties and he actually recorded for Sun Records and then he went on later to record for Atlantic Records. As a piano player, he played with everyone from Aretha Franklin to Bob Dylan to the Rolling Stones to Albert King and Albert Collins, great blues guys like Bukka White. And production-wise, he produced Big Star and The Replacements and the Texas Tornadoes. He worked for many years with Ry Cooder. And then there’s all this great roots rock or rock & roll stuff or blues. He worked with Johnny Cash and it was just an amazing line-up for me to grow up in. Because of him and his friends I always knew that I wanted to be a musician. I was surrounded by such a cool, creative rock & roll culture and it was very inspiring for me. We collaborated for a lot of years and then unfortunately he passed away in August 2009.

What do you think was the most important thing that you learned from him?

Well, I would say personally, he was such a devoted family man and I think that was a beautiful thing to grow up with. He and my Mom were married when she was eighteen and they stayed together. He was just a wonderful father and he created such a great environment for us. I think it was my friend Patterson Hood of Drive-By-Truckers who said that my Dad, when they got to know each other, that he was a great example of how to balance your career and your family, and even combine them if that’s possible. But that was a wonderful example. Even now, my wife and I have our first child and I travel all the time and music is definitely a big part of my life. But I say music and family pretty much sums it up. As far as musically, he always told us to play every note like it’s your last, cause one of them will be (laughs). That was a great lesson to learn because it applies to every day, every situation, every time you pick up your instrument you have to give it your all and I definitely apply that in many different levels to what I do.

You have a little girl. Do you find it hard leaving her every time you go out on the road for extended periods of time? I’m sure you do.

Of course. She’s such a sweetheart and nothing makes me happier than when she wants me to pick her up and carry her around. But you know, I have to work and make a living and it could be worse. I have friends in the military and their situation is so impossible. I’m so fortunate that I can’t complain. She has a great Mom and she’s well taken care of. She’s fifteen months and sooo cute.

You know, being a family man definitely makes your musicianship deeper and I learned that from Chris Robinson in some ways. He’s like, when you have a family, you hate to be away from them but when you go out and do your thing it makes you get into it that much deeper because you’ve got them depending on you and the future to provide for and you ARE away from them; but you ARE doing your thing so you might as well dive in a hundred twenty percent. And he’s exactly right.

I think love and loss, like losing a father, the birth of my child, definitely makes it all deeper. It’s more life because you know art, be it music or writing or painting are an expression of your life and I think that is why our current record KEYS TO THE KINGDOM has turned out relatively powerful, you know. Because I was experiencing the most life I’ve ever experienced, with my father being ill and passing away and my child being born, and it all came out in the songwriting. I can’t force songwriting but it just comes out as a reflection of my life and my environment. So I think being a family man definitely deepens your creativity.

When you picked up a guitar was it just so natural for you that you became like LUTHER DICKINSON overnight?

My brother and I grew up as kids surrounded by music and I always knew I wanted to be a guitar player. As far back as I can remember, that was my calling. My brother was a natural musician, be it guitar or drums or keyboards, whatever he played it just came to him naturally. But myself, I was not a natural at all. Man, I would practice, I practiced my whole youth, I practiced non-stop. And I had great guitar teachers and studied and I’m still learning and finding new ways to approach the instrument. And you know, my father was keeping it real cause he knew I wanted to be a guitar player but he said, “I’m not going to bullshit you, I’m not going to tell you that you can play when you can’t and you need to just practice and keep working on it, man” (laughs).

Eventually in my twenties he started hiring me to do sessions and being able to quote-unquote to play. That’s like a level of the art when you can play. It’s not anything that you can really pin down, it’s just a constant. Maybe that’s just his generation but we were doing a session and my Dad, Levon Helm on drums and David Hood, the famous bass player, Patterson’s father, was playing bass, and we cut this song and once we got finished and took our headphones off, David Hood, he shook his head and said, “Man, that Luther sure can play”. That was so happy (laughs) because someone from his generation, a true musician master accepting me, he just brought me in the core of it and I was so happy (laughs). Someone from Dad’s generation who knows the concept of being able to play to say that about me meant so much to me.

But you know my brother is so naturally talented but my Mom said I had the burning desire. So I think the direction and knowing what you want to do with your life can be as much an advantage as being a natural talent, because I have just always focused on music. As far as guitar playing goes, that’s a funny thing too because I can’t sit here and bedazzle you with fancy guitar licks or any type of showy guitar work (laughs) but what I have learned how to do and can do with different groups of people, when everyone is open to it, and this kind of comes into what my Dad said, “play every note like its your last”, if you concentrate on what the other musicians are playing, if I totally submerge myself in the music and what everyone else is doing and let my subconscious handle the guitar playing, I think that is a more accurate ensemble type of music, especially if you do a group improvisation. Not improvisation, but interpretation. And that could be just a couple of vocals or anything.

But when everyone is listening and getting locked in sometimes you hit these moments where everything comes together and you push it and you start getting goosebumps and just have one of those moments, what the Allman Brothers called “hittin the note”. And that’s a big part of it and it’s a collective surge that can happen. And I think that’s maybe more how I’ve learned to nurture, to create those moments and nurture those moments and extend those moments and maybe that’s more valuable than fancy guitar playing. I don’t take credit for it because it’s not just me, it’s everybody.



You make it sound so effortless. You just stand back there and just go to town like it was the most natural thing in the world to you. You seem like you really love it, playing guitar, making music.


I do indeed. I love it so much and I’m so grateful to be able to spend my life in music, you know. My father and his friends showed us and our friends, the second generation of musicians. It’s almost like they taught us a trade, a craft. It’s very fulfilling to grow up and do something that I love. And it means the world to me. Sometimes someone will say, “you played great, man, and I loved it”, and I’m like “thank you very much, my life depends on it” (laughs). It’s true, man. I’ve got a family, got my mom, my wife and my daughter, and my brother, and my life does depend on it. On the other hand, it’s still supposed to be fun, even at it’s baddest (laughs)

George Potsos of Devon Allman’s Honeytribe said basically the same thing. It IS a job and he has to support himself and be able to earn a living and eat.

That’s right. There are certain aspects that you have to look at like a job, like training yourself to write and putting yourself in the mode for months on end and always be open to songs coming in and give every idea its due and respect. You get in the zone of writing songs. And when you’re on the road it’s like every day that’s the show. I have great respect for the fans too. I don’t go onstage wasted, I try to make the sets different. I keep records of the setlists from different cities I’ve been in and make sure that it’s a different type of set cause I don’t want to repeat myself. You know, we have the utmost respect for the fans because without them we’d all dry up and blow away (laughs).

I’d like to talk about your latest CD. Is it really about your grief and the cycle of grieving and life and death?

It’s what to expect. That’s what it turned into at a certain point, I realized. You know when our father was ill, Cody was playing with his band Hill Country Revue, I was playing with the Black Crowes, and he was like, “I want to see you guys playing together. You’re stronger together than you ever will be apart”. And we promised him, “of course we’ll always play together”. And so when we joined together to make the record KEYS TO THE KINGDOM we definitely felt the power coming from ourselves and for him; we were definitely channeling our collective energy towards doing it for him.

I didn’t set out to write, I can never control the type of songs I write, and that’s worked to my favor or to my demise in the past. But songs just kept coming out and like I said, it was the most intense life I’ve ever had. Sometimes I would wake up in the morning and the whole song would just come out. Like “Ain’t No Grave”, definitely one of the more deeper songs on the record, the whole song just spilled out of me. But writing all the songs, it was really a joy. I mean, the whole thing is that there is a celebratory, joyful, side to the cycle of life, you know. And our father was so brave and he took it like a man. He was so brave all the way to the end, it was a beautiful thing. His last words that he wrote that he wanted read were, “I refuse to celebrate death; I won’t be gone as long as the music lingers”. And so we really tried to honor that. And he’s always with us when we play and everything we play so much of it stems from him and the experiences he gave us, that he exposed us to, we are a product of him and his environment and his friends. I don’t know, I’m just rambling (laughs).

One of my favorite tracks is “The Meeting” with Mavis Staples. She just sounds awesome on that one.

Yeah, she is the queen, man. That is an older song. We’ve recorded it a few times and never used it. I think it’s just the way things work. It was just waiting for the correct time. But this is a new arrangement of the song that I definitely based on like the Rev Robert Wilkins-type of sound. We recorded the song live, live vocals, and then I flew into Chicago and Mavis just killed it on the first take. Mavis is a queen, I mean, full of life and so amazing, so humble and so cool. Such a good example of how one should carry themselves. And to me she just represents so much of American history. She, through her father, they go all the way back, her father was friends with Charlie Patton, that’s the early Delta Blues. So you have the whole American music history there. And then the civil rights, she represents the civil rights. She’s just an American queen and I love her to death and such a beautiful family and she’s very dear to us.

With “Let It Roll”, you can just feel it down in your bones.

I wrote that song right after Dad passed. Once again, it just came to me in a rush, just the whole thing. My father didn’t want a funeral so we just had a very private ceremony. But I knew that myself, a lot of his friends, band mates, musicians, everyone was so devastated that I knew we needed to get together. I just felt the need for all of us to get together. I was going to do an acoustic gospel record, solo, and I had the thing booked and it turned out to be the day after my Dad’s ceremony. And it dawned on me right there at the ceremony. I was like, Dad did not want a funeral with all his friends but he loved recording sessions so I’ll invite everyone to the recording session. And that’s what I did and I had that record called LUTHER DICKINSON AND THE SONS OF MUDBOY: ONWARD AND UPWARD. A friend of mine was rolling the tape machine into the studio cause we recorded it straight to a two-track tape, which is my favorite way to roll, and we were literally rolling the machine in and I said, “Let it roll” as we were rolling the machine in and the song just came to me (laughs). And we recorded it that day, just by myself, and then re-recorded it with the band. And that record was nominated for a Traditional Folk Grammy.

How does it feel to be recognized by your peers when you’re just doing something that you love to do?

It really does make you feel good cause you’re right, it’s recognition by your peers and your industry and it makes you feel like alright, man. I make serious records and I know they mean a lot to me but if other people recognize it’s serious business, that definitely makes you feel good.

And it was recorded at The Zebra Ranch.

Oh, of course, definitely. I like other recording studios but especially for this project whenever we walk in there it feels like our father, a shrine to his aesthetic and his recording principles and the way he thought it should be and its definitely a wonderful place to work. I love it to death. If you go to our website [www.nmallstars.com], we have an EPK up that has a tour of the studio. It’s our YouTube channel but you can find it through our website.

I want to step back and talk about the HERNANDO album for a minute. It’s really rocking. But you never seem to do the same record twice. Was that your intention to just rip it up with that record?

Yeah, definitely. I was trying to make like a late sixties/early seventies classic rock record, just this loud party record, and it was a lot of fun. But it’s not where I was at at all at this point. I got that out of my system. I wanted these songs on KEYS TO THE KINGDOM, my criteria was that they all had to be able to distill down to an acoustic guitar. I wanted them all to appear ancient at the bare bones level.

I really picked up on that, especially on “The Hills” with the old-timey piano playing. Amazing sound.

Yeah, that’s Spooner Oldham. He’s had an amazing career, a great friend of my father’s, been playing with Drive-By-Truckers for a few years but he’s of our father’s generation and our Dad’s favorite piano player. Unfortunately, Dad could not play on the record so I called his friend, who was his favorite piano player, and Spooner just played beautifully of course.

What has it been like playing with the Black Crowes and what do you think about them going on hiatus? It does give you a chance to hit the road with the Allstars again.

It was a great experience. John Hiatt, Mavis Staples and Chris Robinson are great singers and are very seductive to me and I think Chris is a great singer and I always have. As a musician, I love to sing and it feels beautiful and it really gets me off, but as a musician backing up a really great singer takes music to an emotional level that it really should be at. And I love Rich’s music that he writes, the whole band, and it was so great to play in such a big band. You had two to three guitars, bass, great drums, keyboards, background vocals, it was really a gas.

On my first day when I first joined the group I went up to Woodstock to make the WARPAINT record and they totally put my amp right next to the drums and from that point on I saw how they operate and that’s a real rock & roll band making real records live in the studio. You work and you get a good take and that’s it. They don’t even let you fix a mistake, you know, and that’s a beautiful thing as well. It’s the way records are supposed to be made. It’s a great experience and I love watching them work. It was a good opportunity for me because the Allstars had been on the road for so many years that we needed to take a break and give the market a rest. I think that may be part of what they’re experiencing now. I couldn’t tell you the ins and outs of the hiatus but I know I had a great three years playing with them and I hope to do it again in the future.

Colonel Bruce Hampton gave you some very wise advice about playing live.

Yes, he gave me some great advice. First, he has these rules for his bandmates about how to conduct yourself on stage. But what he told me was, if you just concentrate on the music every night, it won’t be a problem; if there were ten people in the crowd or ten thousand people in the crowd, if you let that get to you, if you’re mad, frustrated it’s not a big crowd, intimidated or nervous by the size of the crowd, either side of the coin is just your ego fucking with you, your ego messing you up. You don’t have to block them out, but if you just concentrate and find your balance and your place in the music every night, then it won’t be a problem and you can handle every situation as they come. And that’s the best advice ever. It’s so professional. It relates to Dad’s advice to play every note like it’s your last. Every situation is as important as the next. The people that are there, they’re there on your side and you got to give them your best and that stems from engulfing yourself in the music every night.

So what goes on in Luther’s world before you go on stage?

I like brushing my teeth, washing my hands (laughs), trying to warm up a little bit. Like I said, we pretty much like to stay low-key till we get on stage.

Is there anybody that you haven’t played with or jammed with yet that you’d like to play with? Is there anybody left you haven’t played with? (laughs)

I’ve been thinking about that lately and its Billy Gibbons. He is the man. I’m such a huge fan. He is so amazing. He has taken the blues tradition all the way into the future in such a great, cosmically, inventive, graceful way and he just kicks ass. I would love to work with Billy Gibbons.

You were born into this sort of blues roots music and then you jumped into the harder rock with like Black Flag, and now you’re back again. Do you think you’ve come full circle?

I will always experiment. I’ve done a lot of off-the-wall crazy rock & roll. It’s all part of expression. I did grow up with rock & roll and blues and country and then when I was twelve I discovered Black Flag and for me I felt like it was my own music that I could relate to. By the time I was fourteen I got completely turned on to the blues so it’s just an up and down thing. I listen to music all the time. I love jazz, gospel, blues, country. The hardest thing for me to listen to is contemporary music cause even though I love the musicians and I love the music, I just can’t participate in the way modern records sound. With KEYS TO THE KINGDOM, I tried to make it sound as old-fashioned as possible. I do think it sounds like a recording from the late fifties and that’s what I wanted to do. I just like the way that those old recordings sound.

I hear that you have a really huge collection of music.

I have a wall full of vinyl at home (laughs). I love old vinyl records and I have a pretty bad itunes addiction. But I know people who are way more obsessive about hearing and owning everything. Me, I just like what I like.

Who are you liking now?

Some of the strangest music (laughs). You know, I love Alan Lomax’s work and his field recordings. The Georgia Sea Island Singers, Alan Lomax recorded this group in the fifties and sixties and seventies and that’s basically what I listen to (laughs). And a lot of old weird gospel music from the Smithsonian website. I think what I’m going to do is a cultural experience with a lot of vocals and a lot of percussion. I think I’m gearing up towards that.

Last question: As a major Bob Dylan fan myself, I am curious as to why you picked “Stuck Inside Of Mobile” out of the whole Bob Dylan oeuvre of music to put on this record?

That was my father’s idea. While he was in the hospital, there was a great Bob Dylan interview in MOJO Magazine and I was spending the night with him and I read that interview to him cause Bob had a lot of great insightful ideas and thoughts about the South and music. And you know, they were friends and it was a great escape for us to talk about that that night and we’ve always talked about art and music. A few hours later, I’d passed out and I woke up and Dad reached for his pad and paper and he wrote it down and passed it to me. It was his idea, and I don’t know if you can tell, but when you took all the chord changes out of that song, it made it sound like a Fred McDowell or Junior Kimbrough type of song. It was completely his idea.

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