Robben Ford is one of those artists who doesn’t like repeating himself. With every new project, each new album, he puts a new spin on his sound, his playing, his lyrical focus. It’s how most artists are; otherwise they end up with dozens of songs that sound exactly the same. And that is NOT what Robben Ford wants in his body of work.
With five Grammy nominations in his thirty-year career, for his late 2018 release, Purple House, Ford, “Was inspired to go past what would certainly happen on a traditional blues or R&B album, take more chances sonically, and open it up without losing the essence of soulfulness or live performance.” Featuring nine songs, Purple House has rockers and ballads, songs inflected with blues, soul and jazz. For connoisseurs of Ford, this is right up their alley.
Born and raised in California, Ford found his calling early, learning saxophone before moving to guitar in his early teens, local bands and eventually to playing for such musical greats as Miles Davis, Charlie Musselwhite and Joni Mitchell; he’s even recorded with KISS. His 2015 album, Into The Sun, featured ZZ Ward, Keb Mo and Warren Haynes; while past albums have featured such artists as Benmont Tench, Jeff Porcaro, Susan Tedeschi, Edgar Winter and Bernie Worrell. And Purple House includes the kick ass vocals of Bishop Gunn singer Travis McCready on the track “Somebody’s Fool.” “Travis has that real gravelly voice; he means it, he’s going to elicit some danger.”
So what does Robben Ford have up his sleeve next? I spoke with the guitarist last week about his future plans, Purple House, the blues, befriending technology and the secret to surviving Miles Davis.
I understand you are living in Nashville now. How long have you been there?
I’ve been here now a year and three months
So you’re still a newbie
Relatively speaking and especially because during a great deal of that first year I was here, I was traveling a lot so I wasn’t able to really fully settle down. That really just sort of began the beginning of this year, the ability to relax and do the things I came here for.
And what was that?
Well, I came here because I had been living in a lovely home in a beautiful valley in southern California for quite a while and it served me well for what I was doing at the time, which was on the road constantly. When I got off the road, I was happy just to be home and I wouldn’t really interact that much in a musical way, you know. So finally about three or four years ago, I really started feeling the need to have a musical community that supported the things that I wanted to do where I was living. By this time, my band lived in Nashville, my tour manager lived in Nashville, my management at the time lived in Nashville and whenever I would come here I would have just great experiences with people and really embraced by the musical community here big time. So I knew that I wanted to come here and finally just made the move.
Who made you want to become a guitar player?
My first instrument was a saxophone. I started playing when I was ten. At about age thirteen, there was a record in my local small town record store that was set out as sort of the featured record and nobody bought it. It sat there for ages and I was always fascinated by the record cover and it was a band called the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, this integrated blues band from Chicago. One day I just said, “I need to hear that,” so I saved my lunch money for a week and I bought the Paul Butterfield Blues Band record and it absolutely changed my life and I would say it gave me my direction in music. The guitar player was Mike Bloomfield, the lead guitar player, and I just resonated so much with the way he played, as did everybody. You know, Mike Bloomfield, he was the first real American guitar hero. Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix followed but Mike Bloomfield was the first. He just never reached the acclaim of Eric Clapton and Hendrix. He was a hugely influential guitar player in the sixties and I was one of his acolytes.
After you had that initial impact of hearing him play, what was your next step, where did that direct your focus?
Well, my father played guitar and sang. He had done it professionally as a very young man. He went into the service and met my mother while on leave and they got married and started having kids and went to work. So the professional music life was not in the cards for him. But he used to play and sing with us when we were kids so there was a guitar in the house and I picked it up and started fooling around on it. He showed me my first chords and I just kind of accelerated; I grew quickly with it. Some might say it came naturally. That rolled along pretty quickly and after hearing Mike Bloomfield, I just started copying the way he played, which again I was able to do relatively quickly. So in a couple of years I sounded a lot like Mike Bloomfield. I wasn’t Mike Bloomfield (laughs) but I sounded a lot like him.
What guitar were you first learning on?
The first guitar was a very hunky, hard to play acoustic guitar. I don’t even know that it had a name on it. Then my father got me my first electric for Christmas, and that also was very hard to play, but you just don’t care when you’re thirteen/fourteen years old. You don’t care that your fingers kind of blister and maybe even bleed a little bit (laughs). You don’t care, you just power through it. Then I borrowed a guitar from an older guy when I was invited to join their band. Finally I took out a loan and bought my first electric guitar that was a good guitar. It was a Guild Starfire III and at the time it was awesome. I played it maybe four years.
What did blues music have for you at that time that maybe other genres didn’t?
There was a much more emotional impact. You know, everything before that that I had been listening to was popular music and most of that was a lot of just boy-meets-girl, you know, people falling in love; the Beach Boys singing about when I grow up to be a man. And this [the blues] was music being played by men, with a very strong attitude. PLUS, they were really playing. You didn’t really hear, even with the British bands – they were okay and I enjoyed them, the Rolling Stones or the Kinks, the Hollies, all those wonderful bands of the sixties – but in this case, the playing was a lot more important. It wasn’t just supportive of a song, which all the records that I’d heard up to that time were all basically bands presenting songs and making records.
This, on the other hand, put the playing right up front. You HEARD what the drummer was doing or the guitar player was playing his ass off and playing A LOT and the lead singer was wailing and playing the harmonica, which was an unusual instrument at that time for most of us. You didn’t hear a lot of harmonica, especially being played like that, the way Paul Butterfield played and he was coming out of Chicago Blues. So their influences were Muddy Waters and Little Walter Jacobs and Howlin’ Wolf and Willie Dixon. These were like big, powerful blues forces. So it was just a whole other level. You know, the Rolling Stones never had that capacity to play like these people did. They always sounded just lighter, you know.
When you got to see those guys live – Albert King and BB King – that must have blown you away even more
It just took it to a whole other level, absolutely. BB King was absolutely a religious experience, and I don’t say that even with quotations around it. It was. It was a religious experience. I was fifteen and it was ridiculous, I’m telling you. BB was like forty years old and in his prime.
You’ve put out a lot of music. How does your latest album reflect who you are at this time in your musical life?
I appreciate that question, first of all, because it is something that is a product of growth. I’m proud of my body of work. I’ve never done two records that sounded alike. And for me, at this stage in my life and career, to make a record like the one I’ve done here with Purple House was very gratifying, to feel like I’m absolutely still creative and vital as a musician. Right now at this time, my attention is toward what happens in the recording studio. So this record I was far more involved with, from beginning to end, in terms of how it was recorded, how it sounds and where the emphasis was placed.
Generally, the emphasis, for me, has been placed on capturing a live performance, getting the instruments to sound like they sound. Like, I hired this guy who is playing THAT bass in THAT way because I liked the way it sounds and I want to hear exactly that. On this record, it was like, okay, let’s record the bass. We like it, good. Now what can we do with it? And that process was used for all of the instruments throughout the record. So the production values on this record, it was a big focus: how we can make it sound in the studio AFTER recording. And the way you record is actually a really important aspect of that. Like, if you record an instrument a couple of different ways, if you record it one way, how you process it and effect it and use it will be different if you recorded it a different way. If you cut a big amplifier in a large room, you’d have to work with it as such. If you cut it through a small amplifier in a small room, you work with it as such. And the outcomes will be different. So how you record an instrument is essential right from the very beginning and you’re thinking about that. It’s not like everything is post-recording. So beginning to end, this record was really thought through and chewed on.
Obsessed over?
I wouldn’t call it obsession. To me, it’s just the creative process. This wasn’t neurotic. This was creative. And the creative process takes time. I would call it obsession if you take a year to make your record. That’s obsession. This took about four months. That’s not obsessing at all. I mean, that’s the least amount of time I would like to spend on a record ideally and that’s because the creative process takes time. It does, it takes time. Shit doesn’t happen instantly. You have to say, okay, now how does that feel up against that now that we’ve added that? And maybe we take that out? We would cut a track, I’d go in and listen and maybe we’d sit on it for a few days, listen a little more and listen a little more.
One particular song, “Empty-Handed,” we cut with the full band and at a certain point I’m unsatisfied and I’m listening to it and I just said, “Take out my guitar.” So we took out my guitar. Then it was like, “Take out the other guitar,” which was also an electric guitar. Then I’m like, I’m going to play an acoustic so I went out and played the part on the acoustic guitar. Went back in to listen and then was like, “Take out the drums, man, I can’t hear the fucking lyrics.” (laughs) So the drums are gone and then we wound up using them just a tiny bit. They take up about 2% of the sound spectrum, just really small. And the whole song came to life. It was like all those instruments were just crushing the lyrics and you couldn’t really find the feeling of the song – is it a rhythm & blues song? Is it a ballad? Are we going to have a guitar solo on it? No, no guitar solo! That would kill the song (laughs). So it was all about the song and that takes time and that’s the beauty of it: you have to have the time to go through that process.
So I’m assuming technology has been your friend
Well, it’s become my friend
What were you hesitant about?
Well, it doesn’t sound as good as tape. I mean, that was the technology of the time. It was just analog, it was tubes and it was tape. And it certainly was my friend, I loved it. Recording music was a wonderful thing. When Pro Tools came along and CDs and digital music, it was like, oh my God, you have to be kidding me! (laughs) So I fought it, or struggled with it, I should say, and eventually I became okay with Pro Tools and I saw the merits of it. But here again, on this new record, we just embraced it, took as much advantage of what was at our fingertips as we could, because it has continued to sound better, sound better and sound better. They are always improving digital technology. So I’ve gotten past hating it to at least embracing it. I may not love it but boy is it convenient (laughs).
I want to ask you about a couple of the new songs and I want to start with “Cotton Candy”
Basically, the record was recorded and one of the pieces that we had recorded was really just a rhythm track and I had tried writing a lyric for it. Michael McDonald took a crack at writing a lyric for it. Beth Nielsen Chapman took a crack at writing a lyric for it. And none of it was really working for me so I gave up and I had to write something. So it was written out of need. We needed another song. So I went back to the drawing board, which is my couch and my coffee table and acoustic guitar, actually an electric guitar in that case, and I just started playing the guitar, found a riff that I thought was kind of cool and just kind of ran with a quick inspiration, which was cotton candy, a phrase I liked. I had actually used those two words in a song I had written years ago that no one ever heard. So I knew I was safe (laughs).
But it’s not really personal, just sort of something that most men have been through. It’s kind of like that spike at the end of the song, the last verse, “You know the story, fellas, you’ve been there before; you know the story, girls know how to find the door” (laughs). So it wasn’t exactly personal but again, everyone has gone through it, every man has gone through that scenario, where you think something good is going to happen with this person you meet at a bar and then they split. So it was easy to write. The imagery was very easy. It wound up being a lot of fun and boy it changed radically from the way it was cut. I would say the only thing that remained the same was the drums; everything else was redone. Again, taking our time, and if we weren’t happy with it, “Is this salvageable? Should we just forget about it? Let’s see what we can do.” So we start trying things and suddenly it’s coming to life.
On “Somebody’s Fool,” you use a different singer
That song was inspired initially by a gentleman, I can’t remember if it was the management for the Thunderbirds or their agent. Somebody called and asked if I would be interested in writing something for the Thunderbirds, who were going to be recording. This was a little while ago, that song is a couple years old actually, but had never been recorded. So I wrote that initially thinking of the Thunderbirds and then I wound up not passing that along because I didn’t think they would like it and I also thought, maybe I should keep it. It was a little bit of both.
So that was the genesis of that song. We cut it and I was singing it and I know myself as a vocalist, I know what my strengths and weaknesses are, and in order to cut the song the way we wanted to, which is what you hear with a very aggressive, slamming performance from the band, I just really felt to do the song justice I’d like to have somebody else sing it. The guys from Bishop Gunn, they’re from Natchez and they live here in Nashville now, but my co-producer Casey Wasner had produced some of their recordings and was friends with them and I had met them and I said, “What about Travis McCready? Let’s get Travis to sing it.” So Travis came in and sang it.
As a footnote to that, I also really like their guitar player, not only as a person but he’s a really good guitar player and his name is Drew Smithers. Whenever I meet young talent, I like to help it along, cause I know what it’s like. So I invited him to come in and play on the record and he takes the guitar solo on the last song, “Willing To Wait.”
I want to go back into the past a little bit. You cover “I Got Over It” on Talk To Your Daughter [1988]. Whereas Guitar Slim’s version is more a slinky kind of blues, yours is all boogie woogie. What gave you the idea to change it in that direction?
I always put songs through a process – try it faster, try it slower – cause you want to do something different. It’s one of those salient aspects to covering something that you love. It’s done by the man himself, Guitar Slim, and it would be foolish to try to duplicate it or copy it. So I take something like that and I think, okay, how could I do this song so that it makes sense for me. And that’s always the way an artist should approach someone else’s material. You’re not that person so don’t just copy it, don’t do it just like the record because you’re just making a big mistake. You should personalize it. And I think it turned out great.
On “Moonchild Blues,” in terms of the guitar, it has minimal notes but it contains a lot of emotion.
For me, it’s basically Robben Ford doing BB King. I wasn’t trying to sound like BB King but it’s just the inspiration, all of what I learned listening to BB King. It’s like I get an opportunity to express myself in that way. Like, the song exists in order to do that (laughs). I gave myself an opportunity to express myself in THAT way so it’s a combination of those things. Yes, it’s very inspired by BB King and at the same time, it’s an original song that I wrote that is slightly like “The Thrill Is Gone.” So all of it is there but it’s NOT “The Thrill Is Gone.”
What guitar were you playing on that song?
It was the Robben Ford Model made by Fender at that time. It was called the Fender Ultra Esprit and it was designed for me by Fender. It was kind of the Robben Ford Signature Model.
What is your primary guitar right now?
For the last few years I’ve played primarily a 1960 Telecaster, vintage Les Pauls and vintage SGs. It’s been a bit of musical chairs with the guitars these days. I want to settle down with one instrument so the instruments keep passing through my hands, like buy, trade, sell, and I’m still looking for that holy grail for me. Right now, I have a couple of instruments I’m experimenting with so it’s hard to say. I can’t really say one guitar.
With as many compositions as you’ve created, has there been any that you couldn’t transfer to the live stage?
There is a lot of my music that I haven’t played live because it would be missing horns or it would be missing the background vocals or it might just be too much for me to sing and play at the same time. So there is a fair amount of music like that that I haven’t played. Right now, from the Purple House record, we’re playing three songs. It’s just not easy to pull off things like “Willing To Wait” or “Empty-Handed.” It’s difficult, like for me, I take two guitars because I can’t really carry any more than that. I mean, if we could carry more instruments, we could pull these things off. I just don’t have that luxury.
Just from reading about Miles Davis, I don’t know how you got onstage and played with him. You must have had a lot of balls to do that.
(laughs) What you’re saying makes a lot of sense because he was very intimidating. But the thing with Miles was you had to get past it because he wasn’t really mean. He just came off with this hard ass thing and if you could sort of stand it, stand the heat, and in fact deliver a little back to him, he would laugh. That’s kind of what he always looked for from people. He would just sort of push your buttons to see what you would do. Then he would begin to respect you (laughs).
Tell us about Jimmy Witherspoon. You made a record with him early in your career [Jimmy Witherspoon & Robben Ford Live, 1976]
It was an incredible learning experience, certainly something I hadn’t been expecting, and I was a big Jimmy Witherspoon fan. Even though I didn’t have but one record of his, I wore the record out. If anybody would have asked me, I would have said he was my favorite blues singer when I was in my teens. I was twenty when I got the opportunity to play with him. He played a club up in northern California where my group was sort of the house band at this place and he came in with only a guitar player. We opened for him at my request to the club owner. I said, “Can I open for Spoon?” and he said, “Of course.” Spoon asked us to back him for his set. We did that for two nights, cause again, all he had was a guitar player. It was strange that he showed up with just a guitar player but he was going up to the El Matador in San Francisco the following week and he said, “I want you to come and play the El Matador with me and then move to LA and be my band.” That’s how that began. He was incredibly supportive and he was always pointing to me, you know, spotlighting me like all night long. He loved the way I played and was incredibly complimentary and, as I say, he would just keep the spotlight on me as much as on himself. He was incredibly generous that way. So I had the privilege of playing for him for a couple of years.
What is your main goal for this year?
As I was saying at the very beginning, I came to Nashville because I want to work in Nashville. Like producing records, it’s really how I want to be spending my time. I think, more than any other aspect of my musical career, producing would be front burner. So that is what is going on. I have my own small label, which we haven’t really put it out there in the public eye yet but will be soon with the release of a guitarist based in New York named Jeff McErlain. It’ll be my second release on my label, which is called 13J Records.
Where did you find him?
Jeff does a lot of guitar instruction. He lives in Brooklyn and he and I both do quite a lot in the realm of producing instructional materials for guitarists through a company called TrueFire, which is probably the largest and most successful company in the realm of guitar instructional materials. Jeff was a fan of mine and knowing that I was coming into TrueFire and them knowing Jeff as a great resource, they agreed for Jeff to come in and help out with my first DVD with them and we became friends. Since then, I’ve done a guitar camp for the last five years in the Catskills and Jeff has been one of my instructors and he’s been on the road with me as a second guitar and I said, “Do you want to do a record for my company?” and he said yeah.
So we’ll kind of raise the curtain on that in the middle of the month through social media and have the record available on a variety of platforms. I’m excited about that so it’s important for me to stay here in Nashville, to work in Nashville – producing, recording, writing, teaching, all those things that you can do if you stay in one place. So touring, I am bringing to a minimum and only doing things that I really want to do and that are truly rewarding.
