BLUES BROTHERS
Sstephen Stills & Kenny Wayne shepherd
One hour east of Los Angeles, splayed out in the dusty foothills of California’s arid Inland Empire, sits the city of Riverside, a modest burgh of just over a quarter of a million. Though the sun generously pours warm golden rays down the main drag, the only sign of life is a noisy stream of gaily attired guests filing into a downtown hotel for a wedding reception. One block over, the marquee above the Fox Performing Arts Center announces tonight’s entertainment – The Rides, the blues-rock supergroup formed by Stephen Stills, Kenny Wayne Shepherd and keyboardist Barry Goldberg. Their 2013 debut, Can’t Get Enough, clawed its way into Billboard’s Top 40 behind a pounding fusion of 70s hard rock and smouldering electric blues.
Tonight’s show marks the final date in support of their sophomore effort, 2016’s Pierced Arrow, which saw The Rides (also featuring Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame drummer Chris Layton on tour), expand their compositional outlook to include lush vocal harmonies, jazzy dynamics and more exhilarating fretboard interplay between Stills and Shepherd. Bare-knuckled belters like opener Kick Out To It and the Willie Dixon cover of My Babe vibrantly summon the band’s classic blues pedigree, while the acid-tipped barbs of Mr Policeman and Virtual World loudly recall Stills’ fiery counter-culturalism of the 60s.
In the back of the hotel’s barren restaurant, we find the two iconic axemen encamped at a table, where Stills regales us with tales of his good friend and guitar teacher, James Marshall Hendrix. “Put up your hand,” he barks. Seeing that Stills has lost none of the intensity that fuelled his mercurial ascent into rock history in bands such as Buffalo Springfield, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and Manassas, we hastily comply and he measures approximately two inches past our fingertips. “OK, his hand was this much bigger. He had hands like a basketball player. He was really strong and fluid and he’d been doing it all his life. But he was very patient – he showed me a whole bunch of stuff.”
For a man “whose age begins with a ‘seven’,” as Stills notes, he seethes with pure energy, laughing easily and loudly and rarely passing up an opportunity to take the piss. “Hendrix drew a rather large entourage,” he continues, “which explains some of the muddled guitar playing in the later albums. But in the first album, it was just knock ’em dead, first and second takes. Chas [Chandler, producer of Are You Experienced?] knew what he was doing. I think Glyn Johns would have probably got a better sound, though. All respect, Eddie [Kramer, engineer]!”
Calm, easy going and arrestingly sincere, Kenny Wayne Shepherd cuts a sharp contrast to Stills’ room-filling personality, exuding a genial Southern charm that belies his own hyperbolic success. Before he was old enough to legally buy a can of beer, the 39-year-old Louisiana-bred prodigy had raided the Top 10 seven times, eventually releasing one of the longest-running blues albums in Billboard history with 1997’s Trouble Is… All told, he’s scored seven No 1 blues albums, five Grammy Award nominations, countless awards and a slew of No 1 rock singles. Though decades and styles separate the two musicians, an uncommonly deep rapport suggests something deeper, rooted in a shared reverence for men such as Muddy Waters and BB King, as well as an unslakeable thirst for exploring the untapped possibilities of a beat-up guitar and a vintage amp.
Stills formed The Rides in 2013 as a vehicle for celebrating the blues with men who could push his playing into provocative, uncharted realms. Explaining the band’s origins, Stills says, “[My manager] Elliot Roberts had a mouse race in his office. I wanted to make a blues album, so we put guitar players’ names on the backs of little mice, put them in a box and the first one that found the hole…”
“Was the Kenny Wayne Shepherd mouse?” asks Shepherd, as the two roar with laughter. This will happen often over the course of the next hour, with Stills serving up one preposterous answer after another, Kenny completing the thought
and both men laughing. Stills continues, “I’d been craving a pared-down, simplified blues band forever. I was on the road and Elliot called me and said, ‘Well, I’ve found a great guy and he really wants to do it. His name is Kenny Wayne Shepherd.’ In my best imitation of an owl, I said, ‘Who?’ No offence,” he deadpans as Kenny waves him off. “I was in a casino and I open the curtains behind me and in the parking lot is an eight-storey marquee that read, ‘This Weekend: Kenny Wayne Shepherd’. And I turned and said, ‘Oh yeah, that’ll be fine.’ [Laughs] And then I started really looking into his work and saw he was a perfect fit.”
In For The Ride
Shepherd saw The Rides as an opportunity to play beside some of classic rock’s living legends, but also to push his playing beyond his comfort zone. “Because of Stephen’s background and my background and Barry’s background, I knew it would be interesting and that it would be very different from what I usually do. And we’ve got Chris Layton on drums! These are the types of people I like to surround myself with so I can continually improve my playing. And I feel like I inspire things in them, too. I think I bring a sort of young energy to the band and you can see that in those guys.”
No conversation with bluesmen lingers too long before influences come into play, and the two men piously worship at the altar of Chicago and Delta blues, not to mention a self-taught approach to the instrument that has invested their voice with such palpable vitality, each man infusing his stylings with lustrous streaks of jazz, Latin, folk and hard rock. Stills’ sixstring odyssey began with men such as Doc Watson, Elmore James, Chuck Berry and The Shadows’ Hank Marvin. Few titillated the young Stills, however, more than Chet Atkins. “[He] came through on a demo in-store tutorial in Tampa, Florida, and my buddies were all raving about Gretsches and so I went and saw it. I was just at that age when I was becoming a sponge and that experience still affects my playing. Only he could actually read and write music. I went all the way through high-school bands and to the podium, faking it [laughs].”
Shepherd also confesses, “I took a guitar class and I did the same thing. I couldn’t read music, so I’d sound it out and play it by memory and I’d set the music up on the stand and totally fake it.”
Shepherd cites his influences to underscore that while learning scales and techniques are non-negotiables for any developing guitarist, it always comes down to feeling. “Albert King played a lot of the same licks a lot of the time, but he did it so extremely well and with such passion that it doesn’t matter how many times I hear him play those very same licks, I feel it every single time and it moves me. Some people say, ‘Well, he doesn’t know this scale or he’s never played that scale,’ but he’s still one of the greatest ever. He just did what he did.”
Asked to describe his development from rhythm to lead guitar, Stills says, “Playing
lead came hard, because I’m not as adept. I actually found out from having my fingers tested that I don’t have a lot of response in the left hand, so there’s a couple of key things to play in lead guitar that I just can’t do, even 40 years later. But that’s why I always get somebody better to steal from [jerks a thumb at Shepherd]! And sure enough, I’ve got four or five licks now that I’ve just snatched from him for my repertoire. The switch was hard on Neil [Young], because I was trying to play lead and I’d interrupt. Actually, we fell in love with that and we started this business of just playing right over the top of each other. We’d watch each other’s hands and we’d start chording. For all his moodiness, Neil on the stage is really generous.”
Speaking of Neil, we ask about some of the alternate tunings that Stills has used throughout the years – particularly his EEEEBE tuning on Suite: Judy Blue Eyes. “That was us trying to be Ravi Shankar,” Stills says in a jokey cockney accent. “We invented that around Monterey. Bruce Palmer, the bass player in Buffalo Springfield, showed that to me and we found that we could do all kinds of things with it. Particularly if it was lower, you’d get a richer sound. I’ve always liked having the guitars tuned down a little bit anyway.”
Both Shepherd and Stills play Buffalo Springfield’s Bluebird in drop D and for Shepherd’s Blue On Black, he uses a hybrid. “We do Blue On Black in G for my voice,” he explains, “I have this half-open G thing where the first three strings are in open G tuning and the last three strings are in standard tuning. That’s the most effective way to play that song in G.”
Turning to techniques, we ask what makes a truly proficient rhythm player. Stills interjects before the question ends: “Not rushing. And being spare. When you play acoustic guitar or folk music, you go [strums in a continuous rhythm], but that doesn’t work in rock bands.”
Shepherd adds, “I stay really attuned to what the drummer’s doing. That just dictates it. And when I write rhythm parts, I do so with a drum beat in mind. It almost lays out the guitar part for me. But really it’s about finding where you fit in, and making it interesting, and not conflicting with somebody else. There’s a lot involved.”
One of the more unique aspects of The Ride’s live show is the two guitarists’ dramatically different approach to soloing. “I’ve noticed that Stephen’s solos are different every night,” Shepherd explains. “Like, drastically different. There are certain parts of the solo I can tell he really likes, so he throws those in there, but he’s always searching for something different and something new in his solos.”
“Well that’s just plain brain farts,” Stills interjects with a guffaw.
Rock For The Soul
“I try to do the same thing,” Shepherd adds, “but I really like to refine the part that I’ve crafted in the first place and get it down pat. Then, once I’m satisfied with that, I’ll start to really change it up.”
Having jammed with pretty much the entire classic rock pantheon at one time or another, Stills knows a thing or two about the dos and don’ts of jam sessions. “Less is more,” he says. “And listen. Tacit is a really good part to play – take your hands off the instrument and wait for a good idea to occur to you. Or just play without any music to it. Play with the drummer. Get out of the way.”
Soundcheck beckons and so we ask one final question: having summited some of music’s tallest peaks, what goals remain? Stills adopts a faux-serious tone and says, “Apparently, we have to change gender, hair colour, dress in spangles and get lights and the loudest, deafening sound that we can make because our simple little brand of rock ’n’ roll apparently is dead [laughs].”
Earnestly, Kenny interjects, “We make authentic rock ’n’ roll and blues music. We’re just trying to remind people that music is still relevant because it is – it speaks to the soul.”
Stephen continues, “And it makes you feel good. That’s what this thing is all about.”
As the two men leave, Stills puts a hand on Shepherd’s shoulder and begins discussing tonight’s show, still four hours away. The show is sold out, but as they chat excitedly on the way out, it’s hard to conceive that there will be anybody there tonight who will be more excited than these two.
“It’s about finding where you fit in, and making it interesting, and not conflicting with somebody else. There’s a lot involved”