THE SOUL OF JOHN BLACK Source: Blues Wax - Part 2 Date: 12/2009 Writer: Don Wilcox

Sittin' In With The Soul of John Black Part 2
"Don't call him one-dimensional, but he does like to party!"

John Black's latest album is The Soul of Black John on Eclecto Groove Records. He spent time with Miles Davis back in the '80s when Miles was looking to tap into the rhythms of a young African American who had the pulse of the new generation. Never mind that Black's rhythms at the time were electronic, and he didn't know the first thing about playing drums. In the first part of our interview, Black said of Miles: "If you wanna play in the band, you have to be bold enough to step up and do your thing. That's what he's looking for." Obviously, Black gave the jazz master something he liked. "Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He was a good friend to me, really."

Black's resume also includes eight years with Fishbone on guitar and keyboards, a 2007 solo album called The Good Girl Blues on Yellow Dog Records and this current CD which features a series of seemingly interchangeable players whose credentials include work with everyone from The Black Crowes to Sheryl Crow. Black does not see himself as being inside a box with the name Blues on it. "You know what? I think I just snuck in the door that was open, you know? Snuck in the back door that was open really 'cause that's who was looking for me."

Don Wilcock for BluesWax: How do you look at your style because you do take from so many different places, and yet you are so consistent.

John Black: I just do what the song is asking or what I feel the song needs, and I really don't analyze it while I'm doing it. I actually finish it first and then look back and see what kind of a song is this. But while I'm doing it, I'm just putting it together, and I'm not thinking about (whether) this song goes with this other song, whatever. I make out a set early in the game of what songs I think are gonna work as a record, and then I go through the process of finishing each one and putting whatever I think would go on there. And that's it. I just do it. It just comes natural to me to do it that way and just the fact that it sounds unique to anybody else? That's something that I don't ever know. It's just me doing stuff the way I do it. I don't even know that it's different from my angle.

BW: What you need is somebody to put a title on what you do because you could have your own genre.

JB: Yeah, I've tried to put a couple of titles on it. I think I was callin' it rock 'n soul, and then I was calling it country funk, country soul, but cheez.

BW: Your attitude is not country. Your sound is laid back, but your attitude is very urban.

JB: Yeah, that's interesting because if I step into the urban world, they would immediately single me out and say, "Dude, are you rock or something?" You know what I mean? I can't fit in that camp. I can walk in that camp. "Okay, how ya doin? You know I really love Velvet Underground." And like what? "What the hell is Velvet Underground?"

BW: You told one critic you had an epiphany with Kiss's "Detroit City Blues," and I'm going, "What the heck?"

JB: No, no, no. That's all a misunderstanding. What happened is he was saying he had an epiphany with "Detroit City Blues" and what was my epiphany?

BW: Oh, it didn't come out that way in print.

JB: Yeah, yeah. I read that because later if you look now, I think I said Iggy Pop.

BW: Yes, you did, and you got very abrupt with him, too, and I'm thinking, "Oh, no. If I piss him off, this guy is gonna cut me off.

JB: That's so funny because you know that that was? They sent me a bunch of questions, and I just sat there and answered them. So, it wasn't like I was taking to somebody. So, it looks like...

BW: Oh, I looked at you the wrong way, man.

JB: They look terrible. I saw that, and I'm like, "Damn, man. I look like I'm a (total) asshole. It was whatever he asked, I was like, "Yeah, yes, no, whatever," but that was like me sitting down like after doing I don't know how many of those things and just like, "Okay, here's your answer. I don't have an answer and da-da-da-da," and just sent it back to them, and if I would have thought about it a couple more minutes I probably would have. It would have got a little bit more detailed answers.

BW: You did a really nice interview with Downbeat, and you talk about getting the lyric and the music simple, and I think that's one of the big secrets of great music. Like in writing it was Hemmingway. Hemmingway was able to say a lot in very few words. How early in your career did you learn that lesson? That seems to come late in life to a lot of musicians.

JB: Well, I think I'm still learning that lesson. I think the first (artist) that inspired me lyrically as far as how to write songs (was) Sting. And I thought Sting was the perfect example of talking about a lot of complicated things without getting real worried. I think he just melted for me, and I just took that thing from him and also just reading a lot of classic books. I was just talkin' about this the other day. You read this stuff in high school. I mean you're basically making it through. For most of us, it's just, "Oh, yeah, whatever, man." Who did what, and I gotta know these facts so I can pass the test.

So I'm rereading a lot of books we probably all read in high school like a lot of Faulkner stuff. I just read The Sound and The Fury, and I don't know if I really would have understood that in high school. Or right now, I'm reading The Great Gatsby, and I've read a couple of stories before I read this book, but I had never really remembered reading F. Scott Fitzgerald. Once I started reading, I was like, "You know what? I think I understand why this guy was so popular," and they say he was popular with the Saturday Evening Post. He was more popular with that than he was with the books, and I think what it is is (that) it's a smooth read. When you read it, the words just fly by. You're ten pages into something before you realize you've read that life, and it's just because of the ease of the way they write it. It's very disruptive but very simple. Everything they say you can pretty much pull up in your imagination.

"I'm Dr. Jekyll, but Mr. Hyde comes out
and says all these crazy little things
 in the music and has a lot more swagger."

BW: Now have you ever gone back to music you listened to when you were in high school and have the same reaction now that you're several decades out? Or are you able to listen to it in a different way?

JB: Oh, yeah. I was kind of the strange guy in high school, too, 'cause my favorites were Jeff Beck, John McLaughlin and John Scofield, a lot of fusion-type stuff, heavy guitar and all that kind of stuff. And when I go back and listen to some of the more intricate guitar stuff, I can listen to and go, "Oh, wow, this is very boring. [chuckle] It's very boring. I understand it's this high technique but very boring." But then some of the other stuff, even some of the Hendrix stuff? I mean I never stopped listening to the Hendrix stuff. That goes on and on and on, but, yeah, I listen to some of the early stuff I used to listen to. I still enjoy it, or I can't believe they ever spent like days and days listening to the same record.

It's hard for me to conceive that I spent so much time listening to this music that I don't ever listen to now, but I still love it. I still get thrilled on it. I get a kick out of some of it. I would spend most of the time in a cover band. So, I was playin' all the time. So, I don't remember a lot of stuff I listened to. I probably listened to more music before I got into high school. Once I got into high school, there was a lot of stuff going on.

BW: In your bio they talk about you're playing in some place called Café Boogaloo. How long ago was that?

JB: Oh, that was just the last year. All last year pretty much. I think it was all last year. Maybe a little bit before, but yeah, actually before that because that's where I got connected to Eclecto Groove. So I was playing Café Boogaloo in about 2008, but 2007 became friends with the owner at the time, Steve Roberts, and that was my first real Blues club and (that was) when I realized, "Okay, these people want to party."

BW: Are they in a different head than the kind of people you play for now that you've got this album out on Eclecto Groove?

JB: That's exactly who I'm playing for. They want to have the party Blues. Maybe I'm wrong, but when I was playing there, it was like, "Hey, man, when are you gonna play songs we can dance to?" And it's like that. In all of these pop clubs, they wanna hear the shuffle. They want to get into that stuff. It's kinda one-dimensional. I hate to say that, but it is. If you shuffle all night, it's gonna be good all night long, but I don't think you could sit down and play some old country Blues unless they knew beforehand that that was what you were gonna do, and that's what they've come to see on a Saturday night, but really that's not what they wanna see. That's what I get, and if I was a super star like Keb Mo or something? Okay, Keb Mo is gonna have a glass of wine, but it hasn't got to that point yet.

BW: So, are you working on your next album?

JB: Yeah, yeah, definitely working on the next album. I got my potential ten songs that I'm just rolling around and seeing how they work, the set list. I kinda do a set list like I was performing it live, and I'm just rolling around. I don't know. There's more Chris Thomas songs for sure. He wrote a few songs that are kinda more from a Euro-soul flavor. He spent time in France or now in Italy. I'm sorry. He just wrote a couple of songs, and I just held onto them. As time went by I listened to 'em more and more, and I was like, "Wow, these songs are really interesting," and it's got pretty full arrangements like strings and horns and stuff like that. So, horns as in oboes and stuff like that.

BW: Oboes?

JB: Yeah.

BW: Okay, I can't wait to hear it.

JB: Yeah, no sax or trumpet. It's just kinda more intense arrangements. I'm actually trying to figure how to play some of the stuff on guitar because usually what I do is take what he's done and try and dumb it down a little bit for my own ease of playing guitar. So, I'm working on that stuff now and I'm diggin' it, but at the same time I'm still trying to perfect playing the record that's out right now. I'm still trying to perfect those songs as far as being able to play them live with the band or by myself. I have some ideas that I haven't been able to really get deep into. I've done maybe a few shows by myself, and they've gone well, but that's my problem. Everybody wants to hear a band, and so it's really kind of put me off a little bit.

BW: I can understand that. I'll ask you one last question and then I'll let you go. It's been fun talking to you today. You took your name from a 1976 film called J. D.'s Revenge.

JB: Yeah, yeah.

BW: Tell me a little bit about that. Who's the Soul of John Black in the film? Where does that come from?

JB: That's Glynn Turman. He's a medical student/intern, and that really has nothing to do with the story, but he's like a clean cut guy living I think in New Orleans or somewhere in Louisiana and it's kinda one of those things. Glynn Turman finds something that used to belong to this guy who was a gangster, and then all of a sudden the guy's spirit comes into Glynn Turman. So he turns from being like a really nice guy, and he's got a beautiful girlfriend. I forgot the lady's name, but you would know. (Joan Pringle) She was a TV star. (on NBC's Generations)  So he's treatin' her all nice, and then when this character takes over, he turns into like a pimp and carries a razor and makes mad love to his girl. You know that movie Face Off? Have you seen Face Off  with John Travolta and Nicholas Cage.

BW: No.

JB: The one guy's a nice guy, and the one guy's a bad guy, and they change bodies or something. So the bad guy is in the body of the nice guy, and he used to live with the family, and the family is all nice. He turns a little bit nice, but he also realizes that this guy's wife hasn't had any good sex, you what I mean? So, he decides he's gonna show her how it's done, and he has a delinquent daughter, and he helps the delinquent daughter out by just tellin' her she shouldn't smoke so much and stops being an asshole and all this stuff. It's kind of one of those things. This guy becomes a different person.

BW: I was watching Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde last night, the 1932 version with Frederick March, and that was kind of the same thing.

JB: Yeah, I watched that a few years ago, myself. Yeah. It's that same thing, and so because the thing is I used to try and sing a little bit, but I had a problem with my jaw hurting and so I kinda just ditched that whole idea and then after playing in Fishbone for a year I was writing songs. I wanted to get my songs out there, and the only way I felt like I could do it is to sing 'em myself, and I just kept going. Then I decided, "Well, shit, I think I'm writing something I feel comfortable singing." And this was like a new side of me and so I felt like it was something that I had no idea about when I was younger. I could've just come out here and done this shit. I had no idea I could've just wrote my own songs and came out and didn't have to worry about auditioning for anybody's band. I had no idea. So, this is all new to me, and it's like a character I didn't even know was in me. So, The Soul of John Black has taken over.

BW: So, are you Jekyll, or are you Hyde?

JB: Who's the good guy?

BW: You're Dr. Jekyll.

JB: I'm Dr. Jekyll, but Mr. Hyde comes out and says all these crazy little things in the music and has a lot more swagger.