Walter Trout
Walter Trout has been nothing short of prolific over the course of his seven decades on this Earth. He just released his 30th solo album over a career that has spanned the globe, and delivered notoriety as one of the great purveyors of the blues and blues rock. Trout's history is equal parts thriller, romance, suspense and horror. There are musical fireworks, critical acclaim and fists-aloft triumph, offset by wilderness years, brushes with the jaws of narcotic oblivion, and the survival of an organ transplant few come back from. From 1973, when he left his New Jersey home headed to Los Angeles, he has followed a road that afforded him an opportunity to just play, sharing the stage as a sideman with Jesse Ed Davis, Big Mama Thornton, John Lee Hooker, Lowell Fulson, Joe Tex, and of course the great John Mayall (following a four year tenure in Canned Heat).
Even now, some will point to Trout’s mid-’80s guitar pyrotechnics in the lineup of John Mayall’s legendary Bluesbreakers as his career high point. But for a far greater majority of fans, the blood, heart and soul of his solo career since 1989 is the main event, the bluesman’s songcraft always reaching for some greater truth, forever surging forward, never shrinking back.
