Netherlands.
Twenty-two years ago he surprised -fresh from the wet Louisiana swamps - the world with a new type of sturdy girl. Polk Salad Annie had such a wild look in her eyes that she could tame alligators that were on the look-out, and at the same time she made singer, guitarist and songwriter Tony Joe White world famous. After a lot of albums and hits the gators are now an endangered animal species since they saw their swamps change into four-lane highways.
Gators and women are still a hot issue, despite the fact that the greying sexy bush-ranger has been living for years, happily married to his Lee Ann in Franklin, in Tennessee, a quite place in the countryside between Memphis and Nashville. Soon (December 8) he will be in Paradiso with his band, returning from never really gone, he is according to himself Closer To The Truth with his first album in eight years.
The first thing that catches my eye in the hotel room is the tobacco pouch. On the table lies a pouch of Drum. White - unshaved, jeans, Texan boots and a dark blue shirt - enters after a minute from the glazed veranda. He seems to have walked away from the set of the publicity for the tobacco. A man who rolls home. "When I was fifteen, I often accompanied cowboys and they would roll their own cigarettes, with tobacco that they would get from a jute pouch. Prince Albert's Roll Your Own. This comes very close to it. Normally I don't really care much for tobacco, but this smells damn good!"
Along with his own culture he also discovers the blues in '59. "My five brothers and sisters made music. In the cotton fields I heard the black boys, plodding alongside of us, sing the blues of the delta. That created a sensation like a knife sliding through my soul. I first was mad about baseball, but when someone brought an album of Lightnin' Hopkins, I was lost. What that man could get out of his throat and of his guitar! Baseball was history. Playing the guitar and the blues had a spell on me. For this reason I was as proud as a Peacock when I could play along with Hopkins in Los Angeles some seven years ago on his album Los Angeles Mudslide, one of his last albums before his death."
What a hazzle
Tony Joe White's one but latest album, Dangerous, dates from '83. Why did it take this long before he made himself heard again? "I did not have a contract with any record company. I was sick to death with all the commercial hazzle. What really made me sick were these people who wanted to add violins, coppers or background-vocals. And I was fed up with the fact that I could not control this myself, because when you write your own songs you really do know how they should sound. I listen to my demo's, which I recorded on the eight track recorder in the shed at the back of my house, for weeks and when I enter a studio I know exactly what I want to be recorded. These past years I have mostly performed solo in blues clubs. But I did continue to write songs and I've worked with other artists in studio's. I wrote songs for Tina Turner, Joe Cocker and Ruth Pointer, one of the Pointer Sisters who wanted to make a comeback. Tina is a terrific colleague for me. She sung Steamy Windows as if she had written it herself, she sensed precisely what I had intended with the song and recorded it precisely that way with four musicians, it sounded exactly like the demo made seven years earlier. If you don't play it the same way as you did at your place I'm going to beat you to pieces! She cried. You mustn't change anything!
"Songs come to my head in bits and pieces. I never sit down to write, I wait until they come into my mind. A word, a title, a guitar lick. My wife and I also write songs together. Sometimes a sentence that she phrased lingers for three years in our minds and then suddenly, at our campfire sessions in the woods, a story builds itself around it. This happened to Undercover Agent For The Blues. That song really impressed Tina. She heard it at my place. I believe Mark Knopfler played along on the demo as I gave several of my songs to him. We are close friends. He often visits me when he is around. He once gave me a very rare guitar, made by a guitar builder from Leeds. There are only nine of these guitars worldwide. And with this guitar I wanted to play Cool Town Woman in an acoustic version. I am still deeply impressed by his album Brothers In Arms and especially by the title song.
'I adore the music of Eric Clapton, Knopfler and David Gilmour, but then they too listened to my favorites. To Hopkins and John Lee Hooker. For a lot of kids around the age of fourteen, that come to listen to my music, blues is something new, as if they are just discovering it. That it why I am glad that John Lee Hooker is finally getting the recognition that he owes for all these years. Knopfler, Eric Clapton, myself and Bonnie Raitt we pass on the blues.'
Key album
And that he is still in the grip of the blues in all its facets, is shown by the titles of the songs on Closer To The Truth, his single You Gonna Look Good In Blues and also by the way he plays his guitar. Although when listening to the album you can hear quite a few well known licks and only little whomper-stomper-music. White's famous strong wah-wah guitar play that shook the world 22 years ago and instantly made him famous. Blues, the concern for the threatened environment, nearby in the bayou as well as globally, a sparse love song, fierce protest over what has been done to Indians - White himself is a quarter Cherokee - and quasi philosophical, but nonetheless considerate remarks and observations ('we keep leaving scars on Mother Earth', 'They're changing the rain forests into a room without a view') pass by on Closer To The Truth. 'In many ways this is a key album for me. Personally I consider it my best album so far. Many of my previous albums, the old funky albums were also good, but this is really a personal album, it means a lot to me."
How did Closer To The Truth come to existence? 'I felt that I am approaching the ideal of my playing of the guitar, my songwriting and my singing. I am not there yet, but I am approaching it. Maybe I will have reached it by the age of eighty. And I was playing more blues with my guitar, I came closer to the essence of my music. I was mainly focused on the guitar lines in each song.
'I had about thirty songs ready. I selected twelve and then couldn't resist the urge to head into the studio. But this time to do it the way I had it in my head. With a bass, drums, a Hammond B3 organ, my harmonica and my guitar. In the Muscle Shoals studio in Alabama. For the second time by the way, because that was where I recorded The Train I'm On with Atlantic-producer Jerry Wexler back in '72. Now again I chose the famous Muscle Shoals rhythm section, that still is composed by Roger Hawkins on drums and David Hood on bass. And for the legendary Spooner Oldham on piano who played on one track, Love M.D. Spooner, a skinny man with a glass eye, he called me and asked whether he could play along. We did one track, in one take with him, live. He played four accords on the Wurlitzer piano and he was gone. Just like me he strongly believes in the line the less (notes), the better (it sounds)! After that I have mixed the album myself and I did not want to give the album out of my hands again, but Chris Alge, a nice guy with whom I worked together on Tina's album, wanted me to. I thought he had a good ear. Try to improve what I've done, is what I said to him. And he did it! Chris managed to pull my voice more to the front and he made the sound of the guitar fuller and fatter.'
Although the opinions on Tony's deeply cherished project (which he intended to only sell by mail) are diverse, it does contain some beautiful songs like Tunica Motel and BI-YO Rhythm. Whereas the furious epos The Other Side demonstrates an unprecedented fierce White. 'Tunica Motel is a worn-out hotel thirty miles from Memphis Tennessee near the Mississippi with only eight rooms, without windows, on the Highway 61. This is the region where the blues begun to radiate, from the delta near by Clarkedale, Mississippi. Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson, Lightnin' Hopkins and all the others played there in bars and pubs. Bass player Donald 'Duck' Dunn (amongst others from Booker T & The MG's - PF) and I go over there to fish. It is far removed from the crazy world. On such a little boat in the sun it is ideal to forget everything and to come to peace.'
The bio-rhythm of the Bajou is the roughest song on the CD. White sings - on whomper-stomper guitar-music- about the awful position of fighting cocks which are armed with surgical sharp metal knives attached to their legs, and who múst win in order to live another fortnight and about threatened gators. The title song also relates about the strong instinct to survive, but The Other Side is a different story. 'I support the Indians fully. No-one was screwed as much as they were. Their land was taken from them, they had to trade their dignity, their spirits for food. This is also a song about people who look for the freedom to live their lives the way they want to. But they will not find this in their existence, only on the other side.'
Sexy
What has happened to his image of the white man's Barry White? The sexy voice of Eyes? 'I wrote numerous love songs, about men and women and their mutual feelings. That was the type of song that I used to write. Nowadays I am very concerned about the threatened environment. Even in Franklin they dump rubbish in the river. I really believe in this album. The truth will appear when you write songs which, later when you lie in your bed, give you a sense of: This is how I've done it and it is good this way. That's what truth is about.'
Nov 1991
Photo: Hester Doove
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