Joe McMurrian

Interview, Tokyo

Blues and roots guitarist, singer and songwriter Joe McMurrian toured Japan in the fall of 2014, playing a series of great shows all over Japan. His show at Rooster November 1, 2014 was a stunner. He covered classic roots music, like “Cuckoo,” “I’ll Fly Away” and “Death Letter Blues” but jumped in to newer tunes like Bob Dylan’s “Oxford Town” and John Martyn’s “Over the Hill,” too. Playing slide guitar, classic fingerpicking style and banjo, he bowled over the audience with potent roots music that ranged from wild upbeat fun to dark and lovely.McMurrian tells stories in the tradition of Delta bluesmen and dives deep into songs with the energy to swim back up with the mysteries he finds. He’s a performer who rivets the audience. He took time before his show in Ogikubo to talk about his passion for the music and for life.

What got you into blues and wanting to play it?

I grew up hearing a lot of Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker growing up from my parents, a lot of country, and I think it’s still just respect for old American music. I’m not even sure I consider myself blues. I’m more of a roots musician with a Delta leaning. I was playing in all these rock bands and someone put Johnny Winter on the TV. I was transfixed that he could be that powerful. That was more rock, I guess, but it got me there. And then the roots stuff really hit me with Robert Johnson. In’85 or ’86, they put out a box set of his stuff, re-released it, and that just killed me. I had a transcendental experience when I heard that and just sold all my electric stuff and never looked back.

So, it was just the feeling of liking acoustic better?

I had a lot of electric background. Like my current electric band Woodbrain, which is more of a four-piece Zeppelin meets Robert Johnson thing. When I’m playing with them, I’ll crank it up on the tube amp. But I’m still playing finger-style blues and I’m not playing with a pick. So, that’s a big thing, doing both the melody and the bass line together. I have to have that. That’s what got me when I heard those country blues artists. They are doing it all themselves.Eric Clapton said when he first heard Robert Johnson, he knew it was man’s music and what he’d been playing until then was boy’s music.I think for me I heard it more in terms that I had never heard music so personal. And not just Johnson, it was all those guys, Skip James, Son House, Robert P. Williams. You felt the person. You really felt the yearning and personal experience they were delivering. You didn’t hear that in modern rock. It just hit me, the pure form of expression there. The person sitting right there doing it and nothing in between.

You must find a lot of overlap between your visual work as an artist and telling stories in music.

I have a master’s in painting and I’ve always been a painter, but I’ve stopped teaching art. I just hit a moment where I didn’t experience the connection I have with other people with music. So, I put art on the side a little bit. It’s still there, and it definitely ties together. It’s the same synapses, and you’re still working the same thing somehow. But I realized finally that music is the highest art. I had to follow that.

Music is more immediate?

Visual art you have to just sit alone and work your brain until you’re dying, with theory, if you’re modern. It’s so self-serving. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just so ambiguous, when you take it seriously. Music is not supposed to be that ambiguous.

Art has a delay factor to it. You don’t know what people are thinking until a lot later sometimes.

Right, and at that point you don’t care about it so much because you’re already on to something else by then. With music, I can just make something up on the spot. I’m very much improvisational and I love that. People are there to feed me, and vice versa.

Your CD “Get Inside This House” struck me as being roots, but very fresh, and just yourself. How do you balance the technically rooted Mississippi playing with just telling stories.

I think at this point when you put enough hours, the 10,000 hours thing, into the music, it’s just there. I play guitar only, and banjo, but that’s the same thing, it’s just a guitar. That gives me the ability to not think about it, so I can think about singing or writing. In the last ten years, it’s gotten stronger, so I feel like a storyteller or a writer. I love to play the instrument, but I don’t think of myself as a guitar-player. I don’t even want to get caught up in all that.

So, for you, story comes first?

Well, the experience comes first. Sometimes the beauty with the blues is you don’t even know if it’s a full story, or what’s being told, but you get something from it. You feel the person. Why can’t you do both, technical guitar and story? Robert Johnson and all those guys used to do that. They were technically facile, but they were still doing a story. And not so far out metaphysically or symbolically that no one gets it.

It’s everyday experience.

Especially on my new album, I put in a lot of stuff about relationships and life. I feel I’m in my own groove. I don’t sit and learn Son House songs anymore. I listen to it, but I don’t sit down and listen to it. It’s just in me. It gets to the point you just kind of channel it. I’m just there.

So, now you’re going back and forth the between acoustic and electric.

When I say electric, I just mean I plug into a tube amp with my ’28 Stella and turn it up and play with my power band. It was Johnny Winter that gave me that. I thought, what if one of those old players had access to the power we had, but didn’t change their style? How would it sound? Big Joe Williams, I know he played with bands, and I know Robert Johnson played with drummers, so it must have had a power to it that is different from a lot of the recordings that we hear. Like Johnny Shines, for instance, he took that sound and put it to a full band. Like on “Dynaflow Blues,” he’s just Robert Johnson but with a band behind him that was really powerful.

So, are you traveling a lot, playing festivals?

Where I’m based in the northwest, things are really hopping. It’s all roots based. There’s a lot of blues there. I’m with the blues community, but really I’m with the roots community. The old time, the folk-ies, the bluegrass-ies, a lot of punk blues going on. I was swayed by R.L. Burnside as much as anybody, so I blend with all that.

How is coming over to Japan for the first time?

The audience seems to love it, and appreciates that I’m giving my all to it. I don’t know if I got that from Son House or something, but I completely lose myself, start sweating a lot, and people just get it. I was in the Netherlands last year, and it was similar, they were really into the roots music, they really respect it because it was old and real.

Seems like people want something more than computer-made music. People want something real.

I think I’m the last generation that had to learn off a record, right? And search for pictures, and things. I remember I finally got a Stefan Grossman video and I thought, oh my god, that’s Son House. And now, everything’s available. I think we’re in a folk boom beyond compare right now. This generation, the next twenty years, is going to be really powerful because they are all out there learning, off of YouTube. They’re going to get over the pop music and realize all of this is out there. Luckily, I just had the drive to search. Maybe that’s better? Maybe they’re spoiled now and won’t go the extra mile. It’s so much easier now you can take a class on Son House on YouTube.

Music is also visual. These days, people always say, I saw the video on youtube.

It takes the mystery away and makes it more approachable. There were probably so many people who were turned away when they heard Robert Johnson, they were too amazed. But it’s just a guy with six strings and ten fingers.

How is the music business going for you? Is it changing?

It’s a pain in the ass. That’s all I’ll say on that. I felt that way when I was working with a band, it was really a pain. As a solo artist, it opened more opportunities. I got to open for so many legends. I opened for Johnny Winter right before he died. It’s so much easier now in some ways, you can put out your own CD, you can get it all up there ready for download and purchase right away. Labels, that’s another story, you can do a lot yourself these days. It’s an experimental time.

What do you see for your future?

I’m devoted to the music. It’s like a spiritual thing to me. I fell in love with the idea of performing this music. I just love the whole format. People like John Hammond have been doing it forever. And no apologies. It’s just a guy with a guitar. I think that’s a beautiful thing.

omeone said, music isn’t just an aesthetic category; it’s an ethical category.

It’s part of the life you lead. That’s what leads me on. I’m not thinking about the aesthetic, so it’s spiritual in that way. I want to play it, I want people to hear it, I want to be true to it. It’s a soul thing. You’re just devoted to it. I realized I have to give myself to it, and ever since I’ve done that, really given myself to it, things have been really good.

For more about Joe McMurrian: http://www.joemcmurrian.com