Guitarist Duke Robillard has always moved into the future by revisiting the past. In 1967, Robillard and pianist Al Copley formed Roomful of Blues, an aggregation that sought to emulate the sound of Chicago blues artists like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf. Before long, though, the band dug further back and discovered “jump blues,” a hard-swinging form that was popularized during the ‘40s and ’50s by Louis Jordan (“Saturday Night Fish Fry”), and Bull Moose Jackson and His Buffalo Bearcats (“Big Ten Inch Record”) among others. In the process, Robillard made his name as a guitar playing badass.
The musically peripatetic Robillard left Room Full of Blues in 1979, performing for a while with rockabilly revivalist Robert Gordon before joining the Fabulous Thunderbirds after Jimmy Vaughan’s departure in 1990. His tenure with the T-Birds only lasted for a few years, and since then, Robillard has worked as a solo artist while maintaining a parallel career as a sideman, backing jazz great Jay McShann, R&B icon Ruth Brown and Nobel Prize winner Bob Dylan (more about that later).
With over 30 albums as leader under his belt, Robillard continues to record discs that shed light on music that might be termed “primordial.” His latest, Six Strings of Steel is a prime example of this ethos.
“I just love all kinds of music,” Robillard says. “And especially if it’s at the very beginning of any style. I love American roots music, so if you’re talking about the Carter Family or Hank Williams, or if you’re talking about Charlie Christian – any of those styles, I love them all. And I always love the earliest part, because that was the most pure and the most original.
“I’m inspired by all of those sounds, all of those people,” he continues. “And I try to honestly represent all of those styles in a way that it sounds fresh. I try to stick close to the original concept, because that’s what moves me, that’s what gets me off.”
Robillard has established a reputation as a prolific artist, so it is no surprise that the recording of Six Strings of Steel was not a fussy or complicated affair. The guitarist is adamant that his recordings remain “as live as possible,” and consequently his technique harkens back to early blues and rock and roll recordings.
“I like to spend a lot of time making sure we get the sounds that we really want, which means that there has to be a lot of ambient mics to make it sound like we’re playing together, because we are,” Robillard says. “Very often, when you’re so isolated, they have to make it sound like there’s some air in the room, with artificial reverb, which I’m not against at all, but I do like ambient microphones that make things bleed into each other and sound real.”
When the Fabulous Thunderbirds needed a new guitar player, Robillard was an obvious choice. “We were good friends long before, when they were first starting to get popular,” Robillard explains. “The first time they came north, I met them. They came to see Roomful, and we went to see them, and we became instant friends. We did a lot of shows together, sat in with each other. It was a good time to play in that band, because they had just had their big hit [“Tuff Enuff”]. The one album I did with them, Walk That Walk, Talk That Talk, I’m very proud of. I think it’s one of their better albums.”
“I said, ‘You know what, I’m 65 years old, and I don’t need this shit.’”
Things didn’t go quite so swimmingly when Robillard was called to play with Bob Dylan. Things started out well, with Robillard contributing to Dylan’s 1997 album Time Out of Mind. “I had a great experience with him,” Robillard says, “though [producer] Daniel Lanois didn’t want me there. Lanois would throw me out and say, ‘Go sit in the control room, I’m going to play on this one.’ I was basically taking his job as the guitar player, so you can imagine. It really didn’t make that much of a mark on the session, because Dylan wanted me there. It was really exciting, being on that session. He kind of works the same way I do, which is, ‘Let’s just play it, not work it to death.’”
In 2013, Robillard was hired to go on tour with Dylan. “We did one tour where he loved it. He was patting me on the back, I was feeling like it was coming along really good,” Robillard recalls. “We took a break and did a second tour. I don’t know what happened, but all of a sudden, the stuff that he liked that I played on the last tour, he seemed to hate. I went out for just a week, and I couldn’t do anything right, and he was saying really rude things to me.
“I said, ‘You know what, I’m 65 years old, and I don’t need this shit.’ I just don’t know how it went so south. Bizarre things were happening those last few days. My wife asked me, when I called her up, ‘Where are you playing tonight, the Twilight Zone?’”
Robillard appears not to hold a grudge – at least in a musical sense – as Dylan’s classic “Watching the River Flow” shows up on the new album, along with tunes that inspired Robillard when he first began to play the guitar.
He says that the idea was “to go back in time and kind of honor some of the influences that I had when I was young, when I was first starting out. Lots of New Orleans guys like Smiley Lewis and Fats Domino. And some of the early guitar players that influenced me, like James Burton and Steve Cropper, of course.
Gee, sounds like he had good ears for a youngster. “I was about 7, and my brother was 10 years older than me,” Robillard says, “and he collected all the cool records of the time. My brother was bringing in Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, Little Richard – it was just incredible. He has good taste, so I had all of the good stuff at my fingertips.”
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2023.
