In addition to maintaining an active recording career as a solo artist for three decades, Dayton has played guitar with OG outlaws Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson, toured with the iconic punk band X, appeared in horror films by Rob Zombie (The Devil’s Rejects and Halloween II), and written a masterful autobiography, Beaumonster. There’s more, but we only have so many column inches to work with here.
Fresh from a tour with fellow hot shot guitarist Samantha Fish in support of their collaborative album Death Wish Blues, Dayton is momentarily chilling at home in Austin, awaiting the release of his latest album The Hard Way Blues next month and looking forward to performing at a private concert with Lyle Lovett at Anderson Fair on Saturday, April 20.
Album Cover
So Hard Way was put on the shelf, at least temporarily? “It was probably a good thing to do,” Dayton says, “looking at how well Death Wish did for us.” That’s a bit of an understatement (Dayton is a modest guy), considering that Death Wish received a Grammy nomination for Best Contemporary Blues Album. The record went to the top of the blues charts, garnered rave reviews, and enlarged the fan bases of both Dayton and Fish.
The Hard Way Blues was produced by Shooter Jennings, son of Waylon Jennings. The younger Jennings and Dayton have known each other for some time. “I met Shooter when I was playing guitar for Waylon. I played on his record called Right for the Time. Waylon kind of plucked me out of obscurity, and I was a kid, 24 or 25. So I was closer in age to Shooter than I was to any of the guys in Waylon’s band. Shooter would come to the studio, and I think he was in 9th or 10th grade. So that’s how far me and Shooter go back. Shooter would be wearing a Marilyn Manson shirt, and years later, he’s producing Marilyn.”
In addition to Manson’s album We Are Chaos, Jennings has produced records for a variety of artists, including Guns N’ Roses bassist Duff McKagan, Brandi Carlile and Tanya Tucker. With Hard Way, what did Jennings bring to the party?
“He brought a lot to it, man,” Dayton says. “Everyone thought I was going to go in and make this revved-up outlaw country record with Shooter, and I didn’t want to keep repeating myself. And unlike a lot of my contemporaries – singer-songwriter guys in the world that I came out of – I’m a lead guitar player. So, God bless ‘em, but you’re not going to hear those guys who are playing cowboy chords pick up a guitar and sit in with [metal vocalist Glenn] Danzig, or whoever.” Yes, Dayton has done that too.
“After I fired my pedal steel player and went off and joined X – I did this long tour filling in for Billy Zoom – I realized that people just wanted to hear me play guitar. And it was a hell of a lot cheaper to go out with just me playing guitar,” Dayton says. “So this record is really a guitar record. I mean, it’s got everything on it. It’s got East Texas blues, it’s got New Orleans rhythm and blues, it’s got honky-tonk, early rock and roll music, just all kinds of stuff that I grew up on.”
Dayton was born and raised in Beaumont, and the city’s location on the border between Texas and Louisiana mightily influenced his musical aesthetic and provided him with a plethora of influences. “Absolutely,” Dayton affirms. “And it prepared me to learn the arrangements for all these arrays of musical genres that I thought were totally normal. I didn’t know until I left Beaumont that everyone else didn’t grow up like that. Like accordions, everyone had an accordion.
“And then you get up to Dallas, and you realize these people like both kinds of music, country and western. Whereas me, I was playing in all-Black zydeco bands, playing in little rhythm and blues bands, honky-tonk bands. And learning those arrangements not only affected my songwriting, but also made me a ringer guitar player. Because I could effectively tell you when the chorus was coming, even though I hadn’t played the song before.”
It was this breadth of stylistic knowledge and an ability to drop into almost any musical situation that got Dayton his gig with Waylon Jennings in the mid-‘90s. However, Dayton soon discovered that Jennings was maybe not so well-versed in music outside the world of outlaw country.
“One day we were in the studio, and I’m listening to some guitar overdubs, and Waylon walks in,” Dayton recalls. “And he goes, ‘Well, Hoss, they want me to play the Lola Falana show.’ And I go, ‘Wow, that’s that hot Black chick that was a dancer back in the ‘60s.’ And he goes, ‘I don’t know,’ and he walks out, kind of defeated. Five minutes later, his manager walks in and says, ‘Did you hear the big news? We’re opening for Metallica at Lollapalooza!’”
It seems as if Dayton always has a number of metaphorical balls in the air. Is that intentional, or is it just the way things seem to work out? “It’s usually never intentional,” Dayton says. “It’s usually just because I get a phone call, or something happens, or I meet somebody, or whatever.
“I’m making a record right now with Ian Moore and Johnny Muller from the [Fabulous] Thunderbirds. We’re doing a three-man guitar record. It’s going to be patterned after this record that we all loved, from the ‘80s, Showdown. It had Albert Collins, Johnny Copeland and Robert Cray on it.
“So I was like, ‘Why don’t we all get together and do something? We’ve been friends forever. We’re all from Texas.’ So we’ve gone in and cut a few songs already. Things keep happening, dude, and I’m grateful. You’ve got to seize the moment. That’s the whole deal.”
Jesse Dayton’s album The Hard Way Blues will be released on May 31. A single, “The Hard Way,” is already out. To learn more about Jesse Dayton, visit JesseDayton.com.
