ROBERT CRAY: STRONG PERSUADER, STRONGER GUITARIST

CREEM SHOWCASE

ROBERT CRAY: STRONG PERSUADER, STRONGER GUITARIST

Moira McCormick

by

Robert Cray, the acclaimed young bluesman who critics say is just about singlehandedly going to save that genre from certain extinction, is a little sick of being called the messiah. For one thing, he says, “I’m not worried about _ being the savior of this kind of music, because this music’s always going to be around.”

More to the point, the Robert Cray Band isn’t just about. the blues. “What our band has always been is a combination of blues and r&b,” Cray stresses. “We do funky things, souj things...”

The 33-year-old singer/guitarist and his Seattle-based group (bassist Richard Cousins, keyboardist Peter Boe and •drummer David Olson) recently released their third album, Strong Persuader (PolyGram). It’s their first for a major label, having been preceded by a pair of laurel-heaped independent LPs, Bad Influence and False Accusations.

“Both those records hit the top of the indies charts in England,” notes Cray, “and PolyGram is real strong in Europe and the U.K. That’s what I think [stirred up] the interest.”

Strong Persuader finds Cray and band exploring more of the urban-bluesy, smolderingly soulful grooves its predecessors did, dominated by Robert’s whipcracking guitar and burnished, distinctive vocals. Yet it’s a more accomplished disc than the other two, which is as it should be. Not surprisingly, the skipper considers it his crew’s best effort. “J think this record probably resembles Bad Influence,” he ventures, “because of the fact that it has a lot of different kinds of music on it. False Accusations had a lot more slow material, ballads, things like that.

“We’ve been working together a long time,” Cray reflects, “and it’s starting to show now. I think the band’s really gonna grow.”

Cray himself, a former Army brat, grew up in a moveable household where blues, jazz, and gospel held sway over the turntable. He studied classical piano for a bit while Cray pater was stationed in Germany, and promptly abandoned it when the family moved back to Washington state. “When we got back, the Beatles had hit, and everybody in the neighborhood had guitars,” Cray recalls, “so I got me a guitar. My parents bought a little inexpensive Harmony acoustic.” As for the forgotten piano, “I don’t mess with it at all,” Robert laughs, amending, “I do a little bit, but I don’t play it onstage or anything.”

Cray eventually became rhythm guitarist for a junior high band called the One Way Street, a rock/soul combo which happily practiced hours on end and only ever played one gig. “We’d do Hendrix and Cream for half the night, and then turn around and do stuff like Wilson Pickett—-it was fun,” Cray remembers.

By the time he reached high school, Cray was hanging out with other budding guitarists, many of whom had gotten seriously intrigued’with the blues. “We’d spend afternoons listening to Magic Sam records, learning B.B. King lines and Buddy Guy stuff,” says Cray.

Robert’s biggest hero was Texas guitarslinger Albert' Collins, who to Cray’s delight played at his high school graduation party. In 1976, Cray and his two-year old band were playing a club in Eugene, Ore., when they discovered the Iceman himself was due to perform there the next night. As luck would have it, Collins didn’t have a band himself, so Cray and company of course volunteered. “We instantly got along real well, because we did a bunch of his songs anyway,” says Cray. “So we didn’t have to rehearse as hard as would’ve if we’d been a [typical] new band.” Over the next two and a half years, the Cray Band backed Collins in venues around the country, when they weren’t touring on their own.

In 1977, Cray had a shot at the silver screen when he appeared as Otis Day & The Nights’ bassist in Animal House. That year, the band also took on vocalist Curtis Salgado (now with Roomful Of Blues), and recorded an album called Who’s Been Talking on their own label, Tomato. Things look pretty spiffy.

Then Tomato sank, the album stiffed, and Salgado quit. But constant touring and rising notoriety brought the Cray Band to the attention of producer Bruce Bromberg, on whose Hightone label Bad influence and False Accusations were eventually released, in ’84 and ’85 respectively. Cray also appeared triple-billed with old pal Albert Collins and blues great Johnny Copeland on last year’s Showdown!, a not-to-be-missed LP from premier Chicago blues label Alligator. And Who’s Been Talking has been rereleased, on England’s Charly Records.

With Strong Persuader, Cray returned to a more uptempo feel, as he mentioned, than that of his previous record. “It wasn’t deliberate,” Robert says. “We always go into the studio with the idea of playing what comes down at the time.”

Longtime producers. Bruce Bromberg and Dennis Walker figure in as “contributors to the album” in terms of the finished songs, says Cray. (Walker, in fact, wrote four of its ten tracks.) “Most of the material is written beforehand, but we do learn things in the studio,” he explains. On Strong Persuader, at least three cuts—first single/video “Smoking Gun,” “I Guess I Showed Her,” and “Fantasized”—were essentially written during the recording sessions.

“We have a real tight relationship," says Cray of producer Bromberg. “I can do pretty much what I want to do, and-he’s there to encourage me.” Bromberg’s partner Walker also had a hand in ihe arrangements, Robert notes.

Strong Persuader was recorded in three months at Los Angeles studios Sage & Sound and Haywood’s. “That’s longer than usual,” Cray says happily, pleased at the fact that touring had slacked off enough for the Cray Band to take their time.

Cray and company went for as live a sound as possible, as befits the warmth and spontaneity of their chosen genre(s). Sometimes, as Robert describes, he’d get so carried away while laying down a rhythm guitar part that he’d break into a solo—which, of course, they’d end up keeping. “Then I’d have to go back and stick the rhythm over it,” he smiles.

Cray is a devoted wielder of Fender Stratocasters, of which he owns four. He’d been playing Gibsons for some time, including an SG Standard and Les Paul Deluxe, but as he puts it, “I wanted a cleaner sound. A Gibson has a fat distortion sound, and a high bright sound, but no middle...Albert Collins’s rhythm guitar player played a Strat, and I liked its sound.”

Cray’s Strat quartet includes two 1964 models, one green (“that’s the one on the cover of Bad Influence, the one I play most of the time”) and one white. He also owns a mint-condition ’58 Stratocaster with maple neck, which he found in a Hollywood shop called (what else?) Guitars R Us. “And I have a Japanese Strat,” he says. “I bought it while on tour there. It says ‘Made In Japan’ on the back of the neck...I think the Japanese guitars’ electronics are a little different, and I don’t think they’re as good,” he confides. “But they had a real cheap sale on it.”

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Despite his mini-array of vintage axes, Cray doesn’t consider himself a collector. “I use ’em all,” he reasons. "I picked up a couple because I could, at the time, and so now I think I’m through buying ’em.” He prefers the older models, he says, because "the hecks were a little bit fatter then, and I have big hands.”

As one might have guessed, this very downto-earth bluesguy cares not at all for the digital derring-do and snazzo effects favored by so many contemporary guitarists. “The only time I play with effects is sometimes in the studio,” he says. “But I ddp’t use ’em onstage, and I don’t own any, ancf I’tfi not that interested in ’em.

“I just find that if you have all those things, you spend half the time looking at the pedals," Cray grins. “These things sound good, mind you, I’m not putting ’em down. But on a gig, I don’t take the time to mess with them. The effects I use are all on the amplifier—reverb, tremolo.

“I guess I’m old-fashioned.” E