TECH TALK

TECH TALK

ROBIN TROWER: NO JIMI_COME_LATELY

Marc Shapiro

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Robin Trower is the last person you would expect to play Robin Trower’s kind of music, It would take a sizeable adrenalin injection for Trower to even qualify as milktoast. By CREEM standards, this aging practitioner of da blues is a board-certified wimp. And ya wanna know the funny part?

Robin Trower agrees.

“I don’t drink, I don’t take drugs and I’ve been married to the same woman for 20 years,” chuckles Trower. “People are actually surprised that somebody as boring as me can make the kind of music I do."

Trower, looking very British and too Rolling Stoned (to cop a title from RT’s back pages), is in Los Angeles whipping up support for his latest album, the blatantly commercial but straightforward muso-wise Take What You Need. But don’t yawn at the prospect of yet another “how’s the album, how’s the tour, who does your hair” diatribe. For Trower’s got a lot of interesting backs to put up front.

He’s back to touring and recording after a five year hiatus. He’s back on a real live big label rather than one that pays royalties in coupons. And, most importantly, he’s back to a state of mind that even allows him to address the haunting question of why he sounds so much like the “other” long dead rock star—you know, the one who hasn’t been spotted at Burger King.

“Oh, the Hendrix thing?,’’ purrs

Trower. “No, that doesn’t bother me. It’s just how people see the music. Everybody has a right to their opinion.”

They do? Could this be the same Robin Trower who, as a hot to trot blues-rocker in the early 70’s, would be moved to commit rock critic-cide at the mere mention of Jimi Hendrix or the hint that his downright erotic excursions up and down the fretboard might qualify him for guitar hero status?

“It was difficult to be as famous as I was in the 70s,” deadpans Trower. “I didn’t handle the fame real well because I never really felt that fame was part of a natural existence. I fought it because I felt it was morally wrong for a human being to be treated like a god.”

Morals, however, did not keep Trower from grinding out album-touralbum-tour on an annual basis throughout most of the 1970’s. He grumbled some when his record company fumbled the ball on his In City Dreams album but kept plugging away like a good little soldier until 1980 when a whole lot of festering sores finally came to a head.

“I had basically gotten to the point where I wasn’t enjoying playing live,” complains Trower. “I felt musically everything I had set out to do in 73, had been accomplished and I wanted to move in a different direction but, unfortunately, my management and record company were greedy and kept pushing me to churn out more of the

same stuff. I decided that I wasn’t going to keep working just to make other people rich, so I quit.”

Trower spent the next five years laying about the house, following his wife around and experimenting with some ‘out there’ musical directions, the most ominous being a self taught course in commercial songwriting.

“My passion had changed from wanting to write pieces of music for my guitar to writing real songs.” That’s how Trower recalls the time off. “It wasn’t an easy process. Teaching myself to be a songwriter necessitated separating myself from my identity as a player. Songwriting was always a talent that was there but it was always overshadowed by my playing ability.”

Trower’s doodlings produced a lot of moon-in-June clinkers, a few bizarre “things nobody will ever hear” and some promisingly commercial poprock like ‘Caroline’. On the whole things began looking up to the point where, in 1985, Trower returned to the rock wars; playing a series of low-profile club shows and sounding out the big league labels on their interest in Robin Trower Mark II.

“What I found out was that the majors were not standing in line to sign me up,” chuckles Trower. “Totheir way of thinking, I had been away too long and that mine was an old sound that they could not see selling in the ’80s. So I was basically put in a position of having to prove that Robin Trower was capable of conning up with a hit single.”

Trower and band (featuring singer Dave Pattison, who, coincidentally sounds like every other Trower’s ever had) found a taker for this one-shot in GRT Records who reaped some bennies when the album, Passion and its offshoot single ‘Caroline’ both charted. Trower had one big last laugh before signing with Atlantic and recording Take What You Need; an album that Trower indicates is not far removed from his Bridge Of Sighs days.

“It would be very hard to change who I am,” says Trower in defense of his current hook-oriented output. “What I’m doing is still pretty simple, raw stuff. As a writer I’m definitely making commercial concessions but

my writing has progressed. But, as a guitar player, I think I’ve regressed, my playing is even more simple now than it was 10 years ago.”

Having effectively brought every practicing guitarist in the mag’s readership to attention, Trower, ever the patient teacher, clamps down on the specifics of what makes his sound such a snarling Paleozoic beast.

“I’m a soul player rather than a blues player,” he explains, “which basically boils down to my having a better sense of chord structure and melody than blues players. I like to think I still maintain a blues feeling in what I do but I’m more creative than most blues players.”

“I always start with the riff; something big and soulful that explodes,” he

instructs. “Then it’s the bridge and the melody. If it’s a simple rock song, those elements tend to come rather quickly. But the bridge to ’Bridge Of Sighs’ took six months to come to me and I’m quite prepared to wait as long as it takes to get those parts of a song right.

“Lyrics are always last,” continues .Trower. “And I always take great pains to make sure they enhance rather than detract from the music. The ideas? Well, they just sort of come to me. I’ll be fooling around with the guitar and all of a sudden I’ll think ‘oh that’s nice’. Songs don’t usually take too long to come together. Usually it’s no more than a few hours over a couple of days and most of that revolves around refining the melody and the chord changes.”

All of which Trower claims are woefully lacking in much of what passes for rock music in the ’80s.

‘‘Most of the music being made today is junk,” frowns Trower. “There’s no emotion and no sense of committment by the musicians playing it. Hell, Bon Jovi and Motley Crue are basically the ’80s version of The Archies. It’s bubblegum music for 10-yearolds.”

But Trower has more on his mind than blowing away easy targets. He’s got the beginnings of a second stage career to put into perspective. And that career, he concedes, will, for a while at least, deal with what that old 70’s has been makes a comeback cliche.

‘‘Yeah it will be a bit much for a while,” agrees Trower, ‘‘but I don’t really look at it as being a matter of having survived. It’s just part of a natural progression for a creative person.

“Sure I dropped out for a while. But it was with every intention to come back and move forward.”

Robin Trower’s Equipment Guitars: A Fender vintage reissue electric body with American standard neck. Large frets. Flat radius. Locking tuners.

Strings: Fender.

Amplifiers: Marshall 800 series heads. Slightly doctored 4x12’s which contain vintage 30 speakers.

Toys: Jennings wah wah. Tube screamer.

The sound: “A very traditional emotional sound. I went through a phase in the 70’s where I tinkered with my guitar sound. But I got bored with that and reverted back to a basically pure guitar sound. Nothing I do is deliberate. I do have a signature guitar sound but it’s the result of what I put emotionally into the music."