Bill Durst
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Your voice has got this really great bluesy feel to it and you have very nice technique. Yet your guitars are a kind of gut wrenching metal. How did you arrive at that sound? I have no clue. I guess you just have to play for about forty years and then you run across some good stuff. I'm no different from any other guitar player I just got pretty lucky and I got a really neat tone and we are trying to do something a little bit different with the blues and I think that you have to use your strengths. We have a good beat some, really pounding guitars, so we try to combine that in. We also try to be gentle and sensitive as well. |
| I guess its all part of the blues contrasts. Yeah. For some reason the blues has the ability to project emotion like no other music that I know of, honestly. I love all different kinds of music, but the blues really is a great avenue for raw emotion and that's what I like doing now a day's. The more the better. |
Absolutely, how did you get started, what's your background, musical interests or influences?
Right. I'm a child of Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Pete Hudson and Jimmy Hendrix
All blues derived.
Yep all blues derived, and with a kind of lesson giving by billy Gimmers from ZZ Top and those are the main influences that influenced me as a kid. I got playing because I heard those guys play. Actually I heard a guy named Domminic Tiamo who just recently passed on who was a very famous guitar player and an unsung hero who was just as good or better than Clapton and those guys and I saw him play once when I was 14 and I just had to do it.
So when did you get started, at what age?
Well I wrote my first melodies when I was five years old and I wrote my first song when I was ten and I was in my first band when I was eleven or twelve.
Okay, do Canadian musicians not get as much of a spotlight as the American or the British musicians, just speaking blues?
I would say that for some strange reason there are a lot of extremely good guitar players who need more of a spotlight on them. Its possible to do it, Jeff Healey had a really nice go there that was really nice for him. But it is difficult in this country, people find it hard to believe that a guy, that is a world class player, is playing at their local bar. There is a disconnect there right?
Absolutely.
But in Britain in the 1960s if you went into a bar, there was the Rolling Stones. Everybody has got to start somewhere. But I think that's a good point, more spotlight on the Canadian musicians.
What is the first blues record or musician you listened too?
I want to think it was B.B. King. I want to think it was probably in the mid 60s and about a month later I stumbled into a record store and I said to the guy in there "I want something nice" which was code for 'I'm now smoking something and I want to listen to something'. And he brought me over to the first Jimmy Hendrix album, that was it for B.B. and Hendrix came in. I actually only got into B.B. King in a serious way when I was older and I realized how sublte and what a wonderful a player he was.
He has got that very gentle side to him as well that goes right to the heart.
Yes, very very heartfelt. He plays one note and his band plays 500 notes and his one note says more than the 500 from the rest of the band.
You are a recording artist as well right?
Absolutely, yes. My friend Jodie Angela who is hear with us and I have written five top thirty Canadian hits in our time and we have over a hundred published songs mostly from the band called Thundermug which, for the Canadian historians, had our band out in 1972.
So you have been recording for a little while then?
Yes for many many years now. It looks like about 36 years, wait, no 38 years? Ahh, a couple years any how.
Where did you learn to play the Blind Willy McTell song?
Well I listend to different versions. I listened to Blind Willies version from 1928, I have listened to TaJ Mahal and I have listened to the Allman brothers. I realized that Taj Mahal hadn't even bothered listening to Blind Willie he just ripped the Allman Brothers off and so we decided to go with the version that was known and just trust that we would play it a little differently and we did. It is on our CD the Warencliff sessions.
Is there still the activity of handing down techniques or the exchange of songs, like when there was when blues was really prominent or even in the revival. Is there still that kind of activity going on now a days?
Well that is a very interesting question. I think that if you are going to do the blues, if you don't innovate and you don't bring something from yourself to it, don't bother. Because the original masters really were real masters. Blind Willie and Robert Johnson were true masters. The Chicago blues simplified all that and made it into a different thing by mutating it. But I will say this, we do a song called Man of Constant Sorrow , speaking of handing down melodies, the melody of Man of Constant Sorrow is 500 years old. It is one of the first early recorded melodies in the history of Britain and there have been many different lyrics to it and one of those sets of lyrics was Man of Constant Sorrow, so we are participating in a 500 year old tradition right there.
How do you think the blues landscape is changing now a days? What is it compared to Chicogo blues or the old stuff
Oh that's a hard question to answer. I think that you have to keep it evolving. I think the problem with the blues a few years ago on the local scene - and forgive me I'm not an expert - but all the stuff was too similar and the innovation was not enough. I would hope that what I see at the festivals is a very wide pallet of different styles and I think that is very, very, very healthy. And yet, there are guys I know that can identify subtle little differences in songs being from North East Louisiana or North West Louisiana, like, I am not that qualified to dig that deep, maybe one day I will be, but at any rate I think the innovation is what's got to happen.
Do you think that people need to be knowledgeable like that to know little differences or even just the history of the music to bring it out of them?
I think that intellectual knowledge is very good for a player but it really all doesn't' matter when you are playing because you have to bring that deeper thing out from you. Again, the blues is like an instrument to bring out emotion. And that is the beautiful part of blues.
One last question, what are you doing now?
A Montreal Festi Blues in August, and also Kitchener, Ontario's Blues, Cruise, and Barbeques. The Montréal date is on the 11 th of August and the Kitchener one is on the 13th. Those are the biggest gigs. Summertime is a time for musicians to go nuts, that's when it's all going on. We are getting our fair share and we are very grateful. We just played at the Windsor Blues fest and that was thrilling. We are doing our bit.
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