No need to fret

>> Slide-guitar virtuoso Derek Trucks
just keeps on truckin’

SLOWHAND-PICKED: Derek Trucks (centre) and his band

by JOHNSON CUMMINS

This past February, Rolling Stone announced “the New Guitar Gods” with John Mayer, John Frusciante and Derek Trucks gracing the glossy cover. It could be debated both for and against Mayer and Frusciante (and I would be foolish to offer my opinion on these pentatonic popsters), but there is hardly room for any argument about Trucks. At the tender age of 28, Trucks has already achieved more and shown more musical growth than most six-string slingers will in a lifetime. In short, Trucks truly is a guitarist’s guitarist.

Derek Trucks has long been recognized on the jam-band circuit, but has recently been dragged beyond the hacky-sack set when none other than Slowhand himself, Eric Clapton, brought Trucks along on his latest tour. Clapton even had Trucks step up to the solo plate by taking the lead on classics like “Layla” and “After Midnight,” giving the chestnuts a new sense of ascension. Most Clapton fans would’ve called this a travesty, if not for the fact that Trucks is just that good.

“I’ve been really, really lucky to be able to gig with a lot of really great musicians,” says Trucks, “and I really do take away something new with each person I get to work with. Doing New Year’s Eve with John Lee Hooker, for instance, really stands out in my mind. It was so exciting just to be onstage with him, but he was amazing as a person as well. He was 82 years old and heavily hitting on my wife [Trucks is married to blues guitarist Susan Tedeschi] right in front of me—which I admit I thoroughly enjoyed.

“When you get thrown into these different musical directions, I think you learn confidence without resorting to arrogance.”

Too cool for school

Taking up the guitar at the age of nine in Jacksonville, Florida, Trucks forewent the standard tuning and fretting notes, and was instantly attracted to the vocal-like sound of the slide. He proved to be a prodigy early on and started hitting the road, with his father chaperoning, only a year later. In his preteen years, while most of his friends were soaking in the numbing glow of MTV, Trucks’ was woodshedding away in his bedroom and listening to Wes Montgomery and Django Reinhardt.

“I was definitely the oddball at that time, compared with all of my friends at home. It didn’t really feel that weird, though, because even at that age, I knew that Charlie Parker was better than Vanilla Ice.”

Initially influenced by slide bluesmen like Elmore James, Trucks quickly embraced the lyrical slide playing of Duane “Skydog” Allman, who proved there were many more possibilities to the glass bar than James’s brash albeit brilliant “Dust My Broom.”

Although blues is still Trucks’ touchstone, his last record Songlines showed him adding to his already rich vocabulary, reinterpreting songs by Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Toots & the Maytals and others.

“I think as a musician, it’s always important to keep searching, and it’s just as important to be able to help people open their heads up to different music. We’re just lucky that we get the platform to do it. It’s only natural after awhile that people are going to get sick of the radio and are going to move towards something with a little bit more substance.”

Allman joy

Trucks’ first turning point would’ve had to have been when his uncle, Allman Brothers Band drummer Butch Trucks, managed to persuade the rest of the band to check Trucks out at a small club in Jacksonville. They quickly recognized that Trucks’ massive talent and ability to coax soulful lines out of his guitar hadn’t been heard since Duane ruled their roost, and Trucks received the invitation to join the Allman Brothers Band at the age of 20, in 1999.

Since then, it’s been a whirlwind of attention for Trucks, with a heaping amount of accolades, but as far as becoming the next guitar god or achieving the Herculean task of comfortably living in the looming shadow of his idol Duane Allman are concerned, the humble slide guitarist isn’t paying much attention.

“I don’t really buy into that too much, so I really don’t feel that much pressure. I kind of shrug off compliments, I guess, because I really don’t see how that can help you musically. If anything, that would just be stagnating. I guess I’m just always trying to look ahead.”

At le Spectrum on Wednesday,
July 4, 6 p.m., $36.50