Bonnie Raitt, the world’s greatest redheaded slide guitarist, returns to the Jazz Festival on May 3, armed with a new CD—Silver Lining—and a band that includes pianist Jon Cleary, the exceptionally funky expatriate Englishman who calls New Orleans home and leads the Absolute Monster Gentlemen, Ms. Raitt’s opening act on her current tour.
Our original ideas was to enlist Mr. Cleary to interview Ms. Raitt, but it was eventually deemed more realistic to engage the services of a professional, in this case OffBeat founder Jan Ramsey, a fan of Bonnie Raitt since first encounters eons ago (“Back when she was still going out in the audience and having drinks with people”) at Tipitina’s and Grant Street Dancehall in Lafayette. Jan interviewed Bonnie and Jon by telephone, as they conducted rehearsals in Los Angeles. For the sake of clarity, the responses of Bonnie Raitt and Jon Cleary bear their initials.
How many times have you played the Jazz Fest?
BR: I don’t have any reason to count, but ’76—wasn’t it the first one? I played Nick of Time. I debuted Nick of Time, Fundamental and now Silver Lining at the Festival.
JC: The first time I saw you play was at the Fair Grounds.
BR: Oh, really?
JC: Yeah, it was.
How did the two of you meet?
BR: I guess legend preceded him in R&B circles, it really was like a scent of funk coming up. Seeing Maria Muldaur and Taj and a bunch of other people in L.A. that just raved about Jon, and they said “Wait until you hear him! I know you, Bonnie, and know this guy is going to curl your feathers.” You know I met Jon the first time in Belize at the Taj Mahal session.
JC: It was a Taj session, yeah.
So you hired John right after hearing him the first time?
BR: I don’t think so, I think he became available between his solo and other projects—after I got off my knees begging if he would consider going out on the Fundamental tour!
JC: I left Taj Mahal’s band to make a record so I really couldn’t give Taj the gig. Bonnie called, and I didn’t think I’d be able to do it, because I felt that I had an obligation to make this record, the record company got into this, you must be out of your mind, what are you talking about, I said would it be all right for me to do it, they said they’d be delighted. I think it worked out beautifully.
You and the Absolute Monster Gentlemen are opening for Bonnie on the whole tour?
BR: Yeah, they are going to be my special guests. Jon was in England over the last week. They posted a big ad in the New York Times, and in the corner the whole tour ad says “And very special guests Jon Cleary and the Absolute Monster Gentlemen” in a big box right next to my mug.
JC: Oh, great, I didn’t see that!
Well, it is sort of a paradox and I talk about it all the time—the thing that makes New Orleans so cool is also the thing that kind of holds it back. You know a lot of New Orleans musicians don’t even want to tour. They don’t want to leave home, you know, it’s funny.
JC: So this is an incredible opportunity for me. It is a very lucky, privileged position, because I get to play with Bonnie’s band, a really great gig, and I get to play with my band too.
BR: Selfishly I get to hear twice as much Cleary. It was just massive, you know, I’m so thrilled to be able to showcase Jon in a special light, with a new album out, not only will we be playing three months in the spring, but we do a two-month double bill with Lyle [Lovett] opening in the summer. For me to be able to showcase Jon to the people that may have seen him the last time with me, my core fans that always come out to see me, but be able to really showcase him with his own group with a new album out for both of us is a dream come true. Believe me, that’s one of the reasons why Nick Of Time had such a ten-year explosion of benefits for me in terms of security and being able to travel to Africa and Cuba and spend a year off the road for the first time. For 30 years I never was on a vacation.
It seems like you were on the road forever.
BR: The funny thing about mortgage payments is they keep coming! Sorry—but you don’t make money from your records. I make records so that I can get on the road and play. It used to be that I would always have to wait to have another name or short act to either open for, or double-bill, and now I can actually have the kind of clout where Jon’s got his own following, but together we make a really killer package.
You’ve made the big time.
BR: Well, you know, there are a lot of age groups on radio that are bumped, people like me. A lot of artists that thought we were “in,” in the early ’90s with my Grammy win and a couple of hit records, by ’96 they really have taken a lot of people over 40—at that point I was 46—off towards VH-1, to the point where it didn’t make any sense to make a video anymore, so we are actually doing TV ads that are going to run where we are on tour. That’s because they’ve shown the 45 to 55-year-olds don’t spend enough money for radio stations to put them on the air, so, I mean I ran for rock star and I won. It’s really a fight for ages: look at Rodney Crowell and Boz Scaggs and Delbert [McClinton]—they made three of the best records of their whole career last year and it’s a blip on the radar, you know.
It’s longevity versus flash in the pan.
BR: It’s the long haul.
How do you choose the songs that you record on your albums?
BR: I listen to Jon for starters. You notice that we did two of his songs.
Of course I noticed that! That first song is one of my favorites from Jon’s last album.
BR: I go back and listen to lots of my old R&B records, and then I suffer through hundreds of publishing demos where people send me songs, bad slide guitar and girls that try to sound like me. After I’m finished lifting my head from the bucket, something actually drops through, like “I Can’t Make You Love Me” or “Valley of Pain” or the two songs Tommy Simms co-wrote. I knew I could go to the studio once I had those Tommy Simms songs, because they are just funky and catchy in a way that would cut across a lot of genres. Without a decent single you’re making art records, you’re preaching to the choir, and I’d have to drop my salaries back down to half if I didn’t start selling records again and I don’t want to do that.
JC: It’s an interesting process—when Bonnie first sent us some songs to do on the record, to see how the elements to the songs were magnified in the course of the rehearsals. She was able to see aspects of the songs that other people wouldn’t, and to bring those out, so that there was a uniform quality to the songs so it actually sounded like a “record.” It was interesting to me to see the process taking place. The songs blossomed.
BR: That was very diplomatic! [laughs] You create your own. And a lot of times what you’re playing on is stuff that’s based in jazz or blues and New Orleans funk. I hear David [Gray]’s “Silver Lining” and Jon may hear David’s version, and he probably knows enough from hearing my style and my playing other songs in the past that I’m going to do something that would allow him to play on it. I wouldn’t want the band to play on something they wouldn’t get off on. Jon’s been with me enough from being on the road with me for a couple of years to trust that I would want him to contribute.
David Gray’s song is the title song on this CD.
BR: I heard his album three years ago and I was so thrilled to find a young up-and-coming relatively obscure songwriter. The other thing I do about finding songs is to ask a lot of “younger” people about who’s under the radar who I should be hearing about. I ask Kathy in my office who’s married to Phil Cody, who’s a fine singer-songwriter. For me, it’s a thrill to be able to uncover some heretofore unheard-of Tom Waits that’s in Bulgaria or something. It makes it more interesting for me and fun to be able to showcase on my album somebody who can now ride on my star. Once I do a Paul Brady or Richard Thompson song, they become much more well-known.
I’ve always loved your version of Allen Toussaint’s “What is Success?” I thought it was a very interesting song, knowing Allen. Does that song have a special meaning to you?
BR: I did it because at that point, I told Warners that if I signed with them they couldn’t tell me—here I was 21—who to record with, how to sing it, when to record it, what to sing, how to produce it, and whether there had to be a hit single. If they would agree to all these things, I would sign with them. I never thought they would agree to it, but they did it, so I signed with them.
Then it turns out after three albums of using people that weren’t famous, but really well-respected musicians, like John Hall, and Taj, Lowell George, and Michael Cuscuna, they then basically said, “Well, we won’t promote you if you don’t work with somebody that’s had a track record.” After three albums of critical success, and good reviews and building up my following the hard way by busting my ass on the road, I would have liked them to continue their agreement, to let me pick somebody and not penalize me for my self-determination. So I picked Jerry Ragovoy, who had had a hit record—just many years ago—and he was well-known for producing Howard Tate and he wrote “Piece of My Heart.” So I did a record with him and I chose that Allen song because Lowell and I were buddies and I thought it was a good little note to tell the world “What is success? To do your own thing and avoid the rest…”
JC: What flipped me out is the song that Bonnie did, “I Know” by Barbara George, because that’s always been my favorite groove, that’s the reason I moved to New Orleans, for New Orleans funk.
Barbara herself actually sang that song at Ernie K-Doe’s funeral.
BR: I met an imposter who said she was Barbara George at Trinity’s in Baton Rouge. God, my liver hurts just thinking about it!
One of the things I really admire about you is your concern for the older R&B and blues artists who have contributed so much to us, and your involvement with the Rhythm & Blues Foundation.
BR: Thank you. It’s just the right thing to do. [Sarcastically] Yeah, I’m gonna keep all my money while the people who’s records I’m cuttin’ and covering didn’t get paid. That’s a good move! Real high in the karma bank for me! I’m just surprised that the whole industry hasn’t swarmed over this issue and rectified it. All I can do is open my yap and keep talkin’ about it. Why don’t you pay some respect and loyalty to the artists of our generation? It’s fine to give ’em an award show, but if you’re gonna raise a million dollars in one night, how about givin’ some of it to some health insurance? There must be about 60 people who the Rhythm and Blues Foundation has paid for their funerals. Just think if they had been getting royalties all these years, they would have had some health insurance and at least six that I know of would not have been dead now. When you work people to death because they’re broke and they don’t ever go to the doctor because it’s either pay the rent or, you know, forget about it. It’s like when I visited Africa and said “Why don’t they fix their teeth?” They said, “They don’t have any money to do that.” I guess I just grew up in California where people had the money to do stuff like that.
I see that in New Orleans all the time. There are famous musicians who are sick and can’t work, and they don’t know what to do—because if they don’t work, they just don’t have any money. They feel as though they have to work until they drop, and a lot of times they do.
BR: It’s great that the Jazz Fest exposes people to some of the older artists who they wouldn’t necessarily see.
In some ways the Festival’s booking seems to be trying to attract a younger audience that isn’t necessarily going to be attracted by the heritage, it’s more about the party.
BR: I think the Jazz Festival should intersperse the big name acts with the local acts.
JC: I think the Jazz Festival has become so big lately that, in my experience, a lot of local people don’t even bother with the crowds anymore. If it’s the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, it seems to me that primarily it should be exposing New Orleans jazz and heritage. In my opinion, I think it would be nicer if the whole thing was scaled-down a bit.
BR: To tell you the truth, the first time I was invited I couldn’t understand why they were inviting me. Now, anybody that does blues is called “jazz.” It’s actually a source of income for older blues artists when they can get on the jazz festival circuit. Having said that, I’m all for having American roots music in the form of old-timey Appalachian O Brother, Where Art Thou? folk tradition. At folk festivals, you would always see the African stage, the blues stage, the bluegrass stage and those festivals were fantastic because I could finish my set and walk over and see Ali Farka Touré, sit in, and go over and see Doc Watson in the same afternoon. And then at night it would be some unbelievable mix-and-match line-up of Howlin’ Wolf and the Pentangle. When you have people like Jimmy Buffett and Sting and Phish, we’re all coming from some sort of roots music and we’ve all amalgamated into some kind of cultural fib. It really is true that in making the Jazz Festival more corporate, making it bigger and more successful, you can’t expect the people who are only there to see Jimmy Buffett to walk over and see Walter Washington. And they should.
That was the appeal, to me, of the Jazz Fest. One of the things that you do is run from stage to stage to try to catch acts. Now, frankly, it’s gotten so crowded that you can’t do that.
BR: At the Jazz Fest, if you’re an artist, you get shuttled around on a golf cart. So I didn’t even know it had gotten so crowded. The last time I went as a fan, it wasn’t so crowded.
Last year, they had a day with 160,000 people! It was dangerously crowded. Dave Matthews and Mystikal playing at the same time—there’s heritage for you!
BR: But I don’t want to rag the popularity of the Festival. For a lot of the artists I love, the Festival is the most important gig of their whole tour—the one that allows the African artists to even get over here. I don’t know how to penalize people for showing up at something that’s popular.
A lot of my fans say, “I don’t come see you anymore since you’ve gotten big because I don’t want to see you looking like a postage stamp with your nostril on the video screen the height of a building.” I say to ’em I’m trying to mix-and-match and do a theater tour but then the tickets sell-out in two hours. Because there’s 3,000 seats and we can probably draw 6,000. It’s a tough issue: I don’t think the populace at large knows you can’t pay your band a third of what you’ve been paying them just so your fans can come and see you.
I’ve spent 20 years building up my following and tickets go fast. I’m happy but I’m also sad for people who can’t get in.
Who do you want to see at Jazz Fest?
JC: The one person I really want to see is actually playing the day after I leave—Bobby Womack.
BR: I’m really looking forward to New Orleans. I’m trying to eat just rice cakes the week before I get there so I can pig out. I have so many great memories of many, many years in New Orleans. I have to say the greatest gift I’ve had is to be able to come to New Orleans, like I did last spring with my brother, and get the Cleary tour of the nightlife scene.
JC: I took her to the Yellow Pocahontas Indian practice in Tremé.
BR: It was a power-packed day with Kermit Ruffins and Walter Washington. You’re so lucky to live there. Sometimes I envy Jon being able to walk around at night in the Quarter. I don’t know if it’s okay to not only be a celebrity but to be a woman and do all the crawling around I like to do. I sure look forward to spending more time down there now that I have the Absolute Monster Security Patrol.
