Boz Scaggs’ latest album may be called Out of the Blues, but really he’s all in — blueswise. The album features sublime covers of songs by the likes of Bobby “Blue” Bland and Jimmy Reed, with Scaggs in fine voice and his band in fine form. Scaggs is bringing his tour in support of this album to the Granada Theatre on Tuesday, Sept. 11. Tickets are available by clicking here.
In addition to the blues, we can be sure that Scaggs also will revisit highlights from his vast catalog like “Lido Shuffle,” “Lowdown,” “Harbor Lights” and “Georgia” from his smash Silk Degrees album, plus other favorites like “Jojo” and “Loan Me a Dime,” whose original recording nearly 50 years ago features some amazing blues guitar from the great Duane Allman.
In preparation for Scaggs’ return to town, Noozhawk revisits an interview conducted with him back in 2013.
• • •
Jeff Moehlis: If you don’t mind going back in time a little bit, what was the good, the bad and the ugly about the San Francisco music scene back in the late 1960s?
Boz Scaggs: Well, the good was that so many musicians converged upon that scene, so many styles. I think it told us all how closely related we were. There was a great intermingling of all sorts of forms of music from all the bands and musicians that were coming in — folk music and rock-‘n’-roll and blues and jazz. Everyone from Ravi Shankar to the British Blues and Pop Invasion with Led Zeppelin, Eric Clapton and Cream. Janis Joplin, Otis Redding, great blues artists, Miles Davis. You know, everybody came through that scene. It was a great cross-pollination. You know, Miles borrowed from the scene. It just crossed over.
It was a great explosion, probably the greatest thing that happened in the 20th century in popular music. I can’t think of any other convergence that was so … ooof! So that’s the good of it.
The bad of it … I don’t know. I don’t dwell on it. I don’t think there was any real bad that came of it. There was an aftermath to the Haight-Ashbury scene after everybody went home after the Summer of Love. I mean, I’m generalizing. After the great convergence, there was a tapering off. Just like a high, you know, there’s a comedown always. There was something empty after the party, after the parade went through. But, not bad. It’s life. It’s kind of remarkable, the trail of ideas and the effect that it had on the culture.
JM: Unfortunately, I missed the fun. I was born in 1970.
BS: Yeah, well, you’ve probably absorbed more of it than you realize. It’s still around. It certainly influenced a generation and had its fallout. I have a son who’s 35 years old, and he knows an awful lot about the music from that time, and you probably do, too.
JM: Your first solo album after you left the Steve Miller Band has the song “Loan Me a Dime,” with that killer guitar solo by Duane Allman. What was it like recording with him?
BS: Duane was a very big influence on those sessions. It took place at Muscle Shoals, and there were studio musicians. Duane had been an active musician with that section and left about six months before to start the Allman Brothers Band. So it was something of a reunion for him to come back to Muscle Shoals and work with those guys. He was very much respected, and I’d say loved by those guys. And his coming in, he inspired those sessions. And, you know, personally he was a wonderful guy. Besides being a fantastic musician, he was a real solid guy. A very kind guy, a funny guy. A very private guy in his own way. And just a really wonderful presence.
JM: Is it true that he had to be put in a separate room because his playing was so loud?
BS: Well, you know, the studio doesn’t have a lot of booths or spaces, so you have to separate things that bleed into other microphones. The drums are going to leak into the horns, and the guitar is going to leak into the bass. You’ve got to separate them to some degree. You want some to bleed into each other, but you have to separate the snare drum from the vocal microphone, and stuff like that.
In order to get his tone, he used a very small amplifier, and he turned it up in order to get distortion out of the speaker. So you always isolate that amplifier, that’s just the way you do it. The only place that they had to isolate Duane’s guitar was in this little bathroom. I was doing the vocal live out in a little room where they had a coin machine, a Coke machine. So I was locked up in there with my microphone. The horns were over on one side of the room, and the bass and drums … you had to get that isolation. That’s where Duane was, perched up on top of the john.
JM: Moving on to your album Silk Degrees, which was a huge, smash hit , what are your reflections on that album?
BS: It was really a great experience for me to work with those musicians. They were young, very highly respected studio musicians. My sessions, I think, were somewhat special for them because I really used their talent and ability as arrangers. I wanted their opinion. I really locked in with them. And we had a lot of fun making that record. They got to do things with my sessions that they might not have gotten to do with some of the other sessions they were doing. It was a special occasion, and a lot of fun for all of us. We made good music, and of course we got to enjoy the success of that album. Just wonderful. I’ve remained friends with everybody I worked with.
JM: You probably always get asked this. Is Lido from “Lido Shuffle” based on a real person?
BS: No, it’s just fictional. Just an idea.
— Jeff Moehlis is a Noozhawk contributing writer and a professor of mechanical engineering at UC Santa Barbara. Upcoming show recommendations, advice from musicians, interviews and more are available on his website, music-illuminati.com. The opinions expressed are his own.