Chris McDermott
 
chris on beachMETRONOME MAGAZINE
interview by Brian Owens - 2-2007

Singer-songwriter-guitarist Chris McDermott continues to evolve as a songsmith as is evidenced on his latest album Radio Ghosts. In the late eighties and early nineties, McDermott was called upon by many of the blues world's finest players as their guitar sideman. He learned about life on the road and sought honesty for the blues. In 1995, McDermott struck out on his own and never looked back. Now, in 2007, McDermott is still making music on his terms. Melding classical guitar stylings with jazz, blues and pop, McDermott is forging new territory. I had a chance to talk with Chris and he told me about his travels through music...

METRONOME: Tell me about yourself. Where did you grow up and what got you in to music?

Chris McDermott: I grew up in Newark, Delaware listening to my older brother's blues and jazz record collection. I got in to a blues jam band when I was in the 4th Grade. I had a friend whose older brother was an amazing blues guitar player. He taught his two younger brothers to play bass and drums and they were really good. I went over and he had another guitar and put it in my hands and said, "Do what I'm doing." He wanted a rhythm guitar player. Every Saturday and Sunday throughout my childhood, we would be in their basement jamming away. My way of learning to play would be him saying, "Now take a solo... do what I'm doing." Then I started getting into bands and studying some jazz and playing with some blues players.

METRONOME: Did you attend Berklee College?

Yeah.

METRONOME: Is that what brought you to New England from Delaware?

Yes.

METRONOME: What year did you come to Boston?

1979.

METRONOME: You graduated and decided to stay in Boston?

Yeah. It's interesting because all my friends from that time were moving out to L.A. and getting famous and I thought, If I move out there I'm going to get buried or become a drug addict. The same thing with New York. I went down and played with John Scofield once and he said, "Why don't you move down here and starve with the rest of us?" That image of going down there and starving with the rest of them like John Scofield, whom I really admired, that kinda scared me. So I hung out here and did the whole falling in love with somebody and getting married and had a daughter.

METRONOME: Who are some of the people you have played with over the years?

Carrie Bell, Hubert Sumlin, Zorah Young, Eddie Kirkland, Nappy Brown, Marva Wright...

METRONOME: You were a sideman to all these guys?

Yeah.

METRONOME: What years are we talking about?

Mid eighties to the mid nineties. About ten years. I would get calls and go out and do dates with different people. I was never a steady guy in anybody's band for longer than a few months at a time.

METRONOME: You struck up a long term relationship with Eddie Kirkland. Tell me about that.

I played with him at a time when I was going through a change in my playing and searching to really solidify what I was doing. I had gone through a period where I was playing nothing but jazz for a while. Then I just stopped playing jazz because it completely turned me off. I just felt like there was no social point for it. It just didn't serve a real purpose. So I completely went in the opposite direction. I started playing rockabilly, punk rock and blues and getting as far away from that and playing just as primitive as I could. I played with a lot of blues based and rockabilly based bands in Boston and had a lot of fun.

METRONOME: Name some names.

I had my own thing called the Black River Snakes for a while. Then there was The Jitters, a rockabilly band; The Assassins, a rockabilly band. None of them were really challenging to me but it was just fun. Then I really started getting back in to blues and funk. Eddie was the first guy I had ever played with that was completely organic. In our basic musical terms, he doesn't know what the hell he's doing. In his terms he does. He would turn around and face in to his amp and come up with some wild tuning and just look at me and say, in front of a thousand people at a festival, "Follow me in C" when really he'd be in A flat. He'd be playing a bar of 5 here and a bar of 7 here... it was all about being completely on your toes, and I just loved that. It was all about the feeling. That's what I loved about him. That's why I was always disgusted with all the records from him during that era. There was never any of that wildness that happened live. They always wanted to sell him like a Delta bluesman. He was way more than that and way ahead of his time. I produced that record for him a few years ago. It's very different. There's moments of what I heard him do live that I was lucky enough to be a part of.

METRONOME: In the early nineties, you struck out on your own. Tell me about that.

I had been writing a lot of songs. I've always had my own thing happening at different times but this time I decided to record a CD and get more serious about it.

METRONOME: Your first album was called Got It Made and it came out in 1995. Was it all original music?

No, there was a Magic Sam cover, a Lonesome Sundown cover and I think the rest of it was all me. There were seventeen songs on that CD.

METRONOME: Where were you at musically, at that point?

What I was hearing was the blues played in a more honest, natural way that a white kid in the 1990s could play it without sounding corny. When I was on the road with these blues guys, every single blues club in every single city, all had their Stevie Ray Vaughan clone. In every single city, there would always be some guy with a white Strat and a hat and his initials on the guitar strap and it just seemed like a big joke to me after awhile. Then you'd hear all these bands with everyone of them covering "Sweet Home Chicago," and the same stuff. It was embarrassing to me. That to me is just gross imitation. It's just taking up space. If that's all people have to offer to music I wish they'd stop taking up space! It's stunting the growth of our culture. I'm not saying that I'm adding anything gigantic to our culture but I wanted to be myself as much as possible. I really love the blues but I also like a lot of different kinds of music. So I was trying to fit that in to what I was doing. At the same time I was trying to play in blues clubs where they are extremely traditional and very close minded about alot of things. One cool thing that happened that made a big difference was the band members, just by chance, I auditioned a Bulgarian bass player who was great and really hip. Then he brought his Bulgarian trumpet player friend and Serbian drummer. Suddenly I had an Eastern European band playing American blues. Their interpretation of it just made it that much stranger and to me it was hilarious. It was like being in the circus.

METRONOME: You guys had come in to your own by the time your next album, Trippin' Out was released, right?

No. It got better and better. Trippin? Out came right when we started to figure out what we were doing. There was an approach to my writing that had changed right around that point but the actual playing of those tunes got better about a year or two after Trippin' Out. We were actually touring and doing a lot of big gigs and playing a lot and that just makes a huge difference.

METRONOME: What happened to The Wild Combo?

That was also a time when I was signed to Warner-Chappell and had a big publishing deal and there was a lot of money involved. I had a manager in Hollywood and we were being flown out to L.A. It became pretty stressful to be doing showcases in New York all the time. I was paying everybody out of my pocket and it got to a point where... one guy in the band realized he didn't want to be in this music scene. He just wants to play music and doesn't want to kiss anybody's ass. He got out of it all together. He's actually on an island near Cuba now.

METRONOME: Who is that?

The bass player, George Donchev. A beautiful guy. So then I brought in Lenny Bradford on bass and he upped the sense of funkability and then we did another CD called To Be.

METRONOME: What year was that?

That was in 1999. I had added turntables at that point. That album is much more pop oriented but still keeping it in the blues with some hip-hop.

METRONOME: Were you using the turntables?

No I had a guy named Eroc playing turntables at that time. Actually, through his father, who started managing us for a little time, we ended up playing at "Woodstock 1999."

METRONOME: Was the name of the band still The Wild Combo at that time?

No. I changed the name of the band to The Chris McDermott Love Perimeter.

METRONOME: How long did that last?

About three years.

METRONOME: I thought Trippin' Out was the last album you did before your latest CD Radio Ghosts.

I did two since then. I also did a solo blues thing called Wound Up Whitey, Fucked up, Messed Up Thing.

METRONOME: When did you release that?

2002.

METRONOME: So it was just you and an acoustic guitar?

It's basically an experiment in distortion. It's mostly electric guitar but it's all solo guitar and me going off. I was pretty angry at that time. Songs about anger, loneliness and sexual frustration. I listened to it recently and it's actually really good but it?s so raw. It's so incredibly honest that I didn't let many people hear it.

METRONOME: Where did you track the album?

I was still living in the house in Groton with the recording studio that I had built and I recorded it there. I also recorded another CD last year called Leaf.

METRONOME: I thought Leaf included alot of the same songs you recorded for Radio Ghosts?

Actually I think three of the songs ended up on Radio Ghosts. Then there's two of the songs on that, that?s going to end up on a CD that I did in Latvia with a Latvian blues band a couple of years ago which has yet to be mixed. Leaf was just a compilation of a bunch of stuff I had sitting around and I just needed to release something.

METRONOME: Tell me about Radio Ghosts. You have a lot of great players joining you on the album.

Yes, especially Clyde Stubblefield. He's been my hero for so many years from listening to those James Brown records. He's played with a lot of great people and done a lot of great records.

METRONOME: How did you meet Clyde?

Actually through Grant Green, Jr. I know Grant from the New York scene from playing down there alot. I talked to Clyde and hired him on the spot basically. He was exactly what I was looking for. The idea was to do a record the same way that soul records were made in the early 70s. Have a really good band in a pretty enclosed space and just do it.

METRONOME: How long did it take you to record Radio Ghosts?

We started in December of 2005 and because I added strings and a bunch of backup vocals and horns I finally got it finished last June of 2006.

METRONOME: What was your musical vision for Radio Ghosts?

To me there's a thread. There's a few songs on there that I had previously recorded but I wanted them to be retreated in this way that I was going to treat all the songs. First of all with me playing an acoustic archtop guitar and singing with a great soul band. The idea of how to make a record in that sense is that you start with great instruments being played by great musicians playing great arrangements of great songs and hopefully the singer is going to be able to bring something to the table with the recording process being the right one.

METRONOME: Do you feel Neal Ward at Silvertone Studio captured you as well as he could?

There are a lot of different elements that were captured in many different ways. I'm happy with the sound of the record. A great way to make a record is to record on old discreet stuff like the Neve and then to mix on a solid state SSL G-Plus. That's the classic way of making a great sounding record, sonically anyway.

METRONOME: What are some of your favorite tracks on Radio Ghosts?

I'm really happy with the entire thing. This is the first time I've ever done a CD where I can listen to the entire thing from beginning to end and I can hear the intended thread that was meant to keep everything stylistically together. I think it also tells a story from beginning to end.

METRONOME: You've got a lot of different players showing up on this album. Do you feel that the guys who played with you captured the vibe that you were looking for?

Yes. The main core of the music is Clyde playing drums on everything, Brian Charette on keyboards and Jerry Dugger holding down the bass. The other guys were the icing on top. John Abrahamson came in and did some trumpet parts. Greg Hopkins actually played live in the studio with us on trumpet. Ricardo Monzon played live with us too. On one song, I had my eleven year old daughter, Grace, sing backup vocals on "Under The Water."

METRONOME: That must have been a treat for her?

She's actually made it on to every single one of my recordings.

METRONOME: Is she a guitar player?

No, she plays piano. She's starting to write songs. She takes lessons.

METRONOME: Why kind of guitar did you play on Radio Ghosts?

That's an Eastman archtop. That's 98% of what I played on the CD.

METRONOME: That's new for you because you use to play Harmony Rockets.

Yeah, and for the more electric funk blues, I still play that. I played it on one cut "Oh, Go Baby." The Eastman archtop has that combination of Django gypsy music and blues. Something that I could really dig into and handle it. It's inspired me to really work on my chops.

METRONOME: How long have you had the Eastman?

I got it in October 2005. I only had it for two months before we started recording. It was pretty cool, they invited me down to their warehouse in D.C, and I got to sit and try out guitars all day. They just brought me guitar after guitar. This is a beautiful handmade guitar. Every note on it just sings. It's completely changed my life. It's the first really fine instrument I've ever owned.

METRONOME: What kind of amp are you using?

A Fender Vibro King in combination with an AKG condenser mic in front of it. I've also been using a Pro Jr. for the blues sound. This whole CD was about the acoustic sound of the guitar.

METRONOME: Where can people buy your new CD?

CDBaby and iTunes.

METRONOME: Are you getting airplay for Radio Ghosts?

Yeah. The first week it was picked up by twelve stations. Twin Vision in Brooklyn, New York is promoting us to radio... Peter Hay. He promoted the Trippin? Out CD. Radio Ghosts is really the best thing I've ever done only because the money and time was there to do it. Also I guess the maturity and the great players, so I'm really trying to get this out there and be heard. I never felt that way before but with this one, I want everyone to hear it.

by Brian M. Owens