Jonny Lang's Blues & Candies

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SOUTHWEST AIRLINES SPIRIT

February 2000

True Blues
by Chuck Thompson

At the ripe age of 19, Jonny Lang has proven that you don't have to be a grizzled dude from the delta to merge with the myth his tunes hang with the best

Cover photo by Jim Purdum
Like a man with a secret, Bruce Walker takes a careful look around before removing the slender Ibanez guitar from it's case. Satisfied that the coast is clear, he turns it over reverentially, first showing me the signatures on the backside.

"That's Stevie Ray Vaughan," he says, giving the veneer above the autograph a light polish. "He's the first one I got, back in 1988 in New Jersey. Then here's B.B. King, Bo Diddley, John Lee Hooker." Walker lingers over each signature while reading the names, then turns over the guitar and slowly clicks off the rest of the roll call for me. "Buddy Guy. George Thorogood. Robert Cray. Jimmie Vaughan. Carlos Santana."

Monsters of the six-string dream machine to a man, and tonight Walkers, a 38 - year-old deputy district attorney from southern Oregon, has driven five hours to stand on a street corner at 4 p.m. on a sunny Thursday in Portland, Oregon, in the hopes of adding one more name to his guitar's roster of legends.

Jonny Lang's tour bus is already parked outside the back entrance of the Roseland Theater in downtown Portland, just across the street from where Walker has been standing for an hour. The 19-year-old blues sensation is inside doing his sound check for tonight's 8 o'clock show. But Walker figures Lang might eventually wander outside - maybe head back to the hotel - between now and show time. And he's determined not to miss his chance.

"Jonny can play like crazy, but so can a lot of guys," Walker says, as though talking about a close friend. "But he also writes and sings with such emotion. That makes him a triple threat. That makes him special."

In exchange for talking to me and showing me his guitar, Walker has exacted a promise that I not reveal his real name or hometown. "I live in a small town, and it'd be real easy for someone to find me," he says. I ask him if he thinks somebody would actually break into his house to steal his prized possession. "Well, I keep the guitar locked up in a gun case at a buddy's house," Walker says. "But you can't be too careful."

Such devoted, cautious, and religiously zealous fans as Walker have been both a blessing and a curse to Lang since he exploded onto the music world in 1997 at age 16 with Lie To Me, an album of mostly straight-ahead blues that he played and sang with such preternatural power that no one knew quite what to make of him. Now with a second million-selling CD, Wander This World, Lang finds himself in the midst of a coronation as the world's latest savior of the blues.

No genre of music, not even jazz, is surrounded by such a pious mythology as the blues. And no other genre has developed a legion of fans - defenders of the faith of which Walker is a typical part - who have become the self-appointed caretakers of that mythology. No one questions the legitimacy of the emotions of, say, Hanson, or the heartache of the 12-year-old Michael Jackson when he screetched "I Want You Back," but the blues is a different matter altogether. Just a year or so ago, the purists weren't buying into the ability of a white teenage kid from Minneapolis - by way of hometown Fargo, North Dakota - to summon the demons that have traditionally fueled the blues aura.

"The blues has a great cool myth that you've got to be this old dude from the Delta with an alcohol problem, but people ... don't understand that, like all music, the blues are universal and doesn't see age or race or anything," Lang told Interview magazine last year, responding to a typically contentious critic.

A few hours before the Portland show, he still finds himself shrugging his rail-thin shoulders over the age/race issue.

"When I listen to me, I still sound like a white boy," he laughs, but he's clearly sick of the topic.

Currently in the midst of a nonstop world tour - a tour that's included opening gigs with The Rolling Stones and Aerosmith and a string of sold-out shows of his own - Lang has slipped comfortably from child prodigy into the role of been-there-done-that veteran guitar great. He's traded leads onstage with B.B. King, headed Jesse Ventura's gubernatorial inauguration party, and even had Mick Jagger score him some drugs before a show in Honolulu.

"It was all legal!" Lang stresses with a laugh. " I was really sick, so my voice was just jammed up. He got me some of that prescription steroid stuff, an anti-inflammatory for your vocal chords."

Despite the impressive resume, Wander This World is being spun by A&M Records and Lang's management as a growth album. One reads press releases with caution, but even from it's first track, it's clear that Lang's development over the past two years has been astonishing, especially considering the referred level from which he took off. Lang's first solo on the opening track of Lie To Me was a pretty good run at a basic 16-bar blues progression, with lots of '70s wah-wah pedal thrown in. On "Still Rainin'," the first cut on Wander This World, Lang blazes through an extended break, using many fewer recording effects to generate many more emotional effects.

"I grew up on Motown stuff and soul music," Lang says. "So [Wander This World] was just kind of returning to that. I like singing that stuff better, and writing that stuff comes a little easier to me."

At Lang's shows, it's the singing as much as the guitar playing that amazes audiences. Truth be told, almost every major city in America has a handful of local legends who can run up and down blues scales with as much skill, speed, and dexterity as Clapton, King, or Lang. But to be present when Lang's whiskied baritone flies out at tornado force from his wispy frame - even after Thanksgiving dinner, Lang couldn't weigh more than a buck fifty - is to see the real revelation of his talent. Forget the purists - no one on earth suffers agony with as much fervor as a teenager, and Lang's raw vocals handle all the bitterness, joy, love, hate, defeat, and victory of life as well as almost any new singer of recent years. On stage he rarely opens his eyes, blindly blasting through songs as though wrapped in a dark dream.

"Lyrics are the biggest part in picking my songs," Lang says. "Just as long as they're real. I hate clichés."

Lang played saxophone in school bands and was 13 when he got his first guitar, a Fender Stratocaster given to him by his father. By the ninth grade, he'd dropped out of school to pursue music.

"I hated school more than anything," he says. "I love learning, but I like to learn I my own way. Once you learn the basics, you have all your best teachers on albums. ... Stevie Wonder, Music of My Mind. That was huge. Greg Brown, Slant 6 Mind. That totally floored me. Jeff Buckley, Grace. That album really hit me. Chris Whitley, Dirt Floor. That was huge." Lang can and will talk about music - any genre, popular or obscure - all day long.

Along with immense talent, Lang's success is also the result of a mature and businesslike approach to the trade, rare among musicians of any age. The Portland sound check goes off without any of the impromptu jammin, hazy hangover playing, or obscene cutting-up typical of many tours. A few days later, at a sold-out show at Los Angeles' Wiltern Theater, Lang and his four-piece band finish a typically draining set and - with a notable lack of hoots and high-five's - quietly walk off stage to wait for the encore applause to build. When Lang decides he's ready, he saunters without a word back in front of the stomping crowd, and his band follows. Backstage, smartly dressed fans and VIP's sip bottled water, espressos, and cappuccinos, and pick at a tray of sliced fruit while waiting to mingle with the man of the hour. Not exactly the excesses typical of VH1's Behind the Music you'd expect from a 19-year-old playing a sold-out tour of the world with a Fender Telecaster designed precisely to fit his narrow hands. Not exactly the smoky, gritty image of the blues the world has grown up with.

"There's not a lot of horseplay on this tour," confirms keyboardist Bruce McCabe, who has written some of the best tunes on both of Lang's CD's.

Like the rest of the band, McCabe is a Minneapolis scene veteran, a talented, middle-aged guy who struggled along in local clubs for years before being pulled into Lang's miracle ascension. Lang moved to Minneapolis as a teenage wunderkind, fronting a band called Kid Jonny Lang and the Big Bang. A few days before a two-week breakthrough tour with Buddy Guy, however, the Big Bang imploded and Lang recruited local players he'd met and respected.

"It was literally, 'Can you come to rehearsal tomorrow?' and then being on the road with Buddy Guy two days later," recalls guitarist Paul Diethelm, 34. Of Lang's current band, only 46-year-old bassist Doug Nelson - who's played with big names from Prince to Olivia Newton-John - has any previous national credentials of note.

The Jonny Lang story is, in fact, the latest chapter in the triumph of the Minneapolis music scene that has produced, among others, '80s alternarockers The Replacements and Husker Du, Janet Jackson's production team of Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, and, of course, the purple reign of the Artist Formerly Known As Prince. Both of Lang's CD' have been produced by Minneapolis' David Z - who has worked exclusively with The Purple One - and Wander This World includes "I Am," a one-chord funk track co-written (but never released) by Prince. At sound checks, Lang occasionally wows afternoon by-standers with a stunning version of "Hey, Baby, Hey," a lifting tune by Minnesota folkie Greg Brown, who became a favorite on Garrison Keilor's A Prairie Home Companion radio show before earning international critical acclaim.

In concert, Lang has performed the laid-back "Hey, Baby, Hey" only a couple of times. But he shyly admits that, though he hasn't recorded any of them, Brown's strummy-acoustic-guitar songs are more in the vein that he usually writes himself.

"I kind of like keeping those songs to myself," he remarks. "At this point in my life I really like going out and just rocking. ... People coming to a show have different expectations of me."

Which gets us back to the expectations of one of Lang's fans in particular. It's 11 p.m. and Bruce Walker is back waiting patiently near the service entrance of the Roseland Theater in Portland. Lang never did come out before the show and Walker's repeated efforts to talk the security guards into slipping him backstage for a few minutes have been fruitless. By now, I've taken a rooting interest in Walker's quest, so I hang out on the street with him after the show to see what happens. We talk about the concert, and I debrief him on my impressions of Lang.

"So what's he like? Is he a nice guy?" Walker asks me as a small crowd of competing autograph-seekers begins to accumulate around us.

I tell him that Lang is, in fact, a very nice kid and that what surprises me not about him is just how much of a kid he really is. On stage and in recordings, Lang is so controlled and his voice is so deep and soulful that he really does come off as a guy who has "seen it all through the yellow windows of the evening train," to quote another whiskey-voiced troubadour, Tom Waits. But away from the stage, Lang is like a lot of other young kids I know. Laid back. Kind of funny. Only abstractly aware of what the adult world considers the larger issues.

Lang lit up when talking about Jesse Ventura, Minnesota's Governor and, literally and figuratively, one of Langs' biggest fans. "He's awesome! He's totally cool! I mean , whatever, as a governor, I don't know the first thing about him. He's just a really cool guy."

Before the L.A. show, Lang sat giddily on Jay Leno's couch and joked about getting his driver's license after failing on the first try. He's most at ease talking about the things that interest most teenagers. Music. Cars. Celebrities. Movies.

"I saw The Matrix five times," he told me shortly before going on stage in Portland. "Oh, man, I love that movie! I want to believe that there is a parallel world where you can actually do stuff like that, you know?"

Dude, I could barely stop myself from telling him, don't you know that you are in the Matrix? That this is the parallel universe? That you are living in the dream world?

Lang probably would have laughed at that, had I had the nerve to say it. Instead, he just shrugs his shoulders and gets ready to hit the stage, gets ready to close his eyes for the next 90 minutes and drop into a dream that even he can't see. Not even when, at just past midnight on a chilly street corner in Portland, Oregon, after nine hours of waiting, a 38-year-old guy with his own set of heartaches, regrets, and disappointments that no one will ever immortalize in a song gets pulled into the dreamscape for just a moment with a signature on a guitar that will be looked at in awe for years to come.