Rick Holmstrom Interview: Post-Insurrection Barbecue Music
Holmstrom, Steve Mugalian, Gregory Boaz
BY JORDAN MAINZER
Less than a week after I spoke to him over the phone from his home in Venice, CA, Rick Holmstrom texted me to clarify why a song on his new album Get It! was not influenced by Jimi Hendrix as I initially speculated. At length, he wrote that while he hears Hendrix on the radio today and is still blown away by how much he pushed the guitar, his own influences were the guitar players that came after Hendrix, and later, those that came before Hendrix. It was just a matter of the fact that Jimi died when Holmstrom was just 5. In other words, just timing. I laughed when I received the text because, having now spoken to Holmstrom twice, it was exactly the type of intentionality and attention to detail with which he approaches his albums. That said, the origins of Get It! were anything but intentional.
Last January, like everybody, Holmstrom was reading the news, still wondering, “What the hell just happened?” when a mob, spurred on by the current President, tried to overturn the results of a fair election. See That Light hadn’t even come out yet, but instead of getting ready to promote that album, Holmstrom was distracted by an unprecedented political situation. To clear his head, he booked some studio time and fleshed out some instrumentals he had in his back pocket for a while. He liked them enough to approach his long-time collaborators, drummer Steve Mugalian and bassist Gregory Boaz, and they fleshed out the songs during sessions in studios and at Mugalian’s garage. They were imagining the summer to come: friends vaccinated and gathered for outdoor barbecues and pool parties. What would they want to hear?
As a result, Get It! is an album back to Holmstrom’s roots, instrumental bops of blues and funk spanning a wide array of regions, from the Meters-indebted single “Erlee Time” and the San Antonio jump blues of “Robyn’s Romp” to the Chicago soul-inspired “FunkE3″. Songs like “King Freddie” and “G Like Junior” are reflections on the influence of Holmstrom’s mentors, both spiritual (Freddie King) and actual (Junior Watson), going so far as to riff on actual songs. All in all, Get It! functions like a good mixtape: stylistically diverse, with a few key tying threads.
Of course, Holmstrom’s solo music is more than tangentially related to his job as bandleader with Mavis Staples. You could say the two outfits have a symbiotic relationship. “FunkE3″ was originally written for the band to play on tour while crew got the stage ready for Staples’ set. Holmstrom generally plays trio shows of his own material on off nights with Staples. And the trio used their remarkable chemistry to tackle the challenges of performing songs from Staples’ new album Carry Me Home (Anti-), a 2011 recording of Staples and Levon Helm playing standards and tune from their respective catalogs. Take “This Is My Country”, a song by Curtis Mayfield and The Impressions that leads off Carry Me Home. “There were 16-17 people on the [album version],” Holmstrom said. “Now that we’re [playing it] with a trio, it’s really difficult, going from melody to chords and rhythm seamlessly.” He cites players like jazz pianists Ahmad Jamal, Mose Allison, and Count Basie and saxophonist Sonny Rollins as essential in helping him figure out how to get a bigger sound out of fewer players. “I try to hit the melody and go to the chords and the rhythm,” he said. “Sometimes, you have to ignore the melody the next time around and hope it’s still in some people’s minds.” It helps, too, having Mugalian and Boaz. “There’s endless positivity. Nobody’s getting defensive. We’re always looking to improve,” he said. It’s why they were able to make two albums in a short period of time, pandemic or otherwise.
You can catch Holmstrom playing with Staples on Saturday at Wrigley Field opening for Chris Stapleton along with The Highwomen and Mike Campbell & The Dirty Knobs. If the set sports anything like his guitar work on Carry Me Home, whether the blues lurch on “Trouble in My Mind”, his raw pierces on “Move Along Train”, or his bendy licks on Helm’s “When I Go Away”, attendees will be in for a treat. Oh, and I guess Mavis is pretty good, too.
Read our conversation about Get It! below, edited for length and clarity.
Since I Left You: Last time we talked, you told me you were working on some instrumentals, which turned out to be this record. How long had these songs been mulling about?
Rick Holmstrom: Some had been mulling about for years. Some are brand new. I’ve always done instrumentals, from when I started way back until now in my trio shows. And we do them in Mavis shows, too, to provide a break for Mavis and her sister Yvonne in the set. I was also in a band called The Gimme 5′s for quite a few years, and we were an all instrumental band made up of touring musicians. We could only play when all of us were home. Drums, bass, guitar, and organ, very much in the M.G.’s or Meters form. In that group, we did some Meters and M.G.’s songs. Mostly, what we did is took songs and turned them into instrumentals that were sort of in the vein of The Meters or The M.G.’s. What would The Meters sound like playing an ELO song, or what would The M.G.’s sound like playing “Rhiannon” by Fleetwood Mac or a Beatles song? It was really fun. I learned a lot. The Gimme 5′s were kind of famous for throwing songs at me the day before a gig. “I know you just got home last night, but while you were on the road, we worked up these three songs. Can you take a stab at them tomorrow?” [laughs] It was very challenging. Some of these songs grew out of that, variations on what I developed playing out of The Gimme 5′s. Some were throwbacks to my blues days with William Clarke, Johnny Dyer, and Rod Piazza. Some were coming from the Mavis world.
SILY: I definitely noticed that variety of influences. You mentioned The Meters when releasing the first single, “Erlee Time”. I also heard them a lot on “Bubbles”.
RH: Mmhm.
SILY: So you basically brought these songs to Steve and Gregory and said, “Let’s bang ‘em out!”
RH: Every time I hear a musician talk about a new record, they’re all pandemic records. My last one was definitely a pandemic record. I’d consider this one an insurrection record, or a post-attempted coup record. It started in mid-to-late January a couple weeks after the insurrection. The news was just driving me crazy. I couldn’t stand all the time I spent reading the news or watching MSNBC. So I booked a session and made myself go into the studio and start putting together these ideas. The very first session was just me and the engineer, me playing some guitar over some loops to see if some of these raw ideas would hold together. I really liked them and thought they worked, so I started getting Greg and Steve together. Some of the sessions were in studios, some were in Steve’s garage. We were trying to do them as lo-fi and low-budget as we could. What we discovered right away was that it was taking our minds away from all the news and making us feel good. We weren’t really touring with Mavis yet at that point, and there were no gigs happening. Before See That Light even came out in February, we were halfway done with this record.
SILY: When you say, “It’s an insurrection record,” it’s not that the songs are about the insurrection, it’s more of a way for you to cope with the world by playing these upbeat songs.
RH: That’s right. They were totally made about parties, barbecues, fun drives during the summer. Just trying to think about good times.
SILY: On “FunkE3″, I hear a little Hendrix in your guitar playing. Am I off?
RH: [laughs] No. I mean, who doesn’t love Hendrix? He totally changed the game. But he did that when I was a really little infant. I’m actually not very influenced by Hendrix. I don’t say that in any kind of derogatory way, it just happened that way. By the time I started listening to guitar, I heard Hendrix, but I was also hearing the post-Hendrix people. When you hear those Hendrix things, you’re probably hearing me getting into Curtis Mayfield or Don Covay. That intro was kind of Don Covay. That song, “FunkE3″ came from a tour we did with Joan Osborne. The trio backed up Joan and Mavis. We used to play a 45-minute set with Joan and play her off with this instrumental. While we were doing that, the crew would come on and bring on Mavis’ mic and reconfigure the monitors for our background vocals. It only took 3 or 4 minutes, but rather than take a 15-minute break, we just kept it going. That’s part of the reason that instrumental has so many twists and turns. I knew I didn’t want to get up there and jam on a blues shuffle or a one-chord thing. It needed to keep these people’s attention for a bit while [crew] were walking on stage. We used to laugh at it and call it our James Gang-type instrumental, like “Funk #49″. It doesn’t have much to do with “Funk #49″, but it has all these little bits in it that are like, “What? Where did that come from!”
SILY: Is “King Freddie” in reference to Freddie King?
RH: [Yes.] It’s got bits of “Side Tracked” in it, in that the bridge is probably closer to a Hank Williams type of bridge changes-wise. It’s also got bits of “In The Open”. But it’s just me kind of shuffling around my early Freddie King influence. It was kind of fun to let it come out. When I was in my early 20s, I was really into Freddie King before I got into T-Bone Walker or digging farther back. My friend Junior Watson let me know [that] so many people covered Freddie King, from Peter Green and Eric Clapton in England to here in the States. You almost couldn’t go to a blues gig in the 80′s or 90′s without hearing a Freddie King instrumental. I kind of stayed away from it because so many people had done it, but during this time at home, I went through this period where I was rediscovering records by Freddie King, Little Milton, and Albert King and discovering little subtleties like bends or pickup notes I missed when I was in my twenties.
SILY: Is your friend Junior the “Junior” in “G Like Junior”?
RH: Yeah. Junior Watson is a great jump blues guitar player in Southern California. He’s played with Rod Piazza and Canned Heat. He was a big mentor to me in my twenties and now. The song really doesn’t have much to do with Junior’s style. I was just hunting for a title and thought, “Geez, I’ve never given tribute to Junior in a song title.” It’s kind of up his alley. It’s in his wheelhouse.
SILY: In including so many names in the titles--some are obvious in terms of who you’re referring to, but some aren’t--are you trying to contextualize them for listeners, or are they winks and nods to yourself?
RH: A little bit of both. There were a lot of working titles, but when you have an instrumental, you don’t have anything lyrically or vocally to go from. The working title for “Taghazout” was “Flea Market”. [laughs] Steve and I wrote that together. I just said, “Man, we gotta come up with a better title than ‘Flea Market’.” He said, “Maybe something in West Africa.” I asked my surfer nephew Harlan, who was in his mid-20s and has gone all over the globe in search of waves, and he mentioned Taghazout in Morocco. I did a little research into it and thought, “Yeah, that sounds cool.” A song like “Pour One Out” is me thinking about all of the blues people that have come and gone and left us, and the custom of standing there with your pals and pouring one on the ground for those who can’t be there. It’s loaded with people I knew and people I didn’t know but who were big influences on me.
SILY: We’ve already talked about the different directions this album takes, but there seem to be a few true one-offs. “Robin’s Romp” is straight rockabilly.
RH: I actually look at “Robin’s Romp” as being early 50′s jump blues down in San Antonio or Houston, like [Clarence] “Gatemouth” Brown. I was thinking of “Okie Dokie Stomp”. Almost pre-rockabilly. It’s African American R&B jump blues.
SILY: Did you sequence the record more with tempos in mind or in order to bounce around different subgenres?
RH: I just threw the songs in a bunch of different orders. Like any record, sequencing is hard, but it finally started to get a flow. It seemed like around halfway, we needed to have “Weeping Tana”. There are only two songs on the record with any minor key capos, and we needed to have one of them be halfway and be followed by a real upbeat song like “Erlee Time”. Sequencing is just a thing where you keep trying, ask friends what they think, and that’s it. As far as the variety, I was really just trying to have fun. I was trying to imagine getting together with friends. If you’re having friends over and are thinking, “Oh, I’m gonna put on The Meters or I’m going to put on The M.G.’s,” maybe you just did that at the last party. Or some Lee Dorsey. Sometimes, when I have parties, I don’t want to hear lyrics. I just want the music.
SILY: A few songs on here have different moods than party moods, though. “Weeping Tana” is melancholy, “Taghazout” is hazy, and “Walking With Diane”, kind of like "Joyful Eye” from See That Light, is a nice slow song to end on. How do those songs fit in with the idea of “barbecue music?”
RH: I was aiming to have it all be upbeat barbecue music, but sometimes, you listen to a record and have 4-5 upbeat songs, and you need a little break so you could come back up again. “Walking With Diane”, Diane is my mom’s name, and I was picturing us walking up around this lake in Alaska, which we’ve done many times. It came out of playing many versions of “Mary Don’t You Weep” by the Swan Silvertones as an instrumental with Mavis and on my trio gigs, and trying to think of something that had that mellow shuffling gospel groove but its own melody. “Weeping Tana”, I was listening to a lot of soundtrack music like Morricone. I was trying to envision a small band trying to play something Morricone-esque without being overly so, if that makes any sense. It probably ended up being somewhere in the middle, but that’s where it was coming from. Something like “The Vice of Killing”. “Taghazout” was a melody that Steve had most of, and I helped him finish it and put a chord progression and bridge together. We cut it that day. We were trying to come up with something upbeat like a Jimmy McGriff thing, which we ended up getting later with “All About My Girls”. But [on “Taghazout”], Steve picked up that guitar and started playing that minor melody and I thought it was cool and finished it for him. He plays a little bit of guitar, but he’s not a guitarist.
SILY: How’d you come up with the album title?
RH: That’s something that Smokey Wilson [used to say], the great bluesman from Mississippi who moved out here and who I used to play with at his club The Pioneer Club in South Central L.A. in my early twenties. I used to back him up playing with William Clarke. Smokey was a great guitarist and vocalist and super intense artist and showman. I was in my early twenties, so I was nervous, and once or twice during the whole show, he would give me a solo. He was plenty of a guitar player. He’d look at me and go, “Holms!” I’d start playing and he’d get over in my ear and yell, “Get it!”
SILY: What about the cover art for this record?
RH: My friend Ben Hernandez put that together. Originally, we were going to use the photo that was on the back, taken by Greg Vorobiov. I asked [Ben], “Would you mind putting something together?” and thought it was striking from a distance. I’d never had a record cover like that. Ben is also a singer and songwriter and we have hired him as a background singer with Mavis on some tours as a sub. He’s an Oceanside musician.
SILY: Anything you’ve been listening to, watching, or reading lately that’s caught your attention?
RH: The Summer of Soul documentary blew my mind and [that of] everybody I know. It makes me want to see what else they’ve got.
Music-wise, I’m scattered all over the place. Friends of mine will send me links and I’ll go down that rabbit hole for a few days and then pop back up. It’ll be something from Jamaica for a few days, or something from Africa, something from Brazil, and then I’m back up listening to Dylan. I’m always chasing sounds, so as a guitar player, I might be listening to Lightnin' Hopkins on Herald [Records], which I constantly go back to, or Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown in the early 50′s on Peacock [Records]. Just the sound of those records, I never get tired of it. I’ll also be listening to saxophone players or piano players like Ahmad Jamal or Sonny Rollins. I like listening to them when they play with a really small band. I like to hear the way those players use space and imply things that aren’t there in their melodies and playing. You can hear Ahmad Jamal play piano and get the feeling of a horn section in his hands, and when he stops playing those chords and plays little simple melody lines, your brain hears the chordal harmonic texture in those melodies even when they’re not there. I like to take that imaginary thing and utilize it myself when playing with the trio.