It was meant as an insult but Walter Trout has adopted 'Too many notes and too loud' as a slogan. Not that Lick Library agrees. Just the right number of notes at just the right volume, we thought, when we caught up with him at his recent London show

Words: Gez Kahan; Pics: Kim Waller
06/11/2007

"I never sleep too well on tour, so I may not be at my most photogenic," says Walter Trout as he takes his place in front of the LickLibrary TV cameras. "Nobody will care," replies Lick Library's Stuart Bull, who's conducting the interview. "They just want to watch your hands."
Which suits Trout fine; the music's his thing after all. And though he's by no means a gearhead, he's passionate about sound and the tools of the trade. He's a Mesa Boogie [LINK http://www.mesaboogie.com] endorser, and we've laid on a Mesa Boogie amp but this is at short notice, so it's not his regular model. "Got a cable?" he asks. Now he's on his hands and knees examining the control panel, muttering, "Right, what we have to do first is turn the volume right down..." then turning to us to explain, "I've played a Mesa Boogie Mark IV for 17 years. I love it. But I'm not familiar with this model. I'm gonna have to mess with it for a while to get my sound right."
"It's got a setting called 'Spongy'," offers Bull. "Sounds like the setting my brain's on," Trout replies.
And then he's manouevring himself into his elaborate guitar strap. "When you've been playing 45 years one shoulder just can't take all the weight any longer. This was made for me by a guy named Troy Dare - it's called the Dare Guitar Strap [LINK http://www.darestrap.com/]," and he demonstrates how he can adjust it to distribute the weight however he wants between both his shoulders while still being able to move freely. He straps his Strat on, fiddles with controls, blazes through a couple of licks, tweaks the tone and we're set.
Trout works hard. His Autumn 2007 European tour crams over 60 dates into just over nine weeks and today he's just at the beginning of it, about six days in. "On every tour I get to where I don't know what day of the week it is or where I am," he says. "What day of the week is it?" Bull asks. Trout doesn't skip a beat. "I have no clue."
"I've been doing 200 shows a year since I started and I've never really let up on that," he adds. "Sometimes it takes a little toll on me. I get physically ill. On the last tour I did in the States, three months over the course of the summer, I started having some equilibrium problems and I had to do the last two weeks of that tour sitting on a chair because I couldn't stand up. The doctors were telling me basically I was just going at it too hard.
"When you start gettin' up close to 60 and you're out there and you're not getting much sleep and it's crappy food, you start thinking, 'It's time I take care of myself...'
"And when do you plan on doing that?" interrupts Bull.
"I don't know," Trout says, and laughs. "I'd agreed with my wife, who manages my band, that I'd cut back on touring. Then she called me last night and started mentioning all these offers that are coming in for next summer - go ahead and book it, I kept saying. I do like sitting on my porch but after a couple of weeks I start getting itchy to get back out there."...

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