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 SPECIAL FEATURE | |
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Jimmy Herring by Rob Johnson | |
Please enjoy these excerpts from Issue #59, when Jimmy Herring spoke at length about his album Lifeboat. Here is Jimmy Herring, from the vault. On Derek Trucks: "In the beginning, it was, 'Yeah, he's good for a kid,'" Jimmy says about Derek's days as a child prodigy. "When people would say that, I would get mad! No, he was good for an 80-year-old man. The fact that it was an 11-year-old just made it that much more hard to comprehend. "When we met, it was an instant bond; it was like that day. We knew right away. It wasn't just music either, it was the things we like to do away from music. The ocean, fishing...There were a lot of similarities in the way we were brought up," Jimmy says about his relationship with Derek. "He used to be real influenced by ARU, and then there was a period when I got real influenced by him and started ripping him off. Then it went back the other way for a while, I'd hear him play stuff and go, 'Hey!' Now currently, it's back to me being really influenced by him. "Actually, all of the tunes had him in mind, but he wasn't able to play on everything," Herring explains about Derek's involvement in the Lifeboat sessions. "He had the time to do everything, but he couldn't make that commitment because of his record company. They can't have him playing on an entire album, especially before he's finished with his album, which he was doing at the same time I was doing this. "When the project first came to light, it was supposed to be me and Derek, and Oteil, Jeff and Kofi, and then we would have Greg Osby on some tunes, too. And that was the band, that was what every song was going to be, but unfortunately he just couldn't do at the time, which we totally understand. I mean, he had been out playing with Clapton, and playing in the Allman Brothers, and his profile shot way up, and this would have been the first album he played on since his profile went up. We kicked around all kinds of ideas on how to get around it, but there is really no way around it, because you can't even put a false name. You can't even use an alias name for Derek, because as soon as he plays one note, you know who it is! He can't hide his identity! He plays one note, and you say, 'That's Derek.'" Don't worry though, Jimmy says that the inevitable Herring/Trucks project will one day become a reality. "There is going to be plenty of time down the road, we've got the rest of our lives," Jimmy says reassuringly. "We're going to do an album together, we've been talking about doing an album together for a long, long time." On Steve Morse: "He changed my life," Jimmy says reverently about Steve Morse. "He is another guy that I think is misunderstood by the jazz community. There's all these jazz people who don't understand that his focus is on his songwriting. Of course, he's writing really complicated songs with a lot of difficult parts, but more important than that is that his songs are his strength. The way that he writes, there is nobody like him, and his guitar playing is just unbelievable. If you ever notice, Dregs solos are pretty short - they serve the song, that's what their job is. You're not going to hear him improvise for 10 minutes and playing all this 'out' stuff, that is not what he does." Jimmy clearly remembers the first time he was exposed to the Dixie Dregs, in the way some people remember where they are when someone famous passed away. "I heard the Dregs for the first time when I was 18, and it completely changed my life that second that I heard it. From the first note of 'Take It off the Top' - off of What If? - I was just dumbfounded by the strength and the personality of the music in that band. Another thing that really shaped me a lot was that I was able to see them play live a lot. They toured quite a bit, and they happened to be coming through the area where I lived pretty regularly. And I would drive to go see them like a Deadhead, except I was a Dreghead, you know? I probably saw them about 150 times over the course of three years." Herring still needs to fight an inclination to be TOO influenced by the Dregs, and by Morse's playing specifically. In fact, he won't even let himself listen to that music. "I can't listen to it, because I will just want to go right back to it," he explains. "There was about four or five years of my life where all I did was try to play Dregs tunes. You can't focus on one thing, but that's what I was doing - I couldn't help it! Because I'm a Southern guy, and that music, to me, gave credibility to Southern music. Because those people who would fold their arms and say, 'Dumb Southern bumpkins, stupid rednecks, blah blah blah'...Well, listen to the Dregs and tell me that. Because it is undeniably Southern. There is a lot more to Southern Rock than 'Sweet Home Alabama.' "Twiggs Lyndon was so freaked out by the Dregs that he left the Allman Brothers and started working for the Dregs," Herring says, pointing out that he wasn't the only one who was so profoundly affected by their music. "He was so bowled over by what Steve and the band were doing, because the music has so many similarities. I know lot of people don't hear it, because they hear all the notes and say, 'Sounds like that guy gets paid by the note.' You know what I mean. I find him to be one of the most ridiculously brilliant composers in electric music." On Colonel Bruce Hampton and Aquarium Rescue Unit: "In 1986 I moved to Atlanta, and I met Jeff Sipe two or three days later, and a week later we were playing together in his basement," Jimmy recalls. "Three or four days after that, he calls me up and says 'Man, you won't believe these guys that just moved to town. These two guys, they're brothers, they just moved here from Virginia Beach, and they just moved into my house - they're my roommates. One of them plays bass, and the other plays keyboards. You've gotta get over here right now!' I went over there, and it was Kofi and Oteil Burbridge." Shortly after that, Jeff Sipe and Oteil invited Jimmy to come play with a local musician names Bruce Hampton, and Herring hasn't been the same since. "They said, 'Man, you've gotta come sit in.' And the first time I played with him, it just exploded," Herring says, awe in his voice. "It was the freest I had ever felt up to that point in my life, it was like a revelation that I can't even explain. Bruce called me the next day and said, 'You have to join the band, the higher council says you have to join the band.' And I'm like 'I'm there!' I didn't care that there was no money, it wasn't about money. It was just such a musical revelation, and all of us were having these leaps and bounds in our progress musically, and he was the catalyst that sparked all of it. "He's ruined us for the rest of our lives," Jimmy says fondly about Bruce. "We'll never look at things the way most people do. All of us are skewed permanently, in a good way. It was the greatest thing to be a part of something where you never knew what was going to happen. With us, 90% of what you were hearing was right off the cuff. Oteil and Jeff Sipe would steer the band in different directions, and everybody was completely listening to each other to the point that when someone came up with an idea, you just went there. You never knew where it was going to go, but sometimes that ended up being good. "He doesn't shed 10 hours a day, he doesn't practice scales," Jimmy says about the Colonel. "But he can play that tree right there; he can look at that tree and play it. That's what he's got that people who shed 10 hours a day, they're totally missing the point that he's trying to make. "What he taught me was to get out of that scholastic consciousness. He would say, 'I know what you can do; I don't want to hear that. Let me hear something you don't know.' No one had ever said that to me before, and I didn't know how to react. But it was a tremendous influence, and it opened the door to a whole new style. If it wasn't for him, I'd probably be teaching. I would have followed that little road of academia as far as it could go - which isn't very far. "It's much like the way John Gilmore, this saxophone player who played with Sun Ra, put it. People would ask him. 'You could play with anyone, why are you playing with him? What are you doing?' And he was like, 'One day, I just heard it.' He heard what Sun Ra was trying to do, he heard the validity in it, he heard that it was not below the status quo, it was above. He heard the higher harmony, and when he heard it, he couldn't go back." 
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