Photo by Dino Perrucci
Since teaming up with John Medeski and the North Mississippi Allstars as The Word and beginning to release albums with his Family Band, both around the turn of the century, Robert Randolph has established himself as one of the preeminent guitarists in the realms of soul, funk, rock, blues and more. Employing the pedal steel guitar in the Sacred Steel tradition that started with Willie Eason and came to Randolph through his active participation in the House of God Church, the guitarist brings a high-energy fervor to his bands that has put him on the map as a must-see live act.
While in New York recently to play his annual Family Band residency at the Brooklyn Bowl, Randolph takes time to talk a little about the past but mostly about what’s still to come, including an almost-finished new album, a new online music school that he says is “going to change the world” and what it’s like when your family and your band are one in the same.
Your Brooklyn Bowl Thanksgiving run has become kind of a tradition. How did you approach it this year?
This year’s thing, we just actually got all of my cousins and my sister there this year, so it’s a little different. Yesterday we had seven people, seven of us from everywhere—Virginia, Charleston—everybody is in town this year. You know, we’ve got a big music family, lots of guys. So we just figured we’d come in and just do a throw down, man. We had some good grooves going last night, making up stuff as we’re getting ready for our record to come out in April. It’s always funny—like, we’re supposed to play some new songs off the record, but it was like, “Oh! I forgot!” Everybody forgot, because we haven’t even rehearsed yet. But I’m sure we’ll come back and do another run or something in maybe April or May or somewhere. We don’t want to wait until next Thanksgiving.
So that new album is all recorded?
Yeah, it’s recorded. We’re just doing our last mixing touches and stuff like that. And we’re actually going back into the studio in January to record a couple more tunes. It’s coming out on Sony Masterworks. It’s funny because I actually made two records—once again—so I’m trying to see which one we’re actually going to put out, the more bluesy-rock one or the more funky-rock one. We actually might do like five of each, and do kind of a two-disc. Does anybody buy discs anymore? Or some kind of funky layout—it’s got to be one or the other. Feeling funky today? Feeling bluesy today? One of those things.
Any ideas for a title yet?
I’m leaning on the title Got Soul. But it’s not set in stone.
So a lot of people who were in bands, they say their band is like their family. But with you, your band is your family. What is it like to be able to play with your actual family? Does it generally help or hinder the process of writing and performing?
Man, I think it helps out. You get it all, which makes you get through the good and bad times much easier, you know? Like I’ve known bands that wind up breaking up just for the simple fact they’re not really family. When you got real family, you know, you still gotta talk to each other. You’ve got parents, and you’ve got aunts and you’ve got uncles and brothers, so at the end of the day, one of them will curse the other one out at some point. And somebody will go, “What are ya’ll fighting for?” But musically, too, it’s like you get the great things about [family], like you’ll say, “Hey, let’s do this Hendrix tune, but like, let’s sort of do it our way,” and everybody would automatically know whatever that means, you know? “Let’s put a little gospel flavor to it, whatever, or add this and add that,” and everybody would spontaneously just start doing stuff,. Which happens a lot during our shows. And probably more so for the Brooklyn Bowl shows than anywhere else, because it’s kind of like fun jamming. More than 70 percent of the stuff we play at Brooklyn Bowl—every time we play there—is totally made up on the spot.
You guys obviously have a lot of energy when you’re playing live shows onstage. How do you try to capture that when you’re in the studio?
Most of this was all recorded live, you know? What winds up happening is we’d get to the studio and we’d play and we’d just go through different ideas and sort of have these jams. And it’s so weird, because, you know, you hear all these guys say, “Oh, you shouldn’t do that. You can’t do that.” But when you’re a guitar player—all real guitar playing and all the soulful stuff which is connected to life, it’s really this spontaneous thing that happens, you know? Unless you’re trying to do some jazz thing that’s all chorded and charted out, which is not what I do—not what we do. And talking to guys like Eddie Kramer, and when you talk about one of the greatest guitar [players like] Jimi Hendrix—all of those songs were taken from him just playing, and then they’d have to go and edit it and then he would sort of [write] while he’s playing…Which is something that I actually do. Like while I’m playing, there’s a chorus that runs through my head. So you may have a general idea, but then once the music is done, you can go back and listen and then these choruses come into play. And sometimes once you actually have the finished song, you can try to go and do it, but what winds up happening most times is that you never can replace those spontaneous moments. Whether it’s soloing or playing along with everybody—when something feels right, that just winds up being the one.
So in this case we just got back to it. We really just got back in the room and just played, you know? And so I think that’s the magical part. And that’s what happens live all the time. You look at all the great live bands—and I can tell you, most real musicians, once that song is recorded, they just can’t wait to get on stage and see what happens. Because there’s the stage, there’s these fans, you see people dancing along—it just brings about all this new energy. That’s why some of the great live recordings are just irreplaceable, because some guys are just like, “Man, we must have really been feeling good that night!” You know? And look, some guys like to go in and overtly rehearse and do these things: “I’ma do exactly this, and you do exactly that.” But to me, that’s a little boring, you know? [Laughs]
Do you have any guests on this one? I know you had Trombone Shorty and Santana on your last album.
You know what, we did, but I’m not allowed to say right now. But yeah, we really got some really cool guests that really fit with what we do. It’s really gonna be a cool record.
Photo by Dino Perrucci
How does this new music compare to what you guys have released before?
You know what? It’s funny because everybody always says this but this is definitely our best studio record. It’s so hard to beat the live things, [2002’s] Live at the Wetlands and all of that. This one is just a little bit more edgier, you know? A little bit more energetic in that way. We’ve written some great songs, you know. Co-written with some guys, and we kinda all got together in a studio, in a room, and really got some great things. I’ve written so many songs over the past couple of years, collaborated with so many guys, from Eric Krasno to Carlos Santana, all these different guys. I’m sure I’m forgetting people. They’ll be like, “Hey, you didn’t mention me!”
I actually wanted to ask about your relationship with Krasno. How did that come about?
Just years of playing music together and knowing each other. He’s great, man. It’s funny how we’ve all gotten kind of older. It’s weird how it all happens, man. Even if you look at Lettuce. We opened our first show for Lettuce. Then, we always teased them guys because they had like eight bands. It was like, “What the hell, man? How many bands are you in?” We didn’t know nothing about the scene. It was like, “Kraz with Goapele,” “Kraz featuring Javier,” “Shmeeans and the Squad,” “Lettuce.” Like, damn, man.
As the years have passed, everyone’s made music and everything has gone to another level. You look at those guys—Lettuce and Soulive and Kraz. Everybody is sort of slowly climbing, everybody’s just gotten better. It’s kind of funny to learn to accept that. You’d rather have that sort of career. Because we all love playing music anyway, so you’d rather have that [kind of] career. It’s just real musicianship and real collaborations and being steady. We all used to complain, like, “How come your song is such a hit and mine’s not? Look at this band—why is that band a hit?” And then next thing you know, those bands are gone. Nobody will show up to watch them play or buy their music.
In a Relix interview two years ago, when you switched to Blue Note, you were talking about how you felt like you were kind of going in the wrong direction with Warner Brothers, how do you feel about your trajectory now?
Well, with Sony, it’s a much better vision. I think Blue Note was just a transition. It’s a company, you know—so many of these companies are in transition, and sometimes we can all kind of get caught up into their thing. But sometimes it might not be the right thing for certain artists. And Blue Note is a great company, but it just wasn’t the right thing for us then. Warren Haynes was on Blue Note too; he’s not on there anymore. It’s just changed; a lot of these companies change. Some of them really don’t fit the kind of the artists who have already been around. They like to work with newer artists, you know, unknowns, so it becomes another process, I guess.
You also mentioned that you were opening up a school in New Jersey?
Yeah. It was a music and arts school. We’ve actually since shifted. It was just a lot of politics, so we shifted to this great online school, because there’s so much bureaucracy with the Board of Education and all these different people. It’s a whole other deal, which actually became a better idea than me going out and fighting with the school boards and all that. This is a much easier thing that basically everybody in the world would be able to access and have every sort of learning tool. And not just music—arts, dancing, you know, all these different components to it. It’s just a wonderful, wonderful thing. The website is going through beta testing right now, but it’s actually something that’s really going to change the world, it really is. It’s a big idea, a big thing.
Can you talk about it at all?
Not really [laughs]. It’s just a great online music school. That’s all I can really say. You’ll hear about it very soon. Shmeeans is involved, which is something really great, Roy Hargrove, Warren, so many other guys have been involved, so it’s going to be a big thing.
You’ve mentioned your relationship with Santana, and how he sat you and Derek Trucks down at different times and talked about your careers and how you both needed to tweak some things to take the next step. Did you take that to heart?
Well, you know, I think it’s just like advice, kind of, that really helped us all grow. You can see what it’s done for Derek and Susan. They’re a success. You know, you like to be surrounded by those guys that give you that kind of helpful criticism and advice. Just career things. Because you kind of forget that those guys have been around. We think we’ve done a lot of stuff, but then you think, “Geez, man, I can’t imagine.” You don’t even know what those drugs will do to you. They used to just take them and party and play. He’s like, “Man, we played 200 gigs and we don’t even know any of them, what we did.” So it’s always important to learn musically, taking all of the criticism and the advice. It’s all helpful to me, so it’s great.
Do you feel that you’re at a point in your career where you can give that sort of advice to younger artists?
Oh yeah, yeah. You know, once you’ve been doing music this long, as long as we’ve been doing it—I mean, we’ve played over a thousand live shows, and we’ve done all these TV shows, and just being on the road, life, and this and that—we kinda like to give advice to people. But then you have guys like Santana who will tell you like, “Man, you’ve only been doing this fourteen years. You still got another forty years to go!” So it’s kinda funny when you think about that. When you think about guys like Santana, Gregg Allman, Warren and all these guys that have been playing music so long, it’s like “Wow, man.” You never really think of that. It’ll pop into your mind every now and again, like, “Man, I really wanna be playing music till I’m 70,” and then five years later you’re like, “Man, I’m only 35.” But you go through all these phases, you go through these fun phases of life and new music and new inspiration, you know? You know, we just had one of the guys that worked for this venue out in Texas, he let me hear this old set we did at Bonnaroo from like 2005 or something, and I was like, “Woah, man.” You know, there were a couple songs that we don’t even play anymore, and I was like, “Wow, we gotta start playing those again!” But I don’t even know if we could play them any better than that, man. I don’t know what was going on that day!
