Blues rocker Kenny Wayne Shepherd wasn’t always a guitar god. After all, he didn’t start playing until the ripe old age of seven. His debut album, Ledbetter Heights, followed at 17 and recently celebrated its 30th anniversary. To celebrate, Shepherd is performing the album in its entirety on a tour that will stop at the Hard Rock Casino in Gary, IN on April 24.
We talked with Shepherd about revisiting his early work, collaborating with Talking Heads guitarist Jerry Harrison, and getting ahead of himself—literally—while opening for the Rolling Stones.
On your upcoming tour, you’re performing your debut album Ledbetter Heights in full along with other career highlights. What’s it like to revisit the album after all these years?
It's pretty exciting to be honest with you, because a lot of these songs we haven't really played for the better part of the last 25 years. It’s a great experience kind of revisiting the material on this record and get reacquainted with these songs. And the cool thing about it for me is, obviously it's a big deal for us, it's the album that introduced me to the world and my music. I was 17 years old when I recorded this album and the biggest takeaway for me that I'm so happy about is that, when I started making music, I wasn't trying to be a pop star. I just wanted to make timeless music. I was hoping to write and record songs that people would enjoy for decades to come. And here we are 30 years later and we're doing this tour and the fans are excited, we're excited. And I'm looking back on the music that I created as a 17-year-old and I'm still proud of it and I'm still excited to play it.
If you could go back and give 17-year-old Kenny any advice, what would you tell him?
The main thing that I would tell myself is honestly something that I don't think a 17-year-old is able to fully comprehend. It's just something that you learn with age and experience but it would be just to try and be in the moment as much as possible. Really immerse yourself in the here and now because once a moment's gone, there's no getting it back. So just enjoy every single moment to the fullest which is a hard thing I think for a teenager to do. They're so full of energy and there's so much going on in their young lives that you really only learn how to slow down and be present as you get older I think.
How were you able to handle all that level of success and hype just out of high school?
I don't know that I really fully understood the magnitude of what was going on. I just knew that, every day, I got to put on my guitar and walk out on the stage and people were there to see me do it. Every state that we drove through, I could turn the radio on and hear my music on the radio. That was kind of the extent of it from a 17/18-year-old's perspective at the time. It's only with experience and age that you look back on things and you're able to fully put it into perspective and go, ‘Wow, this is incredibly unusual.’ It didn't seem unusual at the time because that was just the experience I was having.
In addition to Ledbetter Heights, you’re performing other selections from your career on this tour. How did you determine the set list?
I'm still working that out. (Ledbetter Heights) is probably only going to be an hour, maybe a little over an hour's worth of music, so that's not enough for a full headline show. So obviously we have to bring in some other material. I look back at what songs I think people might want to hear. But I'm also trying to make sure they're not ones that we've been doing on previous tours, because we have fans that come back and see us time and time again, so we want to make sure that they get a unique experience. There'll be some showstoppers in there but hopefully there'll be also some songs that we haven't played in a while that people will be excited to hear us play.
This is not the first time that you've done a tour where you're performing an album in full. You already did a 25th anniversary performance celebrating your record-breaking Trouble Is… album, and even re-recorded it in full. What do you find is the appeal of doing a whole album front to back rather than a mixed set list?
That tour went really well. It sold out just about everywhere we went. (The first two albums were) back in the era where, if you heard a song on the radio and you wanted that song, you went and bought the record and then you listened to the record. People would really experience an entire album's worth of material, so these people are familiar with all these songs. Some of these people have probably come to our shows and heard one or two of the songs from that record, but they probably have hoped at different times to hear some of the other songs as well. That Trouble Is… 25th anniversary tour really connected with the fans, so I'm anticipating this one will do the same as well. It should be a great experience for everybody.
I'm actually thinking about at some point in the future doing like a greatest hits tour, because if you look at our track record at radio over the course of the first four albums, we had a big string. Every one of our singles, I think, charted in the top 10 on mainstream rock radio. Many of them in the top five and several of them went to number one at some point. So we did have a lot of radio success when there was still a format that supported blues rock music on the radio.
When you’re not playing or listening to the blues, what’s spinning on your record player?
I love all kinds of music. I grew up on everything: country, jazz, rock, southern rock, blues, R&B, funk. I don't think there's anything too surprising though, because if you understand that I'm a person who appreciates music as an art form, then it wouldn't be surprising that I appreciate just about all forms of music that are art as long as it's done with integrity and quality. I'm not a big fan of a lot of the mainstream stuff nowadays, but I guess that's how it goes as you get older. You just kind of fall out of touch with whatever the pop people are doing nowadays. But it just seems to be…I don't know, it seems like there's not a lot of effort and art that's really being put into that stuff. It's just kind of generated to support clicks and likes. It's all about the numbers instead of about the art with the mainstream stuff.
I will say I was at the Grammys recently and, I've never been a big Justin Bieber fan, but I think he really was the one that had the standout performance. It was just him up there with a guitar, standing there by himself, singing a song, and he captivated the whole place. He didn't need all the lights and the fireworks and the freaking dancers and all that stuff. I think maybe he's really growing into his own as an artist and letting the music speak for itself. So I kind of dug that.
You’ve worked with a number of legendary acts over the years and toured with Dylan and the Stones among others. But the one I want to ask about is Jerry Harrison of Talking Heads. He’s not necessarily the first person you associate with blues music. How did that partnership begin and how did he influence your output?
I thought the same thing when I first met Jerry. I was like, ‘What does this guy know about the blues?’ But he told me his first band was a blues band and he loved blues music. I listened to some of the projects that he had produced, other artists, and he did a thing with a band called Big Head Todd and the Monsters, and they covered a John Lee Hooker song and they got John Lee Hooker to come in and play on it, and I actually thought it was a really cool version of that song. So that kind of persuaded me to take the meeting and go meet Jerry and have the conversation with him. We went out to dinner and I just really liked the vibe that I got off of him, and that was the beginning of a very long and very productive working relationship. We still talk to this day. We did a 25th anniversary version of the Trouble Is… album a couple of years ago for that tour. Then we actually did a new version of the Ledbetter Heights album for this tour, and Jerry helped me in producing those two projects.
Three decades into your career, what’s been your biggest Spinal Tap moment?
The silliest thing that always pops in my head is when I was opening up for the Rolling Stones in St. Louis at a football stadium. I got a little carried away. My guitar cable was only about 25 feet long and the stage was the full width of a football field. I just got fired up and took off to the left to go entertain the people over there in the middle of a guitar solo, but I forgot that I only had 25 feet of guitar cable. I just ripped my cable out of my guitar right in the middle of the solo in front of 80,000 people. I’m running around, scrambling on stage to try and find the cable to plug it back in and finish the solo. It's not one of my finer moments, but it's all good. Left a memory for sure.
Kenny Wayne Shepherd appears at Hard Rock Cafe, 5400 W 29th Ave, Gary, IN, on Friday, April 24 at 7pm. Tickets (starting at $46.95) are available now.
