Robert Cray enjoys a life on the road.
Last year he spent 200 days traveling.
Cray plays straight
By Burl Burlingame
with blues
Star-BulletinWhat's bringing master blues guitarist Robert Cray back to the islands? Is it the friendly people, the magnificent scenery, the incredible climate, the fascinating cultures? Or can it be the siren call of the mahimahi?
"Ooooh, mahimahi," said Cray, and you can practically hear his digestive juices start up over the long-distance phone line. "The food is so good in Hawaii. I had a mahimahi there for breakfast once that I still think about. My!"
OK, he also likes the "real cool pace of life" here, plus Cray has nieces living in Honolulu he's going to visit. Plus, Cray is playing three concerts here, including tomorrow night in Waikiki.
Such is the life of the hard-traveling bluesman, whether or not, as the blues mythology goes, hell-hounds dog his trail. Cray is part of a Gen-X blues revolution, neither an aged throwback to a hard-scrabble past, like Gatemouth Brown or Muddy Waters, or a middle-aged enthusiast, like John Mayall or Taj Mahal. He's a regular guy in his '30s who happens to play a blistering guitar and has enough tire tracks across his back to sing with real soul.
"It's grown-up music," Cray explains. "Can't do it without a bit of understanding of heartbreak. It's easy when you're young to sing someone else's songs about bad times, but you're not really feeling the passion. It has to be personal and heart-related. As a blues player, (16-year-old) Jonny Lang is a pretty good guitarist."
Home base is San Francisco, although the memorable parts of Cray's childhood were spent in the Seattle-Tacoma area. "My dad served in the army and we lived all over. Like a lot of military brats, I spent a lot of time by myself -- I sat in my room and played guitar. When we spent a couple of years in Germany, my parents bought great hot blues records at the PX, and so the house always had good music going." Cray began playing some himself, becoming a respected blues artist.
"By the early '80s, the "blues appeared to be dying. Then Stevie Ray Vaughn and other groups were signed by major labels and got a lot of exposure. Everything like that kind of woke people up to the blues, and there was more attention paid."
Monkeying with the details was inevitable. More so than other types of music, blues takes into account the real world.
"There are people who would say to hold on to (the traditional blues forms), no matter what," said Cray, whose sense of phrasing strikes a balance between urban and rural blues styles -- almost suburban blues. "I don't regret doing what I do or the way I do it. I don't like any music that requires a sound check to play. I like it straight-forward, no posing."
Last year, Cray spent 200 days on the road. "No time to write or catch my breath. I'm going to cool my heels a little this year. I do like traveling, though, checking out the different cities and American places. I grew up traveling as a military brat, so I like it, it seems normal. And you get to check out all sorts of different food. Sampling regional cuisine -- now THAT'S traveling."
So maybe Cray DOES have hellhounds dogging his trail -- looking for table scraps.
The Robert Cray Band
When: 9 p.m.tomorrow
