Life Among the Guitar Gods : Onetime Sideman Sonny Landreth Has Found His ‘Sense of Place’

One would think the pantheon of guitar gods would have a “No Vacancy” sign on it by now; the guitar has been the dominant instrument in popular music for four decades. Critics, listeners and fellow musicians have had no trouble, though, making room for Sonny Landreth.

The Louisiana-based slide guitarist has been singled out for an embarrassing quantity of praise from critics who have been describing his playing with terms such as mind-boggling , astonishing and magical . They have wasted no time comparing him to such legends as Ry Cooder, Elmore James and Duane Allman, while likening his songwriting to the prose of William Kennedy. And now Landreth finds himself breakfasting with such heroes of his own as Chet Atkins and Mark Knopfler.

“Mark and I are both big fans of Chet’s. In Nashville, he called me up real early one morning--he was still on London time--and said, ‘Would you like to come have breakfast with Chet?’ So they came to pick me up and we went to eat at the Cracker Barrel, this touristy family-oriented place. And I was sitting there with Chet Atkins and Mark Knopfler, thinking ‘What a trip! I must be dreaming.’ ”

Landreth was on the phone from Nashville, between tour legs, the latest of which has him opening for Buddy Guy at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano tonight and Tuesday and at the Galaxy Concert Theatre in Santa Ana on Wednesday.

Landreth, 44, first gained national attention as John Hiatt’s guitarist, touring the world and playing on Hiatt’s “Slow Turning” album. The range of others with whom he has toured or recorded runs from the late zydeco king Clifton Chenier to pop singer Kenny Loggins and includes Beausoleil, John Mayall and Zachary Richard. He appears on Knopfler’s most recent album; the British guitarist returned the favor by playing on Landreth’s current “South of I-10” collection.

Another guest is legendary New Orleans pianist/songwriter Allen Toussaint, who plays on the album’s stripped-down blues, J B Lenoir’s “Mojo Boogie”; on “Congo Square,” a Landreth composition previously recorded by the Neville Brothers and others, and on “Great Gulf Wind,” which also features a horn chart by Toussaint, which Landreth requested because he’s a big fan of the Band, for whom Toussaint also had written horn parts.

Landreth met Toussaint on a Bottom Line “In Their Own Words” songwriters tour that had them onstage swapping songs with Michelle Shocked and Guy Clark (Landreth was recording in Europe when the tour came to Santa Ana; Joe Ely took his place).

“That was great for me, being up there with them, hearing all their songs,” Landreth recalls. “And I couldn’t help joining in on the songs, being a born sideman anyway.”

Although he did made his initial mark backing others, it was his songwriting that landed him a spot on the tour and that sets him apart from other exceptional guitar-slingers who remain in the outfield.

He started doing his own thing early. “My dad was an adjuster for State Farm Insurance and they had these Dictaphones. When I was a kid I used to record stuff on that. By the time I got an electric guitar (at age 14), I had a Panasonic reel-to-reel recorder I could overdub on, and I started putting songs down on that.”

He was born in Mississippi; his family moved to Lafayette, Louisiana when he was 8. Though not from a Cajun background, he immersed himself readily in that culture and found he wasn’t treated as an outsider.

“One thing people are always impressed with when they come down there is how warm and open the people are. It’s very endearing and a very special thing. It’s not just the music or just the food. It’s all of that, and the way they dance, and the ritual of the way they are socially and their philosophy. You really have to experience the whole thing to get it. It influenced me tremendously.

“Even though I don’t speak the (French) language, it’s like a musical vocabulary I learned. I think it’s given me a unique perspective which has enabled me to branch out in certain ways, especially with my songwriting.

“I was really lucky. I had a lot of influences, growing up hearing Cajun and zydeco and blues and R&B;, while at school I had the academic part with classical training and jazz, and of course rock ‘n’ roll. I just took it all in as a kid.”

He initially played trumpet, an instrument he stayed with into his college days, but it was the guitar that really hooked him, ever since he saw Scotty Moore playing with Elvis Presley. (The back cover of the booklet with “South of I-10” is a photo of Landreth at age 14 rocking out in his kitchen with Tommy Alisi, who went on to become the drummer for Beausoleil.)

Like many learning guitar in the ‘60s, Landreth learned to play along with Ventures albums. Then someone taught him the complex thumb- and finger-picking method of Chet Atkins.

“It’s when I heard Robert Johnson that I really flipped out,” he continued. “I had been getting into the blues and had been trying to play slide guitar and failing miserably at it, but kept hanging in there. I was mostly trying more of a linear, single-line approach. But when I heard Robert Johnson, the power of the music was awesome to me, really scary in a way. He had so much detail in his songwriting, his voice and his guitar.

“But technically what knocked me out was, it had never occurred to me to take the bottleneck and to think in terms of a finger-picking approach. I had been doing all this Chet Atkins-style stuff, and after hearing Johnson I put the two together. I had been learning the guitar as a solo instrument, where Chet would play the melody, rhythm and the bass line at the same time. And then to hear Robert Johnson doing it with a bottleneck so many years before was a real influence.”

Landreth took a number of music courses in college, “but once I realized a degree wasn’t going to help me book gigs, that was it. I was out of there.”

He recorded an album in 1973, but most of its tracks went unreleased. With the band Bayou Rhythm he recorded two albums, “Blues Attack” and “Way Down in Louisiana,” in the early ‘80s at J.D. Miller’s studio in Crowley, La., where Slim Harpo had recorded. But distribution was bad.

After six years of club gigs leading nowhere, he took a breather from music and then started doing session work. He was already experienced as a backing musician, having worked--among other gigs--with Chenier’s band in 1979.

“He had just had his first major operation (Chenier had severe diabetes and eventually died from its complications) and couldn’t play accordion at first. In fact, at first he played harmonica and sang, and that was incredible, this Jimmy Reed-style harp he played. Then as he got stronger, he played accordion again. He was a huge influence, just the way he did everything.

“I figure that to be the highlight of my career, and that was in 1979. Everything after that was lagniappe “--a South Louisiana term for “a little something extra.”

Hiatt got a little something extra in Landreth, who could take the songs from Hiatt’s “Bring the Family” album and lend them the same level of empathy onstage that Ry Cooder had brought to the recordings. Hiatt got a band to boot, basically hiring Landreth’s Bayou Rhythm and renaming it the Goners.

(Goner bassist David Ranson--with whom Landreth has played since his early teens--is in Landreth’s touring band along with longtime associate Steve Conn on keyboards and new drummer Steve Ebe.)

The Hiatt gig brought a lot of attention to Landreth, and a fair amount of pressure as well.

“ ‘Bring the Family’ was such a popular album, and a lot of people were coming out wondering, ‘Well, who’s going to play guitar if it isn’t Ry Cooder?’ We were really in the spotlight and on the spot. There were times you couldn’t help but feel the pressure, but the music had such a magic happening, we all just focused on that.”

Hiatt had a go at recording his next album, 1988’s “Slow Turning,” with two sets of star players in Los Angeles. When neither came out to his satisfaction, he persuaded his label to let him try again with his road band.

Landreth said he misses playing with Hiatt and regrets that they never got to put out the ultimate Hiatt/Goners album, which he feels a live recording would have been. He does, however, like the opportunity to ply his own songs now.

“I love doing these projects for other musicians, because I found you learn something different from every one. It can be the same three or four chords, but everybody has his own way of doing them. And bouncing off that, I get different ideas.

“And there’s really nothing quite like having an idea, turning that into a song, recording it and then getting to play it for people. There’s something really unique that happens there, and I think it’s kind of a driving force. I always enjoy working with other people, but I’m always itching to get back to doing my own thing, just having that freedom to cut loose.”

And so he has for two albums, 1992’s “Outward Bound” and the current “South of I-10.”

“With this album I really wanted to establish a strong sense of place. I wanted it to be closer to the roots, though it’s not traditional Cajun music, not traditional blues or zydeco. If pressed on it, I would still call it rock, but the roots in it are apparent to me.

“I also wanted to record it there at home. Fortunately I have a friend who has a great studio there now, about 40 minutes from my driveway. It’s right on the Vermilion River with 11 acres, huge trees, a pond stocked with bass. It’s great to be in there and so focused on what you’re doing, and then walk outside and have that relief, to get away from it. They’re going to have a real hard time prying me out of there to record anywhere else,” he said with a laugh.

He thinks the locale contributed to the mood of the album. Hearing him set the scene, it’s hard to imagine how it couldn’t.

“I’d be recording at all hours of the night, so I’d have less distraction. Then about 3 or 4 in the morning I’d be doing overdubs in this trailer right on the river, and outside the window these tugboats barging shale from the gulf would be going by 30 feet away, with these lights cutting through the fog. It was an ethereal experience.”

The songwriters Landreth admires most, from Delta blues men to Dylan, have a strong narrative style. He strives for that, along with a balance between important themes and a human scale.

Touring with Hiatt, he played in Berlin three times before the wall came down--an event that has been a source of more than one song for him, including “Orphans of the Motherland” on “I-10.”

“The Berlin Wall coming down had a profound effect on me. I think the trick to writing about something as big as that is to write about what you know from a perspective that you know, but in a way that can embrace larger issues. For me, my backdrop is being raised in southwestern Louisiana, using that as the language and drawing from that to include more universal themes. I’ve been working on that for a long time. You can’t really force that kind of thing. It takes years of experience to arrive at it, and when you do, really, it’s your inner voice coming through.”

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Sonny Landreth opens for Buddy Guy tonight and Tuesday at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano, and Wednesday at the Galaxy Concert Theatre in Santa Ana. (714) 496-8930.