BLUES / POP : BLUES PLANET : Nearly All the World Is a Stage for John Hammond

There was a wild and interminable blare from John Hammond’s end of a transatlantic call, making it awfully hard to hear what he was saying.

Jeez, John, are those car horns?

“Well, this is Rome.”

By now, Hammond is pretty well acclimated to the distinguishing sounds and smells of most major world cities, and quite a few of its lesser-known holes as well.

It was a choice bit of prescience that his parents nicknamed him Jeep. More than practically any other performer, Hammond is the jet-age embodiment of the traveling bluesman of the ‘30s.

The 52-year-old has been making his living with a guitar and a suitcase since the early 1960s, currently averaging 240 days a year on the road. Unlike those of his ground-bound predecessors, Hammond’s road stretches from Melbourne to Majorca, from Helsinki to Hong Kong. When he plays in San Juan Capistrano on Saturday night, he will be freshly back from Istanbul.

Fortunately for him, he likes the road. While there are some places he may like to play better than others, “I like to play, period,” he said. “I just enjoy traveling and enjoy wherever I am.”

Which generally is obvious to his audiences. Armed merely with a metal-resonator National guitar, a harmonica and a stomping foot, Hammond makes more of an exultant racket than most full bands do, pushing so much emotion through his throat that you expect his head to blast off.

As electrifying as his playing is, there are more miles than even Hammond has traveled between him and most purported blues musicians who think the music is defined by speed, volume and grimaces. The barely reined emotion in Hammond’s music is always propelled by the song. Others may sing of hellhounds on their trail; Hammond plays with such immediacy that you can hear the fangs snapping at his tail.

He is a son of the late, legendary music industry figure John Hammond, whose range of discoveries included Billie Holiday, Count Basie, Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen. His own love of blues music, he said, is the result of “becoming aware of it gradually as opposed to hearing it once and having it bang me over the head.

“I guess subliminally when I was really young--my parents split up when I was 5--I heard a lot of jazz and blues from my dad. Then I remember getting real excited about Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry when I was about 13.

“I just got more and more drawn to the R&B; and rock ‘n’ roll of the era, and finally I heard a recording of Robert Johnson and that’s when I just lost my cool completely and went nuts.”

Growing up well-to-do in New York City was a far remove from the rural sharecropping experience that formed the music he heard on blues records. He said it took a good degree of nerve to presume that he might be able to create the sort of hard-traveled magic he was hearing in the grooves.

“There was a lot of fantasy involved,” he said. “But, listening to those records, I got my fantasy in full gear. I had been in school it seemed like my whole life, and I was just ready to do something on my own and be my own person. I bought a guitar and had begun to play, to the point where I about drove everyone nuts.

“So I left home and went as far from home as I could, which was Los Angeles, where no one knew me, and I started playing professionally, and that’s all I’ve ever done since.”

It was in Southern California, he said, that he cut his teeth, playing clubs such as the Ash Grove in Los Angeles, the Satire club in Southgate and the Insomniac in Hermosa Beach.

Soon he found himself sharing stages with musicians he’d idolized on record, such as Son House, Howling Wolf, Mississippi John Hurt and Bukka White. A great many bluesmen had played in obscurity for decades but found their careers suddenly revived in the folk boom of the early ‘60s.

“I was really in the right place at the right time to be able to work with them. They were usually very encouraging, giving me a pat on the back and saying, ‘Listen, man, that sounds great.’ That meant a lot.”

Hammond doesn’t write many songs, instead interpreting a rich supply of blues from over five decades. For many in the ‘60s, Hammond’s inerrant song choices on his albums served as an introduction to the blues. Hammond played both solo and with a band, enlisting undiscovered musicians who went on to make names for themselves. Among them: Jimi Hendrix, Mike Bloomfield, Charlie Musselwhite and the the Band.

By the late ‘60s, many of the musicians Hammond had a hand in influencing were amping up the blues to showy, arena-filling extremes. He said he doesn’t begrudge them their success or rue the club-gig life he’s had.

“I always had a lot of work and really was into my own playing. There have been hard times, but overall it’s been terrific. Once in 1966 I felt like I really got burned on a recording deal I signed. It took me about eight months to get over that, and then I got right back into it. I’ve had a good career in the sense that I’ve always done what I wanted to do.

“Some things have been more successful than others, but I think things now are on a roll real good. I get to play all over the world; the jobs are getting better; I’m with a really good record label, and I’ve got a great agent. In my personal life, I’m married to a terrific person who I really love, and I think she loves me really fantastic. We go all over the world together. So we’re doing really well.”

The Hammonds are related to the Vanderbilts, and the rumor persists that he is wealthy and only tours for fun.

“That’s very funny, and it’s not true,” Hammond said with a laugh. “I’m not very wealthy, and I’ve had to deal with folks that are trying to make me even less so. If you work hard, you make money, and there are always people who want a part of it. The IRS, for one thing, is right on your case. I work to live.”

He is delighted with his record company, the Virgin-distributed Pointblank/Charisma label, which he says actively promotes his albums and allows him to record them the way he wants to. His most recent, 1993’s “Trouble No More,” features Little Charlie and the Nightcats on most cuts; a new release due in August, tentatively titled “Found True Love,” includes Duke Robillard and his band. In the past few years Hammond has toured with both outfits, mixing electric sets with his usual solo performances.

As pleased as he is with his recent albums, he said, they are not a substitute for his live shows.

“To hear an artist live is to see where he’s really at. For me, my strength lies, I think, in my performance,” he said, maintaining that when he plays, “I try to take an audience on a trip, using my own dynamics to bring them from a certain point to an end point where they feel they’ve gotten a great ride out of it.”

Sometimes he gets pretty gone himself.

“It depends on the show and the audience, but on the best of nights, I kind of get outside of myself. I let things come through me, somehow. This may sound very corny, but it’s true. And on a night when there’s that magic happening, I can play stuff I don’t know how to play.”

Does he ever wonder, heading into the information age, if the world will stop relating to music born of dirt farming and no-electricity shotgun shacks?

“The world has pretty well remained constantly [messed] up. I think that is why blues has remained so popular and always will be, because the human condition hasn’t changed at all, I don’t think, despite technology. People don’t seem to learn from their mistakes, so there is this constant running amok that happens. It’s funny, and it’s sad, and it’s got the whole gamut of emotional range in it, and that’s what blues is, I guess.”

* Who: John Hammond.

* When: Saturday, May 27, at 7 and 9 p.m.

* Where: The San Juan Capistrano Regional Library, 31495 El Camino Real, San Juan Capistrano.

* Whereabouts: Take the San Diego (5) Freeway to the Ortega Highway exit and head west. Take a right onto El Camino Real.

* Wherewithal: $3 to $5.

* Where to call: (714) 493-1752.

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