Is it too much to say that Robin Trower, Jack Bruce and Bill Lordan’s 1980 all-star collaboration, BLT, is a stone-cold blues-rock classic? Maybe. But we can definitely call it a minor classic, ripe for rediscovery.
Here you have a power trio featuring Bruce, one of the format’s chief architects, on bass and vocals, the former Cream frontman’s very presence inviting comparisons to his promethean work with Messrs Clapton and Baker at the tail-end of the ‘60s. Lordan had played in Trower’s solo band, but had also racked up credits in Gypsy and Sly And The Family Stone.
The power trio was very much Trower’s preferred format since leaving Procol Harum in 1971 to stretch his wings on electric guitar. There was no room for guitar solos in a band where Gary Brooker’s keys were front and centre.
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After a false start alongside Frankie Miller in Jude, the Robin Trower Band was more like it, with their 1973 debut, Twice Removed From Yesterday, a taste of things to come, and its follow-up, the seminal Bridge Of Sighs, inaugurating Trower as one of the great players of his generation.
He, like Hendrix, had fathomed the magic of the UniVibe, its chewy swirl a psychedelic counterpoint to the blues guitar DNA in his playing. Speaking to MusicRadar in 2019, Paul Gilbert says he felt like he was under the influence of something illicit when he first stuck that on.
“I never did drugs as a kid but to me it was what I imagined that drugs would do,” said Gilbert. “It was sort of like the whole world was resonating in an unusual but attractive way.”
For Gilbert, Trower was one of the world’s great “warbly players” alongside Frank Marino, Alex Lifeson, Pat Travers and Pat Thrall, and Peter Frampton.
“In Day Of The Eagle he’s got this looping riff, and when he hits those open top two strings and it warbles,” said Gilbert. “He might have like double-tracked it and bent one with the whammy a little bit – the whole world just comes unglued. When he hits that note, it’s so cool.”
Trower was still a blues player, albeit with one foot in Chicago and the other in Haight-Ashbury. He was taking the art form forward, even if he never gave it a second thought.
“Well, I wasn’t really intellectualising it,” he says, joining MusicRadar from his rehearsal room, where he is preparing for a string of UK live dates. “I was just doing what comes natural. The most satisfying music I come up with is always where the heart leads the head, definitely.”
Trower had made his bones in the psychedelic scene with Procol Harum but the blues was his heartland. His awakening as an artist came when he first heard BB King.
“Definitely. I first heard a BB King track in the ‘60s and that was very inspiring,” he says. “That was 3 O’Clock Blues.”
There were soul and R&B influences percolating in there, too. When Trower talks about “power soul” tracks on his forthcoming album Shine, that comes from the Godfather of Funk.
“Things like James Brown Live At The Apollo and that kind of level of performance are inspirational,” says Trower. “And it is as you say, it’s an underlying influence. There’s a lot of stuff like that. The main things that I would play during the ‘60s would be BB King Live At The Regal, James Brown Live At The Apollo, and I think the other big album for me – well, there’s a couple – Moanin’ In The Moonlight, by Howlin’ Wolf, then later on in the ‘60s Albert King’s Born Under A Bad Sign.”
Players such the Kings and Willie Johnson of Howlin’ Wolf’s band knew the value of economy in their playing, and how vibrato could be as good as a signature. The lesson was was not lost on Trower.
“Yeah, it was simple but very, very powerful,” he says. “I think that’s the whole thing about it. It had real potency to it.”
The Robin Trower Band had been prolific throughout the ‘70s. Seven studio albums in as many years, the hot streak culminated in 1980’s Victims Of The Fury, an album on which Trower’s old Procol Harum bandmate and gifted lyricist Keith Reid was brought on as cowriter. It was the last hurrah of the band’s classic lineup of Trower, bassist/vocalist James Dewar. Trower was looking for a fresh collaboration.
He had Jack Bruce’s number. Like his fellow Scotsman Dewar, Bruce was a fine bassist and had the voice. The former Cream frontman would be a perfect foil for Trower. A jazz head who drew influence from classical arrangements, Bruce was not your typical bassist. This was not to be your typical collaboration.
Once again, Keith Reid was heavily involved even if his name wasn’t on the cover. What was on the album’s cover was a sandwich photographed by Trevor Key.
It was wonderful working with Jack. He was such a unique musician
It’s a little silly having an actual BLT on the cover – and it Key would certainly do better work with Mike Oldfield and New Order – but it was quite the visual.
Into Money opens the album with some artery-clogging grease from Trower’s Strat, a riff that dances all around Bruce’s vocal, breaking out in the throaty squawk of his guitar solo. It is implausible that a twenty-something Lenny Kravitz did not have this on his turntable.
What It Is and It’s Too Late remind us of what Gilbert was talking about when he described Trower as “warbly player”. Won’t Let You Down betrays the changing of the decades, a decade ferried upon a succession of clean arpeggios. More after-hours, nocturnal and witchy, Carmen finds Bruce singing in falsetto.
Throughout Bruce’s bass playing his on point, in dialogue with Trower’s guitar. This is something we hear on Trower’s latter material, where he has handled bass and guitar. Was this something he learned from Bruce? Trower doesn’t think so.
“It was wonderful working with Jack. He was such a unique musician,” says Trower. “Unique. I don’t think I could learn anything from him. He was on a different level altogether.”
If Cream fans tuned in and expected Trower to play like Clapton and for Lordan to channel Ginger Baker then they would have been disappointed.
Trower never felt that BLT as a trio was trying to be some kind of Cream Mark II.
“No, I don’t. I don’t feel like we were trying to do a new Cream or anything, no,” he says. “No, I still stuck to the writing that came natural to me. But obviously it was a great thrill playing with Jack.”
BLT had the tunes. Listen to No Island Lost for a taste of Trower’s Strat through his dimed 100-watt Marshall. It’s him at his most Hendrixian, with talky wah solos, and this great hydrocarbon groove. Believing they didn’t have enough original material, BLT didn’t tour the record – and these things mattered.
Lordan did not return for the 1982 follow-up, Truce. Billed as a Robin Trower and Jack Bruce album, it featured Bridge Of Sighs drummer Reg Isidore. It was the label’s idea they made another record. Trower was disillusioned.
Soon, he and Bruce would go their separate ways, only to reconvene in 2007. They were revisiting BLT and Truce and discussing a remix. Bruce suggested they write a couple of new songs for the release. One thing led to another.
“We got together and started writing. Before we knew where we were, we had four or five songs and it was obvious that we should do an album,” Trower told Guitar World in 2008.
“We didn’t rehearse at all, but we spent time, he and I, writing songs together, so that’s a kind of rehearsal. We had a good formation in our minds of how those pieces went. All we had to do was find a drummer and then record them.”
Enter the prodigiously talented Gary Husband. And this time Trower and Bruce did tour, releasing a live album in 2009. Their final collaboration on record came in 2014 when Trower visited Bruce at Abbey Road to record Rusty Lady for Silver Rails.
BLT? Stone-cold classic or not, it’s definitely worth a second bite.
