If anyone questions whether Robin Trower is 100 per cent badass then just consider how he got his sound. After leaving Procol Harum in 1971 in search of a more suitable vehicle for his burgeoning guitar talents, he was one of the early adopters of the Marshall Super Lead.
There was no master volume control on those things. He had a Fuzz Face in the mix, too. Trower was working with a lot of decibels. And he played a Fender Stratocaster, invariably inviting comparisons with Jimi Hendrix after he too incorporated the heady swirl of the Uni-Vibe in his rig.
Taming all this with single-coil pickups is a fool’s errand or a job for the unnaturally gifted. Like Hendrix, Trower was in the latter camp, and as MusicRadar catches up with him at his Friday morning rehearsal, he is still as bullish about guitar volume as ever; he still has that dragon under his thumb.
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“Well, I mean, it comes natural to me to be able to control that volume,” he says. “During a performance and maybe sometimes in the studio as well, I do use the volume control on the guitar.”
But, wait, didn’t he worry about the single-coils and 60-cycle hum?
“Yeah, I mean it was a real problem. There’s no doubt about it,” he says, like a seasoned trawler man talking about a little chop. “I mean, some gigs I have to go to the in-between pickup setting to get rid of the RF.”
That, however, is the extent of Trower’s precautionary measures for reducing the noise floor. The rest is technique, and there is plenty of that on show on his latest solo album, Shine. Trower reveals himself from the first notes of The Missing Piece. There’s no mistaking him. He is, as Paul Gilbert described him, “one of the best warbly guitar players” of all time. You hear that tone, that phrasing, and it’s like a fingerprint, identifying who’s responsible.
As Gilbert said in praise of Trower in a MusicRadar interview from 2019: “In Day Of The Eagle he’s got this looping riff, and when he hits those open top two strings and it warbles – 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 says now: “There was no thinking about it. It’s just feeling it. That’s all it is. It’s just, ‘I like playing this. I am going to play it, and I’m going to give it everything I’ve got. That’s really all it is. I don’t think I ever tried the Leslie. That was the Uni-Vibe was the first thing that gave me that vibe.”
It might tickle Trower to know that listening to his hugely influential 1974 sophomore album, Bridge Of Sighs, made Gilbert feel like someone who had partaken in some of what was being passed around the festivalgoers at Woodstock ’69.
“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, and Robin Trower would have that.”
He still has it. Now 81, Shine finds Trower playing in his preferred power trio format, handling guitar and bass guitar, and all of the production duties. Chris Taggard joins him on on drums with Richard Watts on vocals, with British blues/soul singer Jess Hayes providing a guest turn on Truth.
“When I’m writing songs for the new album, I’m hearing the vocalist in my head, so for the songs that Richard sings, I’m writing to hear him sing,” says Trower. “I always put it in a certain key register where his voice is, where I like it best. I know where that sweet spot is. The guitar – especially the lead – is very much my voice.”
Working as a producer might give Trower a different perspective on his work but the goal hasn’t changed. He is always in search of a live take in the studio. If it sounds live, then he has done his job, and the plan worked.
Listening to some of the arrangements on Shine – the vampish late-night groove of Live Your Time, the smoke-show wah of The Race – they sound like they could be extended and jammed out.
Without You is like that, too, and you might find yourself quietly daring Trower to keep it going, or at least take a few more bars for the outro solo, take the song over the horizon (when the song finishes, it even feels like it’s past midnight).
Trower says we’ve got it back to front. He cut these songs down –“so it’s not just all whanging about! [laughs]” – to give them some “form”. The years have taught him a little restraint. He’s also treating that weather-beaten signature Stratocaster of his with a firm hand.
“Well, I think the main thing compared to the ’70s is I have a lot more control of what I’m doing now,” he says. “It was all a bit wild in the ’70s.”
The brand names are different but the main ingredients to Trower’s sound have changed little since the ’70s.
His pedalboard is exclusively Fulltone, with Mike Fuller’s Deja Vibe providing the chewy swirl of the Uni-Vibe, the FullDrive providing the grit, and the Clyde Wah V2 replicating the vintage Vox wah pedal circuits that were designed for the American jazz trumpet ace and magazine publisher Clyde McCoy. And all this stuff sounds really good together. Guitarists sometimes invite ridicule for how obsessive we can get about our tone and yet it’s critical – this is where it all starts for Trower.
“All of my song ideas come from sitting and playing the guitar at home, and that tone is very, very important – it’s inspirational,” he says. “Someone famous once called the guitar ‘the little orchestra,’ so it’s limitless, really.”
Trower is a blues player at heart. He heard BB King’s Three O’Clock Blues and that was him hooked. You can hear the influence. Discovering James Brown was another revelation. When Trower talks about the “power soul” on Shine, it’s coming from the Godfather of Soul.
“The main things that I would play during the ‘60s would be BB King Live At The Regal and James Brown Live At The Apollo,” says Trower. “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. It was simple but very, very powerful. I think that’s the whole thing about it, it had real potency to it.”
![Robin Trower - Daydream Live [Official] - YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/MBAPfQRWEn0/maxresdefault.jpg "Robin Trower on tone, songwriting and what today's pop lacks 21")
Trower was blues but he was no purist. He was among a cohort of players who were changing the form of the blues throughout the ‘70s, plays such as Frank Marino, Jeff Beck Rory Gallagher and Freddie King, who would flavour it with psychedelic rock, fusion, folk, R&B and soul.
“Well, I wasn’t really intellectualising it. I was just doing what comes natural,” says Trower. “The most satisfying music I come up with is always where the heart leads the head, definitely.”
Of all the parallels to be found between late ‘60s and early ‘70s society and the present day – the sociopolitical upheaval, the economic hardship, and the sense that the centre will not hold – the music is not one of them, at least not to Trower’s ear. These days, Trower finds himself listening to movie soundtracks.
He argues that the sounds he hears from contemporary pop lacks “depth”.
“Most of what I hear now seems very thin to me. It’s thin, just no real depth to it,” he says. “For instance, if you listen to Help! by the Beatles, there’s nothing in pop music today that’s as strong as that – it’s very potent stuff – and I’m not even a Beatles fan, though I recognise talent when I hear it.
“With all those early Beatles tracks, you know, there’s something happening there! There’s something going on! It’s a recording of a happening, which you don’t really get today. It’s like I said to you earlier, that’s exactly what I’m trying to recreate in the studio.”
But how do we create a happening in the studio? Musicians have never had so many tools at our disposal, plugins that give us digital versions of studio kit that was hitherto only available to bands booked in at EMI Studios or Sound City. These sounds are now available at the click of a mouse.
This is only a good thing, so long as we remember as Trower does, that if you are going to record electric guitars, the magic happens when you introduce an scarcely controllable element to the controlled environment of the studio.
We’ve got to turn the volume up.
