Thank you for spending some time with us today Eric. I guess we should start at the very beginning, which is when you first became aware of Robert Johnson, how he affected you and, how he came into your orbit, so to speak?

Well, I think my earliest recollection of hearing Robert Johnson was around the time I was 15 or 16 years old. I was in arts school in Kingston. I had run into a small group of guys who liked Blues and R&B and Folk music. There was a few people playing around in the coffee bars and such like, and by then, I’d already developed an appetite for Folk Blues. I liked Big Bill Broonzy and I had seen Josh White play in London, and I had seen Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee on TV when I was really young. So I’d been exposed to it and I was becoming interested in it and I had heard a few people. Someone had this album, King Of The Delta Blues, and I forget who it was now but it was one of blues aficionados. And I was just starting to learn how to play finger style acoustic, you know? And little bits of Broonzy and some other standards, like Nobody Knows You When You’re Down And Out, things like that. And this person who had the album lent it to me and I think we listened to it together, first of all. And I found it incredibly difficult to listen to. I also found Blind Lemon Jefferson very difficult to listen to.

I think it was because I had been introduced to Blues in a much more commercial way. I mean for instance, Big Bill Broonzy, who was very big in Europe, had learned how to really cultivate his music to appeal to a wider market. He was touring all over and playing to white audiences and I’d figured out how to make it acceptable, or just to make it simpler, in some respects so that it was more accessible. Robert Johnson had none of that because of what he did was so long ago and it was in a way I loved; it was almost like purely for himself. Now, maybe that isn’t the case but I got the impression first time I heard it that I was listening in on a very private conversation of some kind. It kind of turned me off first, and then I found I had to keep going back to it. And each time I went back to it, I liked it more and more, until it became the only thing I could listen to for quite a long time. It was the sort of cornerstone of my musical, my mental music archive, if you like. And so everything else had to relate to that and I would always come back to that.

It took you time, actually, to be ready to listen to Robert Johnson, didn’t it?

Yeah. The first things I heard as a kid were all kinds of anything that was to do with an emotional expression. It could be opera, it could be rock ‘n’ roll. It could be jazz. But I was always attracted to powerful expressions of emotion. So I kind of went all the way around the houses and was really into Buddy Holly and Elvis and all of that stuff, until I got into Chuck Berry and edging towards Blues. But I had to kind of prepare myself for it, really.

And you mentioned the emotion. I mean, Robert’s emotion is kind of, you hear personal pain in his voice. What do you think it was?

What did you hear it in, emotionally? What do you think immediately identified with you? I mean, some of the parallels in his life, in your life, you know, there’s a couple of them, that are pretty interesting. Do you think that was contained in the music, somehow, and that’s what you identified with?

Trying to define what it is about Robert Johnson is very difficult, except to say I think what becomes clear is that if I compare him to other of his contemporaries, like Son House and Charley Patton (I have to say Son House would be an exception because he’s so much more raw than any of the others). But what I got about Robert Johnson was that it sounded like he was not making any concessions to anybody in what he was doing. And it’s quite clear, historically, that most people, most black people of that time, were kind of coerced to a certain extent into being entertaining for whoever their audience was. That there would have to be a certain amount of compromise made. I didn’t get that from his music and I don’t have any proof that that was the case. But then there really isn’t that much evidence or information about him anyway. I just felt, intuitively, that he was being really truthful to himself, and he was writing kind of poetry about the way he felt. That was fairly commonplace but his was somehow much more adult, in a way, than anybody else’s. And he wasn’t trying to be cute. There was only a couple of tracks where I felt that he was kind of playing light, you know? But a lot of the time when he was writing about deep stuff. The first time I heard Hellhound On My Trail, I would avoid that track because it was too, too painful, you know? And only now, really, can I listen to that.

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He always talked about struggling with demons, whether it be women or whether he had to travel, or feeling literally that hellhounds were on his trail, which is why he liked to tour and travel so much, maybe? I know Keith Richards has said, when Brian Jones played him Love In Vain, that, ‘okay, that’s Robert Johnson and who else?’ Because he couldn’t believe. Can you explain what he meant by that?

Well, I’ve played a couple of Robert Johnson songs on stage live, with an acoustic guitar. And both times I’ve had to do it with the help of somebody else. We did a tour around the album I did called From The Cradle, where we did a whole Blues tour which would open with me doing Terraplane Blues. But I would have Andy Faithweather Low sharing the guitar load. Because, as Keith Richards pointed out, it’s almost impossible for one man to do what he’s doing on the guitar, let alone sing at the same time. And some of the things that he does as he’s singing, to accompany himself, are so opposed to the time that he’s singing in. I mean, it’s almost impossible, the only way you could imagine doing it if you did it all day, everyday for several years. I wish I could say that I was going to apply myself to doing his material like that but I don’t, you know? But that’s the way I imagine he did it. There’s so much hard work gone into what he did.

The refining of his art, and in what they say about the timespan that it was all supposed to happen, it’s almost impossible. I mean you got this story about Charley Patton and Son House singing and playing one year and then, a year or two later, there was this this master, the maestro came back and blew them all away. If you could apply yourself with that amount of dedication and you had a set repertoire, of course, it would be possible. But, the amount of determination and focus and commitment that is required is unbelievable.

So, therefore, we don’t believe the legend…

Well I choose not to. I mean I prefer to steer away from superstition and mystification of these things because I don’t know. It just think in a way it cheapens it all, somehow. If it’s as easy as that, then anyone can do it. You know? You just can’t sign your soul over to the devil and get what you want, or you become a genius or whatever. I don’t really know. I don’t buy into all of that. No, I don’t. I think he was just incredibly gifted and he found out how to make the most of that gift.

As you started playing music with bands, how did you reconcile it with yourself, to play his music ’cause I’m sure, at first, you were like, well, I’m not going to touch this, right?

Well, at the time that I was starting to become involved in the musical direction of bands, which was around John Mayall and actually all of my career I’ve had that capability. But it wasn’t until I think we put this band, Cream, together, where it was much more kind of flexible outfit in that we could go in any direction, anywhere we wanted. We didn’t have any particular thing to live up to. We were going to do whatever we wanted. So I was bringing in material from Country Blues and trying to do a song called Outside Woman, which was a very old song and we did kind of arrangements. I found it intriguing and I still do, obviously, as you can tell, by what we’d just done with this album. I found it intriguing to take solo endeavours like that and arrange them for a band. And what we’ve done with this new album is an arrangement that is quite big; where there’s three guitars, keyboards, drums, bass and stuff. And that is a real challenge to me - to try and find the essence of the song when Muddy’s playing on the riff, and interpret it into it so that you can play in a band on stage. I think that’s a great thing to do. Apart from the fact that what we’ve talked about earlier, which is, it’s impossible to do on your own.

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What is your interpretation of Robert’s music, and how you can deal with it changed from the very beginnings when you were trying to play his music to the present day?

I think my present day interpretation of him is much more involved with my attempts to do it more than it was then because I think when I first heard Robert Johnson as a kid. I was probably caught up as much with the myth as I was with actually what he was doing. A lot of what he was doing was so on the surface of it, so impossible for me to achieve that I just didn’t even try to go there. I think the first time we did any of his stuff, I found the simplest one to adapt was From Forward Too Late, because it was almost just like a folk standard in a way. There wasn’t too much to worry about in terms of the technique and the song. But because there was this incredible virtuosity going on, I think that I was happier, really, just to identify with the legend. The whole notion of the Black arts and selling his soul and becoming a genius overnight and all of that was really attractive to me as a kid. And as the years went by that became less and less of an issue, and I would concentrate more and more on listening to the nuance and the finesse of what he did.

It’s amazing that even though I don’t know how those things were recorded (what equipment was used and how sophisticated it was), it’s incredible how much you can hear and the tone of the guitar, and it really is one of the finest musical experiences there is, to listen to that, and to that original record.

And you were talking about bringing it into bands and stuff, so the John Mayall, Bluesbreakers Rambling On My Mind, that wasn’t you or was, or was it a combination of you and John or …

I think that was John actually. Rambling On My Mind was another one I think I could probably assimilate to a certain extent without really feeling threatened by Robert’s version. And I remember John Mayall saying, ‘you know, you got a window here. Why don’t you make use of it, you know what I mean?’ And acknowledging his faith me, God bless him, when I didn’t think I could sing, I didn’t really think it was appropriate for me to attempt anything as massive as that. Looking back on it, I’m surprised I did because it is quite a hefty, quite a tall order to do a song like that. But it’s the flush of youth, you know?

I guess as a youth we have a lot more daring and I think that as you grow older, perhaps, what happens is you go for the essence and the truth of what his music is. Do you think that’s accurate?

Yeah, I think the whole notion that I could have grasped what he was, what he was trying to do, as a kid was impossible. I don’t know how old he was when he made those, maybe in his mid-20s but I was still only like 18 when I was trying to figure out what he was doing. And there was no way. On the face of it, actually, it’s interesting, because I had always been interested in the music of older people. I had never really totally identify with what would have been teeny bop in those days. It was all my heroes were either dead or very old, you know? It makes sense that I’d really come to understand it in my later years.

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Yeah, I mean, you walked out of bands because they were going in that pop direction…

Well, it seemed to be going backwards to me. I was for instance in The Yardbirds. When I joined the band we were playing music by Howlin’ Wolf, Bo Diddley, Muddy Waters, etc., etc. and then ended up trying to perform songs written by someone who was gonna be into 10CC… And to me, that was an incredibly retrograde progression. But there you are…

Let’s get to the present time, where you came with the idea of, ‘I wanna do a whole album of Robert’s music.’ I mean, give me the thought process that went into that thing and then actually doing it.

Well, last year, we’re talking about 2003, I was conscious of the fact that it was time to make an album and my partner, Simon Climie, and I had been talking about how we’d go about it and what we had in mind for it. We’d done a couple of things over the last few years where we stepped into different areas, and we did an album that we really loved making together called Pilgrim, where we just holed up in the studio and did most of it without any help from anybody, no musicians at all. It was all machines and just making fabrics and ideas out of nothing and then I went and did the BB King album. And I did Reptile and in the making of these albums we put together some pretty amazing bands and I wanted to do that again. But I wanted to somehow mingle it with the kind of mental attitude we had for Pilgrim. So we started to write in the spring of 2003 and I would go around to Simon’s house. And any time I got to write from not having attempted to do anything before, I’d always go to a blues sensibility. I start to pick out something that comes from my own past or from my past tastes. And as this was starting to ferment and spend about two hours a day with Simon at his house which we did for about two or three weeks. I started thinking about that and it was almost like I was using Robert as a cop out clause, because I was facing the dilemma of having to come up with original compositions and start from scratch on an album that would be all original. I started to look a way of getting out of it.

I’ve done this before and what I said to Simon halfway through was ‘you know what? I’ve got this idea, while we’re trying to do this album, every, whenever we get a break, let’s do a Robert Johnson song. Just for fun, just to see, because maybe, you know, it’ll take the strain off of what we’re really trying to do.’ And sure enough when the time came we wrote as much as we could. And we got some ideas together. Then we brought the band into the studio, and that’s the way we did it. We’d start out with one of these ideas that we’ve roughed up. I had a couple of words maybe but we grind to a halt, because we haven’t got a middle eight, or we hadn’t put the whole arrangement together and run out of steam. Then I’d say, ‘well, let’s get everyone in the control room, listen to this, and I’d play a track off of the King Of The Delta Blues.’ And I’d say, ‘we’re gonna do that. I don’t want anyone to learn anything. Just listen to it a few times and play it the way you feel it.’

And of course, I had some amazing players; I had Andy Fairweather Low, Billy Preston, Doyle Bramhall, Steve Gadd, all with very different different musical backgrounds but possessing incredible listening capabilities. So they would go back out on the floor, and we’d do versions, and that album got finished. The Robert Johnson thing was a done deal, and I kind of thought, I knew this was gonna happen. As we talk right now, I’m in the other room, still working on the other album, a year later. And it will be another year, I’m sure, before that’s completed. So I mean, I know from myself that this means that this stuff comes from, from the heart.

You know, a lot of what I do normally will be a mixture of the heart and the head, and the head is very slow. But the Robert Johnson stuff has come from the heart and has been very, very simple and very intuitive, and as an album, I’m very proud of it.

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That method of working goes as far back as I know - as Layla, right? ‘Cause that’s what you did then.

We would do exactly the same thing on Layla. We’d be halfway through writing something and I’d do, ‘let’s just have a rest.’ But of course, you don’t rest. I mean, someone brings in some tea or something, the guitar is there or the guitar is still in your hands and you start to play, and it’s like something primal comes out. Or something from your core, something from your past. On Layla, we were doing Nobody Knows You When You’re Down And Out, Key To The Highway, things that go way back for me. And if I wrote an agenda, what I wanted to do, they wouldn’t be on it. You know, they would come up when there’s a gap, you know, when you relax and you shut down the head.

And what you were saying before about the head taking a little longer, that’s exactly what happened with your last couple of records, too, wasn’t it? It’s the same thing with Reptile where it took you a while to realize you, about your uncle? You know, same thing…

Yeah, I have real trouble with my head, you know. I know when I’m recording anything that when I apply this too much it all kind of grinds to a halt. I mean, you can make a song, or you can arrange a song and keep going, listen to it, and go ‘oh, it needs that put, that there…’ and it all just starts to kind of glue up…

It has to come up from the heart…

Yeah, and you know, there are times when the lads and I work really quick, because they know that the way to get it best is if I pick up the guitar and they turn it on and, the first thing I play was usually the best that it’s gonna be … And the minute you apply that kind of reflection or analysis or whatever it is it, it immediately starts to die.

And part of the problem with that is people are so tempted to use the technology that’s there today, because you can just slide a switch… Now Robert Johnson wrote, that we know of, 29 songs, right? And on this record there are 14 of them. What was the criteria for choosing the songs?

Well, there are groups of songs that Robert Johnson did, which pretty much fit into, uh, like, a character or a style. Crossroads, Milk Cow Blues, Stones In My Passway, Terraplane, for instance come under one heading for me which is that there’s a riff, and it’s a certain style. And then there are others like Got A Good Friend, Rambling On My Mind, Kind Hearted Woman… What I was trying to do was pick out a song that represented each of those kind of categories or a certain style that he played. I was very much motivated by the power of his versions. I wanted to do the most powerful songs that I thought he’d done, like Kind Hearted Woman, I think, is one of the most beautiful love songs ever written. And Milk Cow Blues, I’ve always wanted to do that. I mean it’s a standard now. It’s a hillbilly rock and roll song… I wasn’t daunted by the fact that the Stones had done Love In Vain. I just thought that was a classic version of that particular style of blues, with the melody and the content. So I really wanted to pick the ones that I thought were the most significant for me, from my listening point of view.

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And some of the choices you had are just flat out fun, like They’re Red Hot…

I never knew it was called They’re Red Hot, I always thought it was called Hot Tomatos… I heard this is one of those songs where I thought he probably had a small repertoire of songs of that nature which we’ll never know about. I heard a rumor that he did things like Blue Moon…

Yes, he did. How about the album title?

The album title was always a bit difficult for me. I think it was probably inspired by Me And Mrs. Jones, you know, so just kind of seemed to be a bit like a spoof really. It actually came with a whole art concept as well where it would be me sitting in the same pose with a guitar in a suit with a picture of Robert Johnson in a frame on a table. But, you know, really what it reflects is the fact that he’s been here. I mean he’s affected my entire life. It’s bizarre to think that all of my musical choices have had him somewhere in the equation, and I would always kind of half consider what if he was alive, what he would think about what I do. There’s an element of obsession involved in it and so I kind of have to refer to that in the in the title of the album.

The thing I like is it shows respect. I mean calling him Mr. Johnson instead of Me And Robert. How many different guitarists and guitars would you use during the recording ?

When we were making the album I used two different Martin acoustics, in addition to a Fender Strat that I normally use, just to give it a slightly pre war kind of feeling. I was using an old Gibson acoustic, jazz guitars and amplified jazz guitars. L5s with pickups, and they’re quite difficult to play if you’re trying to bend the strings and stuff, but I just found it had that more of a earthy sound, you know.

It does. It’s the way some of the guitars blend on some of the tracks, it’s just amazing. At first, you there was one acoustic that I swore I thought was electric at first. Did you need to go out and get any new guitars or were all these already available?

No we didn’t. I go back to what we were saying earlier about the way we were making the record when we were actually making another record. It’s us having fun. So the equipment we had on the floor was really all there to help us make another kind of record. And then when we would take a break and say ‘oh, let’s do a Robert Johnson song,’ we just used whatever we had that was being used on the other song. So a lot of it was really by default, except in situations where Andy would say, ‘I think this needs a mandolin,’ then we now and then go out and get stuff. Of course the one thing that I forgot to mention which really was on the agenda for Robert was to have the harmonica, you know, to have Jerry Portnoy, who I think is one of the great blues harmonica players who came over to play. That would not have normally have been on the list, to have him come and play on, on a normal kind of rock album. So, I must have had it in my mind that we were going to take this fairly seriously. But sometimes I do that stuff, little unconsciously, you know…

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I wanna go through some of the songs, if we can, okay? Now When You’ve Got A Good Friend opens it up and the song is like one of the main themes that goes through Robert’s music. It seems to be a conflict within all the time, which I guess all of us go through one way or another. We’re talking about when you got a good friend that will stay right by your side. Give her all of your spare time, love and treat her right. Yet the next line is ‘I mistreated my baby and every time I, I just think about it I, I wring, just wring myself and cry.’

Yeah, you know.

Is that what appeals to you? I mean, obviously we all just struggle within the good, the bad within ourselves.

Well I thought on that song that it was a song of regret. I mean, the lesson is I kind of felt he was saying, ‘next time…’ Or he’s kind of saying to somebody if you get something good don’t throw it away. See now he says ‘watch your close friends,’ I mean, there are some fantastic lines in there. Watch your close friends and your enemies can’t do you no harm. I believe it also says something about Robert in terms of being alone. I think what his music is that it’s a music of an alone man. You can put it in a group and you can surround it or make it modern or whatever you like. But the actual message is coming from a very, very insolent place. It’s probably right to say that there’s a conflict in there. And a lot of conflict. It’s like he deals with paradox all the time. You know, he actually contradicts himself in many of the songs like in Kind Hearted Woman is the same thing. ‘I got a kind hearted woman, who studies evil all the time.’ And there it says I’m right in my life right now. I can’t completely identify that, but I’ve been there. I’ve been in so many relationships which looked so kind of paradisic on the surface, but underneath there was something else going on altogether.

I mean, he’s also having a little fun too. That’s the way a lot of the guys I know call their wives a ball and chain or the war department or whatever. And it’s the same kind of thing. I don’t, but maybe he wasn’t being that serious. Hard to know. I have the same feeling about Hooker. Hooker and his lady from a long way through his career had incredible respect and a huge following but as a younger player I didn’t. I don’t think too many people thought too highly of him amongst his peers because he never changed. It appeared that he wasn’t really very good. But when you listen to his stuff it is astonishingly intricate and very beautiful, but it wasn’t like anybody else.

You mentioned that Robert’s music comes from a place of being alone before. And, and I think we’ve talked a little bit about this, about how Robert wasn’t necessarily accepted by his peers at the time.

I think it’s almost as if his proficiency was on such a high level that he couldn’t be. I mean it was the problem with the geniuses – they are kind of observed chess players or whatever. You know, people who have got remarkable gifts often become social outcasts or they don’t really fit. Mr. Johnson may have had that problem because he was quite clearly a cut above the rest in terms of his capabilities. I think what the others were touching on was just the fact that he was a womanizer and a traveler. And I got the feeling too that he was very naive; that he was very green about a lot of things. And that people would probably have looked down on him because he was probably not too socially aware about how to get by. I think he was probably taken advantage of a lot. And I tell you, one of the other people I think who was almost like a throwback to Robert Johnson was John Lee Hooker.

There’s some great footage of John Lee Hooker. I think it was the Newport Festival where he comes on. And there’s just something about the fact, he doesn’t look like any of the other people amongst his contemporaries. I mean, it was Muddy there and other people from that present day blues community. John Lee Hooker looked like he completely doesn’t fit. You know, he just doesn’t fit. It has something to do with the way he plays: he played in one key and he sang repetitive lines. He didn’t use a 12 bar method. And a lot of the blues people at that time and throughout, have been on their way somewhere. Or they want to be jazz musicians. They want to be accepted. I got the feeling with Robert, and later on also with John Lee, that they were just almost cursed with this gift. And they didn’t quite know what to do with it. I mean, they were just kind of lumbered with it. Watching John Lee on stage he had absolutely no idea or interest in stagecraft. He didn’t know anything and probably wasn’t that concerned about what to do to get any kind of effect from the audience. I would imagine Robert too would have been the same way. And actually reading the notes and I don’t know if it’s true, but I remember the notes on the back of the album The King Of The Delta Blues, it said that he had to sit facing the corner of the room because of his shyness. I mean, that was just with a guy and the tape machine.

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And the next song, A Little Queen Of Spades, this is slower blues but the one of the other things is his sexual power. And I felt that this is the way you do it and the way he did, very sultry.

Yeah there’s tongue in cheekness in his innuendo. You know, that I really like about Robert Johnson was that he’s often got a couple of agendas going, almost a hidden agenda. You know, that it would work best that way.

The first lead with the organ is beautiful. That’s Billy?

Yes. Billy Preston playing that organ solo on Queen Of Spades. I’d known of Billy as soulful and I hadn’t connected him with the blues, but throughout this record both his piano and the organ is just so appropriate…

In my book Billy is one of the top two or three piano players in the world. And on keyboards he is the master. We worked with him now and whenever I could. If we’re over-dubbing we’ll play him something once and he plays exactly what we want the first time around. He’s a first take man. And that’s the same when with it’s with the band or anything. There is no effort for Billy. I mean, he knows exactly what’s the best thing.

Now, Me And The Devil Blues, now this is the theme, I mean, there’s always been that temptation of women. He likens that to Satan tempting you or the devil tempting you and, and stuff like that. It’s kind of scary this particular song…

I would prefer I think a song like Me And The Devil is it goes back to that of masculine thing. I don’t know, boys will be boys type stuff. And this is what I’m going to call it like it’s like a term of endearment. I’m going to prefer on that side to say that I think to a certain extent he was talking tongue in cheek about somebody. Otherwise it just gets bogged down in being too heavy and too dark. I don’t think it was always like that, you know. Certainly on something like Hell Hound On My Trail, and I even then think there was a certain amount of self pity in that song. Who knows? I don’t. I imagine until the very end of his life he may have had a pleasant experience, he may have been having a fairly good time. And when he’s talking about me and the devil, it may have been someone; some girl that just wouldn’t give him his own way when he wanted it, as he wanted it. You know what I mean? Who knows?

I think you hit on a key, I think he was having a good time in his life which, as we discussed. Traveling Riverside Blues, I mean, you know what he used to do, when he’d go from town to town, how he would get himself well taken care of. Do you know where he would give attention to not the most attractive woman around?

Yeah, yeah. That’s what I heard too, though I’d heard that was due to a certain extent of his own self esteem, but he went out and looked for the plainer ladies. So back in 2002 I went to L.A. ostensibly to start dipping my toe in the in the water about making a new album and it’s funny because I had a series of cover version that I wanted to do; songs that had been in my head for a long time. I had a Muddy Waters song, a Taj Mahal song, and there were a few others including a Spinners song. I mean, just things that I wanted to get started and feel, feel my way. Traveling Riverside was on that list and we got Doyle Bramhall, Jim Keltner, Pino Palladino and Billy Preston and we cut that track. When I went home from doing those sessions, the one that stood out, the strongest of all of these songs were the little mini tributes to the artists that had originally done them. The one that stood out was this Robert Johnson song and as I sit here talking about it, I realize that that’s the seed of the whole thing. I knew the following year, in 2003, I was going to embark on making a new album, that it was gonna be probably it was going to be a studio album, compositions, original songs in partnership with Simon Climie. So Traveling Riverside was the one that got it stoked up for me and because I had forgotten how good these songs can be when, when they are arranged for a rock band.

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The Last Fair Deal Going Down works incredibly well in this context of a rock band…

I don’t know. A lot of the time the history of this stuff is beyond me, and half the time I don’t even get motivated to find out. It’s only when we sit and try to discuss what the lyric is that I’ll sometimes ask some of the American guys, ‘do you know what he’s talking about? What does he mean?’ And when we looked at the lyric on The Last Fair Deal Gone Down, the fourth or the fifth verse, I’m not sure which one it is, and it’s camp A, B and C. I mean, when you look at the album or the notes (and we looked on the Internet and everything) everyone just throws up their hands and actually they say, ‘if you’re gonna do this, you can write anything you like because we don’t know what he’s saying…’

It does give you license in that direction but I believe it has to do with what is called the Gulf And Ship Island Railroad, and it linked the docks at Ship Island, Mississippi, with the mainline at Jackson. So they could take the goods and ship the cotton or whatever it was from down there and the narrator apparently is working for building this railroad line to get money and, of course, they paid nothing. The Stop Breaking Down Blues, to me, this is one of those songs that I hear and I wonder how does Robert do both? How does he sing this and play it at the same time?

I didn’t think it was difficult until I came to do it. I know the Stones did this too, as well as Love In, they did Stop Breaking Down as well as Love In Vain, and I can’t. I’ve only ever heard their version, I think, once or twice. I can’t remember how they approached it. We did it the way we did it, because it seemed to fit with the essence of the written part that he had. And I didn’t sing this live, I think it was because I hadn’t learned the words or couldn’t get them to scan in. I think we’d got to the end of our time in the studio, and the guys all had to leave within a day or two, and we needed to get this cut as a track so I knew I wasn’t gonna be able to learn to sing it in time to get the track done. So the decision was to get the track and then do the vocal later. In actual fact, all the rest of the album, with the exception of Last Fair Deal, was done live, where I sang everything and played everything live. We did everything live, except for those two tracks, because of the lyric and the way he sang it. You try and, it’s like a tongue twist, now the fact that he did that and kept time with his right hand or his thumb is beyond belief. I mean, that’s exactly where you get that thing about Keith saying, ‘well, how, how many people were there playing?’ Because to be able to sing in a scat way like that and go off the time and yet keep time in your own hands, it’s, like, your hand is completely independent to what your body is doing. It’s totally, totally remarkable…

I like Milk Cow. I don’t know what it is about that song but some find it very sad. I don’t hear so much of the sexual stuff in there that they say is supposed to be in the content of the song. It’s just the way he sings it is so sad. All of his best songs are kind of love songs, songs of loss. You know, hat one’s got it for me. And t’s in the way he plays it too, there’s something powerful and sort of tentative. I don’t know how to describe it. I mean, it’s so difficult talking about this stuff, about what he has done. But some of these songs are so emotionally taught, and that one is one of them, you know. I thought if we can pull that off, we can do anything, and actually we did. We recorded Milk Cow about fourth song on the session, and I thought that’s it. If we don’t get anything else and we’ve done that, my dreams have all come true, because it’s been one of my favorites. Anywhere from when he goes in from the intro to the main riff is one of the most powerful moments in music, and we got that. And then I thought, ‘well, now we can do anything we like, maybe, after that.’

Then there was this kind of massive discovery. Ah, there’s this other album, you know, there’s a whole other set of songs plus alternative takes. Now I don’t know how this stuff came to be in the first place that we there got to be one album. Someone made that selection obviously at Columbia. But whoever did it, I believe, did an incredibly good job. It’s sad that that we didn’t get to hear Love In Vain and some of the other stuff until later on. And it was the same with Come On In My Kitchen. The alternate version sometimes seemed like they’re a bit more throwaway, or not so refined, or they they don’t have the finesse. And I went for the original ones each time as, in terms of which one I identified with.