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.

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.

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.