Johnny Lang - interview with music sensation - Interview

Interview, Feb, 1999 by Ray Rogers

He may sound like a howlin' wolf, but that's where tradition and music sensation Jonny Lang come to a parting of the ways. The dynamic eighteen-year-old singer-guitarist is the kind of late-'90s artist who refuses to be pigeonholed by expectations of what a blues man - or any other kind of man - is supposed to be

When Jonny Lang released his astounding debut record, Lie to Me (A&M), at age sixteen in 1997, many people who heard It assumed he was an old blues man: His tough-as-rawhide vocals evoked several decades of wear and tear, his guitar strings sang and danced like the guy playing them was the voice-of-experience incarnate. His second disc, 1998's Wander This World (A&M), proved the first one was not a fluke but a beginning.

But if there's an old soul lurking in Lang, now eighteen, there's nothing old about the mind-set that goes with it. The angelic-looking singer-guitarist from the Midwest puts a new face on the blues, honoring its vintage traditions while making It sound entirely fresh. His talent may be singular, but Lang's unpretentious, wide-open outlook is emblematic of a whole new generation that has grown up with less constrictive ideas about what it means to be a man than those expressed by its forebears. Lang also has the grace of someone untainted by the world, a free spirit whose music and very person refuse to be bound by class, race, age, or any other expectation.

RAY ROGERS: I understand you started out playing saxophone when you were eleven. Why the sax?

JONNY LANG: I was a big Grover Washington, Jr. fan when I was little, so I chose the sax, and that's the instrument every kid wants to play in the school band anyway. It was also the first instrument I played in a group.

RR: Were you any good?

JL: I could play good in B-flat. And then I sucked after that.

RR: Why did you pick up the guitar?

JL: I went out to see this blues band in Fargo [N.D.]; it was the first live band I ever saw. The guitar player really inspired me and I was like, Yeah, I want to do this. It was the band that I eventually joined.

RR: Were the other members older than you? JL: They were in their mid twenties. I was thirteen.

RR: Why did the blues speak to you back then?

JL: I'd grown up on roots music, like Motown. My mom was a huge Motown album collector. She and my sisters and I would sit around and sing Motown tunes all day. It was pretty easy for me to identify with blues music after that because blues and soul are pretty close in a lot of ways. I could just hear it and mentally decipher it.

RR: Did you feel out of sorts with what your peers were listening to?

JL: No, because I was into Nirvana like crazy, and Stone Temple Pilots and Pearl Jam, too. But, for me, it was more real to play roots music. It came naturally for me as a singer, first of all. And then after that on the guitar. For me, music has never been a way to express rebellion or anything like that. But I really shouldn't say that. In a sense, it's all rebellious to a point. Because when you do something fresh and new, you're always kind of bending the guidelines of society.

RR: YOU were sixteen when Lie to Me came out, and you had been playing professionally since you were thirteen. Did you feel like a child prodigy? Were you treated like one?

JL: No. I was a normal kid who loved music and was fortunate enough to get the support of his parents to pursue it, and in turn I got to play with musicians who were so much better than me that it just kicked my butt. That's how I got better. I know so many people my age who are ridiculously talented - painters or whatever - who just don't get that kind of support.

RR: When the record came out there must have been a lot of curiosity-seekers asking, "Who's this young white kid playing the blues?" How did you deal with that?

JL: If you do anything that's unusual when you're young, people love to accentuate the novelty, and the press loves to exploit it. But I've always told myself I'm going to be rated as a musician, not by how old I am. I said, "I'm not going to be good for my age; I want to be good period." So I never let it affect me. One journalist who sat down with me said, "So what's your excuse? How do you justify playing the music you play?" I said, "How do you justify asking me that?" He goes, "You haven't been through anything, you're sixteen years old, you don't know shit about shit." Yeah, the blues has a great cool myth that you've got to be this old dude from the Delta with an alcohol problem, but people like that journalist don't understand that, like all music, the blues are universal and doesn't see age or race or anything. It's part of the universe and it's close to everybody. For somebody to say I don't have the right to play the blues is pretty ignorant. B. B. King would never say that to me or any other young musician. They're all supportive because they started when they were teenagers as well.

RR: When the blues came about and rose in popularity generations ago, the role of the musicians who played it was obviously quite different from what it is today. How have you modernized the traditional image of the blues man?