Andy Aledort Interview - I Played with the Jimi Hendrix Band at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. PT1

 Andy Aledort is widely known for his transcriptions, instructional columns and DVDs and has also toured throughout the last two decades with Dickey Betts and the Jimi Hendrix Tribute. He is also co-author of the New York Times Best Selling biography, Texas Flood: The Inside Story of Stevie Ray Vaughan. Andy visited with The Trout about his career from playing with Mitch Mitchell and Billy Cox of the Jimi Hendrix Band, to jamming with Johnny Winter, sharing licks with Stevie Ray Vaughn, touring with Dickie Betts and his tenure as Associate Editor for Guitar World. His stories are amusing, fascinating and a look inside rock music history.
http://andyaledort.com/
https://www.thetroutshow.com/ 

Transcript

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Hey, everybody. Welcome to the trout show. This is the Trout, aka Rick Troutman. And welcome to season three, episode one of the Trout Show podcast. If you're new to this podcast, let me tell you what I do. I interview extremely talented musicians located all over this planet, and this episode is no exception. Our guest today is Andy Aldor, a guy that's been playing guitar for a while, but his claim to fame is he got to play with the Jimmy Hendrix band, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He's also jammed with Johnny Winner, hung out with Stevie Ray, performed with Zinkie Bets on tour for years. He's been the associate editor of Guitar World for a long time. His website, Andyaldor.com, he teaches people how to play all sorts of guitar, whether it's blues, slide, anything you want to know. I was very happy that Andy sat down with me to talk about his history, the music, and the people he's met along the way. So sit back and enjoy this episode of The Trout Show with Andy. Outdoort next. How did you get involved? Obviously you were a Hendrix fan, but it would have to be a few years later because you were really young at the time when Jimmy died. Right. You were like 14, I think I was 14 when he died, yeah. How did you get involved with Buddy and Billy? It's relatively simple. The first part of it is as a guitar player, when I started to become more serious about playing guitar when I was 17. I mean, I love almost every style of music that there is, except for maybe opera and not that big, not that big on pocus. But Hendrix I really loved. And I'll never forget when I was twelve years old, an Electric Ladyland came out. 1968. I was at summer camp and somehow it was like dusk and for whatever reason I was alone in the bunk. Like I wasn't out with my camp meets doing whatever I was supposed to be doing archery or something, throwing clay in pottery class. But I was in the bunk alone and there was a record player and I put on Electric Ladyland Gypsy Eyes and I listened to it like five times in a row. And I'm twelve and I astral projected, it sounds like something happened, like my DNA got rearranged. It just wasn't the same after listening to the song over and over and over again, I mean, I was a huge Beatle fan. My mother was a singer and an actress, and my house was filled with music. So my earliest memories were her record collection. Everything from Ella Fitzgerald, Billy Holiday and Tony Bennett. But then she also had CHED Atkins records. She had Leadbelly records. Oh, wow. And then sagovia records. Steve did everything. I was too young to think about any of it was different from anything else. Like lead belly. Think of it. There's no difference between lead belly and Segovia and Tony Bennett. When you're three, there isn't and then she even bought a guitar before I was born, like when she was pregnant with me. So when I showed up, there was a guitar there. So my point in just saying all of this was I had been a music fanatic for a long time, but surrounded by music, and music was very important to me. Roger Miller doing Dang me right before the Beatles. When the Beatles showed up, that was this zeitgeist, of course. But then this thing happened, listening to Hendrix when I was twelve that I never experienced before. And so Hendrix became my guy. It was just dead. And then my first band, I started when I was 17, a trio, guitar, bass, drums, and we played literally like 30 Hendrix songs. We played three little Bears and Catastrophe and 51st anniversary. Like, we played this song, no one we played songs and people say, who's that? By every same answer every time, it was Jimmy Hendrix. Jimmy Hendrix, you know, like, do you drive and trip? You were a tribute band before they were trivia bands. We were next. But then, along with the Hendrix stuff, we did Johnny Winter and Leslie West, and Deep Purple, and Frank Zappa power trio. Jethro Tall. I love Jethro tall. And Jeff Becker group. Absolutely. Anyway, my study of Jimmy Hendrix was intense and very deep. And then I started working for guitar magazines in 1984, doing transcriptions, became music editors, started interviewing people, and then started doing music books, transcription books. And I did literally hundreds of books, maybe at least 200 books. I don't even know. And then this thing came along, these instructional books with CDs inside, where songs would be transcribed and there'd be lesson type material. And then on the CD, the songs would be I would recreate to the best of my ability, the original record, but the songs would be in segments and then taught. So I did a Jimmy. He said, Was that in tab? Yeah, the books were in tableture, but the CD was the songs and music. Right. So that book, that specific book was called Jimmy Hendrick's Signature Licks for Hal Leonard. And it became the most successful signature licks book they ever had. It was a series, and that came out in 1995. Now, the only reason I bring that up is I had gotten to know Steve Ravan when he was alive and interviewed him a number of times, which ultimately led to me writing this biography of Steve Ravan. Because he was a huge Hendrix fan. Yes. He's the only person I've ever heard play well. Everybody's heard the Austin thing where he's playing food. One of the few people I've heard that could play. It pretty damn good. Really damn good. Yeah. And when I first met Stevie, the first thing that happened was we played together, which was really cool. And he was a year and a half older than me and there was a lot of symbiotic stuff there. And he was a really nice person, like a really warm and generous and sweet person. Anyway, I got to know him. And I met Chris Layton and Tommy Shannon around that time. But I didn't spend any time with them. If I went to get together with Stevie, it was to interview Stevie. And like I said, we played the first time and then the other times he would just sit and play my guitar. He generally he didn't have his guitar. He had his guitar the first time. So he would just sit and play my guitar, like the whole time. So anyway, then he dies, this horrible, tragic hit, 1990 Hard to Believe, 32 years ago. And I do these interviews with Chris and Tommy and Reese Wineins about he was the keyboard player, right, in Double Circle. Yeah. And then Chris and Tommy formed the Ark Angels in 92. Doyle Bramwell, I know who that played. Doyle bramall two. And Charlie sexton. And then in 95 they had a band called Storyville. So, anyway, so I'm getting to know Chris Leighton and Tommy Shannon Post. Stevie right. And this Steve, this Jimmy Hendrix book comes out where I recreate the songs. And Rick, I mean, not blowing my own horn, it sounds a lot sounds pretty damn close, like, you know, so close, in fact, that I had told Tommy Shannon about it. Now, of course, Tommy met Jimmy because when he was playing with Johnny Winner there's a famous photograph of Johnny Winner jamming with Jimmy Hendrix. And Hendrix is playing a white Fender jazz bass upside down. That's Tommy's Bass. It was at the Scene Club. And Tommy heard my replications of Hendrix's songs in this book and he freaked out. He said, I can't believe it's not Hendrix. I can't believe it. Is that you? Really? And then Mitch Mitchell heard it. And now this is a little later when I started to do those tours with Mitch. And one day he said to me, I'm mad at you. And I said, Why? And he said, you used my drum treks for your book and you didn't ask my permission. And I said, Well, I'll tell Ed Kavasano, the guy who's playing drums, my drummer, that you heard him and you thought it was you because that's going to be like the greatest day of his life. Oh, yeah, sure. That Mitch Mitchell heard his drumming and he thought it was him himself. So then by 98 or nine, I started to do some stuff with Chris and Tommy. I started to stop right there. What were you doing when you're doing mitch was playing with you. Wait, let me get up to because your question was, how do I get involved? Okay, get going. I want to interrupt you. All right. So the first thing I did with Chris and Tommy was their instructional videos. They did chris did a drum video and Tommy did a bass video and we shot them at the same time. And they asked me, they said, would you come and play guitar in our videos? Because they knew I knew all the stuff, like, they heard me play the Hendrix stuff and then I sent them other stuff. In fact, I sent them tracks. I was in the midst in 98 of putting together my first album, put a sock in it. And so they liked my guitar playing, simple as that. And they could tell that if I was going to be asked to play in a Steve Raymond style, I'd probably be able to do it, or Freddie King or BB king. They could tell from listening that I had studied that stuff. And don't forget, they knew me a little bit from conversations and hanging out some over the course of the previous decade. Sure. So, in 2000, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame did a Jimi Hendrix exhibition to coincide with the release of the Purple four CD box set called Jimmy Hendricks Experience. And there was lots of different people that played and the headliner was Double Trouble. In that band was Chris and Tommy and me and the singer Malford Milliken from Storyville. Okay, so we did that, and I'm in the dressing room like the other bands are playing and me and Tommy are just jamming. And who walks in? Billy Cox and Mitch Mitchell, who, by the way, Chris and Tommy are also, you know, massive fans of. Yeah. And Billy looks at me and he just points me, he goes, I heard about you, which was really funny. And he took Tommy's Bass. And then me and Billy jammed for like an hour and a half before we even went on. And we played everything. I mean, by everything, I mean, we played Free, we played all the hard ones. We played Freedom, Municipal and Powerful, Step Up after he died, the stuff they released afterwards. Well, I mean, band the Gypsiest came out while Hendrix was alive, I believe. Yeah, it did. But I was trying to think, was Freedom on that? That was afterwards. That was the Cry of Love or whatever. Freedom's cry of love. And that came out. And I think, if I'm not mistaken, even Eddie Kramer still had something to do with engineering on that stuff. Oh, yeah. No, he still does. Yeah, he still does. mitchell. Come on. Anyway, then when we go out, I'll send you the recording because he'd love to hear it. We're going to dig it. We open with Spanish gospel magic. It's so heavy. And Hendrix's dad was there. He was standing like 10ft away from me and I'm freaking out, Rick. Oh, I'm sure. I just came out of the dressing room with Mitch Mitchell and Billy Cox. I'm excited anyway, because I'm doing a gig with Double Trouble. And then, oh, this is Al Hendrix, Jimmy's death that's what it is. I was trying to think it was now Al. Yes, that's exactly and I'm like and then because we followed everybody else, I was feeling like, well, we better kick ass. Yeah, you got to be good. Because it was Eric Gills and it was like all these people that were great. So there was 100 watt, 19, 6800 watt half sack there. And I just put every knob on tent. I did the Johnny Winter move where you just go like this. You just go across the top. Mine is right behind me. You can't see it. It's right behind all right. I saw Johnny do that at the Lone Star. He was going to sit in with the teebirds, and they had a super and his tech was, like, setting each knob to, like, a really specific number. And Johnny fell down the stairs, and I thought he was dead. And then he was fine. He was super drunk, and he sat in a stool and I handed him his firebird and plugged him in, and he went like, Plant, plant. And he just did the move across all the noise, he just went so I did that open with Spam's. Customers get so heavy, rick that's such a cool turn now. And then the second song is Manic Depression. Okay, we really lightened it up. Then we did angel, and after that oh, man. And then we did I Don't Live Today, which I sang. Oh, well, I am singing I don't live today looking at Hendrix's father. Oh, wow. How where does that dude, I'm not on Earth anymore. Yeah, I was then we were going to do something else. I can't remember. And I had turned around I think I brought a couple other musicians on stage. And then I turned back and Mitch is on the drums. Like, Mitch and Billy had walked up, and Mitch took Chris's place, and Billy's putting on Tommy's base. And I'm just like and Billy walks over and goes, let's play Voodoo Job. So anyhow, that's how I got it. I assume the slight return is the one you played with the Huawei in it. Of course. Yeah, of course. And so that was my entrance introduction into doing Hendrick's tribute shows. So we started to do them. That was the first one. And I did them for a bunch of years, and then later, by the time we get to, like, 2007 or eight, they wouldn't have me do the whole tours, unfortunately. I would have liked to, but I would come and play, like, the New York, New Jersey shows and more local shows. Right. It was fine. But getting to know it's no slight on Billy. It'd be wonderful to get to know Billy, but getting to know Mitch and have dinner with Mitch and sit with him and him talk about his life, which was a very difficult life he went through. I just actually read a little bit about him. Just the other day I was reading about, oh, he had a child. And very early on, like by 71, his wife disappeared with their one or two year old baby and he didn't find his daughter for 20 years or something. All I remember is when they came out and I told my friend this at lunchtime, when they came out, no intro, but they came out, he put his drums down and they put a two by four, nailed it to the floor in front of his kicked drum. Of course, I guess that was where everybody thought, you know, what we could do is we could rugs out. And I thought, he's going to kick the crap out of thing. But, you know, the amazing thing to me about listening Jimmy Hendrix was he wasn't that loud. I've heard other people after that were a lot louder. I mean, he had I don't know how many marshals, three. I don't remember what it was. But when you talk about 1970, the sound systems are so different now. Yeah, it's not going to crush you like that. But I had a conversation just in the last week with Joe Perry. Again, not at the risk of name dropping, but that's all right. Joe is a guy I've gotten to know from Arrowsmith that he's a wonderful guy. He's one of the sweetest people ever. And we've hung out many times, just sit around playing guitar. He's great. He's a great dude. And I think he's 70 now, but he just is like a kid. He loves guitar and music, and all he wants to talk about now, he's on this kick of finding this thin paper for low audit speakers. He's so into it. And he was saying exactly what you're saying, that you could stand in front of original 66 67 Marshall Stacks. And it's much softer than a 72 metal front. Like it's a completely different sound. And it's loud, but it's not hard. And this is a guy who saw the original Fleetwood Map with Peter Green at the Boston party many times. And he said every English band that came in would be at least one or two full stacks behind them in a bar. And it was loud, but he said it was not like your brain was getting crushed. It had to be amazing to see Hendrix. I can't believe it's one of those things. This is kind of a side note. So my buddy and I, he found out about now we live 250 miles away, but we didn't care. We were going to drive this 4 hours to 5 hours it was to go see him. We went and saw him. He played an hour. The last song he played was Voodoo Child's, Thigh Return in the middle of the set. He played Starspangle Banner. Everybody stood up. Nobody sat down after that. Walked off stage and never came back. What was interesting was my friend and I separated when we got out of high school, didn't see each other for years, and he had a very common name. And so on Facebook come out, I tried to find him a couple of times, and one time he found me. This has been 40 years, maybe 40 years after the event, okay? And so he says, hey, do you remember we only saw Jimmy? And you know how you have some of that stuff in your mind? You're thinking, was that really there, or was I just making it up? And then he says this to me, says, remember the guy smoking a cigar in front of us? And I went, oh, my God, do you remember that, too? I mean, those little details yeah, that I thought, you know, and I was thinking about it, you know, and I actually found one time on the Internet, the playlist in a picture from him playing at the Hemisphere Arena. Of course, not there anymore. To me, I think my story is somewhat similar to yours when it comes to Jimmy. So in 68, when that album came out, the other big album that came out was Tommy. That was the year Tommy came out, okay? I saw the who. I saw the who in 68. And so all my friends are like, I'm going to get Tommy. And I go, Nah, I'm going to get Jimmy Hendry. They're like. Oh. What's? Jimmy henry. And I had heard Jimmy the first time I heard him. I was a freshman in high school during a football game. Went down to see a football game in high school that for instance, you got to come over and listen to this guy playing on this album. And it was what was this? Not x's boldest level. What was the first one called? Are you experienced? So he puts on our experience, and I go, who is this guy? And that's kind of where it went from me. And then so when I listened to Electric Ladyland, I told my parents, who had a Magna box record player, you know, the big wooden things and all this stuff. No headphone jack. But I got a converter where I could plug screw the wires in and put a headphone in and sat there and listened to this mix going, holy crap. Stuff going around my head and all this. I didn't know how I don't know what this is. That's kind of where I went from. And then, of course, when he passed away, but then I bought all the stuff afterwards. I got a good story for you. So I'm backstage at the Beacon Theater, and I don't know what year it was. I'm guessing 2008 or nine, I don't know. We're doing a Hendrix tribute show, and I'm sitting with Eric Johnson, who I'd gotten to know, the Texas player, great guy, incredible guitar player, giant Hendrix man. And we're just talking, and then these two guys walk in with a guitar case plop it down and open it. And they go, here's Jimmy's strat that he played with Woodstock and Rick, it was like meeting one of the Beatles or something. No, there was no question of whether I was going to touch it, but I'm looking at it thinking, this guitar launched a million chips. You know what I mean? This is the Star Spangle Banner guitar, where we all watched in the movie, the Woodstock movie, we all heard it. It changed the world. If a guitar player plays The Star Spangled Banner at a baseball game, now they're going to play it like Hendrix. It's as American as apple motherfucking pie at this point. Exactly right. And when Hendrix was on the decavico a couple of days after Woodstock, I've seen that clip, but I never didn't know what it was. So it's right after Woodstock then? Well, he was on a couple of times. One of the times, one of them, he had a kind of funky looking look like a pajama outfit or something on it that was well, he wore kimonos one time, blue one, I think it was a couple of days after Woodstock. And Cabot asked him, are you like a very disciplined person? Do you get up and work every day? And Jimmy goes, well, I try to get up every day, she's so amazing. And so he said, did you get any angry letters or any flat plan to start Spangled Banner? And he went, well, why would anybody and he goes, well, anytime you take a song like that, national anthem, and you do it in an unorthodox way. And Jimmy just goes unorthodox. Because it wasn't unorthodox. He goes, I thought it was beautiful. And so people start clapping and cheering and Jimmy goes like this. And then he goes like this, which says everything you need to know about it. Because it's like we're talking about being unorthodox, right? And he goes like this, which everybody understands. And then it was sort of like, but why not this? He goes like, yeah, does it matter? Does it matter? Like he's so ahead of everybody. Well, that was such a weird interview because it would be like me interviewing Lawrence Welk. He was, okay, but I'm going to give him credit, cabot, in fact, in that interview, Cabot was funny. He refers to him as Hendrix just as a joke. He goes, Listen, Hendrix. Well, that was back when they used the word cats. And Hendrix was always talking a man dude never used dude and didn't use dudes back. And he's he's a cool. And he talked about one of the things that he talked about on one of the shows was when he met Billy Gibbons. Because that's when and he talks about moving sidewalks with Billy and all that stuff and how great Billy Gibbons was. You know what amazes to me is that you're talking just a second ago, how one person can impact so many people. How many thousands, if not millions of people, does Hendrix influence to pick up the guitar and play? It not only millions, I mean, it's across like five generations at this point. I mean, now look at it, it's never going to stop. And I'll get and I said, Tell this to people all the time, like, when we were young, people would argue, who's the best rock guitar player? Hendrix. Oh, no, I think it's clapped in. Yeah. They talk about I think it should be pitched. So my son is 30 to his generation, there isn't even a discussion. If the question is like, it's so cut and dried. It's like if I asked you, who's first president in the United States, there's one answer. Yeah, George Washington. There's no debate. If you ask anyone in my son's generation who's the greatest rocket or player ever lived, the answer is Jimmy Hendrix. There's no Eddie Van Hayland, there's no aircraft, there's no debate, there's Hendrix, then there's everybody else. And it's just the way they filtered it from when they were young, it was obvious to them. To me, the proof is really in the pudding. We are in the midst of so much different stuff that from a distance, looking at things with a different perspective. To my son's generation, it's like it's not even like a silly conversation. Why are we talking about this? It's like, how could you compare anyone to Jimmy? And it's insane. Like, you must be nuts. Here's Andy playing with Mitch Mitchell. Billy Cox rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Freedom. I wonder, though, Andy, when they were sitting there recording, of course, Kramer did a lot of that stuff, but I wonder if he knew at the time that he was singing. I mean, it's always easy to say stuff years later or a few years later about Jimmy, but I wonder when they always wonder about this, when iconic songs become iconic, whether it's was sitting there and they're listening to Voodoo Child. I know Jimmy did a lot of different things in the studio and all that stuff, but if you're sitting there and listen to it, they turn to each other and go, holy crap, this is something that's going to last forever. Or they just didn't know. They just knew he was different. Oh, go ahead. No, that's all I was going to say. and I do think this is true for all of the most important music. And I'll even expand it to other art forms, painting, because I've got a degree in art. I don't know if you know that I went to School of Visual Arts and got a degree in art and was much more involved in art for most of my life, or at least up until I was 17 and I started guitar like a psychopath. But I think when you listen to Miles Davis Records and Charlie Parker Records, that part of what got captured is some level of awareness and acknowledgement of the musicians that they're doing something extraordinary, like they are experiencing it too. Like you could listen to Cocoa or a variety of things from Charlie Parker the Bird and Diz record or Jazz Massey Hall. The level of excitement in that music is always going to sound as fresh as the day it was recorded because it's totally real. And I do think that manic depression sounds the way it does because they in the studio were as excited as anybody could be about what was happening, because it had not happened before. They didn't hear it anywhere else before they did it. You could say the same thing about Cream, especially Cream Live. No one else did what they did. They fed off of it themselves and that's in their recording. I don't think you could have there's no way Hendrix could know when he did All Along the Watchtower that it would be this thing later. But he definitely wanted it to be as good as he could make it. And he made it really, really good. Thanks for watching or listening to part one of the Andy Outdoors interview. What you're hearing right now is a little bit of Andy playing off his brand new album release slide hello. For more information about Andy, you can pick up his music on his website, andyaldor.com or it's available on all major streaming services. For more information about the Trout show, you know where to go, the Trout Show. So until next time, remember people, it's only rock and roll, but we love it. See ya.