Blues guitarist Chris Cain can vividly recall a memorable night back in the early 1990s at The Decade, an old club in Pittsburgh’s Oakland neighborhood. Actually what happened after the show proved to be unforgettable on his end.
“At The Decade, they had a good bar,” Cain recalled in a phone call Tuesday. “When we were loading out, we were being loud because we were kind of festive now. And it’s right in the neighborhood. So, all of a sudden, this older brother comes down the stairs in pajama bottoms with a singlet on and a bat. And he’s like, ‘I’m going to hit you in the head’ — because we’re making all this noise — and then he points at me and ‘I’m going to hit you!’”
Nobody wound up smashed with the baseball bat, but Cain did lose his guitar in the hurry to get out of there.
“I left my guitar by the door of the club,” he said. “So the guy from the club said, ‘Hey, I got your guitar. I insured it for 600 bucks, and I’m sending it to you.’ The guitar never came, so I got the 600 bucks. But that guy came down in the pajama bottoms and that bat, I was like, ‘Whew, that wasn’t good,” so we learned that day to shut up.”
Now 69, Cain has settled down but still puts on electric live shows, earning the 2018 Blues Music Award for best instrumentalist and drawing praise from the likes of B.B. King and Joe Bonamassa.
“I’m going on 70 now, and it’s like my teen years and my 20s, it was a whole different Chris Cain,” he said. “There’s been different ones throughout the years, but this is the most well-balanced and not as nutty one. When I was younger, I was like three wild Comanches. I did everything wrong you could possibly do and still stay in the business. … Now, I’m user friendly, and before probably fighting like wild dogs.”
Signed to Alligator Records, Cain is touring in support of his latest album, “Good Intentions Gone Bad,” with a stop on April 13 at Thunderbird Music Hall in Pittsburgh’s Lawrenceville neighborhood.
In a call from his home in Copperopolis, California, a few days before heading out on tour, Cain discussed how producer Kid Andersen shaped this album, a deeply personal song and much more:
It seems like you pride yourself a lot on your live shows.
Yeah, I know that I always try to get fellas that play with a lot of love, like they’ll play whether there’s people there or not, they’ll do their thing. I’ve been very lucky with bands that I’ve had – and this is a great band. When you go out for any length of time like that, if it’s not people that you like, it’s hell on earth. But these guys are all really beautiful cats. You don’t have to worry about, on the break, they yelled at somebody’s wife or something. There’s none of that stuff. Because you can get that kind of thing where the guy plays great, but he has some kind of an anger problem. Over this many years of having this band, I’ve kind of learned that you kind of got to be like a psychologist a little bit, too. Because some guys can play really great, but they’re just not really that nice. (laughs)
For the new album, how did recording it at Greaseland Studios with (producer) Kid Andersen help shape it?
Oh, man, really a lot because that’s just a fun place. Of all the places that I’ve ever recorded in any studio, that place is the place that I’ve really had the best musical results and the best time, just the vibe in there. Kid knows what the heck he’s doing, he knows what I’m trying to do, and so he expedites all that stuff because he knows what I’m trying to do and he helps me get to that thing so that at the end I can hear what I was trying to do on the recording.
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I talked to Tommy Castro a little while ago, and he was also full of praise for that studio too, just all the vintage equipment. It seems like it’s like a musician’s wonderland.
The gear is one thing, but I’ve seen other places where they have all old gear and things like that, but the guys that were turning the knobs and that were running the thing could never really seem to get the vibe. Kid, he’d just start recording when you might think this is just a run-through, but he knows when to roll the tape, and he really doesn’t run it into the ground. If it’s not happening right now, he just goes to another tune and then comes back to it, as opposed to just staying on this thing and grinding it.
His bedside manner for recording stuff like this is one of the best I’ve ever been around because some guys just use the same template for any kind of band: ‘Here’s how I set the drums, here’s how I set this.’ But he does it according to what you’re trying to do, and he knows how to do that. That’s a gift right there. Because a lot of guys have the gear and they turn the knobs and stuff, but when you hear the thing back, it sounds like not what you wanted. But he can make it sound like it’s live. He can do crazy stuff to make the vibe even better. And it’s really a gas. I don’t think I’m going to be able to record anywhere else. I swear to you, man, because he did things on the last two records that I’ve recorded, that would not be on there if it wasn’t for the fact that he was in the room and he was playing bass or doing something on that thing. But he brought a lot of stuff to the recording sessions that made, I think, the record better.
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Does this feel like the best work of your career?
I feel like it is because I just think that I’m older now, so I’m not trying to play everything I know every time there’s a blank spot. I’m just getting older, maybe I got a little bit wiser musically, hopefully. But, yeah, I feel that these two records really are exactly what I heard in my head. And when they play, I don’t have a problem listening to them.
With the song “Good Intentions,” I’m hoping that none of those situations have actually happened to you in real life.
Oh, some of them, the names might have been changed, but happy blues guy’s just not gonna sell. (laughs)
With “Blues for My Dad,” was that one of the most personal songs you’ve ever written?
It is, man. Definitely. And the thing is, I couldn’t find all my demos, so I just took the whole recording disc to Kid’s studio and then I was going through them and I went past that one. He goes, ‘Wait, what’s that?’ I go, ‘No, no, no. That’s something I wrote.’ He said, ‘Oh, no.’ I went kicking and screaming, man. He goes, ‘No, you’ve got to put this on this record.’ I go, ‘Man, he’s going to get me thrown off this label, I barely got on here.’ He’s like, ‘No, no, no.’
So I went kicking and screaming, but after I heard it and I saw the video that he made with it, I was in tears. He blew my mind with that thing, and he has more to do with that thing being on there than I did because I thought, man, this doesn’t go on the thing. And then it turns out that everybody that has heard it, they’ve been touched by it. It was so personal that I figured, eh, you know? But every time I think something like that, I’m dead wrong. Just the fact that it’s a tune about my papa and that people dig it, it really makes me very happy, no kidding.
Did it seem like the song “Thankful” was a fitting closer to the album then?
I was trying to do a Sam & Dave thing with two guys singing a tune, a tune like that, so that was where that came from. And then, actually, I thought about it, I was like, I wonder if (Tommy Castro) would come, because we see each other sometimes, like I’ll sit in with him or something, we’ll just play something. And so he said, yeah, he’d love to do it. So he came and sang on it. And that really made it great now. So if I go see him somewhere, he comes where I am, we could just do that tune. But having him on there, it was really just a special treat, because I’ve known (him) since the beginnings of both of our things. And he’s always been just really encouraging and a beautiful cat in my life. And then he had me on his record playing piano on a Ray Charles tune, and then he recorded (my) “Wake Up and Smell the Coffee” on his latest record, so it just touched my heart. I love that guy, he’s crazy, I always have.