The life of a traveling blues musician isn't easy. The vocation is rife with loneliness, bad food, cheap hotels, and lack of sleep.
Walter Trout is a survivor of that life (just barely). During the late 1960s and '70s, he worked the road with
Big Mama Thorton,
Joe Tex, and
John Lee Hooker. In the 1980s, it was
Canned Heat and
John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers. He's led his own bands since 1990 and experienced cycles of triumph, tragedy, alcohol and narcotic addiction, and recovery from a near-fatal liver transplant that required two surgeries.
Trout's dues are paid and then some.