Derek Trucks

Derek Trucks
Trucks playing the slide guitar in 2009
Background information
Born	June 8, 1979 (1979-06-08) Jacksonville, Florida, United States
Genres	Blues rock, world music, Southern rock, blues, blue-eyed soul, jazz fusion
Occupations	Musician, songwriter, record producer
Instruments	Guitar, sarod
Years active	1990–present
Labels	Columbia, Legacy Recordings
Associated acts	The Allman Brothers Band The Derek Trucks Band Soul Stew Revival Tedeschi Trucks Band
Website	www.derektrucks.com
Notable instruments
Gibson SG '61 Reissue

Derek Trucks is an American, guitarist, songwriter and founder of the Grammy Award winning The Derek Trucks Band. He became an official member of The Allman Brothers Band in 1999 and formed the Tedeschi Trucks Band in 2010 after marrying fellow musician, Susan Tedeschi.

Early life

Trucks at early age, sitting with Livingston Taylor

Trucks on stage at early age

Trucks was born June 8, 1979, in Jacksonville, Florida. His uncle, Butch, is a founding member of The Allman Brothers Band and according to Trucks, the name of Eric Clapton's band; Derek and the Dominoes had "something to do with the name [Derek] if not the spelling”. His younger brother, Duane, is a drummer^{[citation needed]} and his great-uncle, Virgil Trucks, was a professional baseball player.

Trucks bought his first guitar at a yard sale for $5 at age nine and became a child prodigy who played his first paid performance at age 11. After taking lessons from his father and from Jim Graves,a well known local musician,^{[citation needed]} Trucks began playing slide guitar on his Gibson SG electric guitar.^{[citation needed]}Before his 13th birthday Trucks had "jammed" with Buddy Guy and gone on tour with The Allman Brothers Band.

Career

Trucks performing on stage with his wife

Trucks formed The Derek Trucks Band in 1997 and by his twentieth birthday, he had played with artists such as Bob Dylan, Joe Walsh and Stephen Stills. After performing with The Allman Brothers Band for several years as a guest musician, Trucks became a formal member in 1999 and appeared on the albums Live at the Beacon Theatre and Hittin' the Note. In 2006 Trucks began a studio collaboration with Eric Clapton called The Road to Escondido and Trucks performed with three bands in 17 different countries that year. Trucks was invited to perform at the 2007 Crossroads Guitar Festivaland afterwards, he toured as part of Clapton's band.

Trucks built a studio in his home in January 2008 and he and his band recorded the album Already Free. It debuted at #19 on the Billboard Top 200 Chart, and #1 on the Internet chart, #4 on the Rock chart and #1 on the Blues chart. Truck's and his wife, Susan Tedeschi, combined their bands to form the Soul Stew Revival in 2007 and performed at the Bonnaroo Music Festival in June 2008. In late 2009, Trucks and his band went on a one year hiatus and in 2010 he dissolved the band and formed the Tedeschi Trucks Band with his wife.

Musical style

Trucks has appeared twice in Rolling Stone's list of "The 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time". He was listed as 81st in 2003 and 16th in 2011. An article in the Wall Street Journal described him as "the most awe-inspiring electric slide guitar player performing today". In 2007, Trucks appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone for an article called the "New Guitar Gods".

Trucks at the Hard Rock Cafe 2009

His music is reported to bridge categories such as jam band, Southern rockand jazz while is rooted in the blues and rock genres. His playing was more often inspired by older bluesmen like Howlin' Wolf and Albert King, jazz musicians Miles Davis, Sun Ra, John Coltrane,Charlie Parker, Django Reinhardt, Charlie Christian, and Wayne Shorter.^{[citation needed]}

In recent years, the influence of traditional Southern Sacred Steel can be heard in Derek's slide work.^{[citation needed]} Trucks credits Allman Brothers' primary founding member and guitarist Duane Allman and second-generation blues man Elmore James as the two slide guitarists that most significantly influenced his early style.^{[citation needed]} Additionally, Freddy King, and B.B. King were some of the original blues and roots musicians that Trucks mentions as influences.^{[citation needed]} Trucks became a fan of Ali Akbar and studied at the Ali Akbar College of Music in San Rafael.

Asked about his choice of becoming a slide guitarist, Trucks has explained initially, it was because he learned to play at a young age, and that the strings were painful, and his small fingers too tender to adapt quickly, and the slide made it easier for him to advance on the guitar. Once he learned the basics on the guitar, Trucks found only an elite few musicians to pursue the slide guitar above all else. That short list includes Duane Allman, Ry Cooder, Sonny Landreth and, Trucks feels the person to come the closest to be the late Lowell George. Because of this, Trucks sees greater possibilities in taking the sound in a new direction, which has intrigued him.

Trucks uses open tuning, mainly open E – a practice familiar to most other slide players. Duane Allman's bottleneck slide was originally made from a Coricidin bottle, but since such pill bottles are not manufactured anymore, Trucks explained in an NPR interview that the only way to get them is to look for them in antique stores, or buy the re-issues. Trucks has used the use of a replicate of the late Allman's bottleneck slide, made of Dunlop Pyrex to approximate the sound closest to that of Duane Allman.

Sound

Trucks, playing his resonator guitar in 2007

When playing older Allman Brothers material, Trucks sometimes takes parts originally played by Duane Allman, most notably the long slide guitar solo that takes up much of "Dreams". In other cases, there are no direct correlations between what Trucks plays and what previous guitarists in the band have done. Butch Trucks said in 2009, "My nephew is just scary. I have played with a lot of really good guitar players. And with every one of them, I start figuring out what they are going to do [...] even with Duane. There are certain patterns they play that lead to something else and you kind of get used to what they are going to do. After all the years of playing with Derek, I still don't have the faintest idea of what he is going to do. Every time he starts off his solo in "In Memory of Elizabeth Reed", he comes from a different direction. He never does the same thing twice".

The Derek Trucks Band plays an eclectic blend of blues, soul, jazz, rock, qawwali music (a genre of music from Pakistan and Eastern India), Latin music, and other kinds of world music, drawing on the wide variety of the different musical influences of each member. The Derek Trucks band, according to one Allmusic reviewer, are a "group of musicians that share a passion for improvisation and musical exploration". Trucks, in a 2002 interview commented that "When you hear people like Coltrane, and the search that he was on, I think that's what it's ultimately about... I heard it on a Sun Ra documentary, he was always talking about making a 'joyful noise'".

Equipment

Trucks playing his red Gibson SG guitar

Trucks avoids processing and effects, preferring to get the purest tone possible by connecting his guitar (a modified Gibson USA SG 1961 reissue with factory Vibrola), which has had the tailpiece modified and a stopbar tailpiece installed, directly to his amplifier, a 1965 Fender Super Reverb loaded with four Pyle Driver MH1020 speakers. He modifies his tone with the controls on the guitar.

In early 2006, an equipment trailer with Trucks' gear was stolen. Some of the gear was recovered from a field outside Atlanta, including the 1965 Fender Super Reverb (an amplifier he's been playing with since he was a young boy), a 1968 Super Reverb (one of the backup amps), a Hammond B-3, two Leslie rotating speaker cabinets, a Höhner E-7 Clavinet, and a few other minor items. He said, fortunately, nobody was home at the time, he "was away gigging with the Allmans", so nobody was hurt.

Trucks regularly plays without a pick. He generally plucks or strums (together or independently) with his thumb as well as his index, middle, and ring fingers. An article from The Washington Post describes the sound, saying Trucks "harvests notes and chords that soar, slice and glide, sounding like a cross between Duane Allman on a '61 Gibson Les Paul and John Coltrane on tenor sax". He uses custom gauge DR nickel-wound strings on both his SG and resonator guitars: .011, .014, .017, .026, .036, and .046. Most of his guitars are tuned to open E. Although he still prefers Super Reverbs when playing with the Derek Trucks Band, currently Trucks is playing Paul Reed Smith amplifiers almost exclusively when performing with The Allman Brothers Band.

Personal life

In 2001, upon learning of girlfriend and singer Susan Tedeschi's pregnancy, the couple married, and their first child was born by the end of the year in December, 2001. Named Charles Khalil Trucks, for saxophonist Charlie Parker, guitarist Charlie Christian, and author Khalil Gibran, he was followed in 2004 by their second child, a girl, Sophia Naima Trucks, who takes her middle name from a John Coltrane ballad, which was also the jazz legend's first wife's name. Again, Naima was unplanned, but welcomed as was her brother; as Trucks points out, it is nearly impossible with two full-time bands touring around the world to plan for children. The Derek Trucks Band recorded a cover of "Naima" on their first album, seven years before her birth. Trucks' marriage to Tedeschi has been an atypical domestic life, with both Trucks and Tedeschi frequently touring, although up to 2010, infrequently in the same place at the same time. The pair endeavored to perform as much as possible together, occasionally merging their respective bands whenever possible. This included others that often included Trucks' younger brother Duane Trucks, singer Mike Mattison's band Scrapomatic, and Tedeschi's former sideman, saxophonist Ron Holloway. Together, they billed their concerts as the "Soul Stew Revival". The difficulty in finding enough time for this led the pair to set aside most dates in December to spend time together. With both Trucks and Tedeschi touring throughout the better part of each year, their two children have been often with them, with Trucks' mother acting as a nanny when Tedeschi was touring. The children began growing through an age just a little younger than when Trucks himself began touring as a child.

Selected discography

With The Tedeschi Trucks Band

• Revelator (2011)

With the Derek Trucks Band

• The Derek Trucks Band (1997)
• Out of the Madness (1998)
• Joyful Noise (2002)
• Soul Serenade (2003)
• Live at Georgia Theatre (2004)
• Songlines (2006) (Legacy Recordings)
• Songlines Live (DVD) (2006) (Legacy Recordings)
• Already Free (2009) (Legacy Recordings)
• Roadsongs (2010)

With the Allman Brothers Band

• Peakin' at the Beacon (2000)
• Hittin' the Note (2003)
• Live at the Beacon Theatre (DVD) (2003)
• One Way Out (2004)

Recording collaborations

• 1994: Storm Warning, Tinsley Ellis
• 1996: The Circle, Planet Earth/Carey Nall
• 1996: Come on in This House, Junior Wells
• 1997: Searching for Simplicity, Gregg Allman
• 1999: Live... With a Little Help from Our Friends, Gov't Mule
• 2000: Croakin' at Toad's, Frogwings
• 2001: Project Z, Project Z
• 2002: Live in the Classic City, Widespread Panic
• 2002: Wait For Me, Susan Tedeschi
• 2003: Little Worlds, Béla Fleck and the Flecktones
• 2005: The Best Kept Secret, Jerry Douglas
• 2005: Hope and Desire, Susan Tedeschi
• 2006: The Road to Escondido, JJ Cale, Eric Clapton Reprise
• 2008: Skin Deep, Buddy Guy
• 2008: Here and Gone, David Sanborn
• 2008: Sidewalk Caesars, Scrapomatic
• 2008: The Blues Roll On, Elvin Bishop
• 2008: Back to the River, Susan Tedeschi
• 2008: Lifeboat, Jimmy Herring
• 2008: Guitars (McCoy Tyner album), McCoy Tyner
• 2010: The Imagine Project, Herbie Hancock
• 2010: Clapton (Eric Clapton album), Eric Clapton

External links

• www.derektrucks.com – official site
• www.tedeschitrucksband.com Official site for both Derek Trucks and Susan Tedeschi
• Derek Trucks Band collection at the Internet Archive's live music archive