LOOKING FOR BIGGER FISH TO FRY : The Walter Trout Band Heads for the Mainstream

Ask Jan Van der Linden how things are going for Walter Trout, and he’ll tell you about 100% cotton wear.

“Any metal concert you go to, you see Walter Trout’s T-shirts,” says the Dutch record executive whose small independent label, Provogue, markets Trout’s albums in Europe. “Does he have a following?” The answer, Van der Linden suggests over the phone from his office in the Netherlands, can be seen on Danish, Dutch and English hard-rock fans’ backs.

It also can be seen in some of the numbers Van der Linden cites: combined sales of about 120,000 for Trout’s first two albums, “Life in the Jungle” and “Prisoner of a Dream,” and projected sales of 105,000 for the just-released “Transition.” As a live attraction, the blues-rocker from Huntington Beach has been able to fill 2,000-capacity halls on his own and has landed slots on prestigious festival bills in Denmark and Holland that attract much larger crowds.

“Compared to R.E.M., he’s nothing,” Van der Linden said, continuing his assessment of Trout’s European popularity. “But if you compare him to just another starting band, he’s a big hero. He’s laying his groundwork.”

In his home country, though, Trout has been lying low, albeit unwillingly.

Does he have a following? Well, yes--but only if you peek in on Perq’s, a funky little piece of bar real estate in downtown Huntington Beach. The club has been Trout’s steady gig for more than a decade. Plunk down the $3 cover and you can catch Trout and his band almost any weekend that they’re not frying bigger fish across the Atlantic (it should be noted that sentences like that one, a staple of stories about Trout, prompted him to call his recently issued live album “No More Fish Jokes”).

What you’ll see at Perq’s is an uncommonly passionate and versatile blues-rock musician whose albums establish him incontrovertibly as a world-class talent. On guitar, Trout is a burner whose Fender Stratocaster fretboard sometimes seems too small for his flying fingers. As a singer, he has good range, full-bodied, husky tone, and soulful conviction in his delivery.

As a songwriter, Trout has shown a knack for catchy melodies without sacrificing emotional depth, writing all-out rockers as well as tender ballads while drawing from influences that range from Little Feat to Little Richard, from Bob Dylan to Jimi Hendrix and Carlos Santana. On stage, Trout’s pumped-up performances live up to that old Wilson Pickett refrain, “99 1/2 (percent) Won’t Do.” It’s that intensity, and the ensemble force of his band’s playing, that have won Trout notice from European metal fans as well as from blues aficionados.

A few weeks ago, Trout and his band--organist Danny (Mongo) Abrams, bassist Jimmy Trapp and drummer Bernard Pershey--made a rare stateside sojourn away from Perq’s to play their first-ever showcase concert for American record scouts, at the Troubadour in West Hollywood. Trout came on in a fringed jacket, grimacing and gyrating and spilling a near-constant flow of notes in a way that normally is the height of guitar-god cliche, but which coming from him seems instead like an honest manifestation of a supercharged musical metabolism. The band played a typically tight, over-the-top set far beyond the capacity of most of the hard-rock wanna-bes on the Los Angeles scene.

When it was over, says Trout’s co-manager, Tim Heyne, “a lot of the questions I got (from label representatives) were, ‘How old is he?’ I shot back, ‘What difference does it make?”’ But Heyne admits that Trout’s age, 41, does make a difference with major labels who see the youth-and-glamour appeal requisite for MTV as the surest way to launch a new act. According to Heyne, “One of them said, ‘I loved it, but the problem in today’s climate is I just don’t know how to get it through to my label.’ ”

Heyne said that most of the scouts were sufficiently impressed to ask for Trout’s catalogue of European releases so they could consider him further. The plan calls for setting up another showcase gig early next year, after Trout and band return from a five-week European tour.

Trout knows there are worse things than being passed over by record companies. Retracing his life story during a recent interview in the living room of his rented house in a quiet Huntington Beach subdivision a few blocks from the ocean, he spoke openly of a past that includes heroin addiction, alcoholism and, about two years ago, a sudden and tumultuous turn-about in his romantic life. Almost as intense a talker as he is a performer, Trout spoke in a deep, chesty voice, fixing his interviewer with deep-set green-gray eyes and, as you might expect from a guitarist, embellishing his words with lots of hand gestures.

He grew up a carpenter’s son in the Philadelphia suburb of Collingswood, N.J. Captured early by the blues, he started playing in bands at 16. In his early 20s, he got a job as a drug counselor, working with addicts who had been released from prison on condition they get treatment and stay clean.

“I did this for a year and a half and had a nervous breakdown,” he recalled. “I couldn’t take the pressure and responsibility of sending people back to jail” if they suffered a relapse. So he decided to go back to music full time. He moved to Orange County in 1974, hoping to get into the Southern California blues scene. He says he reached that goal slowly, after detouring into country and Western music because that was the only gig he could find. A heroin habit came to him more quickly.

“I met a beautiful blonde, rich drug dealer, and I was in a very vulnerable emotional state, and I immediately became addicted. Three years later, I was a patient (in a rehab center) instead of a counselor.”

He kicked heroin, and continued to play in a band led by the late Jesse Ed Davis, who had been one of the most sought-after rock session guitarists of the ‘60s and early ‘70s. In 1980, Trout served a brief stint in John Lee Hooker’s band, which led to a spot in the ‘60s blues-boogie warhorse Canned Heat. In 1984, he stepped up a notch, landing a spot in John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers--a position that put him on the international touring circuit and led to several albums backing Mayall.

But while Trout was making career progress, he says, heavy drinking that began in his Canned Heat days was holding back his musical development.

“There were times when I felt I couldn’t play unless I had a fifth of Jack Daniel’s in me. (Musicians) who think they’re going to play better when they’re loaded are deluding themselves. But I had to go through years of that to finally learn that.”

Trout walked across the room to his bookcase and returned with a well-worn paperback copy of “Discover Your Possibilities” by the Rev. Robert Schuller of the Crystal Cathedral. He said Carlos Santana gave him the book, along with a spiritual pep talk about the importance of being able to play sober, in 1987 when Santana and the Bluesbreakers were staying at the same hotel during a tour layover in East Berlin.

The paperback’s inside flap has Santana’s signature under the inscription, “To Walter, Thank you for keeping the spirit of the blues alive. May you always swim in God’s eternal ocean of peace.” Trout read the book, stopped drinking, and began enjoying life in his busy, high-profile gig with the respected Mayall, whose ‘60s bands had been a training ground for such guitar greats as Eric Clapton and Mick Taylor.

One night late in 1988, Mayall came down with the flu before a gig in Denmark, lost his voice and couldn’t perform. Trout and his fellow Bluesbreakers guitarist Coco Montoya took over the spotlight to rousing response. After the show, Trout said, he was pressed by a Danish promoter and record label representative to consider recording and touring on his own.

Trout mulled it over and decided in the middle of a Mayall show on March 6, 1989--his 38th birthday--that he would go solo.

“That was a tough decision. John is one of my most loved and respected friends. He was like a father, and still is, and the gig was incredibly secure. It was kind of scary to take the gamble and jump into the water on my own.

“But I was on stage thinking, ‘I’m 38 tonight. By the time I’m 40 I want to be in my own band, making my own way in the world.’ I realized if I didn’t take the shot, the next thing I’d know I’d be 50 and it would be too late.

“The first two years was a real struggle” as Trout tried to build a following of his own in Europe. “I wouldn’t have made it if I couldn’t fall back on Perq’s. Perq’s made it possible for me to do this. I’m real indebted. When the day comes when they tear that place down, I’ll be standing on Main Street, weeping.”

Trout’s European career has solidified over the past year and a half. “I’m doing much better. I don’t want to go into figures, but I’m bringing home (about) double” what he made as a sideman in Mayall’s band.

A little more than two years ago, Trout reached another sudden life-changing determination in the middle of a performance--this one in Holstebro, Denmark, concerning a tall, blonde concert-goer with vivid blue eyes. Walking over to his living room mantle, Trout took down a framed photograph of himself on stage that night and, in front of him, the blonde stranger who is now his wife. Trout recalled that Danny Abrams’ Hammond organ broke down that night and the keyboards player, to Trout’s annoyance at the time, began amusing himself by taking pictures.

“I don’t know how many people have a picture of them and their wife before they met. It’s the moment of our eyes meeting. I stared at her so much that I fell over the microphone stand. As soon as the concert was over, I jumped off the stage and grabbed her and said, ‘We have to meet and talk.’

“We had a walk in this 1,000-year-old Viking town, and a half hour into the walk I just realized she and I were going to spend the rest of our lives together. She thought I was nuts, as anybody would, but I pursued her, and 10 days later she agreed.”

Complicating this storybook romantic episode was the fact that Trout already had a wife back in Huntington Beach. “It was very messy, but I had no other recourse but to do what in my heart I knew I had to do,” Trout said.

His Danish sweetheart, Marie, who is now 29, closed an advertising business she ran in Denmark, broke off with her boyfriend and moved to Huntington Beach. They were married in September, 1991, a year after they met, and are expecting their first child in June.

On the new “Transition” album, Trout said, he set out to give a musical account of some of the changes in his life. The romantic angle is well-covered, though without obvious autobiographical references. “Got to Kill the Monkey,” perhaps the most rollicking environmental warning any band has recorded, sets forth Trout’s vision of changes that need to take place in the world at large.

“Playing With Gloves On” is a particularly passionate symbolic account of a person trying to break loose from shackles--a clear reflection of Trout’s effort to shake off alcohol and drugs to emerge as a better player. He said the song’s stormy music and evocative lyrics came to him in a dream one night in Holland.

“I was dressed up as Stevie Ray Vaughan,” to whom Trout says he often is compared by European music writers. “I came out with a guitar on, and I was in the middle of a desert. I started to play and nothing would come out. I looked down, and I had leather gloves on. I took them off, and in the dream I played that song. I woke up and furiously wrote it down. That never happened to me before. It was like a gift. It was all there in a minute and a half.”

“Transition” also marks a stylistic shift for Trout, to a sound less steeped in traditional blues and directed more toward the mainstream. Working at a Costa Mesa studio, Front Page Recorders, with former REO Speedwagon producer Kevin Beamish, Trout came up with tracks like “Transition,” a mainstream hard-rocker, and “Running in Place,” a smooth, glossy love song that could have been on a ‘70s album by the Eagles or Boz Scaggs.

“There might be some fans in Europe who were very much into the blues stuff who might not like this as much,” Trout said, “but I think I’ll gain more fans because this album is more accessible to the general public. If I outrage purists, it makes me happy. There was a review in an English blues magazine that said my music would make blues fans throw up their hands in horror. That makes me feel like I’m doing what I’m supposed to do.

“I don’t want to play like guys did in the ‘50s. I want to expand it. I’ll listen to Steve Vai and Joe Satriani as much as Howlin’ Wolf. I love the tradition, but I don’t want to be chained. I’m trying to put it all together.”

Meanwhile, he says, putting together an American recording and touring career to go with the success now building for him in Europe remains an important goal, but not an obsession.

“I’m no longer clawing to get things happening in America, because Europe has exceeded my dreams. Even if (a U.S. record deal) doesn’t happen, for the first time in my life I’m content and really, genuinely happy with the way things are going. I’m doing what I love and living off it, I have a beautiful wife, and we’re about to have a baby. If the record doesn’t come out in America, I can keep going to Europe six times a year and sort of live the dream over there. Now that I’ve reached the point of not being bitter and desperate about the States, it’ll probably happen here, too.”