Curtis Salgado
What is soul? People have tried to define the word and the style of music for years, but Curtis Salgado thinks he has a handle on it.
“My definition is that if a song is sincere and you believe it, that’s soul. Of course, the contents of a song are going to shape what you think about it, but if it’s believable, there you go. To me, Pavarotti is as much as a soul singer as Otis Redding. Merle Haggard and Hank Williams are soul singers as much as Sam Cooke was. Soul is about heart and about belief. Music is an offering, and if you accept that offering, there’s a connection there, and that is what soul is all about.”
Curtis Salgado is a soul singer, too. On his latest album Soul Activated, Salgado combines the deepest and truest of human emotions with music that combines rock, blues, gospel, and rhythm and blues. Call it rockin’ soul. “Solomon Burke used to call his records that,” Salgado says. “It’s not a new term, but that’s exactly what this is.”
For Soul Activated, Salgado called on some friends both old and new to lend a hand, and they give the album a musical direction that takes off from the singer’s native Northwest and heads over to Memphis, down to Texas, with other destinations in-between. Guests include the incomparable Jimmie Vaughan on guitar, vocalist Lou Ann Barton, the legendary Memphis Horns, and Salgado’s longtime producer Marlon McClain.
As for the songs, you could say the singer has had them in the bag for a while—quite literally. “My bedroom is covered in LP’s and CD’s,” says Salgado, a longtime student and collector of jazz, blues, R&B, and gospel sides. “Underneath my stereo is a space with a couple of paper sacks, and they’re full of tapes. these are tapes of songs people have sent in, or tapes of songs I’ve written and never gotten to, little demo tapes, etc. For this record, I used those paper bags as a resource, and that’s where I found some of these songs.”
“It’s true that people want to see you write your own tunes,” he continues. As it happens, Salgado wrote four of the album’s 11 tracks. “But this album just took its own course. It was like these songs just turned up, and they were songs I really wanted to do.”
One of the songs from the paper sack is the album opener, “Old Enough To Know Better,” which features a fine performance on guitar by Vaughan. “He’s somebody I really admire,” Salgado says. “I’ve known him for over 20 years, and he’s amazing. He’s totally reinvented his guitar playing. He went from playing with a pick, this raw and rocking style he did with the Fabulous Thunderbirds, to playing with his index finger, like Albert Collins. It’s kinda Guitar Slim meets Hank Ballard, pick-your-shot licks. He plays these incredible phrases and lays it in the pocket every time.”
Back when he first met Vaughan, Salgado, was playing and singing in the Robert Cray Band, which at the time didn’t earn him national attention. It did, however, gain the ear of actor John Belushi, who quickly became a fan, and incorporated some of Salgado’s act—and indeed, even some of his trademark stage patter—into his blues Brothers character, Jake. Check the credits for the No. 1 album Briefcase Full Of Blues, and you’ll see that it was dedicated to Salgado. At least Belushi gave credit where credit was due.
In the early ’80’s, Salgado led his own group, In Yo Face, then for two years fronted the Grammy-winning Boston band Roomful of Blues. Afterwards he formed the Stilettos, which became a regional hit in the Northwest. Over the years, he’s managed to sit in with a number of his heroes, including Muddy Waters, Bobby “Blue” Band, Albert Collins (it was Salgado who dubbed him “Master of the Telecaster”), and Bonnie Raitt. Another high-profile gig found him singing with Santana on the band’s national tour in 1995.
Salgado has released four albums of his own: Curtis Salgado and the Stilettos (1991), More Than You Can Chew (1995), Hit It and Quit It (1997) and Shanachie debut Wiggle Outta This (1999).
The song that closes the new album, “More Love, Less Attitude,” actually made its first appearance on the Stilettos album nearly a decade ago. That album is long out of print, but it hasn’t left the minds of Salgado’s dedicated fans. “Every night I play, I have a lot of people that come up and ask, ’Where can I get that first record?’ Putting that song on this record is a way of bringing that back to life.”
Other tracks on Soul Activated include a deeply funky take on Leon Russell’s “I’d Rather Be Blind” (previously recorded by Freddie King), a Memphis-styled version of Jimmy Cliff’s reggae hit “The Harder They Come” and a new take on the Hall & Oates blue-eyed soul classic “Every time You Go Away” that shows off Salgado’s impressive vocal chops.
His own compositions, include “Summertime Life,” with its idyllic Sly Stone groove, the pleading “I Sleep With The TV On,” the harmonica showcase “Lip Whippin,” where he conjures the spirit of Little Walter, and the rhythmically complex, new Orleans-grooved “Funny Man.”
“Hip Hip Baby,” which features Texas blues singer Lou Ann Barton, was another song gleaned from Salgado’s bag of tapes. The Salgado-era Cray band toured for a time with Stevie Ray Vaughan, then just starting out, and his singer at the time was Barton. “Hip Hip Baby” was one of the songs in their repertoire at the time.
“We were the your turks of the blues scene back then,” Salgado says. “It was Roomful of Blues, the Robert Cray Band, Stevie Ray Vaughan, the Fabulous Thunderbirds, and a handful of cats out of Chicago that were coming up. We were putting down something that people were getting into, really putting down a little something different.”
And that’s still true today. Salgado’s reputation has grown over the years, a trend that will likely continue thanks to Soul Activated.
:: Discography ::
2001 - Soul Activated -
1999 - Wiggle Outta This -
- Hit It N' Quit It -
- More Than You Can Chew -
- Curtis Salgado & The Stilettos -
:: Contact ::
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